How a curry almost cost Led Zeppelin their greatest producer: “I didn’t speak to them for about a year”
Love or loathe them, there’s no denying that Led Zeppelin made a tangible impact on music and culture. Whether it be Jimmy Page’s pulsating guitar playing or John Bonham’s elemental rhythms, many of rock’s defining features are traced back to them. However, these musical aspects only account for a portion of what they represent. They’re also synonymous with the rockstar archetype.
This has to do with several factors, including gradually out-there music and deeply unsettling relationships with underage groupies. Following the rock explosion of the 1960s, the genre became all the rage, and its stars were elevated to God-like levels by their fans, basking in mass adulation and lining their pockets with millions of dollars. This led to an entire epoch where rockstars acted with impunity, and excess abounded. It might have been said ironically, but the moment Robert Plant declared himself “The Golden God” symbolises this separation from regular folk.
This outlandish conduct was one of the key reasons why punk emerged in the late 1970s and why other groups, such as AC/DC, were rock ‘n’ roll purists who hated what once inspirational bands like Zeppelin had become. After punk materialised, groups such as the ‘Stairway to Heaven’ outfit could not escape the negative character it had stuck to them, with them incredibly divisive since. Resultantly, future stars who subscribed to the punk philosophy, such as Kurt Cobain, also held negative opinions about them, widening this divide among music fans.
Led Zeppelin did it to themselves, and many stories account for this. One of the most comical but illustrative examples of how far removed they had become from reality comes from legendary producer and studio engineer Eddie Kramer, who played a key role in facilitating their creative development and success. He first worked on 1969’s Led Zeppelin II, one of five for them.
While the marathon for Led Zeppelin II was a majorly positive one, with Led Zeppelin’s towering sound starting to take shape in classics such as ‘Whole Lotta Love’, following it, success took its toll on the band. Kramer then found they changed over the next few years.
Before the quartet was about to peak with 1971’s Led Zeppelin IV, they came into Electric Lady Studios in New York to mix it with him. However, they angered him so much that their relationship was nearly irreparable. It might seem trivial, but it was a simple Indian curry that was at the centre of this flashpoint.
“With Zeppelin, it became a battle because they started to come into studio with such an attitude,” Kramer told Mixonline in 2003 about the band coming to mix IV. “We started, and then one night, the band ordered some Indian food, and a whole bunch of it spilled on the floor, and I asked the roadies to please clean it up. The studio was brand-new, and I had a lot of pride in it. And suddenly, they’re yelling, ‘You don’t tell our roadies what to do!’ And they pulled out; they left, and I didn’t speak to them for about a year! Then later, they called back and asked me to record them again as if nothing had happened.”
It might seem trivial, but when you add the flagrant spilling of curry in a pristine new studio to what we can only presume was a long list of other grating behavioural issues, there’s no wonder Kramer snapped. It also speaks volumes about how inflated the band’s egos were that they had such a lack of accountability that they petulantly pulled out of the project.
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