skyscraper at 444 Madison Avenue in midtown Manhattan. Behind a locked door was a reception area, with a girl answering the phone. The décor was framed platinum albums and piles of cardboard boxes. Danny’s big corner office was bare except for his desk, a ten-line phone console, some file cabinets, a sofa, and a large blue statue of Hindu’s Lord Krishna playing his flute.
Everyone in the Zeppelin organization had a nickname: Pagey, Percy, Bonzo, Jonesy, Granty. Danny’s nickname was Govinda, supplied early on by Robert Plant. “Govinda Goldberg.” (This was actually better than Danny’s first Plant-bestowed nickname: Goldilocks.)
Danny was taking phone calls, so I gazed out his top-floor window. Looking south, in the wan winter light, I could see all the way to New Jersey. A veteran of the exclusive “back room” at fabled hangout Max’s Kansas City on Park Avenue South, Danny was telling a (quite famous) old friend from the Warhol circle that he couldn’t have a job with Jimmy Page on the American tour because he was exactly the sort of person that Jimmy hired bodyguards to protect himself from.
Led Zeppelin would shortly arrive in America, and Danny was working twelve-hour days. All the tour media went through him, much of it channeled through the publicity department of Atlantic Records, distributor of Swan Song product. Danny was also one of the links between the band and its booking agents, promoters, and tour operators. Danny was a wonderful young guy with very long hair, a spiritual outlook, and brain-crunching responsibilities. He didn’t drink, or smoke pot. He just got the job done. A real New York media pro, he maintained a tight schedule of parties, events, and concerts to attend, after hours. Danny was famous for never staying more than five minutes, but he always showed up.
I’d invited him for lunch, and he was glad to get out of the office for an hour. This was a world before cell phones. On the way to the elevator, we passed a dark office lit only by a yellow lamp. A middle-aged man was talking intently on the telephone. “That’s Steve Weiss,” Danny whispered. “Our lawyer. Everyone is scared of him.”
We ate at an Indian vegetarian restaurant and used the time to block out my dates. Danny suggested I cover Zeppelin’s concerts in the New York area at the end of February, and then fly with him to California to cover the Southern California shows, in early March. Danny explained the L.A. concerts were usually the best of the tour, because the musicians were showing off for their girlfriends.
“I thought they were all married,” I blurted.
Danny looked at me like I was an idiot.
Could I get an advance copy of the new Led Zeppelin album?
Oy. Danny rolled his eyes. “I have to answer this fuckin’ question two hundred times a day. I wish that … I … could get a copy. The release date keeps getting pushed back.” Physical Graffiti was now scheduled for the third week in February, a month into the tour. The record company guys were upset, nervous, scared for their bonuses. Danny was stressed. Everyone connected to Led Zeppelin was too.
I asked if I could schedule interviews with Led Zeppelin, and Danny just laughed.
“Jimmy? Forget it.
“Robert? Maybe.
“Jones? No way.
“John? You don’t wanna know.
“Peter Grant never talks to the press, except a couple guys in London that helped the band in the very early days.”
Couldn’t Danny have a quiet word with Jimmy for me? It would be hard to get this story published without fresh quotes from the principals of the band.
“It’s not impossible,” he said, picking up the check. “Think of an angle, and I’ll try to pitch it to Jimmy when I see him. And I promise to get the new album to you—as soon as they come in. See you in about a month. God bless.”
Back in Boston, I made some calls to friends in London. A few days later, I received, via air mail, two BASF C-90 audio cassettes containing stereo dubs of a vinyl test pressing of what the tape label described as LED ZEPPELIN VI. Included was a handwritten sheet with the tentative song titles and track times. It came from a reporter for Melody Maker who shared my fanaticism for Bob Marley and the Wailers, another band at the top of their game in 1975.
That wintry afternoon, I brewed a pot of tea, built a fire, smoked several bowls of crumbly yellow hashish that I had (inadvertently) brought back from Morocco not long before, put on a pair of serious headphones, and plugged the jack into my Sony Walkman Pro cassette recorder. Then I pushed PLAY and cranked the volume.
Side one started with “Custard Pie.” In my condition, it felt like I should be behind a blast wall. It had a pile-driving, tone-drop guitar riff, and amounted to another Zeppelin raid on Bukka White’s old blues song, “Shake ‘Em On Down.” Next came “The Rover,” slower and very hard, with Robert’s plaintive call to his lover “on the far side of the globe,” and a massed choir of electric guitars. Robert’s plea for generational unity fades away, and then into the slithering, devilish slide guitars of “In My Time of Dying,” another appropriation of old U.S. blues. (Bob Dylan had done a version early in his career.) But this “Time” was a twelve-minute sonic splatter painting, so febrile and intense that, after twelve minutes of fiery-furnace musicality, the band loses the moment, and they can be heard laughing at each other.
Whew.
Side two began with the romping “Houses of the Holy,” which had been left off the album named for it. (“The Rover” was another outtake from Houses.) A noble brute wants to take you to the movies and advises to let the music be your master and to heed the master’s call over a loping dance across the landscape. This was nothing compared to “Trampled Under Foot,” a song about a woman and a car that seeks to atomize Robert Johnson’s ancient 1936 Ford Terraplane and turn it into a fuel dragster with a 1975 nitrous oxide hookup. I recognized John Paul Jones’s clavinet riff right away, appropriated from Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” Led Zeppelin stole only from the best.
“Kashmir” finished the side with eight minutes of orientalism, majestic themes, Himalayan guitar choruses, and an astonishing, authentic sense of wonder. I could sense that the song expressed feelings that simply could not be faked—a real work of art. More than any song, I thought, even more than “Stairway,” “Kashmir” sounded like the great masterpiece of the entire rock movement.
Later on, some fans would say that those three songs on side two of Physical Graffiti represented Led Zeppelin’s finest work. Certainly the three who wrote “Kashmir”—Page, Plant, and Bonham—agreed. Robert later described the epochal song as “the true pride of Led Zeppelin.”
CHAPTER 9 Expansive Spiritual Vistas
I took a breather after two sides of Physical Graffiti. I made notes about the intense music I had heard—Led Zeppelin’s latest output, a new chapter of powerful artistry. LZ had to be the best rock band in the world now. I loved the Wailers, the Meters, and Little Feat in 1975, but to almost everyone else, Led Zeppelin was The Shit.
Would it—“rock music”—ever get any better than this?
I put on my sheepskin coat and boots and walked around the block with the dogs. It was winter in America now, and it was raining ice. Back inside, I dried the soaking dogs with old towels. I had another smoke. I made fresh tea, flipped the cassette tape, and waded into side three
