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Chapter 1
Gentlemen, Start Your Egos
Our heroes chart a course out of the 1960s into the 1970s, Led Zeppelin defies the rock-critic elite and prospers mightily, Alice Cooper discovers the power of dead babies (and chickens), and the Who attempt to out-Tommy Tommy.
It is apparently compulsory to depict the 1960s--which is to say the sixties, the tie-dyed simulacrum, not the decade itself--as having ended conveniently with the thunderclap and whimper of Woodstock-then-Altamont in 1969. That’s the tidy, Time-Life commemorative version, not available in stores, call now. It is likewise an article of faith that the 1970s are the inevitable, pitiful, ridiculous aftershock of the 1960s youthquake and therefore deserve to be lampooned into eternity as a theme park of wide lapels, disco, and relentless self-absorption: That ’70s Decade, the leisure-suited pleasure dome lit by lava lamp.
There is, on the other hand, refreshing acknowledgment--if not the “agonizing reappraisal” of Hunter S. Thompson, the dope-upholstered counterculture mascot whose best work, including Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, was published not in the sixties but in the seventies--that the decade is more than feckless cultural and historical throat clearing, ten years of bad endings--Nixon to Nam--and paltry beginnings. The historian Bruce J. Schulman depicts the seventies as the dawning of an actual instead of fanciful age of, if not Aquarius, then nothing less than “the end of the post World War II era.” Schulman rejects the purple-hazy hype lavished on the sixties as an agency for upending the status quo and declares that it is the seventies that define “the terms of contemporary American life”--said terms being constantly, maddeningly in flux without benefit of hindsight because henceforth “the experiences of the postwar generation would offer little guidance.”
That’s putting it mildly. Consider 1973: Ferdinand Marcos becomes president of the Philippines; Lyndon Johnson dies; Richard Nixon is inaugurated for his benighted second term; G. Gordon Liddy and James W. McCord Jr. are convicted for their part in the Watergate break-in; the Supreme Court overturns state laws prohibiting abortion in Roe v. Wade; the Paris Peace Accords are signed “ending” the war in Vietnam. And that’s just January. Before 1973 is finished, the World Trade Center and Sydney Opera House open; the DEA is founded; the ATM is patented; Spiro Agnew resigns; Steve Jobs drops out of Reed College; Federal Express ships its first packages; the Arab oil embargo commences. The director Ang Lee later notes that, while shooting the film adaptation of The Ice Storm, Rick Moody’s novel chronicling the sexual revolution limping belatedly into suburban Connecticut, “My producers and I often joked that 1973 was America’s most ‘embarrassing’ year--with Nixon, polyester, the admitting of defeat in Vietnam, stagflation, the energy crisis. But embarrassment can be a profound and enlightening experience.”
It is probably most realistic to consider the sixties and seventies a cultural continuum in which business begun in the sixties is concluded, however unsatisfactorily, in the seventies. And therein comes a moment when, by sheer momentum, the cultural detritus of the sixties--the peace and love and hash pipes, along with what David Crosby makes a fetish of calling “the Music”--comes hurtling into the seventies and into the laps of a generational cohort too young to parse the Kennedy assassination and Beatlemania but old enough to feel the gravitational pull of the counterculture and big brother’s Disraeli Gears and Surrealistic Pillow albums. This is the audience, born in the late fifties and early sixties, that at the dawn of the seventies makes its appetites and buying power known and in the process radically reshapes the aesthetics and commercial scope of rock and popular music in ways still evident today. They do it by wishing only to continue the sixties hootenanny of which they are given a tantalizing glimpse, blissfully ignoring the fact that not all the bullets they dodge by arriving too late for Kent State are metaphorical: The hems of their faded Levi’s breaking fastidiously across caramel Acme cowboy boots as they saunter into high schools trailing pot smoke and wan entitlement, they are the first of the postwar generation not to have to register for the draft.
The annus mirabilis of these children of both the sixties and seventies--their shimmering summer of ’42--is 1973. At high schools with indulgent open-campus policies, they are allowed to design their own class schedules, come and go with near complete impunity, and smoke cigarettes and whatever else strikes their fancy in parking lots clotted with 442s and ’Cudas leaking bluish clouds from the interiors. They no longer play the hardcore sixties music that they’d worshipped from afar during their Wonder Years, the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, even--especially?--the Beatles, being one gear too retro (the Rolling Stones and the Who, having released the pan-generational Exile on Main Street and Who’s Next in the two years before, are exempt). The hunger among males of the cohort for rock--hard rock, rock as libidinous and priapic as they are--soon supercharges the record business but appalls the nascent rock-critical elite; in the real world of record sales, it is another story. Untold millions of suburban high schoolers from Shaker Heights to Syosset, Sherman Oaks to Barrington Hills, reach deep into the pockets of their fly-button 501s and commence buying stacks, cartons, shiploads of albums, pushing sales of recorded music to $47 million in 1973. And the band the rock-crit elite hate them the most for loving is Led Zeppelin.
“In 1973, in the collective mind of the critical clique, Led Zeppelin was not only not cool, they were distinctly uncool,” the record executive Danny Goldberg, the band’s press officer in 1973, would later recall. The freshly minted “rock critics” toiling at Rolling Stone are ten years older than the average Zeppelin fans, whose sheer number and buying power render irrelevant whatever reservations self-anointed cultural gatekeepers have about the band. Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau, dean of the rock-crit elite and later Bruce Springsteen’s manager, recalled: “Zeppelin forced a revival of the distinction between popularity and quality. As long as the bands most admired aesthetically were also the bands most successful commercially (Cream, for instance) the distinction was irrelevant. But Zeppelin’s enormous commercial success, in spite of critical opposition, revealed the deep division in what was once thought to be a homogeneous audience.” Or, as Goldberg observed, “Led Zeppelin was the first big group to make that slice of baby boomers feel mortal.” As a nonplussed rock writer bleated to Goldberg at Max’s Kansas City--the Elaine’s for the 1970s New York rock-crit elite--after seeing Zeppelin in concert, “Their audience is so young.”
It is the same story in Britain, where Led Zeppelin formed in 1968 from the ashes of the Yardbirds, one of the more adventuresome of the British Invasion groups. Zeppelin’s preposterous name, already as passé and metaphorically plodding as Iron Butterfly, does the band no favors with the rock press. “Led Zeppelin” is a portmanteau coined after a 1966 session for a Jeff Beck track, “Beck’s Bolero,” with Beck and Jimmy Page, boyhood friends and later bandmates in the Yardbirds, on guitars; a journeyman British studio arranger named John Paul Jones, né John Baldwin, on bass; Nicky Hopkins, a top London session pianist; and the Who’s peripatetic Keith Moon on drums. The session went so well--after almost disappearing as the B-side to a Beck single, “Beck’s Bolero” fetched up on Beck’s first solo album and became one of the most influential hard-rock songs ever recorded--there was talk among the musicians of forming a band. The irrepressible Moon, who sneaked into the session in disguise to avoid the wrath of Pete Townshend, predicted the band would go over like a lead balloon--“a lead zeppelin,” corrected the Who’s bassist, John Entwistle, who was considering joining in lieu of John Paul Jones. Nothing came of the band--entreaties to the Small Faces’ Steve Marriott to join as singer were aggressively rebuffed by his management. But the ambitious premise for the song--a rock interpretation of Ravel’s “Bolero” filigreed with sonorous, distorted lead guitar and dramatic contrasts in tempo and dynamics--prefigured the style Page would soon perfect with his next band. “That would have been Zeppelin, I guess, had we had a vocalist,” Beck later acknowledged.
