Guitar master Jimmy Page talked about the early days of Led Zeppelin, explaining to The Academy of Achievement (transcribed by UG):
“The Yardbirds did their last date – I think it’s the beginning of July [1968] – and during August I find Robert Plant and I work with him.
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“I get into my house and I play him various ideas of things that I want to do on this album because I had a very clear idea of what would work at that point of time with the FM radio in America that was just about getting to the point where they were playing whole sides of albums.
“I realized that if you had an album that as you listen to one track it would set up the second track – there would be such a diversity upon the album, different styles and different moods that would capture people’s imagination when they listened to it.
“And now we had the vehicle, with the FM radio, to be able to do that. So yeah, I had very clear ideas of the material that I wanted to do.
“And I’d written ‘Communication Breakdown,’ I had the whole chart for ‘Baby I’m Gonna Leave You’ and… Yes, I worked with him, it was just he and I and I played him some material that I done with The Yardbirds, like ‘Dazed and Confused,’ and he recommended a drummer, that was John Bonham.
“And then I’ve seen John Bonham play – and I felt him play, actually. It was quite an experience. And he was playing with a musician called Tim Rose.
“There were now sort of possible three, and John Paul Jones heard I was getting a band together and he called me out and said, ‘I hear you are putting a band together, would you consider me on bass?’
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“And I said, ‘Okay, marvelous.’ Because I played with him in the studio in some various sessions. Robert had a short time when he played with John Bonham, but John Bonham was off and playing around and starting to make a name for himself outside of Birmingham.
“We had this one rehearsal in a small rehearsal room, and we all knew instinctively from that point that we’d never felt anything like that before, because it was four musical equals with this sort of communion.
“And from that point I got everyone to come to my house and we started rehearsing and recording. And it’s a very fast route because Yardbirds breakup in July, August rehearsals, we’re actually recording by the end of September and we’ve done some dates in Scandinavia.
“Which were a handful of dates, but it was good, I was very keen to be able to play the material live – and we had a set together of other material as well – so that could do that in front of an audience before we went on to record so we could keep the thing really fresh.
“But any alterations we needed to make we could do rather than waste a lot of time in the studio. And so the first album was done in collectively 30 hours – for the time that we went in there and mixed it. So that’s pretty extraordinary!”
Focusing on how Led Zeppelin got its name, Jimmy noted:
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“It was a name that Keith Moon had mentioned back then. He was talking, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to have a band called Led Zeppelin?’ And I asked him if we could use the name, because I was gonna be in this band Led Zeppelin with Keith Moon, so was Jeff Beck.
“So when we were playing in Scandinavia we were out there as New Yardbirds, it was a cloak of invisibility really. And even on the first recordings it said ‘New Yardbirds’ on the box because I didn’t want anybody to know what the name of the band was until we really officially unveiled it. And [the first album] was it.
“We came over to United States right on Christmans in 1968 and then we played some concerts and then we came to the west coast and played Los Angeles and and The Fillmore. And what happened at The Fillmore was that we had an extra night put in, and we just tore it up.
“The band that was supposed to be playing there didn’t come. And of course, we had this really hard set. And the whole of the United States got to hear about this group that now had the record out in the early part of January.
“The record was being played all over the United States, and it was via radio because there weren’t cell phones, there was no internet – it was a word by radio that this band was just incredible.
“And as we moved across the United States by, say, March – we were on the East Coast from the West Coast – the people were just coming to see us. It was incredible, because the reception was amazing.
“But here comes the interesting thing – from that point onwards we were never able to satisfy the demand of people that came to see us. And we were doing multiple date shows in cities and we would still just sell out over all the years that we played. So that’s really good cort of CV, really. [Laughs]”
