Author: u0zp4y

In 2015, Led Zeppelin founder Jimmy Page spoke to Classic Rock about his life and work, from the first recordings he made as a naïve teenager to the legacy that rock’s greatest band leaves behind. He recalled the magic of Zeppelin’s first time playing together, the battles with bootleggers and the press, the brilliance of the late John Bonham, and the joke song that backfired on him. And he explained why playing with the Black Crowes was the closest he’d come to replacing the feeling of Led Zeppelin.

When you think back to 1968, when you first put Led Zeppelin together, how soon did you realize that you had something unique?

It happened in the first rehearsal, which was in London, in Gerrard Street. I said we should play Train Kept A-Rollin’, but I think I was the only one who knew it. I don’t really know what else we did. But as soon as we played together, everyone knew instinctively that we’d never played anything like that before, or heard anything like that before. And it was just so right.

Had you already written songs for the band before that first rehearsal?

There was material I already had in mind, like Babe I’m Gonna Leave You and some other things. And by the time I got everyone in my house and we were doing steady rehearsals, we were working on Communication Breakdown and You Shook Me. Laying down that material, it was phenomenal. We knew just how good it was.

What did you have in Led Zeppelin that was different to other rock groups of that era?

In those days, you’d find really great groups built around one instrumentalist. In Led Zeppelin you had four master musicians. I know Cream had three, but to get four guys together, all at this high level, that was something else. To be honest with you, I knew the group was dynamite. From the rehearsals we did at my house, I knew what we had. And after we did the first tour in Scandinavia, I knew it would translate in a live capacity.

The first Zeppelin album was released in January 1969. What do you remember about the making of that record?

It was great how the first album was done – by playing it live in Scandinavia, to really oil it up before going into the studio. That way you were able really work it out before you’d recorded it. If you’ve got the benefit to do that, it’s a really healthy way to go into the studio, especially with guys who haven’t been in a studio too much beforehand. Also you had to record very thoroughly, and it was pretty ruthless – you couldn’t go in there wasting time, certainly with a new band.

What were you aiming for with that album?

You wanted to get in there and make the thing explode. You put all the chemicals together and it explodes out of the speakers. The word is chemistry, or alchemy. And that album was a complete picture, you know? So may ideas and combinations that people had never heard before. John Bonham had so much power and so much character in his playing, and there was some great keyboard playing from John Paul Jones. To get that album the way that it was, that was very cool.

From the very start, the band created a huge buzz in America.

We just went in and just destroyed San Francisco, and that was it. The first album wasn’t even out. And it just spreads like wildfire – that this band was just incredible, and then they hear the album…

By the early 70s, Led Zeppelin were the biggest band in the world, outselling the Stones. How did you deal with that level of fame?

If you’re talking about the time of the private jets and all that sort of stuff – do you mean that sort of lifestyle? Because other people were doing that, basing themselves out of cities and using a plane. It made sense.

I meant how you, as the leader of the band, coped with that pressure. Was Zeppelin’s manager Peter Grant the key to this – taking care of everything so that you could focus purely on the music and nothing else?

Yes, to go that far creatively, you needed somebody to be looking after the business side of it. And Peter definitely took care of the business side of it – outside of the making of the albums, certainly. But he and I went to Atlantic in New York in the initial stages, to do the original deal. And at the time of the fourth album, when we wanted to put that record out with no information on the cover – no band name, no title – Peter and I had an interesting meeting at Atlantic.

How did that go down?

When we got there, the Atlantic lawyers separated us. Peter was in one office and I was in another. They were saying, “You’ve got to have the name of the band on the cover.” I smiled and said, “You can print it on the inside bag, so that when people pull the album out they can see ‘Led Zeppelin’…” I was taking the piss, basically. Because they weren’t going to get the album unless it was under the circumstances we wanted.

You got what you wanted – and that album turned out to be one of the biggest-selling records of all time.

Yeah. But we were getting so much bad publicity at that time. That’s why we thought: okay, let’s put out an album with no information and let’s see what people think about that. Never mind what Rolling Stone says…

The bad reviews you had in Rolling Stone – did it hurt?

It didn’t matter. You could tell, even from the concert reviews, that they probably spent their time in the bar. They definitely hadn’t concentrated on what was going on. What was going on, right from that point in San Francisco, was that people were just flooding to see us, and that never stopped.

Do you remember Rolling Stone’s review of Bob Dylan’s 1970 album Self Portrait? It began, famously, with the question: “What is this shit?”

Yeah, well that’s what I would say about Rolling Stone. I wouldn’t say that about Bob Dylan.

But for you personally, were there moments when Led Zeppelin failed? Are there songs in which you hear the band struggling, or perhaps reaching for something that could not be reached?

I don’t think so. I can tell you how things were with Led Zeppelin. When we were working at Headley Grange, recording with a mobile truck, or if we were in the studio, booked for time, we would go in there and we would really work with what ideas we had. There would be things coming out of jams, on the spot. And if one had a riff and it didn’t quite make it, or if it sounded like something we’d done before, it wouldn’t be revisited.

So there are no Led Zeppelin songs that embarrass you?

No. None.

But there are some that sound a little throwaway. There’s one on Zeppelin’s last album, In Through The Out Door – the playful rock’n’roll number, Hot Dog…

Yeah. Hot Dog was just a bit of fun.

And earlier, on Houses Of The Holy, you did a reggae song with a phonetic joke title, D’yer Mak’er. It was a joke that was lost on your American fans.

In America they had no clue what it meant, and it was just boring to have to explain what it was. You’d think: why didn’t we name it something else? At least the Brits got it, thank God.

Are there Zeppelin songs you feel are underrated?

What would you say?

Poor Tom is one. Maybe it got lost on Coda, the outtakes album released in 1982 after the band split. But it’s a great track. Dave Grohl loves it: he said that it’s one of John Bonham’s best performances.

Yeah. He’s right. And okay, here it is with Poor Tom. I had an idea for the drumming in that song. I said to Bonzo, ‘This is what is.’ And I knew he’d got it within five minutes, maybe not even that. He’d got the syncopation in his playing. That’s what it was like playing with John. He and I were so in sync – it was so cool. You could be writing something and, bang, you knew exactly how it would all sound.

Another underrated song is For Your Life, from Presence. So underrated, in fact, that when Zeppelin played it at the O2 in 2007 – the first time you’d ever played it live – many reviewers thought it was a new song.

That was… interesting (laughs). The reviews for the O2 were wonderful. But in the euphoria, people thought For Your Life was a new number. They knew all the other things, but that one song they weren’t aware of.

I would suggest that anyone who didn’t know For Your Life should not have been at the O2 that night. Their ticket should have gone to a genuine Zeppelin fan.

Yeah, I think you’re probably right. But in context, it was so cool to do that song. It’s quite edgy to play. There’s a lot to remember in it, so many changes, unexpected changes.

Was it also hard to stay in the groove on that song, because you play it so slow?

To get the tension in it – yeah. It’s quite an intense groove on that one.

You’ve said that you were pretty nervous before the O2 show.

I always get nervous, but probably never more so than then. You only had one shot, for heaven’s sake. But we’d put a lot of rehearsal into it, so I knew it would work. And really, it was a great gig, which is why it was so important to me that we got everything right with the DVD of it (Celebration Day). It sounded so, so good. For people who didn’t actually manage to get to the gig, what they got as a DVD was not going to disappoint them. They didn’t get into the show, but my goodness that DVD is good.

And better than the bootleg DVDs that were on sale within days of the gig…

You know, there was a guy from Japan who filmed it. He was on the plane immediately to go back to Japan, and the DVD was out within a matter of hours, let alone days of weeks. It’s the same thing when you play in Japan. I know for a fact that if you do a tour there, you’re bootlegged instantly. So if you’re starting a tour, you’re warming up, you really don’t want to go over there and do a dodgy show. You’ve got to go in there with all guns blazing.

Surely the biggest problem is not bootleggers but fans filming gigs on their phones?

Oh yeah, everyone’s like that now. On the first Led Zeppelin tour we’d be doing stuff that was going to appear on the second album. But now, bands have to be so careful about playing new stuff in front of an audience. You’re confounded by YouTube.

Kate Bush found a solution. For her shows at the Hammersmith Apollo in 2014, she requested that fans did not film the performances, and it worked.

Did you see that concert? I did. And I can tell you: if somebody had held up a camera they’d have been lynched. There was such a feeling towards it. The people had so much respect for Kate.

You had your revenge on the bootleggers with the Led Zeppelin reissues – all nine of the band’s studio albums supplemented with previously unreleased tracks. Out of all that archive material, what for you is the very best of it?

I love the Bombay session from ’72 (featured on the new version of Coda). It was just Robert (Plant) and I that went out there. I was so mad keen to do something with Indian musicians. They were the equivalent of what you would now call the Bollywood musicians, except in those days it was really insular. They were classical players, and they’d never heard Led Zeppelin music before. The whole idea of the experiment was to see what it would be like for these ethnic musicians to translate from the guitar.

The first song you played with them was Friends, from Led Zeppelin III. Why that song?

When I’d written Friends, I’d thought of it in that sort of Indian style, with the complex rhythms from the tabla.

You can hear that in the original.

Absolutely! I thought we could do this song. They played it purely on their technique. It was so exciting. And because we were only in there for an evening, I didn’t want the moment to go, so I thought: right, let’s do something else. We had this great percussion: a tabla drummer and another playing a double-ended long drum. So I fired up Four Sticks (from Led Zeppelin IV), and these drummers were so technically adept, they just sailed through.

All of this additional material on the reissues was drawn from your personal archive. Is there more treasure that you have hidden away?

Yes. I have stuff that precedes Led Zeppelin as well – stuff that I did way, way back when I was a teenager, writing, trying experimental recordings at home, in a really sort of naïve way. Then, going on to when I was a studio musician, I have stuff from that period. And I’ve got lots of material from The Yardbirds.

Will any of this material ever be released?

Well, I started going through all this stuff, revisiting it with an idea of putting it all together in chronological order, to have a proper inventory of what it was – from Led Zeppelin and beyond. But once I hit the Led Zeppelin stuff, I just focused on that.

So in answer to my question…

For now, there is no answer.

What do you feel is the best record you’ve made outside of Led Zeppelin?

I don’t know. What do you mean by best?

Maybe the one that you most enjoyed making.

I had a solo album in 1988. Outrider. It wasn’t bad at all. I can still relate to it.

What about the records you made in the period just before Outrider? In the mid-80s, you recorded two albums with Paul Rodgers in your group The Firm, but that band seems to have been written out of history.

I enjoyed what I did with those albums. Paul is such a great singer. But I think, unfortunately, that The Firm’s second album (Mean Business) was one of those things recorded in the 80s that suffered a bit from the sounds of that time. The band was really good, but with that album you don’t get the full meat and potatoes.

And after that?

I enjoyed working with David Coverdale (for one album, Coverdale Page, released in 1993). What I really enjoyed doing was playing with The Black Crowes. That was phenomenal. There was only one downside. The set that we had was a mixture of Black Crowes songs and Led Zeppelin songs. So I was playing on their music was well.

But when it came down to putting together an album, their record company wouldn’t let them do a re-record. So that’s why that album (Live At The Greek: Excess All Areas, released in 2000) was mostly all Zeppelin stuff, with some old blues songs. It was really a bit upsetting, but nevertheless the Zeppelin stuff we did, playing it with them, was bloody marvellous. Just fantastic. I had a whale of a time.

Your love of music – is it still as strong today as it was when you were a kid?

I’m certainly very passionate about it. And it’s funny, really. I’m quite aware of the fact of being that kid who was on that bloody embarrassing TV thing when he was in a skiffle group when he was about twelve. But that passion that I had as a kid, it took me though the world of being a studio musician – and it was such a great schooling, you know? I learned to read music, and by the end of it I was doing arrangement and production. For an untrained musician, self-taught, it was so cool.

Did you always believe, as a young man, that you would be successful?

Oh my God. Not if I’d been thinking as an adult as opposed to a teenager.

Meaning what?

As an adult, you’d think: if you muck up, you ain’t gonna be seen again. You know, that pressure of not wanting to fail. But I just went in there and pulled it off. When I look back, I think that was quite something.

And when you think of what you went on to achieve with Led Zeppelin, what are you most proud of?

The fact that our music reached so many people. We couldn’t supply the demand of people wanting to see us. Even when we hadn’t played in England for a number of years and we played Knebworth (in 1980), there were record crowds for that time.

What was it about Zeppelin’s music that connected with such a huge audience?

It’s no one thing – it’s so many things. We touched on so many different areas of music. That’s why Led Zeppelin is such a vast, panoramic, all-encompassing thing. Over the years, you hear these artists that have been inspired by our stuff, and they’ve done something in the same sort of vein, but people can hear what we did first. Led Zeppelin is the forerunner, the catalyst, for a lot if ideas and movements. And the fact that this music has been so alive all through the years – young kids come to it, they learn from it – that’s absolutely brilliant.

The band is gone, but the music lives on…

That’s it, exactly. People are always telling me how important our music has been to their life. And that, really, is the whole heritage and the legacy of Led Zeppelin.

Freelance writer for Classic Rock since 2005, Paul Elliott has worked for leading music titles since 1985, including Sounds, Kerrang!, MOJO and Q. He is the author of several books including the first biography of Guns N’ Roses and the autobiography of bodyguard-to-the-stars Danny Francis. He has written liner notes for classic album reissues by artists such as Def Leppard, Thin Lizzy and Kiss, and currently works as content editor for Total Guitar. He lives in Bath – of which David Coverdale recently said: “How very Roman of you!”

George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four envisioned a dystopian future where totalitarian governments ruled the world and the average person’s attempts to enjoy even the slightest personal pleasure were patrolled and punished by the Thought Police in service of Big Brother. However, when humanity finally reached that symbolic year, the prevailing atmosphere was more of a hedonistic nonstop party than a period of peril. We have the power of the mighty Van Halen to thank for that.

Considered by many – including Eddie Van Halen himself – as the band’s masterpiece, 1984 was one of Van Halen’s best-selling albums and one of the best-selling rock albums of the eighties. It has earned RIAA Diamond certification for surpassing 10 million units sold – a feat the band only matched with their 1978 debut album, with the two perfectly bookending the beginning and end of Van Halen’s classic era with David Lee Roth fronting the band.

Clocking in at a lean 33:22 minutes, 1984 was, as the saying goes, all killer and no filler. Even the best-selling album of all-time, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, can’t make that boast (does anyone even remember Baby Be Mine and The Lady in My Life?). 1984 produced an impressive string of four hit singles, with Jump delivering Van Halen’s only US No.1 charting hit single in the band’s career. Panama and I’ll Wait both peaked at No.13, and Hot For Teacher came in at a not-too-shabby No.56 in the Billboard chart.

Even the album’s deep cuts – Top Jimmy, Drop Dead Legs, Girl Gone Bad and House Of Pain – were scorchers too hot for the Top 40, but found a welcoming home on more adventurous FM station playlists. The only outlier is the album’s title track, but Ed’s solo synth performance perfectly set the mood as a brief overture that boldly introduced Van Halen’s brave new world.

With 40 years of hindsight, it’s tempting to look back and conclude that the phenomenal popularity of 1984 was primarily a result of being the perfect album released at the perfect time. But its success also benefitted from several years of extremely hard work leading up to its release – along with a series of high-profile events that brought Van Halen prominently into the wider public’s awareness.

During the early 80s, Van Halen had become one of the world’s biggest touring acts. The band sold out every one of its 83 shows in the United States and Canada on its 1982 Hide Your Sheep tour, and in early 1983 they made their first ever appearances in South America during a month-long leg that introduced the band to thousands of rabid fans.

A few months later, Van Halen staked a claim as the biggest band in the world when they headlined Heavy Metal Day on May 29, 1983, at the US Festival, performing in front of an estimated audience of 375,000 – Van Halen’s largest ever. Their fee for the US Festival gig was $1.5 million, setting a new world record.

The band experienced a significant upward trajectory in record sales. 1984’s predecessor, Diver Down, was a commercial success thanks in large part to the hit status of the 1982 single (Oh) Pretty Woman, which peaked at Number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.

But what truly catapulted the band into the public limelight was Eddie Van Halen’s increasing celebrity status, even though the guitarist never sought the spotlight and was never comfortable with being called a rock star. His marriage to popular television actress Valerie Bertinelli led to appearances on mainstream prime-time shows like Entertainment Tonight, making the Van Halen name a household word. Ed’s charming, down-to-earth demeanour won over many new fans who would have been shocked by the raucous atmosphere at a typical Van Halen concert, let alone the band’s backstage antics.

But perhaps the biggest turning point that made Ed a bona fide celebrity was his guest appearance on Michael Jackson’s 1982 album Thriller, on Beat It. Jackson wanted to record a rock song, and he knew that getting the world’s most popular guitarist to play a solo would introduce and endear the singer to an entirely new audience. What Ed didn’t realize at the time was that his performance on Thriller would similarly cause Jackson’s fans to notice Van Halen. Beat It went on to top the charts worldwide, and those 33 seconds of guitar shred became an immortal symbol of the most enduring cultural crossover of pop, R&B and rock.

Eddie didn’t want his name to appear on Thriller’s credits, mainly to keep the session a secret from his bandmates, but there was no mistaking who performed that solo.

“Believe it or not,” Ed told Guitar World in 1990, “I did the Michael Jackson thing ’cos I figured nobody’d know. The band for one – Roth and my brother and Mike – they always hated me doing things outside of Van Halen. I just said ‘Fuck, I’ll do it, and no one will ever know.’ So then it comes out and it’s song of the year and everything.”

Despite his request to remain incognito, record company and musician’s union agreements led to his name appearing four times in the liner notes. But it didn’t matter as David Lee Roth immediately knew it was Ed the first time he heard Beat It blaring from a car stereo.

“The new Michael Jackson song, Beat It, came on,” Dave recalled later. “I heard the guitar solo, and thought, now that sounds familiar. Somebody’s ripping off Ed Van Halen’s licks.”

Edward Van Halen’s creative inspiration increasingly grew during the early 80s as he broadened his horizons into new musical styles and techniques and explored instruments beyond the guitar. While he was initially pleased with Van Halen’s fifth album, Diver Down, he wasn’t happy with the rapid-fire approach to the sessions, which were completed in a mad rush over a period of 12 days.

On the band’s previous album, Fair Warning, Ed had finally become comfortable with spending considerably more time recording and crafting multiple guitar tracks in the studio while also experimenting with a broader palette of guitar sounds. He felt that the slam-bang live performance blueprint used on Diver Down was a regression to the band’s first three albums, and the outcome left him creatively unsatisfied.

“I was always butting heads with [producer] Ted Templeman about what makes a good record,” Van Halen said in 2014. “Diver Down was a turning point for me because half of it was cover tunes. When we made Fair Warning I spent a lot more time with [engineer] Donn Landee working on my sound. I became much more involved in the recording process.

“To me, Fair Warning was more true to what I am and what I believe Van Halen is. We’re a hard rock band, and we were an album band. I like odd things. I was not a pop guy, even though I have a good sense of how to write a pop song. When we started work on 1984 I wanted to ram it up Ted’s poop chute and show him that we could make a great record without any cover tunes and do it our way.”

In order to be able to do things his way, Ed took dominant control of the creative reins by building a professional multitrack studio at home in 1982. Initially, the plan was to build a studio for recording demos, but as work progressed the guitarist realized that, with Landee working by his side, he could record Van Halen’s next album there.

“I did not set out to build a full-blown studio,” Ed admitted. “I just wanted a better place to put my music together so I could show it to the guys. I never imagined that it would turn into what it did until we started building it. Slowly it turned into a lot more than I originally envisioned.

“Everybody else was even more surprised than I was, especially Ted. They thought I was just building a little demo room. Then Donn said, ‘No man! We’re going to make records up here!’ Donn and I had grown really close and had a common vision. Everybody was afraid that Donn and I were taking control. Well… yes! That’s exactly what we did, and the results proved that we weren’t idiots.”

Ed’s new home studio, named 5150 after the California law code for taking a mentally disordered person into custody when that person is considered a danger to others, was completed by the end of 1982. In a recent interview with Greg Renoff for Tape Op magazine, Landee recalls that the first recording session took place on January 2, 1983, with Ed on synthesiser and his brother Alex Van Halen on drums.

This was a calculated move on Ed’s part to appease David Lee Roth and Templeman, perhaps hoping to convince them that the studio was indeed up to the task after they worked there and heard the results. The fact that the song was never released and is still locked up in 5150’s vaults suggests that Ed may have never actually wanted to record it in the first place.

However, Ed boldly revealed his hand with his next move. Over the previous few years, the guitarist had worked on a synth-dominated song that would later be named Jump after Roth wrote the lyrics, and with the studio up and running he recorded an instrumental demo of the tune, performed on an Oberheim OB-Xa synthesiser with accompaniment from his brother Alex on drums and Michael Anthony on bass.

“When I first played Jump for the guys nobody wanted to have anything to do with it,” Ed said. “Dave said that I was a guitar hero and I shouldn’t be playing keyboards. But when Ted heard the demo and said it was a stone-cold hit, everyone started to like it more. Ted [Templeman, producer] only cared about Jump. He really didn’t care much about the rest of the record and just wanted that one hit.”

The band worked diligently recording new material there for most of 1983, with the exception of the month of May, which they spent preparing for their appearance at the US Festival. Ed particularly revelled in having “unchained” freedom to experiment whenever and for as long as he pleased.

In addition to equipping 5150 with a solid selection of classic studio gear that included a Universal Audio console purchased from United Western Studios, Ed also added a wide variety of new instruments to his creative arsenal. The musician had become enamoured with the Oberheim OB-Xa polyphonic synthesiser and its updated version the OB-8, and they played a major role in three of the album’s songs.

Keyboards had actually prominently appeared on all three of Van Halen’s previous albums – a Wurlitzer electric piano on And The Cradle Will Rock… (Women And Children First), an ElectroHarmonix Mini-Synthesiser on Saturday Afternoon In The Park and One Foot Out The Door (Fair Warning) and a Mini Moog on Dancing In The Street (Diver Down) – but they were distorted and usually employed as ersatz guitars. With 1984, Jump and I’ll Wait, there was no mistaking that Ed was playing synths.

However, Ed was still a guitarist at heart and to his core, and he made many new additions to his guitar collection. The most notable newcomer was a rare vintage 1958 Gibson Flying V. The V was Van Halen’s primary guitar on the album, used to record Hot For Teacher, Girl Gone Bad, the main riff of Drop Dead Legs and, as recently discovered, quite possibly for Jump.

The guitarist had also acquired a few of Steve Ripley’s stereo guitars, featuring hexaphonic pickups which gave the instrument a very specific sound. Ed put the Ripley to good use on Top Jimmy, using an open D7 tuning and playing harmonics that bounced across the stereo soundscape.

The finished product exceeded all expectations and then some. 1984 was a document of a band at its prime, where years of relentless touring had made their sound tight and their improvisational communication almost psychic. Ed’s songwriting talents had expanded and grown, with his knack for pop hooks balanced by ambitious excursions inspired by progressive rock and fusion jazz.

Perhaps the most surprising element of 1984 is the fact that the first note of guitar is heard after more than two minutes have passed. This was partly the result of Templeman’s late comment that he wished the album had a song called 1984. Engineer Donn Landee realised that he had about 45 minutes of Eddie improvising solo on the Oberheim that could be edited down to an instrumental intro, and voila! He had his wish. The 1984 synth instrumental made the perfect dramatic statement and lead in to Jump.

Jump was pure pop perfection that fit right in with the synth-crazy mid-80s, but Ed’s dynamic guitar solo was the secret weapon behind its success, giving Van Halen a competitive crossover advantage with a hard rock audience that would never be caught dead listening to groups like the Human League, Depeche Mode or Soft Cell. Panama may be the ultimate classic Van Halen tune, with David Lee Roth’s raunchy “fast car and faster girl” lyrics perfectly capturing the SoCal party vibe that made the band so irresistible from day one.

It’s also one of two songs on 1984 that were inspired by AC/DC, which was not a bad move considering how Back In Black had already become the best-selling hard rock album of all-time. The infectious, bouncy energy of Top Jimmy made it a strong contender for a fifth single or at least a hell of a B-side. However, it was probably held back by the difficulty of switching from an open tuning to standard for the solo’s delirious whammy bar workout, which prevented Van Halen from ever performing the song live.

Drop Dead Legs similarly should have been a hit, partly thanks to its relentless pile-driving Michael Anthony/Alex Van Halen rhythm section groove.

“That was inspired by Black In Black,” Eddie admitted. “I was grooving to that beat, although Drop Dead Legs is slower. Whatever I listen to somehow is filtered through me and comes out differently. It’s almost a jazz version of Back In Black – I put a lot more notes in there.” It was never played live until the final 2015 tour.

Jump and its supporting music video may have made Van Halen seem harmless and cuddly, but Hot For Teacher was the opposite, exposing the band as the bad boy party animals they really were. Alex Van Halen’s galloping Simmons drum intro sounds like a nitro-fueled dragster revving up before he switches to a Billy Cobham-meets-Buddy Rich swing that pushes Ed’s hot-rodded tapping into overdrive. Roth’s schoolboy-in-heat lyrics are downright horny and given extra punch and verve by Anthony’s high-pitched harmonies, while Ed keeps things loose and raunchy with ZZ Top-inspired bluesy finger-plucked riffs.

I’ll Wait was the album’s other synth-driven hit, with the yin of Ed’s sophisticated keyboard chords and a chorus with smooth yacht-rock lyrics penned by the Doobie Brothers’ Michael McDonald counterbalanced by the yang of Roth’s semi-goofball rants about “heartbreak in overdrive” and “such good photography!” The guitar solo similarly provides a contrast between Ed’s melodic phrasing and fusion-esque flourishes with explosive vibrato bar noise.

When the album’s final sequence was being prepared in late 1983, no one outside the inner circle had any inkling that the band’s classic era with David Lee Roth would soon come to a close, yet the final two songs on 1984 delivered about as perfect a send-off as any fan could ask for. Girl Gone Bad is simply epic and the closest thing to a prog rock song that the band ever recorded. Ed delivered a tour-de-force performance with dynamic shifts in emotion from elegiac tapped harmonics to dark, drama-filled riffs. This was Van Halen’s equivalent to Led Zep’s Achilles Last Stand with the added bonus of a truly blazing Van Halen solo heavily inspired by Allan Holdsworth.

Dating back to Van Halen’s early club days (demos were recorded in 1976 with Gene Simmons and in early 1977 for Warner Bros), House Of Pain was the only song not completely written fresh for the album, although the only element that remained from the early versions was the song’s main riff.

“I guess nobody really liked it the way that it originally was,” Ed said. “The intro and verses are completely different, and the fast part in the middle for the solo and the groove at the end are almost like entirely new songs.”

House Of Pain showed that Van Halen had grown and evolved considerably over the preceding seven to eight years without losing any of their hunger, intensity and power.

All good things must come to an end. They were too good to last. Always leave the people wanting more. These may be overused clichés, but it’s difficult to think of better ways to describe the aftermath of the 1984 album, its ambitious supporting tour and the eventual breakup of Van Halen’s classic David Lee Roth lineup.

Did success spoil Van Halen? Yes, and no. Eddie Van Halen’s ever-growing musical ambitions and desire to pursue different sonic paths collided with David Lee Roth’s incessant adoration of the spotlight and aspirations to pursue a career as a movie star. With two diametrically opposed forces in conflict, the tensions inevitably sucked all the air out of the room until no one could breathe. Trying to outdo 1984’s success would have been an unfathomable challenge for any band, so it sadly made sense for Van Halen to end that chapter at the top of their game.

The Van Halen brothers and Anthony joined forces with Sammy Hagar and his growing legion of fans to take the band in a different and arguably more progressive direction it couldn’t have tried with Roth. The Hagar-led 5150 didn’t reach the staggering commercial sales heights of 1984, but it became Van Halen’s third all-time best-selling album, going six times Platinum. It was also the first Van Halen album to finally reach the No.1 spot on the charts. [1984 likely also would have achieved that feat, but it had the disadvantage of going head-to-head with the best-selling album of all-time, Michael Jackson’s Thriller.]

Meanwhile, Roth put together one of rock’s greatest supergroups, recruiting the extraordinary talents of guitarist Steve Vai, bassist Billy Sheehan and drummer Gregg Bissonette to keep the rip-roaring party going full blast. Roth’s first full-length album Eat ’Em And Smile was nowhere near as commercially successful as the albums he recorded with Van Halen, but with Vai and Sheehan’s instrumental pyrotechnics and Roth’s inimitable character it kept the white-hot flame burning very brightly for classic Van Halen fans.

The split resulted in a David Lee Roth vs. Sammy Hagar argument as incessant as it is meaningless. For some fans, the change was the best of both worlds, but it didn’t last. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. Van Halen had won the victory over itself.

Our story begins one ass-freezing night in January 1974, in the soundproofed basement of The Wick, a splendid Grade 1-listed Georgian townhouse in Richmond, London designed in 1775 for Lady St Aubyn. Two centuries later its owner was 26-year-old cool-as-fuck Rod Stewart/Faces guitarist Ronnie Wood, hawk-nosed member of a new English aristocracy: old-money rock stars.

At the time he bought The Wick, in 1971, Woody was coddled in cash from the double-whammy success that year of Rod’s Maggie May solo single and Every Picture Tells A Story album both going to No.1 in Britain and America simultaneously. Ronnie played guitar and bass on both and co-wrote the title track to Every Picture. He bought it for a suitcase of cash and began filling the basement with recording equipment.

“I didn’t do it with any sort of plan,” he later told me. “It started with somewhere to put my guitars, then a piano, pool table, some drums…”

With time to kill until the start of a Faces Japanese tour, Woody spent the first weeks of 1974 corralling every muso that wound up at The Wick with a joint in their hand to help come up with material for his own forthcoming solo album, I’ve Got My Own Album To Do. Chief among them was Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richard (still sans ‘s’ back then). Keith and his ‘old lady’, the witchy Anita Pallenberg, had moved into The Wick’s coach house.

Busted for drugs and guns at their Chelsea abode the previous summer, Richard was convinced “the cops were out to get me”, after the judge gave him an unexpectedly lenient sentence of a £250 fine. Woody’s coach house “was a good hideout”.

Other basement regulars included Mick Jagger, George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Rod Stewart, David Bowie, Ringo Starr, Mick Taylor, and various other ‘vibe merchants’ such as rising acting star John Hurt and the crew from Monty Python. “Before any of us knew it we’d be up for days drinking, getting stoned and making music,” Ronnie recalled with a beaky grin.

It was during another such journey into night, fuelled by pharmaceutical cocaine, that Woody found himself gleefully jamming with Jagger, Bowie, session bassist Willie Weeks and Faces drummer Kenney Jones on a loose-limbed jingle-jangle that Jagger later described as “a very Chuck Berry song” but with “a different feeling to it than a Chuck Berry song”.

When Jagger and Bowie started improvising and having fun around the phrase “I know it’s only rock’n’roll but I like it”, it began as a coke-joke take on comedian Dick Emery’s national catchphrase, heard on BBC1 every Saturday night that year: “Ooh, you are awful – but I like you!” Suddenly the whole room was singing along: “I know… it’s only rock and roll… but I like it!”

Some accounts have Bowie whipping out his tenor sax and fattening up the nursery rhyme chorus. Some have Richard elsewhere, with his connection in the coach house. But they kept tooting and returning to it, “…like it… like it… yes, I dooo…” until the sun came up and went back down.

“We all knew it was good,” Ronnie told me matter-of-factly, “but no one thought for a minute it would be such a big hit.” No one except Jagger, who was determined not to leave The Wick without it. The same star-tripping jam also yielded I Can Feel The Fire, the rock’n’reggae track that would open Ronnie’s solo album. “Mick and I cut a deal,” he recalled. “He said: ‘You keep I Can Feel The Fire, I’ll keep It’s Only Rock ’N Roll.’”

Destined to become one of the totemic anthems of classic 70s rock, It’s Only Rock ’N Roll (But I Like It) was only a medium-sized hit by previous Rolling Stones standards when it was released as a single in July 1974 (No.10 in the UK, No.16 in the US). But it became one of the most fitting aphorisms of the times, as 60s ‘we’ became 70s ‘me’.

Suddenly “I know it’s only [insert subject] but I like it” became a good enough excuse for anything. Jagger got it straight away and ran with it. He liked it liked it so much, in fact, he decided they should name the next Stones album after it.

Released in October 1974, It’s Only Rock ’N Roll was the first truly 70s album the Stones would make. It was also the last Stones album to feature their most potent line-up: the one that recorded Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main St., three of the greatest rock albums of all time – no arguments allowed. It turned 50 in 2024. Blissfully, it has not grown old gracefully at all.

Despite the accidental birth of its title track, there was little else that was spontaneous about It’s Only Rock ’N Roll. A patchwork of ideas stitched together in a panic by Mick Jagger as he strove to drag the Rolling Stones into a new era, it “was up and down like a toilet seat”, deadpanned Charlie Watts.

By 1973 the Strolling Bones, as NME had started to call them, were showing their age. Jagger and Richard both turned 30 that year – last orders for rock stars in that hope-I-die-beforeI-get-old era. Bill Wyman was 37, for chrissakes – nearly as old as Elvis. Keith – Keef – still sported a chipped front tooth and deathly white pallor, his matted black hair the result of his habit of not sleeping – ever; he bragged that his record was “nine days without a wink”.

When that year he came top in a new NME poll, Rock Stars Most Likely To Die – a title he would hold for 10 years – he shrugged. “It’s like they want me to die,” he drawled, purring with barely concealed pleasure. Jagger, however, saw the danger. Were the Stones becoming a parody of themselves? When comedian Freddie Starr now did his absurdist impersonations of Mick for chortling family audiences on TV, the likeness was disconcertingly uncanny.

On stage they still enjoyed ‘greatest rock’n’roll band in the world’ status, but their latest album, Goats Head Soup, despite going to No.1 in Britain and America, had largely been met by indifference, signposted by the glaciar-paced single Angie. The sight of Richard nodding off in the video summed up most people’s feelings about the song. Meanwhile, Jagger had taken note of all the attention now devoted to ‘glam rock’ stars like Alice Cooper and T.Rex, Roxy Music and David Bowie, all of whom had bigger and better hits in 1973 than the vanilla Angie.

Even junkie-implacable Keef wasn’t immune to the gnawing sense that the Stones were being overtaken. He developed a deep antipathy towards Marc Bolan, skidding to a halt in his silver Ferrari on the King’s Road one day then leaping out with a hunting knife to slash at a T.Rex poster.

Rubbing metatextual salt into the wound came the New York Dolls, fronted by garish Mick ’n’ Keef burlesques David Johansen and Johnny Thunders. When the Dolls appeared on music TV show The Old Grey Whistle Test in November, an ultra-glam, Biba-clad Johansen jokingly told beardy polo-necked presenter Bob Harris that he had “bunny teeth”. After they’d finished miming outrageously, Harris got his own back pronouncing the band “mock rock”.

But it was the Stones who were now being mocked. Jagger chose not to see this as an existential crisis, but rather a career miscalculation, something that could be adjusted and fine-tuned. He had already identified Bowie as the one to beat. Jagger had been there at Hammersmith Odeon when Bowie retired Ziggy that summer, the most celebrated farewell stunt since The Beatles rocked the rooftop.

On the same day in October that the Stones played their final show of the year, in West Berlin, Bowie released Pin Ups, a stopgap album of hurriedly recorded cover versions, which went straight to No.1. Also in the UK top five album chart that week was These Foolish Things, a collection of covers by the only glam artist considered as innovative and stylish as Bowie, Roxy Music frontman Bryan Ferry.

Ferry’s champagne-bubble version of Sympathy For The Devil thrilled Jagger almost as much as Bowie’s same-sex reset of Let’s Spend The Night Together on Aladdin Sane, his earlier No.1 album that year. It reaffirmed the Stones’ connection to the now and suggested a way forward to Jagger. The Stones would do their own covers album, he decided. Unlike Bowie’s mid-60s nostalgia trip, though, the Stones would focus on timeless blues and soul yardsticks.

Two weeks in November were booked at Musicland Studios in Munich. There the Stones put their familiar stamp on quickfire stuff like Jimmy Reed’s Shame, Shame, Shame, which they’d done in their club days (and ripped off for Little By Little, the B-side of Not Fade Away, in 1964). They tackled oddities like Trouble’s A-Comin, an obscure Chi-Lites album track from 1970, and embarrassed themselves with an awkwardly pale imitation of Drift Away, the rock’n’soul classic that had just been a huge US hit for Dobie Gray. The only cover that really popped was their proto-punk version of Ain’t Too Proud To Beg, a signature hit from 1966 for Motown stars The Temptations.

According to Richard: “We were really hot [from touring] and ready just to play some new material.” But when he got to Munich the plan had changed to a quickie album: one side covers, one side live recordings. It was a decision taken partly to compensate for Richard’s latest attempt to get clean, at an exclusive Swiss clinic, where his joke about going there to have his drug-contaminated blood changed for some fresh virgin plasma would also enter the lexicon of 70s-hip-speak. Going for a blood change: leave me the fuck alone.

With Keith on Mick’s shit-list (again) for putting his drug habit before the band, the singer filled the time writing with guitarist Mick Taylor. A 20-year-old, non-smoking vegetarian when he joined the Stones in 1969, Taylor was now on the verge of self-destruct. He had become that most pitiable creature: the pampered junkie with enough money to never need to stop.

His exquisite ability to fly his guitar straight into the Sun remained as yet undimmed, however, and the two Micks wrote several numbers together, at least three of which would appear on It’s Only Rock ’N Roll, albeit credited as usual to Jagger/Richard. It had happened before, of course; Stones songs Taylor should have received a co-writing credit for. Back when he didn’t know what to say. Taylor was now 24 and a million miles from then and he vowed it would not happen again.

“I felt I should have been credited with co-writing on It’s Only Rock ’N Roll,” he said in 1997. He and Jagger had been “quite close friends and co-operated quite closely on getting that album made”. Jagger, however, rolled his eyes and allowed that Taylor “maybe threw in a couple of chords”.

When recording sessions reconvened at Island Studios in London in February 1974, Jagger began with the Wick demo of the now officially titled It’s Only Rock ’N Roll (But I Like It).

As Keith later told Ronnie: “I took the precaution of removing your guitar parts.” They did leave Woody’s 12-string acoustic in the mix, however, along with Kenney Jones’s drums, with Charlie Watts generously claiming he “wouldn’t have done it any other way”. Willy D. Weeks’s bass was also retained. As were Bowie and Wood’s backing vocals – that’s them singing ‘like it, like it, yes I do’, although Bowie’s vocals are so low in the mix you’d never know.

As with Taylor, neither Wood nor Bowie would receive a co-writing credit. That so peeved Bowie that he retaliated by writing Rebel Rebel – a straight take-off of the Stones classic (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. According to Alan Parker, an uncredited guitarist on the track, Bowie said: “I’ve got this riff and it’s a bit Stonesy, I just want to piss Mick off a bit.”

Jagger’s growing rivalry with Bowie is at the heart of It’s Only Rock ’N Roll. Bowie had started it when he referred to Jagger by name on his 1973 hit Drive-In Saturday. Four months later the Stones released Angie, and Jagger allowed rumours to flourish that it had been written after a tryste he’d had with Bowie’s wife Angie.

While the Stones were working on It’s Only Rock ’N Roll, Bowie was across town recording Diamond Dogs. When Rebel Rebel was a hit in February ’74, Jagger shrugged it off. But when he discovered that his first choice to design the next Stones album sleeve, Guy Peellaert – then at peak fame for Rock Dreams, his ’73 book of impressionistic paintings of rock stars – had also agreed to provide a painting for Bowie’s album, Jagger was livid.

Sure enough, Peellaert’s painting of a naked half-man half-dog Bowie with full canine genitalia on display remains more celebrated than the orgiastic fin de siècle that adorned the sleeve of It’s Only Rock ’N Roll.

Jagger was now a man on a mission. He took the bones of the Munich covers, inlaid some new material, and padded it out with leftovers from the Goats Head Soup sessions at Dynamic Studios in Jamaica the year before. Following the firing of long-time Stones producer Jimmy Miller, whose smack habit had become “a problem”, Mick and Keith now co-produced the album under the suitably 70s nom de plume The Glimmer Twins.

The finished results were patchy, at best. Opening track If You Can’t Rock Me set the tone with its trite doubleentendre chorus and jaded delivery, its overexcited pleased-tameetcha guitars and no-messing drums. ‘Now I ain’t looking for no pretty face,’ Jagger yowls, ‘or for some hooker working roughish trade…’

It may not possess the tank-like force of Brown Sugar or the cinematic scope of Gimme Shelter, but as a trigger-happy album opener If You Can’t Rock Me lit things up. The mix might be muddy but the message was crystal: it’s the 70s, baby, get over it.

The juddering cover of Ain’t Too Proud To Beg that followed was the Marmite selection. Taking The Temptations’ smooth-talking original and punching it up with such power-chord energy was not to everyone’s taste. Unless you were high. Then it sounded daring.

The impish title track, half Wood’s Wick demo, half Mick’s retooling, was the real clincher. Richard told Jagger: “Come on, we’ve got to steal that motherfucker back. And we did, without too much difficulty. Just the title itself was so beautifully simple.”

Side one’s obligatory big ballad, Till The Next Goodbye, was another from the Jagger-Taylor collaboration, and was so arch it could have been one of Lou Reed’s sick jokes, the ringing acoustic guitars and Jagger’s high-camp vocal suggestive of the idea, introduced by Angie, that he could no longer sing a love song with a straight face.

Indeed, the idea that the Stones might come up with something new or original were concepts that felt almost quaint in 1974. That is until the track that closed side one, a new peak in the more heightened musical arc Mick Taylor had introduced to the Stones, the imperious Time Waits For No One.

Another Jagger and (uncredited) Taylor original, Time Waits For No One is simply a masterpiece, a journey not a race that builds and builds until the tension is released by Taylor, marinading in smack and Santana, who delivers an exquisitely tortured solo. A siren sound over midnight rooftops. Jagger’s lyrics like suicide right on the page: ‘Time can tear down a building or destroy a woman’s face/Hours are like diamonds, don’t let them waste…’ His voice tremulous and pained: ‘…dreams of the night-time will vanish by dawn…’

Side two of It’s Only Rock ’N Roll also suffered from a 50-50 hit ratio, beginning with the ick-inducing Luxury. Demoed during the Goats Head Soup sessions, Luxury is toe-curling to listen to now, Jagger chirruping in a fauxJamaican accent: ‘I’m working so hard, to keep you in dee luckshurry…’

Dynamic’s owner Byron Lee claimed Jagger had originally written a reggae song called Man Eating Woman, which he planned to hire a Jamaican band to record, for a mooted solo album. Certainly reggae was breaking through to the rock mainstream, with both Zeppelin (D’Yer Maker) and Eric Clapton (a cover of Bob Marley’s I Shot The Sheriff) ‘dabbling’ successfully with the form around the same time.

“I think reggae could be as popular as the blues,” reckoned Mick. “Black music is all about getting into a groove. What matters is where you put your feet and how you wiggle your ass.”

Dance Little Sister, which followed, was all about wiggling your ass. Pure Keef, it starts promisingly with a nasty, snub-nosed riff and some Rebel Rebel-style lyrics (‘On Thursday night she looked a fright…’) but soon descends into repetitiveness and cliché, so that it’s a relief when it finally ends. Same with Short And Curlies, a bawdy barrelhouse blues featuring Taylor’s adroit honkytonk guitar. Another leftover from the Goats Head Soup sessions, a song about a woman squeezing a man’s hairy balls, was never likely to transcend its tawdry subject matter regardless of how deftly it was performed.

Sandwiched between those obvious fillers, though, was one of the album’s surprise highlights, If You Really Want To Be My Friend. Unlike the fey and prissy Till The Next Goodbye, If You Really Want To Be My Friend was the most heartfelt love song Jagger had written since Wild Horses. It’s a song about grown-up sentiments such as true sexual freedom, real platonic love, and the bile that builds when those things are quashed or denied in a relationship.

In this case, Jagger’s troubled marriage to Nicaraguan-born beauty Bianca Pérez-Moras Macias, whom he wed in St Tropez in May 1971 when she was four months pregnant. ‘I know you think life is a thriller/You play the vamp, I play the killer…’ When he goes on to sing about how ‘people tell me you’re a vulture… Say you’re a sore in a cancer culture’, it’s clear the jive talk is over. That Jagger the cunning deceiver is for once being honest. With Philly Soul outfit Blue Magic adding lush backing vocals, and the band – augmented by regular guest keyboard players Nicky Hopkins and Billy Preston – at their most tasteful, If You Really Want To Be My Friend is an unexpected moment of emotional truth on an album otherwise built to grind its groin muscles.

“I’m not in the least domesticated,” Jagger told Viva magazine. “I try not to hang around my family any more than I have to.” In the same article, Bianca pondered: “Perhaps Mick isn’t attracted to me any more.” A disingenuous remark, given that at the time she was in an on-off affair with Hollywood movie star Ryan O’Neal. While Mick, as Bianca put it, “screws many but has few affairs”.

The album ends on a Kafka-esque note with Fingerprint File. A funky chunk of post-Watergate paranoia, it’s the longest track on the album and its most mysterious. Many critics disliked what they saw as it’s tricksy production – the treated lead vocal, the manipulated guitars, the phased, deliberately woozy production. Adding to the sense of otherhood, Jagger plays rhythm guitar, Mick Taylor plays bass, Bill Wyman switched to synthesiser, Charlie Watts was supported by tabla player Jolly Kunjappu, and Keith enjoyed himself hugely on Superfly-style wah-wah guitar.

Looking back, Keith put it best when he observed: “Rock’n’roll can’t be planned or prepared. Goats Head Soup to me was a marking-time album. I like it in many ways but I don’t think it has the freshness this one has.”

In America, It’s Only Rock ’N Roll became the fourth of eight consecutive Stones albums to go to No.1. In Britain it reached No.2, breaking an unbroken chain of No.1 albums going back to 1969’s Let It Bleed. Music videos were shot for several of the songs. The most famous is the one for It’s Only Rock ’N Roll (But I Like It) featuring the band, for reasons never made clear, in US Navy sailor suits performing in a tent, which gradually fills with foam – again, for reasons no one could be bothered to decipher.

Videos were also done for Ain’t Too Proud To Beg and Till The Next Goodbye. But when the It’s Only Rock ’N Roll single proved to be a poor-selling follow-up to Angie, plans for further singles were quietly shelved. Ain’t Too Proud To Beg became the second and last single from the album, scraping the Top 20 in the US, but was not released in Britain.

By January 1975, Mick Taylor had officially quit the Stones. The official reason given was that he wanted “a change of scene”. Richard sent him a telegram: “Thanks for the past five years – it’s been a pleasure working with you.” Jagger took it as a personal betrayal and remarked sarcastically: “No doubt we can find a brilliant six-foot-three blond guitarist who can do his own make-up.”

Meanwhile, back in the smoky basement of The Wick, Keith, his new gold tooth glinting, turned to Ronnie and asked: “I know it’s only rock’n’roll, but how about it?” To which Ronnie replied: “I like it, like it, yes I dooo…” Honest.

Mick Wall is the UK’s best-known rock writer, author and TV and radio programme maker, and is the author of numerous critically-acclaimed books, including definitive, bestselling titles on Led Zeppelin (When Giants Walked the Earth), Metallica (Enter Night), AC/DC (Hell Ain’t a Bad Place To Be), Black Sabbath (Symptom of the Universe), Lou Reed, The Doors (Love Becomes a Funeral Pyre), Guns N’ Roses and Lemmy. He lives in England.