At the outset, punk was cold-shouldered by the rock-music establishment. The scene was like liquid mercury; it couldn’t be contained. Punk bands weren’t interested in record-label deals—at least not at stuffy corporate labels like EMI, Decca, or Polygram, which rode roughshod over their acts. A small group of upstart independent labels like Stiff, Rough Trade, and New Hormones nurtured the punk sound, putting out EPs that were often recorded, mastered, and pressed the same day. Immediate—as Andrew Oldham had once envisioned it. No overdubs or layered effects or fancy-ass edits. No arty, conceptual Hipgnosis sleeves. It was fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants rock ’n roll, back to basics—and smoking hot.

  Jimmy Page hit the nail right on the head when, in July 1976, he said, “I am actually out of touch with what’s going on today, more than I’d like to be, but I’m pretty optimistic about the future. What seems like a stagnant period may actually be a prelude to a renaissance.”

  The punk movement was in its incubation stage while Jimmy carried on in a cocoon, laboring hermetically in two studios—Electric Lady in New York and Trident in London—over Led Zeppelin’s next record: the soundtrack to The Song Remains the Same. If ever a project required elaborate editing and discretion, this was it. The material was from three Madison Square Garden shows in July 1973, in fits and starts in the film version. But the soundtrack could cheat. With songs that didn’t have to be synced to video, Jimmy could pick and choose the best takes from the three nights, cutting and splicing them like a master tailor, even chipping in a few studio overdubs. That meant taking the intro, say, for “Rock and Roll,” from one night, and stitching Robert’s vocals from two other nights to the master track with brief guitar bursts recorded at Trident. The same was done for “Celebration Day” and “No Quarter.” “Stairway” was pieced together from all three nights.

  “It’s an honest soundtrack live album,” Jimmy insisted, dancing a bit around the word honest. “It was the live material that went with the footage, so it had to be used.” Yet he admitted preferring to release a chronological live album culled from tapes in Led Zeppelin’s vault, a temperature-controlled room in the basement of the King’s Road office. “We’ve got some fabulous live stuff,” he revealed. There was a master tape from the legendary 1970 Royal Albert Hall concert, as well as the 1972 Long Beach and LA Forum concerts, that contained raw and exciting performances, and intimate recordings from the Back to the Clubs tour. “There’s a winning version of ‘No Quarter’ from Earls Court,” Jimmy said. “The ‘How Many More Times’ is also pretty good.” Ten years later, he was still salivating over the prospect of a chronological live Led Zeppelin compilation.

  Instead, the soundtrack for The Song Remains the Same was a lugubrious rehash of familiar material that froze the band in 1973. “Dazed and Confused” dragged on for an interminable twenty-six minutes, and it was anyone’s guess why Jimmy chose to include a fifteen-minute slog through Bonzo’s drum marathon, “Moby Dick.” Without the propulsive visual chicanery, the song was stripped of its vital impact. “Celebration Day” was added to the mix but wasn’t featured in the film. There were exciting snatches of “Black Dog,” “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” and “Heartbreaker” in the film, but for some reason those songs were excluded from the soundtrack album.

  The documentary finally opened in October 1976, with premieres in New York, Los Angeles, London, and Birmingham. To everyone’s amazement, it was awarded a PG rating by the MPAA, the movie industry’s moral watchdog. The rating seemed overly generous, if not preposterous, considering the chilling backstage sequence filmed at the Baltimore Civic Center in which Peter Grant accosted the promoter, using the words cunt and fuck no less than eighteen times. Peter Clifton, the director, recognized the financial blow an R rating would have delivered, excluding hundreds of thousands of adolescent fans from theaters. Before screening the film for the MPAA, he used a pen to smudge the offending words on the print so that they were inaudible to the censors. As soon as the PG was secure, he restored the language so it was crystal clear.

  * * *

  • • •

  The trip from London to the New York premiere was not without incident. A sizable Led Zeppelin entourage had piled into the first-class cabin of a 747. Richard Cole and John Bonham had self-medicated before taking off, bracing themselves throughout the flight with ridiculous quantities of alcohol. Somewhere over the Atlantic, they noticed Telly Savalas, the actor, sitting a few rows in front of them.

  “Hey, baldy, what are you doing?” “Hey, you ain’t got no fuckin’ hair, huh, Kojak?” When Savalas failed to take the bait, food started getting lobbed. Then a knife and a fork. Before it escalated into a full-on fight, a flight attendant intervened.

  In New York, the day of the premiere, Jimmy had gone ahead to oversee the technical elements. Creating the right ambience and pacing was crucial to the movie’s success. At Led Zeppelin’s insistence and at considerable cost, the theaters were wired specially by Showco, the band’s sound team for live concerts. “Theaters in those days used three speakers,” Jimmy explained, “the center speaker for dialogue, and left- and right-side speakers, which were used for effects. For The Song Remains the Same we mixed the sound for five speakers and provided two additional speakers in the rear of the theaters.” He wanted to sharpen the dynamics, so that “John Bonham’s drum solo came out right over your head,” and when Jimmy stroked the violin bow across the guitar strings, “the sound would travel around the auditorium.”

  The New York premiere on October 20, 1976, at Cinema I was especially important. Major critics from both the rock and mainstream press had promised to cover it, and the house was papered with rock ’n roll nobility. Mick Jagger was in the audience, so were Linda Ronstadt, Rick Derringer, Roberta Flack, Mick Ronson, and Carly Simon. Led Zeppelin hoped to soothe opening-night jitters with bottles of brandy they’d smuggled in under their coats. Before the lights went down, Peter Clifton recalled, Jimmy “told the projectionist to turn the sound up to full volume.”

  No matter how he enhanced the volume and dynamics, no matter how much booze the band consumed, it couldn’t salvage the messy The Song Remains the Same. New Yorkers knew the jig was up from the opening scene, which depicts the band landing in Pittsburgh, going through a tunnel, and emerging in New York City. A few minutes later, during the first song, Jimmy and Jonesy are shown wearing different outfits in successive verses, indicating footage from different nights spliced haphazardly together. Vocals didn’t sync perfectly, the footage was uneven. Editing gaffes like that made viewers cringe. They rolled their eyes during the fantasy sequences.

  “You can look at those as either an attempt to break new barriers,” Jimmy argued in retrospect, “or just Spinal Tap.”

  The critics, unfortunately, chose Spinal Tap.

  “Members of the group put on cloaks, ride around on horses, stand in the moonlight,” wrote The New York Times’s third-string movie critic, Richard Eder, who ducked out long before the film ended. “They are pseudodreams, like the unconvinced artwork on rock record jackets. The scenes showing the group performing are more informative though not much more powerful.”

  The Daily News ran its review under the headline film-wise, it’s dead zeppelin, with the rarely awarded rating 0★ (out of a possible five), calling the movie “a hopelessly pretentious piece of trash.”

  It may have seemed unfair of the Times and the News to send fusty, old-school critics, but Rolling Stone’s review was equally unforgiving. Dave Marsh, who’d written favorably about the band in the past, assessed the film as “a tribute to Led Zeppelin’s rapaciousness and inconsideration” and that “(even if their best songs are behind them) their sense of themselves merits only contempt.” Circus was even more dismissive, concluding the film felt as though it were written, produced, directed, and edited “by junior college students who had just discovered LSD.”

  None of the members of Led Zeppelin had thought they were making art. Jimmy admitted straight out: “It’s not a great film.” But the reviews stung. They confirmed to the band what they had felt all along—that the media were disrespectful louts with too much critical power. Journalists, especially the subcategory of music critics, had it out for them. The film was no exception.

  “I just don’t trust those sort of writers,” Jimmy said. “You never know what they were after.”

  In Los Angeles, Led Zeppelin was back in its element. Lori Mattix worked the lobby at the movie theater in Westwood, matching her “girlfriends” up with guests of the band. The Hyatt House was forsaken in favor of the Beverly Hilton, but there was no less a degree of hedonistic behavior. Groupies spun in and out of the suites. Drug traffic in the halls was bumper to bumper. “Some drug dealer came in who had ripped off John Bonham, and the next thing I knew he was laying on the floor bleeding,” recalls Po, who had flown there with the band. “Richard Cole had knocked him clean out.”

  It took more finesse than Ricardo could muster to help Jimmy out of a similar jam. “He was being shaken down by a drug dealer,” says Jeff Hoffman, the New York lawyer, who was flown in to handle the situation. A meet was arranged between the dealer and Jimmy, but Hoffman, no stranger to clandestine arrangements, showed up in Jimmy’s place. “It was a preppie kid, a young guy who didn’t have the smarts to realize what he was doing. He wanted money to keep his mouth shut—a lot of money.”

  “I can get them arrested,” he threatened Hoffman.

  Jeff said, “I hear you. Let me go back and talk to the clients, and we’ll have another meeting.”

  Unbeknownst to the dealer, Hoffman had taped the conversation, aware that he couldn’t use it in a court of law. In California, unlike in New York, both parties had to agree to the recording of a conversation. If the lawyer tried to introduce it into evidence, he would have committed a misdemeanor. Still, he waved a tape recorder at the dealer and said, “Just listen to this.” It was a bluff, but a good one, and the kid disappeared.

  But it was indicative of the behavior that transpired in LA. “It was all power, all madness,” Po recalls. “Every night it was a crazy Sunset Strip scene at either the Rainbow Grill, the Roxy, or the Whisky. Rodney Bingenheimer held court with the band. Young girls hung over their chairs in anticipation. Pure hedonism. I’d never experienced anything like it.”

  Back in London for the premiere at the Warner West End and the ABC Shaftesbury Avenue, everyone was on his best behavior. The WAGs—wives and girlfriends—were in attendance. John Bindon lurked ominously in the shadows. After the screening, there was a party at Floral Hall, one of the old storage warehouses in Covent Garden, former thriving market stalls, one of the first being renovated in what was destined to become a smart upscale neighborhood. Guests were kept segregated. The riffraff were restricted to a hall on the ground floor. Upstairs, in a private room with a window overlooking the crowded hall, the band gathered with their VIPs—Paul and Linda McCartney, songwriter Lionel Bart, Rick Wakeman, and, inexplicably, Joe Strummer, who must have been amused by the trappings of vaingloriousness. “No one was mixing,” says Unity MacLean, who was trying to coerce the band to circulate among their downstairs guests, shaking hands and thanking people for coming to the screening.

  A pool photographer traipsed up the steep flight of steps to take a few pictures for the morning editions. “Where do you think you’re going?” G greeted him on the landing. Instead of waiting for an answer, Peter butted the guy down the stairs using the nuclear mass of his enormous stomach.

  Led Zeppelin had lost all sense of what they were—a rock ’n roll band, not the ridiculous fantasies they portrayed on the screen. Their self-importance had taken over their identities. There were groups like the Beatles and The Who who chafed over how they were cut off from the fans; Led Zeppelin welcomed the alienation. They’d become imperious, overweening, “at war with everybody”—the press, the filmmakers, promoters, the record company, even fans. Their MO was to steamroll over anyone who veered into their gilded orbit. They no longer existed as mortals; they had loyal subjects—handlers, retainers, procurers, muscle, and security. They existed behind glass, bulletproof glass. During an interval when they could have shown some humanity and repaired this image, they chose to remain aloof instead.

  The music papers pilloried them for it. “This is one dumb movie,” Nick Kent reflected in NME, “dumb because it’s excessive, pretentious, and grossly narcissistic—sometimes all at once—and it ultimately presents the film’s subjects, the once formidable Zeppelin, as some kind of corporate, flabby electric behemoth.” He was particularly offended by “the repertoire of music that is bloated in every way, from its brutish volume assault to the wired-out adrenaline input that feeds that basic fire below.” Sounds called the movie “depressing, embarrassing even.” Only Melody Maker kowtowed to the band with a rave, preserving the paper’s all-expenses-paid seat on the Starship and easy access to the musicians’ suites.

  Jimmy, more than the others, understood that the cost of the film was a time suck, too much of a distraction. “It’s a horrible medium to work in,” he said, “It’s so boring! So slow!” Overall, “it was an incredible uphill struggle.”

  It was time for Led Zeppelin to put moviemaking behind them, to return to the one thing they knew how to do instinctively. It was time to play music.

  [2]

  Robert seemed well enough to go back to work. His leg strength was gradually returning. He’d been training with the Wolves—Wolverhampton Wanderers, the Midlands football club he followed as a longtime fan—and fattening up on Maureen’s legendary curry. He still couldn’t straighten his arm, and his ankle wobbled when he put full weight on it. But his voice sounded in mint condition.

  “He wasn’t that eager to go back on the road,” says Benji Le Fevre, who remained glued to Robert’s side throughout his rehab. “But he knew people wanted to see him perform. They wanted him to be Robert Plant.”

  Jimmy and Peter Grant were already laying the groundwork for a tour. And not just any tour but a whopper of a comeback from the year-and-a-half-long layoff: fifty-one concerts stretched over four and a half months, figuring to put Led Zeppelin in front of 1.3 million fans. It’d be profitable beyond belief but grueling, especially considering the band’s fragile makeup—a hobbled vocalist, a guitarist and drummer struggling with alcohol and heroin addiction, a road manager pretty much off his tree, and a manager, the person charged with holding things together, mixing cocaine and violence like a shaky-handed bomb maker. All in all, it was a recipe for ruin.

  Rehearsal time was planned. In late November 1976, Led Zeppelin moved into Manticore Studios, a converted cinema in West London owned by Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and imported an engineer from America to monitor the process. They set up equipment on the cinema stage and over three months rehearsed exactly twice. Most of the time was split between Blake’s, a luxurious boutique hideaway hotel in Kensington, and the Golden Lion pub just off St. James’s Square. “We’d all get fucked up,” recalled Benji Le Fevre. “Someone would say, ‘Shall we go and rehearse, then?’ And they’d say, ‘Ah, not today.’ ”

  For reinforcements, they dipped in and out of the Swan Song office and used the staff to run interference with the WAGs. Robert and Bonzo showed up when they needed infusions of cash, and Jimmy came by to get away from home, always arriving incognito, lest anyone put the touch on him for an autograph or a drug debt.

  “Charlotte Martin regularly called the office looking for Jimmy,” says Unity MacLean. “ ’Is James there? Well, where is he?’ The stock answer was ‘I haven’t seen him,’ even though he was right there in the office.” Invariably, Charlotte would hop in the car and make an unannounced visit. ‘Oh! Jimmy! I just called and they said you weren’t here.’ ”

  Their relationship was long lasting, though anything but solid. Fraught was a more apt way to describe it. They led what one person called “separate lives conducted under the same roof.” She waged her own struggle with alcohol and drugs, and she gave as good as she got. “Charlotte was a tough character who bossed Jimmy around,” says MacLean. “One night, I saw her clock him one. She cut his face open and really bashed him.”

  Peter Grant never came into the office anymore. Since his wife’s abdication, he’d barricaded himself in the master bedroom at Horselunges, surrounded by a security system that rivaled the Situation Room at the White House. A bank of closed-circuit and commercial TV screens hung from the ceiling, and phones, a good half dozen phones, balanced perilously on the bedcovers. The only object more prominent in the bedroom was a receptacle on the nightstand that held cocaine, a trough the size of a fishbowl, from which G habitually dipped and snorted.

  “Peter was completely out of it,” says Phil Carson. “He was not paying any attention to detail. The house was collapsing around him. The divorce had hit him hard, but the drugs had kicked in way before that.”

  He’d become a recluse. Even New Musical Express noticed it and ran an article about his condition—how he’d become unresponsive and surly (more surly than usual) and that he was delegating key business duties to assistants.

  Carole Brown, G’s assistant, hadn’t seen him for about six weeks. “He’d just disappeared,” she recalls. “I was still taking messages, trying to run the office, but nothing felt right.”