The one album Led Zeppelin made before they became a band: “I was given a try out”
Before Led Zeppelin ascended to global rock dominance, its members—Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Bonham, and John Paul Jones—were some of London’s most renowned session musicians. Each had cultivated a formidable individual reputation through their immense talent and dedication. Today, the group is celebrated as one of the great titans of rock, but it was their self-developed skills and artistry that initially brought them into the public eye and laid the foundation for their legendary collective success.
The quartet would take to stages worldwide like the four horsemen of the musical apocalypse and throw down thunder and lightning upon their waiting audiences. However, the first time that they would actually create magic together came when American singer-songwriter PJ Proby arrived in London’s Olympic Studios in 1968 to make his album, Three Week Hero.
Although the record features an array of session musicians rather than Proby being backed by Bonham, Page, Jones and Plant for the entirety of the record, it’s still a hugely monumental moment that can’t be overlooked. Any chance to hear the group perform before they hit the headlines is always of interest, but there may be a few disappointed audience members out there who were hoping to hear Plant’s unique vocals.
In truth, Plant doesn’t even sing on the record and instead contributes his harmonica. Without his thunderous vocals, it’s hard to draw many comparisons between the album and Led Zeppelin’s work, but it’s a poignant moment in the group’s history nonetheless.
Jimmy Page’s success as a session musician meant that getting him to play on this record was a coup for Proby, and, equally, the power that Page carried meant that he could squeeze his new bandmates onto the project, too. Led Zeppelin had only just played together for the first time earlier that month and had yet to play a proper show. It would, therefore, act as the first time the groups ever heard in earnest. However, that soon changed, and they began playing dates around Scandinavia that autumn under the guise of The New Yardbirds.
“I got the opportunity to walk through that sort of iron-clad door,” Page later recalled about his days on the session circuit. The guitarist was famed for his ability to effortlessly weave musical threads to connect the work of those attending the studio that day. “Session music was an extremely closed shop,” he continued. “I was given a try-out with other studio musicians – I must have been seven years younger than anybody else that was around at that point, and some were considerably older.”
Page may have been young, but he certainly had the chops necessary to make things work. It would be his understanding of the music that would give him the pedestal from which to truly lay down some head-turning licks: “They said, ‘You can make up a part, play what you want.’ And because I had these roots across the board, going through from rockabilly to Chicago blues and the whole works, and acoustic playing as well, and I played the harmonica too, I became quite an in-demand session player for one instrument or the other.”
Proby was a seasoned musician who had a fraction of success in 1964 with his debut album but never quite managed to recapture that at any point in his career. Even having the best session musicians in the business playing for him wouldn’t resurrect his waning career.
“The boys told me they were going over to play in San Francisco and all that,” Proby once told Led Zeppelin fansite Finding Zoso. The musician clearly saw the potential of the group laid out in front of him: “I said, ‘Look, from what I’ve heard and the way you boys played tonight, not only are you not going to be my backing band, I’m going to say goodbye right now, because I don’t think I’m ever going to see you again. That’s how successful you’re going to be. You’re exactly what they want, you play all that psychedelic stuff and everything’,” Proby recalled.
Proby recognised the talent and thought Led Zeppelin were set for stardom right from the off: “I said, ‘You’re going to go over there and go down so great I don’t think you’re ever going to come home.’ They didn’t ever come back until they changed their name to Led Zeppelin and stayed over there and came back huge huge stars… I said goodbye that day when I cut that album and I haven’t seen one of them since,” Proby added.
Straight after they finished work on the album on September 7th, 1968, Led Zeppelin took to the stage as a four-piece for the first time at the unlikely location of the Gladsaxe Teen Club of Gladsaxe, Denmark, where they would deliver a now-historic set but this came just after they finished work on Proby’s record.
“Their performance and their music were absolutely flawless, and the music continued to ring nicely in the ears for some time after the curtains were drawn after their show,” a newsletter issued by the venue said of the performance. The literature laid out exactly why fans of blues and rock needed to pay attention to the group, highlighting that Page, in particular, was a maestro with the six-string but that the recruits he had found for his band looked set to eclipse their namesake, The Yardbirds.
Just two months after their first-ever show and finishing work on Proby’s record, they then went on to secure a whopping $143,000 advance contract from Atlantic Records, which, at the time, was the biggest deal ever for a new act. The band would gather up all their musical might, deliver countless albums and songs that would shape an entire generation of music lovers and cement their names into the annals of pop culture history. However, when scrolling back through those volumes of ‘volume-up’ rock, the very first album the four men would work on as a whole would be that of PJ Proby.
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