"I was with Cynthia Plastercaster in Chicago when I first heard about them," recalls Pamela DesBarres, better known as Miss Pamela, onetime member of L.A.'s  GTOs, author of I'm With The Band, and very likely the most famous groupie that ever was.

"The Yardbirds had split up by that time, and Zeppelin had just formed, but they hadn't come over yet or anything. She had a big poster of them in her bedroom--huge, a big, huge poster--we would sit there on the bed and gaze at them.

"`The music's supposed to be fantastic, but they're supposed to be really dangerous guys. You'd better stay away from them.'  I'd always heard that," says Our Miss P, "and I was never one to be with people who weren't going to respect me or take good care of me, so I was going to avoid them. I'd decided even though I'm sure they were amazing, I was going to avoid them."

Soon enough, Miss Pamela changed her mind.

Avoiding Led Zeppelin was not the easiest thing in the world to do in 1969, particularly in America, where the band toured on four separate occasions during the course of 12 months. Representing the flipside of the cliché about the British pop group that expends too much energy to crack America to no avail, Jimmy Page and his three non-Yardbird bandmates cracked the country wide open, purse in hand and legs flailing wildly into the night. It is safe to say that both parties were deeply satisfied.

Absurdly young at the time of their US unveiling--Page was 24, John Paul Jones 22, and Robert Plant and John Bonham each an exuberant 20--Led Zeppelin arrived almost three weeks prior to the January 12th release of their debut album. It was the end of December, 1968, and guitarist Page had already toured the States that year during the Yardbirds' final days. Always more successful in America than Britain, the Yardbirds offered Page's new band a pedigree by default: They had toured Scandinavia under the "NewYardbirds" moniker three months earlier, and most American promoters, prior to the debut album's release, announced their upcoming appearances thusly rather than by the Led Zeppelin name--which at the time seemed a silly permutation of the immensely spectacular Iron Butterfly.

In fact, what often gets overlooked in the blur of time is precisely how much Led Zeppelin's early Stateside success signaled a raw triumph of playing power over only mildly high expectations. Page's old friend and onetime Yardbird bandmate Jeff Beck had already made enormous inroads in the States with his Truth album a year earlier, and when it came to former Yardbirds making a splash with their brand new bands, Page's arrival initially seemed merely more of the same. On paper at least, the onstage repertoire that Led Zeppelin would draw from was disappointingly unoriginal: some familiar Yardbirds tunes ("The Train Kept A' Rollin'," "White Summer," even "For Your Love"),  "traditional" cover "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You", Garnett Mimms's "As Long As I Have You," and a batch of the blues ("I Can't Quit You, Baby" and "You Shook Me," the latter already covered by Beck on his Truth set) as played by strapping young white Englishmen of the rock era. Still, what Led Zeppelin had to offer was in short supply at the time: Loudness, intensity, impeccable musicianship, and a sense of newness and spontaneity well beyond the reach of such American sensations as Three Dog Night and Steppenwolf. Plus--there were some who noted--they were hot.

"The first time they came to town they hung out at this place called Thee Experience," recounts Pamela DesBarres. "We went there and saw a fantastic guy--Bo Diddley was there--and they were all there, and I kept thinking God, that Jimmy Page is such a beautiful guy, such a perfect specimen, he was like the epitome of the perfect British rock god. But I was going to avoid him because he was naughty." Page caught her eye, she says, and "I noticed he was just watching and trying to get me to grin at him and everything, but I was trying to ignore him." Ever the smoothie, Page sent over infamous road manager Richard Cole to do his bidding--handing DesBarres a note revealing the guitarist's room number at the Continental Hyatt House on Sunset Strip. "I guess he thought that I would show up there, which I didn't," says she. "That always made you intriguing to whoever it was."

Zeppelin's arrival in LA had come just a week after their American debut in Denver, opening for New York rockers the Vanilla Fudge. The powerful quartet, whose version of "You Keep Me Hanging On" came to define a style then termed "heavy"--which meant all sorts of things but generally included a sustained and distorted guitar in the mix and lots of pot--got on well with Page & company, not least because they shared both a common U.S. label, Atlantic Records, and attorney, Steve Weiss. Further, they knew Zep manager Peter Grant through his association with Jeff Beck (with whom Fudge bassist Tim Bogert and drummer Carmine Appice would later form power trio Beck, Bogert & Appice).

"Except for Page, everybody was green, the new kids," says Appice today. "We were already on the Ed Sullivan show, we already had big-selling records, we were filling up arenas, so we were like an idol sort of thing to them. And," he laughs at the odd sound of it, "we were bigger than them at the time."

Whatever the benefit of hindsight, it does not alter the fact that to most American audiences, the power of Zeppelin unleashed in full live glory--particularly when their music was being heard for the very first time--was staggering. And loud.  And heavy.

"We had always been wondering who was going to blow us off the stage," says the Fudge drummer, "because we had played with Hendrix and reviewers were saying we stole the show, we played with the Who, with Cream, the Doors, and everybody. And we held our own, per se. And we always wondered who the band was that was going to come up and kick our butt--and it was Zeppelin."

The band's first American jaunt would see them play close to 30 gigs in such storied locations as L.A's Whiskey-A-Go-Go, the San Francisco's Fillmore West and New York's Fillmore East, the Boston Tea Party, Chicago's Kinetic Playground, and Detroit's Grande Ballroom. The debut issue of the Motor City's equally storied CREEM magazine carried a review of Zeppelin's Grande show, noting that "everyone of musical importance in the city was in attendance (MC5, Amboy Dukes, SRC, various DJ's, etc.). We were all expecting something really tremendous to happen..." Giving the show a comparativeky lukewarm review  ["the album is together, and far superior to their live performance"], writer Pam Brent quaintly noted  "as for direction, they will continue in their hard rock bag and intend to use more acoustic guitar" and gave the band a foretaste of the critical mauling they would receive from the US rock press throughout most of their career.

As fate would have it, this writer was in attendance during the group's final shows of the first tour--on Valentine's Day, no less--at a small club in Miami called Thee Image. A revamped bowling alley that was blacklit-and-hippified, the club featured a surprising number of A-level acts (most bands enjoyed ending their tours lounging in beachfront hotels) including Cream and the Jeff Beck Group, who had made an indelible impression there only four months earlier. Having seen the Beck show and deciding it to be the best concert of my then 15-year life, I didn't expect to revise my opinion so quickly: Zeppelin were stunningly great--like Beck but noisier, looser, more extreme, and--to put it in context--much better than Ultimate Spinach.

As fate would also have it, somebody had a tape recorder running.

"Good evening from Led Zeppelin," announced Robert Plant after the fast/slow pairing of  "Train Kept A' Rolling" and "I Can't Quit You Baby." We've been here four days, so it's nice to be able to get down to playing again. We're gonna carry on with a thing off of the album that's currently doing pretty well, apparently. This is a thing called `Dazed And Confused'..."

"Apparently"? Thanks to the magic of bootleg recording--and if ever a band has been heavily bootlegged it is Led Zeppelin--you too can experience the same show I witnessed in that Miami bowling alley (without the nagging fear you may be drafted and sent to Vietnam in two years, then standard). Heard today, it may be somewhat jarring, due to both the material and the sheer surreality of the lead singer actually introducing the members of the band ("...on lead guitar Jimmy Page, and myself, Robert Plant" ) to the quite small audience, with its meager expectations, during "Dazed And Confused." The freeform, improvisatory nature of early Zeppelin performances shines through as well: midway through "As Long As I Have You," bassist Jones breaks into the bassline to Spirit's "Fresh Garbage" over which Plant lets loose some extraneous yelping incorporating "Mockingbird" and his desire to go back to the "cotton fields" of his youth. Huh? Meanwhile, Jimmy Page runs through a non-stop encyclopedia of riffs including "Cat's Squirrel," dazzling a new generation of Florida-born guitarists-to-be and creating expectations where there were none before.  The audience was fully captivated; for weeks afterward, the word in Miami was that Led Zeppelin were better than anybody.

In short, there and everywhere, the first tour had spread the word. Zeppelin were an unknown quantity, usually an opening act, occasionally not even advertised on the bill. But the intensity of their performance often intimidated the headliners; by the end of January in New York, for example, the Iron Butterfly were so aghast at the audience's wild reaction to the band (not to mention the singer's everpresent requests for lemon squeezing) they refused to take the stage.

By the next tour, Zeppelin were headliners.

"So he somehow got hold of my phone number and called me up," Pamela DesBarres is remembering.  "He had this way about him of making you believe that he was just the sweetest gentleman in the world and every word he said dripped like honey out of his mouth. So he wound me up and I went to meet him at the gig in San Diego. I think the night before Thee Experience they'd played the Whisky and I was pretty amazed by him. He was really ill, he had the flu and he was so dramatic--he was like Sarah Bernhardt, I remember they had to carry him off the stage and his little slipper fell off..."

She pauses for a fraction of a second at the memory. "Oh God...

"Anyway, so I met him there and that was it--from that moment on we were sort of enmeshed. We rode home in the back of the limo, and whatever I did, it was just perfect: 'Oh Miss P, how could you say that, how could you do that-- oh my God, I've been looking for you all my life.' And of course years later we found out he said the same exact thing to all the girls, but it seemed very sweet at the time. So I just started hanging out with him."

DesBarres spent most of that year as Page's L.A. girlfriend, hanging with him as the band repeatedly returned to Los Angeles during their multiple 1969 tours. Unlike some artists who treasured their seclusion, the band would be highly visible during their visits, either holding court at the legendary Rainbow Bar & Grill on Sunset or renting an entire floor at the Hyatt House--redubbed the Riot House largely because of Zep's legendary stays therein. Drugs and groupies were the rule rather than the exception--writer Stephen Davis's renowned Hammer Of The Gods tome spells out the particulars extensively--and among groupies at the time, says DesBarres, Zeppelin "were the supreme British rock gods. When they came to town, it was like nothing else was going on. They took over the town."

Zeppelin's early reputation as prototypical party people was not entirely unjustified, by all accounts. This was a band that literally had young girls queuing up for a quick one. "They were very young guys, you've got to remember," DesBarres says. "Robert was 19 when the band started. They were young, wild guys--Jimmy was sophisticated, but the other ones weren't." 

Translation?  "They got up to wild stuff. A lot of it was boredom, a lot of it was real boredom--they were on tour so much in the early days. And in most cities--they loved getting here, they weren't bored in New York or probably Chicago--but the rest of it was so boring, they just would do whatever they could to amuse themselves. And it wasn't just them, the Who were basically doing that stuff, and the Hendrix boys--but they got a little extreme, they got a little rude sometimes, the girls would do anything to get near them and they sort of took advantage of them."

"There's a motel in Seattle, Washington, called the Edgewater Inn...The Edgewater Inn is built on a pier...so that means when you look out your window, you don't see any dirt... it's got a bay or something out in your backyard...And to make it even more interesting, in the lobby of the aforementioned motel there's a bait and tackle shop where the residents can go down and, whenever they want to, rent a fishing pole and some preserved minnows and schlep back up to their rooms, open the window, stick their little pole outside and within a few minutes actually catch a fish of some sort that they can bring into their motel room and do whatever they want with it, you know what I mean? Now in this bay there's quite a variety of fish. Not only do they have mud sharks up there, they've got little octopuses that you can catch. And all these denizens of the deep can come in real handy...Let's say you were a traveling rock 'n' roll band called the Vanilla Fudge...Let's say one night you checked into the Edgewater Inn with a 8mm movie camera..."

--Frank Zappa, from "The Mudshark" (Fillmore East, June 1971)

If there is a singular event that encapsulates all the madness of Led Zeppelin on the road in America--whether real or imagined--it is the legendary "shark episode," which in its many permutations involves 1) the members of Led Zeppelin, 2) the members of Vanilla Fudge, 3) road manager Richard Cole, 4) a willing female accomplice anxious to please Supreme British Rock Gods, 5) various specimens of sea life and 6) the act of "shoving in" something, someplace and 7) the aforementioned movie camera, wielded by Vanilla Fudge organist Mark Stein. Attempts to clarify precisely what went on in Seattle's Edgwater Inn during the second Led Zeppelin tour are inevitably futile: In Davis's Hammer Of The Gods, Richard Cole claims major reponsibility  ("Bonzo was in the room, but I did it," says he), but other accounts have differed. The general consensus: many people were drunk, no mammals were hurt.

"It was just all in fun," says the Fudge's Appice, who remembers the incident well. "This chick--it was my groupie, I found her, and we had a day off, and she kept wanting to be on film with us. Actually, it was hilarious--we laughed so hard--we left the door open to the room and the manager of the hotel came and saw what was going on and freaked out. He sort of broke it up, and everybody went back to their rooms, and then somehow the chick ended up taking a shower or something in John Paul's room. I think she grabbed his bathrobe and had it on, and me, John and Timmy [Bogert, Fudge bassist] were having crumpets and tea in my room and she came in and the next thing you know that's when all the other crazy stuff came in. In all the stories, nobody really got it all, what really happened. What actually happened, it was pretty disgusting, you know? It was pretty nutso.

"We were at Chicago airport the next day or so and I ran into Frank Zappa in the airport and we were talking and I said, `Man, you wouldn't believe the time we just had in Seattle,' and I told him, and then he wrote that `Mudshark' song. It's just funny, just another crazy night on the road."

And the 8mm film? According to the drummer, a Fudge backer bought the film and "it's so old, it can't be developed. It's unbelievable."

Midway through the band's second US tour, their debut album had reached the Top 10 of the American charts and the group were constantly in demand; in six weeks' time they revisited most of the major venues they'd seen scant months earlier, playing extended sets to audiences now fully familiar with their music. Rolling Stone, then at the peak of its cultural influence, had extensively dismissed both the album and the band as the latest in a series of blues-boys-singing-the-whites; it would set the stage for a negative relationship that extended through much of the '70s. The magazine was clearly at odds with the band's audience, which was growing mightily by the moment, spurred on by a third tour which began in July at the Atlanta Pop Festival and stopped eight weeks later.

Between tours, of course, the band had been recording material for their second album, which would see American release on October 22--just a week after the start of their fourth tour, the first rock concert held an New York's Carnegie Hall since the venue had banned the Rolling Stones in 1965. For their glories, they were awarded perhaps the most infamous record review of their career. "Who could deny that Jimmy Page is the absolute number-one heaviest white blues guitarist between 5'4" and 5'8" in the world?" asked Rolling Stone's John Mendelssohn upon the release of Led Zeppelin 2. Many suspected the question was rhetorical.

Yet in the end, reviews would matter very little to Led Zeppelin. From this point forward the tours--and the band--would roll through America inexorably, setting attendance records regularly and positioning the quartet ever higher in the Rock God pantheon. By the time of the ninth US tour in 1973, they had filled Tampa Stadium with 56,000 paying customers--breaking the Beatles' Shea Stadium record set eight years previously-- and were even making nice to the press. Relaxing poolside at a New Orleans hotel, Robert Plant contentedly looked backward at the surge that had driven his band to the very top of the Stateside heap.

"I think I realized what Led Zeppelin was about around the end of our very first American tour," he told CREEM's Lisa Robinson. "We started off not even on the bill in Denver, and by the time we got to New York City we were second to Iron Butterfly and they didn't want to go on! And I started getting this little light...glowing inside, and I began wiggling me hips and realizing that it was all a fantastic trip, you know? I'm not even really sure what it is that I've got to do, but I'm doing it."

These days we call that swimming with the sharks, Mr. Plant.

(Courtesy Q Magazine)