Why Led Zeppelin’s manager hid bad reviews from Robert Plant
Swaggering, assured and suggestive are three words that can be used to describe Led Zeppelin when they were at their pomp. The band were an effervescent force when at the peak of their powers, with each member, frontman Robert Plant, guitarist Jimmy Page, bassist John Paul Jones and drummer John Bonham, all doing their bit to create the commercial goliath that usurped The Beatles as the biggest band on earth.
From their 1969 debut to their final outing, 1979’s In Through the Out Door, Led Zeppelin delivered music that packed more of a punch than anything anyone had ever heard before, underpinned by a genuine energy that was fuelled by a shared creative vision that bands so often miss.
Despite Led Zeppelin’s meteoric rise, in the early days, each band member had to learn as they went along with certain aspects of the job. Although Page and Jones were well accustomed to the inner workings of the music industry due to their previous jobs as two of London’s most sought-after session musicians, the quartet weren’t accustomed to being in the spotlight in such a way.
Still, it was something they had to get used to quickly. Famously though, Bonham continued to suffer panic attacks before every show right until his death in 1980. “I’ve got worse,” he said in 1975. “I have terribly bad nerves all the time.”
Naturally, much of the spotlight was on frontman Robert Plant, so in the early days, when the band were rising to become the world beaters that they’re now celebrated as, he was forced to overcome his stage fright for the good of the group. However, per an account from Zeppelin’s notorious manager Peter Grant, in the beginning, Plant lacked so much confidence that he hid the negative reviews the band had away from him.
“He did lack a bit of confidence at first,” Peter Grant explained in Barney Hoskyns’ Led Zeppelin IV. “I mean, I used to hide all the negative reviews we had.”
“I didn’t even know what to do with my arms,” Plant also acknowledged in Hoskyns’ work. “Now I understand why Joe Cocker did that thing for a while. Because what are you going to do? There were so many solos.”
As Plant would later reflect, it was during the recording sessions for 1970’s Led Zeppelin III, that he would start to come into his own as an artist, some two years after the band formed. This was because things were so hectic that he didn’t have time to collect his thoughts.
“I was shouting too much on the first album,” Plant told Cameron Crowe in a 1973 L.A. Times interview. “I stopped shouting a little bit by the second album. By the third one I finally learned how to sing.”
We all know how this arc ended. Their following album, 1971’s Led Zeppelin IV is their masterpiece.
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