No Quarter: The Three Lives of Jimmy Page by Martin Power

Author:Martin Power
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Omnibus Press
Published: 2016-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 25

Unharmonics

With Presence, Led Zeppelin reasserted their commercial position once more, the album’s number one placing in the UK and US charts confirming them as rock music’s premium selling act. That they did so with Robert Plant not swinging from the chandeliers but seated quietly on a chair while recovering from a car crash surely made the achievement all the more remarkable. “After the 1975 tour,” said Chris Charlesworth, “I’m not sure Zep hadn’t anything left to prove, even to themselves. But Jimmy obviously wasn’t ready to stop.” On the contrary. Pulling the band up by their bootstraps, Page had worked ceaselessly until Presence was in the shops and Led Zeppelin were back in their rightful place: on top of the tree looking down at everyone else. “[Presence] was a sort of test, really,” he later said. “We could have come unstuck. But …”

Nonetheless, there would be no live dates in support of the record. Though Zep had finished their year-long tenure as tax exiles and were now able to return to Great Britain without threat of financially punitive measures, rumours of another ‘Back to the Clubs tour’ remained precisely that. “We weren’t ready to do it,” Peter Grant later reasoned. “It was a bit of a worrying time.” With Plant still a tad on the rickety side and Jimmy having to deal with his own share of triumphs and troubles – to which we shall return in a moment – a small-scale run of UK dates was the last thing on anyone’s mind. Even America would have to wait its turn, as the group and its leader sorted out all those matters that had gone unattended while they were on the run throughout 1975 and early 1976.

For Page, this period of relative downtime was marked by a series of highs, lows and, in the words of Peter Grant, the odd “unwanted squatter … to get rid of”. It began badly. On May 14, 1976, Jimmy received the worst type of news when he learned that his former band mate Keith Relf had died. Only 33 years old, the singer had been writing songs in the basement of his home in Surrey when a faultily grounded guitar electrocuted him. At the time, Relf was busy pulling together his post-Yardbirds group Renaissance for a new album and possible tour.

“Keith wasn’t particularly well then,” said Renaissance’s keyboardist John Hawken. “[But] he was still putting himself out there, writing these songs, trying to get the band going again [while] also caring for his young son, Danny. That he actually died while working on one of our songs … well, it was such a tragedy to befall such a soft and gentle man. A good soul was Keith.” For Jim McCarty, who subsequently took up the reins of the reformed Renaissance182, the loss of his teenage friend and song-writing partner for over a decade was equally hard to take, with Relf’s passing also bringing his days as a Yardbird back and everything that had happened since into sharp focus.

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