The 1960s American rock band Led Zeppelin left in the dust: “No match”
The magic of Led Zeppelin was something that was apparent almost immediately, not just to the public, but to the band itself.
It was the late 1960s in Chinatown when Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and John Bonham all first started playing together. It was quite an awkward jam at first, which always tends to be the case when you’re face-to-face with new musicians for the first time. It’s a process of working out each other’s style and sound for a little bit at first.
However, once they all landed on a song that they could play together, it was clear that they were a musical match made in heaven. “We first played together in a small room on Gerrard Street, a basement room, which is now Chinatown,” said John Paul Jones, reflecting on that first jam session. “There were just wall-to-wall amplifiers, and a space for the door, and that was it. Literally, it was everyone looking at each other, ‘What shall we play?’”
He continued, “There was an old Yardbirds tune […] called ‘Train Kept a Rollin’… The whole room just exploded”. It certainly did, as the sound of those four musicians was something that the entire world came to know and love eventually, but the first time it was ever truly materialised was in that room.
It’s understandable that the first song they played together was a Yardbirds’ track, as Page admitted that quite a lot of what the band did in the early days was a direct result of his time in The Yardbirds, which is where he conjured plenty of the ideas that went on to become Led Zeppelin tracks. Not to mention, when the band began playing together and touring, they were doing so under the name The New Yardbirds.
Maybe the name change was necessary, given how many bands they managed to piss off on their original run in America. In the words of their old manager, Peter Grant, essentially, Led Zeppelin were unable to get many gigs when they first went out to the States because the other groups who were performing were a bit intimidated.
“When we first went to America [January ‘69], and they heard the album, they thought: ‘Fuck this’,” he recalled, “It was hard to get Zeppelin on shows, because other bands or the managers thought: ‘Shit! This is so good’.”
One of the bands who were on the receiving end of Led Zeppelin’s magnitude was Iron Butterfly, who Zeppelin ended up supporting at Fillmore East in 1969. It’s pretty standard for bands to start at the bottom of the bill when they’re new to the scene, but Grant, knowing just how good Zeppelin was, spoke to the gig promoter and said they needed to go on second and be given more time. After a bit of persuasion, an agreement was made, and Iron Butterfly’s management was pretty angry when they found out.
“When Iron Butterfly’s management found out, they wanted Zeppelin off. They didn’t want them near them,” said Grant, “And they were right. Zeppelin did a fantastic set. The audience was still going: ‘Zeppelin! Zeppelin! Zeppelin!…’ when Iron Butterfly had started their set. Good band, not a bad band, but no match for Zeppelin. But then, nobody ever was.”
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