Jonesy was completely indifferent. “I didn’t really feel comfortable,” he said. “I remember asking, ‘Why are we doing this?’ We were not in good shape, mentally or health-wise.” Nobody, he felt, was strong enough to say no to either Jimmy or Peter, both of whom sought to rekindle the old flame.

  Robert just wanted to jam. To ease him into a groove, they warmed up with a selection of comfortable rock ’n roll standbys that had filled Led Zeppelin’s medleys onstage—Elvis, Jerry Lee, and Ricky Nelson were represented handsomely—before working on a new song, “Carouselambra,” a typical conceptual Led Zeppelin epic that embroidered remnants of psychedelic, progressive, disco, and postpunk into a tapestry of abstraction. Robert seemed to warm to his element, but at the end of the day, he couldn’t cope with more. “I felt quite remote from the whole thing,” he said. “I wasn’t comfortable in the group at all. I didn’t know if it was worth it anymore.”

  John Paul experienced a similar feeling. “It’s not that we didn’t have a laugh at Clearwell,” he concluded, “it just wasn’t going anywhere.”

  Months passed before there was any more movement in one direction or another. In the meantime, Robert had begun turning up unannounced in public—to sing “Blue Suede Shoes” with a Worcestershire pub band at Wolverley Memorial Hall, and in August 1978 singing “Johnny B. Goode” at a club in Ibiza, where he was vacationing with Phil Carson. He even made a surprise guest appearance on September 16, teaming with Dave Edmunds at Birmingham Town Hall for a rockabilly-inspired version of “My Baby Left Me.”

  Robert seemed reinvigorated, inclined to move forward. Expressing a degree of optimism, he said, “I started to play again, and I realized that I still possessed something that really turned me on.”

  Proposing anything more concrete, however, was still a touchy subject. Robert’s grief remained profound, his armor intact. The others gave him a wide berth. They feared that pressing him to return to work could have the opposite effect.

  Finally, in October 1978, making a new album was broached. Jimmy had gotten an offer from Polar Studios in Stockholm, which belonged to the members of ABBA. They were trying to establish the new venture by luring a big established band with three free weeks of studio time and the services of a superb engineer, Leif Mases. Three free weeks—that was all penny-wise Jimmy needed to hear. Was Robert up to it? Were Jimmy and Bonzo, for that matter, both still burdened with serious drug issues? Did Led Zeppelin have anything left in the tank, anything to say as a band? Three years had passed since they’d recorded new material.

  It seemed like now or never. It was time to take their best shot.

  [3]

  Stockholm offered refuge, a good place to get away from it all. The city was enjoying an economic and cultural renaissance, with a youthful vibe that was easy to embrace. Sure, it was cold, colder perhaps than the band had bargained for, but Led Zeppelin’s stay would be short and sweet. Jimmy was determined to wrap things up in the three-week allotment granted by the studio owners. Even then, the workweek was streamlined so that everyone could spend more time with their families. The band would arrive in Stockholm on Monday afternoons and return to their homes in the UK on Friday mornings. To accommodate the abbreviated schedule, three weeks of rehearsals were held at a studio in North London, going over material.

  Unlike previous rehearsals, Jimmy came virtually empty-handed. There were no cassettes with slow-burning riffs fleshed out, no iconic solos in the making, nothing for Robert to pursue as a road map or to sink his teeth into. New song fragments came courtesy of John Paul Jones, of all people.

  Jonesy had gotten his hands on a new toy, a Yamaha GX-1 synthesizer, nicknamed the Dream Machine, a prototype for the ubiquitous consumer synths that would become standard rock ’n roll gear for years to come. This one, however, was a beast of a contraption, a three-keyboard console with twenty-five pedals, weighing in at 660 pounds and a price tag of $60,000. Few GX-1s were in circulation as of 1978. ELP’s Keith Emerson had one, and so did Stevie Wonder and Benny Andersson of ABBA. John Paul Jones was an obvious beta tester.

  “The sound one could get out of the machine was at the time very inspiring,” he said.

  “John had it at home and had been working on it,” Jimmy recalled, “and lo and behold he’d got these songs together.” Lo and behold. Songwriting wasn’t exactly up Jonesy’s alley. He’d contributed in the past, but not in a way one would call world-beating, not even substantive. He wasn’t the person you’d turn to for a barn burner or a potential hit. Nevertheless, Jimmy wasn’t opposed to taking a back seat. He took Jonesy’s enthusiasm in stride. “If he had numbers he’d written on this new state-of-the-art keyboard, let’s do an album which focuses on the keyboards and feature it in the forefront.”

  Jonesy’s “songs” at this early stage were more like loose instrumental arrangements that still depended heavily on input from his mates. But they sufficed as good templates for the work ahead in Sweden. “Carouselambra” was one such number that would benefit from Jimmy’s and Bonzo’s contributions. And Jonesy had bits and pieces of what became “South Bound Saurez,” “In the Evening,” and something called “The Hook,” which served as the foundation for “All My Love.”

  Unfortunately, Led Zeppelin’s welfare in Sweden was left in the addled hands of Richard Cole. Richard had always been a mean son of a bitch but he was devoted to the band and altogether dependable. No one was better at wrangling musicians on the road or maintaining order when things got hairy. Now his heroin addiction warped his better judgment. In fact, one of his first tasks upon landing in Stockholm was to line up a drug dealer who lived directly across the street from Polar Studios, so that he and Jimmy had access to smack.

  Peter Grant was indisposed—a euphemism for drug-addicted and paranoid—and had remained behind at Horselunges. He’d also suffered a mild heart attack earlier in the year, which gave him something else to worry excessively about. Doctors warned him to drastically reduce his weight, which had ballooned to twenty-eight stone (just shy of four hundred pounds), but they’d never mentioned anything about cocaine. According to Unity MacLean, with whom Grant stayed in touch, “He continued sending Dave Northover or Ray Washburn to get drugs for him.”

  Polar Studios was a gorgeous facility—a former cinema sporting a cutting-edge control room with five angled plate-glass dividers, each angle defining an isolation room, and a nifty thirty-two-track board. “It was sensational,” Robert said, “and had just the amount of live sound we like.” Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus stopped by to welcome Led Zeppelin and to help them settle in, regretting there was no chance in the schedule for a Led Zeppelin–ABBA jam.

  Beginning on November 7, 1978, it was down to business—or so the situation would seem. “For much of the time at those Polar sessions only Robert and I were turning up,” Jonesy recalled. Jimmy and Bonzo were more or less indisposed.

  “Robert, Jonesy, and I would go out and drink beer at lunchtime,” says Benji Le Fevre, “because we’d show up at ten, when the session was supposed to start, and we’d still be waiting for the other two to get it together.” In the afternoon, they sat around drinking Pimm’s. Waiting . . . and waiting . . . and waiting. Vital time ticking away.

  “We’d sit there with the instruments and nobody else would turn up,” John Paul recalled.

  Jonesy spent much of the downtime grappling with his GX-1. “We’d very gingerly taken it to Stockholm and reassembled it,” Benji recalls, “but it was so complicated that it had lost the raw sound, it wasn’t tactile.”

  Jonesy was undeterred. “I wasn’t going to sit around and just look at it,” he said. And he wasn’t about to stare at four walls, hoping Jimmy and Bonzo would make the scene. “The thing is, when that situation occurs, you either sit around waiting or get down to playing.”

  Teaming with Robert, who was in the same frame of mind, they began to work on their own. “Jonesy and I, who had never really gravitated toward each other at all, started to get on well,” Robert acknowledged. When things grew dark and weird, they turned to each other. The band’s straight men. “It was kind of odd, but it gave the whole thing a different feel.”

  He knew they weren’t going to come up with anything that sounded like “Communication Breakdown” or “Rock and Roll,” but there were songs that allowed them to explore new territory, melodies that updated Led Zeppelin’s sound out from under the riff-laden thunderstorms. The inspired piano figure that announced “Fool in the Rain” only hinted at what would follow, with the bridge overtaking the meter by shifting into a different rhythm. They worked a feverish samba groove into the middle, leaving plenty of room for Bonzo to lay in sharp, precise—disruptive—jabs against the beat. Everything about the track showed how willing they were to be inventive, to torpedo expectations. The same with “South Bound Saurez,” which opened with another red-hot piano flourish that burst into a blues-based riff with just the right amount of bite.

  They also transformed “The Hook” with yawning synth patterns into “All My Love,” a plaintive supplication that darkened into an expression of heartache, and laid down the bones to “I’m Gonna Crawl,” a sultry, soul-stirring ballad that veered further from the Led Zeppelin signature than almost anything they’d ever recorded.

  When Jimmy and Bonzo finally showed—in the middle of the night, after Richard had scored drugs for them—a fair amount of work had already been done. “I would have preferred having some input at that point,” Jimmy allowed, but he dutifully added guitar parts to the Jones-Plant arrangements. “All My Love” was a different story. It oozed sentimentality. Robert had written the lyric “on the spot,” and to most ears it was gut-wrenching, an obvious paean to his departed son.

  “I was a little worried about the chorus,” Jimmy said, especially since they had sworn off such devices in the past. “I could just imagine people doing the wave and all of that. And I thought, ‘That’s not us.’ ”

  Still, Jimmy took the work tapes back to England with him each weekend and performed hocus-pocus on them in his Plumpton home studio. “When the stuff came back after the weekend, you wouldn’t even recognize it,” Richard noted.

  The most obvious surgery had been performed on “In the Evening,” which began life as one of John Paul’s conceptual pieces, now converted into the sole genuine rocker from the session. At first, it seemed as though Jimmy would play along with the Jones-Plant approach. The song opened with almost a minute of technical horseplay—a spooky electronic confection that had less to do with instrumentation than with the turning of knobs and switches. Jimmy saw the GX-1 and raised the ante with a gizmo he’d borrowed from the brain trust behind 10cc called a Gizmotron. He described it as “a hurdy-gurdy type of thing,” a motor-driven apparatus that effectively bowed the strings of his guitar, much as he did physically on “Dazed and Confused,” producing a weblike chorus of wheezes and whines. Just when it seemed like a Vincent Price voice-over might chime in, the rhythm section erupted with a Bad Company–type three-chord riff that drove the song with a ferocious attack. The beat was daring and direct, relentless. A supercharged rock number was what Jimmy had in mind when he feared Led Zeppelin was getting “a little soft.”

  The framework of an album was beginning to take shape. When Jimmy and Bonzo had it together, the music they summoned up enthralled. They were the hairline crack in the bowl. Led Zeppelin was a four-man band, each integral to the full equation. But it was a drama of personalities as well as sound. Bonzo, especially, needed to be on his game. There were times through these sessions when he played brilliantly—and times when he phoned it in.

  During the best take they made of “Carouselambra,” Bonzo was locked in. Locked. In. He was flawless. The drums took a beating. In the middle of the number, the fire alarm went off. The band had been warned this might happen. The system was new, faulty, unpredictable. About a minute later, a troop of firemen burst through the studio door. Bonzo looked up, shouted, “Fuck off!” and didn’t miss a beat.

  Good times . . . bad times. There were so many factors weighing on the outcome. It was no longer just about music. Life had intruded. Life and death and too much in between. Jimmy and Bonzo, once superlative craftsmen, were dancing with demons that sapped their skills. Robert, who had always been high-spirited and ebullient, was burdened by sadness. John Paul, never all that simpatico, felt even more alienated, discouraged by the dysfunction of his mates—“people who could turn up at recording sessions on time and people who couldn’t,” as he put it. “We were beginning, I suppose, to think, ‘Well, wait a minute, it may be coming apart more than it should.’ ”

  Robert seconded Jonesy’s train of thought. “It was the four of us,” he said in retrospect, “but I don’t think it was as Led Zeppelin as it might have been for myriad different reasons.”

  Jimmy was less concerned about the band’s disposition. Yes, Presence had been a guitar-heavy album, while this newest effort was more keyboard oriented. So be it. “It was a summing up of where we were at that moment in time,” he said.

  Be that as it may, all of the differences found their way into the music. Instead of using dueling perspectives to fuel a creative tension, the band allowed tentativeness, indecisiveness to creep in. When all was said and done, they’d made a record, a new Led Zeppelin album, and put a bow on it in a fleet three-week marathon session. Jonesy considered it “a transition period . . . a chance to see what else we could do.” But underneath the web of synth embellishments and tremors from the Gizmotron, the magic was gone. The riffs were stagnant, the arrangements spiritless. The band had lost its groove.

  Whether or not they admitted it publicly, Led Zeppelin knew they’d hit a wall. It was time “to cut the waffle out,” as John Paul said, “take note of what’s going on, and reinvent ourselves.” Nothing invigorated the band like the sound of a half-crazed audience.

  “We are what we are when we walk onto the stage and play,” Robert agreed.

  They needed a stage, a spotlight, and an enormous crowd.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  SWAN SONG

  [1]

  Peter Grant was one step ahead of them. From his heavily fortified bunker upstairs at Horselunges, he’d been plotting ways to put Led Zeppelin back into the spotlight and reclaim their rightful glory. A new album would set the table for the band’s return; gigs would reassure the fans that no other act was more exciting or deserved to wear the crown. G knew exactly how to play it: a few warm-up dates in an off-the-beaten-track locale, followed by a long tour of U.S. arenas. They’d make a fortune and push into the 1980s with a new head of steam.

  That was his plan until Robert Plant got wind of it. There was no way Robert intended to go back to America. Not now, anyway. It held too many memories that touched raw nerves. He couldn’t face them, couldn’t deal with the pain. And he wanted to stay close to his family. In January 1979, Maureen had given birth to another child, a son they named Logan. Robert resolved to be present for his kids, not traipsing around the United States out of reach, an absentee father.

  G knew better than to press him. “I said, ‘Fuck doing a tour,’ ” he recalled. Led Zeppelin could work in England for a change. They hadn’t played there in four years. It was time, overdue. “We’re the biggest band in the world so we better get out there and show them we still are.”

  But where? And how? There weren’t many purpose-built auditoriums in the UK. And they’d already played the country’s largest indoor facility—Earls Court in 1975, the last time they appeared on a hometown stage. “We could have gone back to the Queen’s Head pub,” Robert said. “We talked about doing something like that.” But Jimmy was adamantly opposed to playing small local halls after the disastrous club tour in 1971.

  Peter had it figured out. “Knebworth was the gig,” he said.

  Knebworth. To British rock ’n roll fans it was the equivalent of Woodstock, a day-long, open-air rock show in a natural amphitheater that drew audiences in the hundreds of thousands. Led Zeppelin had been asked to headline the first Knebworth extravaganza in 1974 for the unheard-of sum of £225,000 but turned down the invitation. In the meantime, the Allman Brothers, Van Morrison, Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa, the Rolling Stones, Genesis, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Tom Petty had appeared.

  “Knebworth was the gig, and I reckon we could do two dates.”

  Traditionally, the festival took place on the first and second weekends in August. It would be an ideal way to give the new Led Zeppelin album a second wind. Tentatively titled Look, it was slated for release in late February 1979. Sometime after the first of the year, Peter summoned the Hipgnosis team, Po and Storm Thorgerson, to Horselunges for a meeting with Jimmy to spitball ideas for a cover.

  “I’d like to go back to the roots in a bluesier way—an acknowledgment of where we were, rather than going outward,” Jimmy explained. He told them about a funky old bar he’d seen while on his vacation in Guadeloupe that might provide an excellent backdrop for the cover.

  Rather than studying his pictures of it, the band handled the decision in typical Led Zeppelin fashion—by bankrolling a trip to Guadeloupe for Po. “I found the bar,” he recalls, “but it wasn’t any great shakes aesthetically.” Instead, he detoured to New Orleans and spent five days photographing every honky-tonk on Bourbon Street. His idea was to take the best from each to create a fantasy bar and build it from scratch on a movie soundstage. Storm Thorgerson went him one better: he proposed photographing it in the style of a movie—the different views of six people in the bar of each other.