Glenn A. Baker

'Sydney and Zeppelin'
The Led Zeppelin World Tour Exhibition Catalogue, 19 January 2008.

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SYDNEY AND ZEPPELIN

There are moments in all our young lives when a piece of music comes at us with such galvanising force that, for a moment, it seems to erase everything that went before. That’s what happened to a certain 17 year old in 1969 who managed to get hold of a shattering debut album by a new British band bearing a black and white cover image of an exploding airship. Even though Cream, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Traffic, Vanilla Fudge, Jefferson Airplane, (Peter Green’s) Fleetwood Mac, the Jeff Beck Group and even the Crazy World of Arthur Brown had been sending my senses spinning for a couple of years, songs like Communication Breakdown, Good Times, Bad Times and Dazed and Confused were so sonically startling that they seemed to redefine the very possibilities of rock.

Even though they had come about as the New Yardbirds, seeking to build upon an established chart franchise, these guys were a tribe apart. “We were never part of the pop scene” guitarist Jimmy Page recently commented. “It was never what Led Zeppelin was supposed to be about. Our thing was playing live. We actually shunned commercialism.” So much so that, at least in the UK, where they had some control over such matters, there was no such thing as a Led Zeppelin single. Even where such things did find their way to the market, their tour de force, the one song that has come to define the band’s peerless reach and grasp, was not a hit. It didn’t need to be – Stairway to Heaven is the best-known album track of all time.

As Rolling Stone once observed: “It wasn’t just Led Zeppelin’s thunderous volume, sledgehammer bear and edge-of-mayhem arrangements that made it the most influential and successful of the heavy metal pioneers, it was their finesse.” And as another journal of record has marvelled: “Their legendary, epic live sets – often lasting more than three hours – were wildly magical experiences which traversed exceptional musical territory; sonic journeys which were truly cathartic experiences for the band and audience alike.” For this was a band not prepared to just reproduce their studio sound on the road – they used the concert stage as a palette and a canvas.

Though they were firmly rooted in the gutsy, gravelly blue-rock tradition that was throwing up Joe Cocker, Rod Stewart and Ian Gillian, it could have gone another way entirely. “The trouble was,” Page once revealed, “I could play a lot of different styles but I really didn’t know what to do. Sometimes I wanted to do a hard rock thing. At other, a Pentangle thing.” [They being a very British folk outfit]. With his quiet bass playing mate John Paul Jones, Page was a premier London sessionman of longstanding, having provided indelible breaks on tracks by the Kinks and Them, among others. In fact, the pair had first discussed forming a group while working together on sessions for Donovan’s Hurdy Gurdy Man. The group, when it did form, would provide the backing on a PJ Proby album before anything much else.

Certainly Jimmy was riffing away rapaciously in the Yardbirds, shouldering the full lead load after Beck’s departure, but he was well aware that “the record buying public seemed to have lost interest in us, as we kept having personnel changes.”

What tipped Jimmy toward the unbridled thunder that would be Led Zeppelin was hearing the phenomenally-throated Robert Plant, who had began his career rise in Birmingham outfits The Crawling King Snakes, Band of Joy and Hobbstweedle. The original choice for singer was one Terry ‘Superlungs’ Reid but as he was contractually unavailable he unselfishly recommended Plant. Just as unavailable was the first choice as drummer, one B. J. Wilson, who wasn’t of a mind to leave Procol Harum.

Plant let it be known he would only come on board with John Bonham, perhaps the hardest hitting and hardest living rock drummer of all. Bonzo had begun playing at age 5 and his path to Zeppelin took him through such bands as Terry Webb & the Spiders, the Blue Star Trio, the Senators and, fatefully the aforementioned Crawling King Snakes and Band of Joy.

When a few other things fell into place – a band name proposed by the Who’s maniacal drummer Keith Moon, a series of go for broke American dates arranged by determined manager Peter Grant, a contract with Atlantic records accompanied by a sizeable advance, and a dispensation to allow Jimmy to produce the band – the album that would shift the world a bit off its axis was ready to do its job. Writer Colin Larkin once described it as “the definitive statement of British blues-rock but Page’s meticulous production showed a grasp of basic pop dynamics, resulting in a clarity redolent of 50s’rock ‘n’ roll. His staggering dexterity was matched by Plant’s expressive, beseeching voice, a combination that flourished on Led Zeppelin II.”

And on each album that followed. Though for a band that so changed the face of rock, they were only intact for a relatively brief span – a dozen years, during which they gave us nine studio album releases and a live film soundtrack. Total sales well exceed a hundred million.

Led Zeppelin, like the Beatles, only made it down under once and Ted Harvey, thankfully, was there with his cameras. One of the unsung heroes of Australian rock photography – Ted was active during the golden concert epoch of the 70s, artfully aiming his lenses at not only Led Zep but Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull and Cat Stevens.

Displaying admirable chutzpah Ted not only rolled up backstage at Sydney Showground on 27 February 1972 in his van with a generic press pass, looking for all the world as if he belonged no place else, and shot the whole show, he then went around to the Sebel Town House the next day to show the players what he’d captured. They received him warmly; Robert Plant was particularly impressed and the two went wandering around Kings Cross (where the singer had to be dissuaded from removing a car’s hood ornament in a laneway).

What Harvey was able to train his cameras on was a band at the height of their cock-rock glory – thrusting, edgy, almost menacing. Jeans as tight as the rhythm section, hair and fretting fingers flying. Film coverage included a 2003 DVD release show them in a particularly ferocious form before an eager crowd of around 30,000. Curiously, Robert Plant also filmed parts of the crows at this concert, and this footage, featured a fleeting glimpse of a young, camera wielding Harvey has turned up on the DVD. Jimmy had been on the lower continent before – with the Yardbirds in 1967, memorably clad in purple velvet and playing his guitar with a violin bow – but the others had not. Perhaps, even after four smash albums (two of them number one in the U.S. for a total of 11 weeks) and relentless, draining touring in the top half of the world, they wanted to impress, they wanted to conquer. Though the shows were long and diverse, with acoustic passages, the seemed to be less about Middle Earthism, mythology and folk flourishes than the roar of their current top ten hit Black Dog and the soon-to-surge Rock and Roll. Even acknowledging the 1971 Deep Purple outdoor shows it was as high octane as anything that had been witnessed in the city (the Mick Taylor-era Rolling Stones tour being a year away).

Australia, like America, escaped the singles embargo. In fact a revolution of sorts could be said to have taken place in January 1970 w.nder, pretty much shattering any notions of what could or could not be played on pop radio. With an album charting pattern similar to the U.S. and hits to boot, Australia was as devoted a territory as any other on the planet.

“It was just fantastic, it was a raw rock concert, really exciting and a huge privilege to be a part of,” recalled Ted Harvey in 2005. “I was pleased with my shots, They were well balanced, good exposures, and they really captured the time, the people, and an era which has gone, replaced by a digital age and the remastering of everybody’s voice.”

Because of a pay dispute with a magazine, the photographs were never published. They ended up forgotten about in a drawer and eventually mislaid, for more than thirty three years. “A friend of mine kept telling me he wanted to see the Led Zeppelin photos so I had a big search but just couldn’t find them” Ted explains. “One day I was having a spring clean-out taking stuff to the tip and I came across my original negatives, I was quite shocked.”

He selected a hundred, carefully cleaned and restored them, then displayed the results, to assist a charity, on a one-night-only basis, in a gallery in the northern New South Wales town of Lismore. On the night it seemed as if half the tightly jammed crowd had actually been there in 1972 to witness the legendary band live. There was an acute awareness of not only how rare and precious was the portfolio but how blessed was the fortune that it had not been lost forever.

These were artefacts of an evolving era as innocent as it was audacious; captured moments of a music and an environment nowhere near as sophisticated as it probably thought it was but definitely, as Ted now sees it, “A very inspirational time for a lot of people.”

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