Led Zeppelin on stage at the historic O2 Arena gig. Picture: Supplied Source: Supplied
GUITAR god and Led Zeppelin producer Jimmy Page is reviving his band’s legacy by remastering their classic albums — but don’t hold your breath for a reunion
Led Zeppelin’s reputation as one of the most important, innovative and successful bands of all time is enduring and undeniable.
But the British rock gods were almost as well known for their offstage antics, decadence and interest in the occult. Indeed in the years since the band split, the oft-told and sometimes exaggerated tales of sex, drugs and hotel trashing have threatened to overshadow the quartet’s prodigious musical output.
If even a fraction of the stories are true, founding member, guitarist and producer Jimmy Page might be forgiven for having lost some of the finer details of the band’s journey in the haze of time and various substances. But in trawling through thousands of images for a photographic autobiography as well as hundreds of hours of tapes to remaster the band’s most important releases, he insists it’s almost all still with him. Well, the work parts at least.
1970s photo of singer Robert Plant (Left) & guitarist Jimmy Page from band Led Zeppelin. Picture: Supplied Source: News Corp Australia
“I’m absolutely 100 per cent clear,” he says. “That’s why I went back to do this project. It wasn’t like ‘I don’t know what I’m looking for’. I knew exactly what I was looking for and that’s it. I know the full story behind 98 per cent of the recordings.
“When it comes down to actually making music, you have to be really responsible about what you are there for and why you have been blessed with this gift of being able to play guitar, or be a producer or whatever it is.”
And as to those tales of drugs, booze, women and a customised private jet?
“Well, wouldn’t you want to enjoy yourself if you had the opportunity to have a good time?” he says with a casual chuckle.
As the producer of the original albums, the former session musician and Yardbirds guitarist who assembled singer Robert Plant, bassist/keyboardist John Paul Jones and drummer John Bonham, Page has largely been the keeper of the Led Zeppelin flame all these years.
He took charge of the re-releases — the first three albums came out earlier this year and the fourth and fifth last week — aiming to make them the best they could possibly sound on the technology now available, whether vinyl, CD or digital format.
Led Zeppelin — John Bonham, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones. Picture: Supplied Source: Supplied
He also wanted to create “mirror images” of the original albums using alternative takes or demos to satiate the legions of Zeppelin fans, who have been clamouring for more from the archives ever since the foursome disbanded in 1980 after the death of Bonham.
“There are two sets of people — there are people who have heard Led Zeppelin and then there’s people who have listened to Led Zeppelin and know why it ticks,” he says. “It’s for those people and musicians who really get into the how and why it ticks and what it can conjure up in people’s minds, the images that they have.
The band’s fourth album, usually referred to as Led Zeppelin IV, but technically only titled by four unpronounceable runes, remains one of the highest selling albums of all time, with more than 37 million units sold. Tracks such as Black Dog and Rock and Roll and, especially, Stairway To Heaven have entered the cultural consciousness but Plant remembers it as a time of experimentation and a fierce work ethic. It was mostly recorded in a Victorian house in the UK countryside, Headley Grange, using a mobile recording studio, so the band members could eat and sleep there and were able to conjure tracks such as Rock and Roll and The Battle of Evermore “out of thin air”.
“I thought if everyone makes a commitment to that with a mobile recording truck, it’s going to be really super interesting to see what comes out” says Page.
The band’s epic signature song Stairway To Heaven, which has been covered by Rolf Harris and Dolly Parton and regularly features on lists of rock’s greatest songs (although Plant once paid a radio station $10,000 never to play it again), proved too much for the mobile studio alone.
To blend together the disparate acoustic and electric parts, Page needed the more precise surrounds of the Basing Street Studios in London.
Zeppelin has only performed a handful of times since disbanding — most recently at the 2007 Ahmet Ertegun concert in London, with Bonham’s son Jason on drums. The surviving members were honoured by President Obama at the prestigious 2012 Kennedy Center Honours and also held a slightly awkward press conference the same year for the DVD release of their Grammy-winning live DVD, Celebration Day. Page has expressed interest in playing more shows but Plant has repeatedly rebuffed the idea.
US President Barack Obama greets Led Zeppelin band members after an event in the East Room of the White House. Picture: AFP/Brendan Smialowski Source: AFP
Page is still cagey on the subject of the band re-forming and the suggestion that there might be unfinished business for Led Zeppelin.
Having turned 70 this year, he’s not about to hang on for an answer indefinitely and will hit the road next year, playing music from all eras of his career, including Zeppelin.
“There is unfinished business for me,” he says, emphasising the personal pronoun. “I have no idea about as a band — and that’s it. What I am going to do is go out there and manifest some new music I have got and obviously play some of the things that I have created and am known for. So that’s what I will be doing.”
> HEAR Led Zeppelin IV and Houses Of the Holy (Warner) - out now
