Led Zeppelin Interview

The following conversations with Page and took place over a period of two weeks. We began over tea in Plant's suite at Chicago's Ambassador Hotel. The talk continued 3 days later in Page's darkened room. "It's still morning" he shivered, sitting, underneath a blanket on his sofa. "We may have to talk for three hours before I make any sense." The resulting interview, from which most of this material is taken, stretched into late afternoon. Page, a soft spoken man, apparently preferred candles to electric light. A visit to Plant several days later provided more material and one final visit with Page on the plane flight to New York supplied the remaining details. It wasn't until Led Zeppelin's last American tour in /73 that the media fully acknowledged the band's popularity. PLANT: We decided to hire our first publicity firm after we toured here in the summer of '72. That was the same summer that the Stones toured and we knew full well that we were doing more business than them. We were getting better gates in comparison to a lot of people who were constantly glorified in the press. So without getting too egocentric, we thought it was time that peopIe heard something about us other than that we were eating women and throwing the bones out the window. That whole lunacy thing was all people knew about us and it was all word-of-mouth.

The Story of the Milan Riots The Led Zeppelin Interview...

Vancouver, August 19, 1971
By Rick McGrath

Rick: It was pretty hot out there. . .

Robert Plant: Yeah, sometimes it gets a bit scary when we see half the stage disappearing...

Jimmy Page: It was a bit rough.

Rick: Let's talk about what you've been doing since you were here last.

Plant: We've been to Italy, Switzerland, Denmark. We did a tour of England, intending to go back to all the old clubs that we played in the beginning. .

Rick: ....around Birmingham...

Plant: All those sorts of places. In some way it was a successful move, in other ways it was a bit of a dead loss, because you'd be playing in places that only hold 250 people.

Rick: Isn't that what the club trip is like in England? A lot of smaller halls and stuff?

Plant: Yeah, that's what it used to be like at the beginning. But there's always something bigger than a club in each town, a hall or something. Not so much a Coliseum, though.

Rick: I heard you had some problems in Milan.

Plant: We went to Milan, and there was a big music festival with people from all countries contributing. They travel around, and we just came for one gig. And we were told that it was a cool thing and even though there was a reputation for bottles being thrown in Rome, we were assured it wouldn't happen to us. Anyway, we started playing in a big cycle arena, and they'd been booing everybody else, and as soon as we walked onstage, I noticed some smoke at the back of the arena. And there's all this smoke and there's firemen behind us and I was going "fire! fire!" in my finest Italian.

Anyway, nobody took any notice of me and we carried on for about a quarter of an hour and the fire had gotten all around us. And I turned around and looked at everybody and Peter (Grant, the manager), his eyes had all gone big and red. And everybody was suddenly coughing. People suddenly appeared with masks and things like that and suddenly there were bombs going off, everywhere. And the whole thing about what I'm doing is that I've been doing it seven years and I'm... what time is it?