What if they would have been called the New Yardbirds. It was a close call, and we like to believe that success has nothing to do with the name, and even as the New Yardbirds they would have created the same songs and albums. It was important for Jimmy Page as well. Legend has it that the one "guilty" for the now legendary name was none other than Keith Moon from The Who. He was the one who, with great sarcastic irony, said that the new band would surely go down and fail like a "lead zeppelin". A little corrective and inspired spelling and the legend had begun. Many bands spend many hours and obscene amounts of money recording their new album, and one could only imagine how they feel if it turns to be a failure. Maybe not too many go to the extremes that Guns'n'Roses went with the now infamous Chinese Democracy, but the reverse rarely happens. But when it does, as for the Beatles or, in our case, Led Zeppelin, the end result could actually be a masterpiece. Led Zepp spent about 30 hours in the studio recording their very first LP, some kind of a record for that time, and the costs were comfortable even for a new band - about 1780 pounds. Judging by success and later sales this could be of the best investments ever.
Not everybody was impressed with the band's name, and someone was even angry. Really angry. For she was Frau Eva von Zeppelin, niece to the founder of the company, and distressed because a loud rock band was using the name Zeppelin threatened with a costly lawsuit. It was great publicity for the band, and to appease lady Zeppelin they even played a show, on February 28th 1970, under a new name - The Nobs. Nothing came of the lawsuit and eventually Eva von Zeppelin dropped all charges. But it is hard to believe that she ever became a Led Zepp fan.
How would the group have sounded without the voice of the one and only Robert Plant? It was a close call, for the now iconic singer was not the first choice of Jimmy Page, who was more than dissatisfied with the first audition. Fortunatelly, eventually Page caved and the story of the famous band truly began.
The members of the band were self-confessed J.R.R. Tolkien fans, but Jimmy Page was also an admirer of the controversial writer and ocultist Aleister Crowley, once named the most wicked man in the world. And it wasn't just a passion for his books, for later, when he could afford it, Page bought in 1971 Crowley's former house, in Loch Ness, Scotland. Yes, the same place as the famous monster. Rumours were that the place was used for black magic and was still haunted. Much later Page would say that he really encountered there spooky and unexplainable phenomenons, and yet he kept the house.
Stairway to Heaven is the most famous of Led Zeppelin, and various theories, some of them truly insane, have been proposed about it's meaning and hidden truths. The song was played live for the very first time on March 5th 1971, in Belfast, and as hard it may be to believe it, it was far, very far from being warmly received then. The audience, as Page remembered in a much later interview, seemed even bored by the long and strange composition.
May 2016
