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Unledded emission Led Zeppelin veterans Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, the rock legends responsible for some of the heaviest riffs in history, are back together playing for the MTV generation

Sweeting, Adam

The Guardian (pre-1997 Fulltext) [Manchester (UK)] 17 Oct 1994

MTV's Unplugged has done it again. If the Unplugged performances of Eric Clapton and Nirvana are already established as career highlights for the artists concerned, the reunion of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant could prove the biggest crowd puller yet.

Although Plant and Page are being careful not to trade under the Led Zeppelin brand name, and while questions about the non-presence of Zep bassist John Paul Jones are treated with evasive flippancy by Plant, many onlookers will inevitably regard it as the belated return of the seventies super band. Reformed rock dinosaurs are hardly a novelty, after all. True, the pair's long anticipated professional re-acquaintance has generated some new songs, but the core of the performance is a batch of trusty Zeppelin favourites, albeit with significant modifications.

They insist they were keen not to be seen to be merely re-hashing their past. Page talks of treating the old material as "an old picture ready for a new frame," while Plant says: "It had to be new. We had to use our imaginations."

Above all, they seem to have wanted to demonstrate that Led Zeppelin was never merely a blues band or a heavy rock band. A trawl through their remarkable back catalogue (recently re-mastered on to CD yet again) throws up folk and Celtic routes, Caribbean, Indian and Arabic sounds, plus lashings of the heaviest electric riffs known to man.

How well No Quarter: Jimmy Page and Robert Plant Unledded - to give it its full and rather confusing title - will come across on the average domestic TV set remains a moot point, but to make sure the European media got the full picture, a big screen showing of the film was laid on in Paris over the weekend.

The whimsical rococo trappings of the Cirque d'Hiver, with its multi-coloured chandeliers circus ring and midget-sized seating, lent a suitably fantatic air to footage of Page and Plant strumming and wailing in the midst of a forest in Wales. Then we followed them into a chaotic live performance in the town square in Marrakesh with a full complement of Arab musicians, and got an earful of the performance they staged last August at the LWT studios in London.

Calling this "Unplugged" is in flagrant breach of the Trades Descriptions Act since it runs the gamut from full-scale electric rock and blues, like Thankyou or Since I've Been Loving You to weird Arabicised versions of Battle of Evermore and Friends, before climaxing with a monumental version of Kashmir. Here, the mother of all riffs is treated to the full panoply of classical string orchestra plus Egyptian string and percussion ensembles.

At a post-screening press conference, not much was revealed, except that they'll probably go on tour in February. Meanwhile, place your bets for how many millions the Unledded CD will sell.

Plant and Page Unledded is aired on MTV at 8.30pm tonight and will be repeated in forthcoming weeks. Phonogram release the CD version on November 7

Edited by kenog
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A girl's best friend High camp meets deep bass as John Paul Jones and Diamanda Galas team up in London

Smith, Rupert. The Guardian (pre-1997 Fulltext) [Manchester (UK)] 02 Nov 1994
THIS being the woman who hired out the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York to perform her mammoth Plague Mass, a mixture of howled Biblical texts and meditations on Aids, Diamanda Galas is unlikely to offer a fun night out. The Greek-American scream singer made her name with a handful of extreme albums and performances: at her last London show, at the Royal Festival Hall, she appeared stripped to the waist and dripping in gore.

But in her latest incarnation, Galas has shed the more frightening performance art aspects of her work and teamed up with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, who marries the singer's unearthly power and range to a solid rhythm section. The result was unleashed to the multi-pierced crowd at the Shepherd's Bush Empire on Hallowe'en.

After an overture of snarling noises over an amplified heartbeat, Galas slunk on to the stage, a much smaller and frailer figure than her gothed-up image suggests. She took a deep breath and let rip with a voice that pitches itself between The Exorcist and Maria Callas. Most of the 80-minute set was taken from Galas and Jones's recent album The Sporting Life, a mixture of hellish blues-rock and danceable Greek curses carried off with a maniac sense of humour.

For a few numbers, Galas took to the keyboards and accompanied herself. Only twice did she lose momentum, on the formless Devil's Rodeo and Last Man Down, where screams replaced songs. But all doubts were swept away when Galas, grabbing a mike in each hand, lifted the roof of the Empire with her last three songs (Hex, The Sporting Life, You're Mine) that boasted tunes, rhythm and extreme volume.

Now that Diamanda Galas has diversified from her earlier Aids-related work, she's set her sights on a rock audience with a taste for off-the-rails passion. A brief and explosive encore of Led Zeppelin's Communication Breakdown pushed the point home.

Edited by kenog
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Gill, Andyar_button.gif. The Independent [London (UK)] 04 Nov 1994

No Quarter: Jimmy Page & Robert Plant Unledded

(Fontana 526 362-2)

For their entry in the MTV Unplugged series, Page & Plant have trawled through the Led Zeppelin back catalogue and picked the tracks which best lend themselves to a sort of Anglo-Arabic revision process, re- arranging them for an ensemble which includes musicians from Egypt and Morocco alongside a sizeable orchestral string section, the rhythm section from Plant's group, former Cure guitarist Porl Thompson, and a smattering of folk instruments from various locales.

Unsurprisingly, Led Zeppelin III furnishes more tracks than their other albums, that being the record on which Zep realised that the tools of folk music could be changed to reflect "heavier" times; indeed, No Quarter reprises that album's dedication to their Welsh cottage Bron-Y-Aur, "for painting a somewhat forgotten picture of true completeness which acted as an incentive to some of the musical statements". If anything, however, these new versions demonstrate how premature such notions of completeness really are.

Some tracks - "Kashmir", obviously, and "Gallows Pole" - lend themselves well to the Moorish influence, while others are more substantially altered. "Four Sticks" is subdued by comparison with the original, P & P letting the hypnotic patter of Gnawa hand percussion stand in for the song's big-riff dynamic, while "Friends" comes with a new overture played on Arabic strings and flute. "The Battle of Evermore" perhaps best demonstrates the fertile grey area between the Eastern and Western musical traditions, showing just how close Arabic string drones are to our own hurdy-gurdy and resonant mandolin.

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Sinclair, David. The Times [London (UK)] 04 Nov 1994.

JIMMY PAGE & ROBERT PLANT No Quarter (Fontana 526 362)

IF THERE was one person you could have counted on to resist getting in on the old pals' act it was Robert Plant. Regal in his dismissal of "Led Zeppelin to re-form" rumours, his solo career has been as inspired as his former partner Jimmy Page's was half-hearted. But, as even the surviving Beatles have now discovered, there inevitably comes a moment when the time (and the cheque) is right, and a reunion does not seem such a bad idea after all.

To their credit, Page and Plant have mustered four new songs for No Quarter, and they have attempted a radical overhaul of the various Zeppelin numbers disinterred initially for a live MTV recording, recently broadcast as Unledded. The Zeppelin tracks include "Thank You", "Since I've Been Loving You", "Gallows Pole", "Four Sticks" and a 12-minute version of "Kashmir" which finds Plant doing a pretty good imitation of a muezzin wail.

All four of the new songs scrupulously eschew the traditional Zeppelin rock'n'roll thump in favour of exotic world folk arrangements, with the sound of Arabic instruments given particularly prominence. Best of these is "Yallah", a jabbering Arab-industrial hybrid, but "Wah Wah", with its low-tuned, acoustic guitar riff and massed Bedouin chanting may not be the only song to stretch the patience of the more conservative Zeppelin fan.

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Toop, David. The Times [London (UK)] 04 Nov 1994

Diamanda Galas John Paul Jones, Shepherds Bush Empire CONCERT: Weird, but wonderful WHAT better event could a ghoul choose for Halloween than a Diamanda Galas concert? The pagan priestess of San Diego, Galas possesses a voice to drive away the most determined vampire hunter.

Always more than well-equipped, the star of Russ Meyer's Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! has recently added some new ammunition to her stage persona. Some of this has come from evolutionary shifts of her own, and some from the recent association with the man Robert Plant and Jimmy Page chose not to recall for the Led Zeppelin reunion.

But with Galas at the microphone, why should John Paul Jones feel slighted? His industrial-strength bass and occasional steel guitar, Galas's unique vocal cords and a beefy drummer were sufficient to cause a scary-looking audience to shiver in their bondage outfits last Monday.

Only a few minutes after her entrance, Galas scaled a peak of intensity few vocalists could hope to achieve at the climax of a performance. No matter how well you know the voice, when she screams the chills run down your spine. This was a well-planned assault, however. As well as delivering a scorched-earth monologue on despair, Galas switched between the overwrought delivery of southern soul ballads and honky-tonk country, and an approach to the blues that teetered on the brink of a whirlpool of sound.

For the soul and country material she played Hammond organ with a sanctified touch. Paradoxically, this archaic flavour gave the music a sense of timelessness, as if Greek ritual laments, Mediterranean sorcery, Pentecostal speaking in tongues and good old American heartache were condensed into one potent package. Structured cleverly around the bare bones of Jones's bass riffs, the title song from their recent The Sporting Life album and "Do You Take This Man" proved that Diamanda may have become more accessible, but her basic stance is uncompromised. For an encore the trio tore Led Zep's "Communication Breakdown" to shreds. Zeppelin, who needs them?

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UNLEDDED, FINALLY; Plant and Page reunion on MuchMusic tomorrow

Strauss, Neil. The Gazette [Montreal, Que] 06 Nov 1994
MTV's highest-rated Unplugged episode ever arrives in Canada tomorrow.

No Quarter: Robert Plant and Jimmy Page Unledded, which premiered in the U.S. last month, will air on MuchMusic at 9 p.m.

An album of music recorded for Unplugged, not all of which made the broadcast, will be released on Tuesday by Atlantic Records.

In February, the two former members of Led Zeppelin plan to embark on what's bound to be a highly lucrative world tour.

The reunion comes 14 years after the band broke up as a result of the alcohol-related death of drummer John Bonham.

"Some great blob called public opinion kept demanding that me and Jimmy do something together again," Plant, 47, said in an interview. "So the only thing we had to consider was, can we do it again? Once we found out we could, certain things in me were born again."

Page, 50, continued: "It's not a question of us going back. It's a question of coming together and going forward and doing something which maybe people can relate to down the line and plagiarize from us again."

Zeppelin's classic guitar riffs have been hammered indelibly not just into the music of many rap and rock bands but the consciousness of anybody who has ever been near a sound system in the last three decades.

Plant and Page enjoy being rock superstars and exercising all the privileges that come with the title.

Among the duties of the publicists for their record label during their short stay in New York was to wear Page's new shoes to break them in and to shop for hip new records for him.

"We want to stay in touch with the underground," Page said, "but we don't have time to go to record stores."

Plant and Page sometimes seem like overgrown children. Over the course of a two-hour interview, Plant continually teased Page, Page tried to outjest Plant, and both engaged in sexual boasting, referred to things only they understood, and snickered at each other's comments like two best friends in the back row of a school classroom.

"Working with Robert and Jimmy was like getting a divorced couple back together," said Alex Coletti, the Unplugged producer. "It was a fragile, very tentative thing at first. The slightest upset could have ruined it."

But after they became immersed in the project, Plant and Page renewed their bond. In fact, the pair, who said they had written enough new songs together for a second album, talked as if they had no intention of returning to their spotty solo careers.

For the Unplugged special, the two performed new arrangements of a dozen Led Zeppelin songs and a handful of new pieces in Morocco, Wales and London.

Though Plant and Page did not want to talk about the genesis of Unledded, Coletti explained: "Originally, we were just going to do an Unplugged with Robert, and we hoped that he would agree to get Jimmy to do a few songs. But then his manager took the initiative, got these guys together and made it happen."

Within a short time, the special began to deviate from its original plan, which was to stick Plant in front of a hand-picked audience in a Queens studio with an acoustic band and several guests.

"When Robert's people were presenting the idea over the phone, I knew it was going to be a lot of money," Coletti said. "They said, `Robert wants to go to Morocco because he wrote Kashmir there. Robert wants to go to Wales because he wrote Down by the Seaside there.' I said, `Did Robert write anything in Queens?' "

In Marrakesh, Morocco, Plant and Page fulfilled a longtime dream by performing with Gnawa trance musicians, descendants of Sudanese slaves.

"Every November," Plant said, "the people we played with - Ibrahim and his mates - go to people's houses and clear them of the jinn - everything that's bad in the place. But Ibrahim also makes tapes that you can buy for 15 dirhams in the market. So that's quite a useful gig he's got. It's a bit like Tori Amos. She makes you feel good, and she sells a few records."

Though several executives at MTV wanted Plant and Page to perform the classic Stairway to Heaven, the pair decided not to give any more exposure to that overfamiliar work.

"I think we're in a disposable world and Stairway to Heaven is one of the things that hasn't quite been thrown away yet," Plant said. "I think radio stations should be asked not to play it for 10 years, just to leave it alone for a bit so we can tell whether it's any good or not."

Also missing from Unledded is John Paul Jones, the other surviving member of Led Zeppelin. Jones, who is currently touring Europe in a trio with the avant-garde singer Diamanda Galas and the former Attractions drummer Pete Thomas, said in a telephone conversation that he was never asked to take part in the broadcast.

"I read about it in the papers," he said. "Maybe I might have joined them, and maybe I wouldn't. But I think it was a bit discourteous of them not to say anything at all.

"One slightly naughty thing I was thinking as I was watching the MTV thing," Jones said, "is how many people it took to replace me, and how few people it's taken me to replace them."

New techniques Plant has added to his repertory, like singing in quarter tones and twirling, come from Arabic traditions, he said. Working on Unledded has only increased his belief that taking his and Led Zeppelin's music to a new level means combining it with ethnic cultures.

"When we started rehearsing with the Egyptian orchestra, I could feel that Plant and Page were starting a little journey again," he said. "And that's how our music always was. It was some kind of journey which - in the end - fell into the clutches of the corporate promotional thingy."

Next time, Plant said, he hoped to collaborate with the Jbala musicians of northwest Morocco: "The other day I spoke to one of the chaps who helped us out in Morocco, and he said: `Robert, I've found these guys that really want to work with you. They're the Jbala. Those are the people that can put you into such a state that you can cut yourself with Moroccan daggers and be covered in blood and feel nothing, and at the end of the song, the blood's gone.'

"I don't know if it's quite the same as Teardrop Explodes," Plant continued, referring to one of his favorite bands. "But at least it gives us something to do in the future, even if it only means that we end up learning to do first aid very quickly."

Page snorted. "I can see the headline now: `Former Led Zeppelin Members Disemboweled in Moroccan Trance Incident.' "

Edited by kenog
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Death and the dominatrix Fearsome diva Diamanda Galas sings Satanic verses for midnight's children.

Elizabeth Young shuts her eyes and screams

Young, Elizabeth. The Guardian (pre-1997 Fulltext) [Manchester (UK)] 06 Nov 1994
It is Hallowe'en and the werewolves of London are out tonight. The tribes are here, the lost, the damned, the beautiful, the bizarre, united as celebrants in the psychic assault course that is a concert by cult diva Diamanda Galas.

Galas trails a fearsome reputation behind her, like some newly-slaughtered animal. Famed in America as an avant-garde performer, poet, singer and musical terrorist, her recorded works include The Litanies of Satan and Saint of the Pit. During the Eighties she concentrated on recording and performing her elegiac Plague Mass " an anguished, excoriating requiem for the victims of Aids. Galas's voice is legendary. Classically trained, she can span over three octaves.

Now, in what initially seems an improbable collaboration she has recorded a new album, The Sporting Life, with John Paul Jones, Led Zeppelin's former bassist. Jones has admired Galas since he heard her `Wild Women with Steak Knives' in 1982. Respected now as a composer and a producer, Jones has eclectic tastes, having worked recently with REM, Butthole Surfers, Brian Eno and Raging Slab.

`Sporting Life' is old American pimp slang for the street hustle of tricks, johns and whores. Galas's work has continually focused upon the brutal realities of dominance and submission that underlie our blood-flecked sexual arena. Galas is a Sadeian woman with all de Sade's bleak view of human nature. She is also Luciferian in the original sense of light-bringer, one who defies orthodoxy and authority. Denounced for blasphemy, she continues as a warrior, an obsessive. Her concerts have evolved into ritualistic, shamanic exorcisms.

At Shepherd's Bush Empire her natural audience awaited.

Transvestite Goths with floor-length magenta dreadlocks stood alongside old air-guitar Led Zep freaks with clean-flowing hair. Peroxide dominatrices were tight-lacing red silk bustiers in the flooded lavatories. There were chains and leather caps and full rubber bondage masks with their eerie facial zips and wet, red holes where the drinks went down. A man in a vampire cloak and hessian bondage hood with eight-inch steel spikes protruding from his necklet had space priority at the bar.

Galas was late. Finally " blue lights, teasing electronic whispers. And then the lady started, one note, one word that went on and on, sliding up and down the scale, longer than seemed believable. `Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii' she sang, interminably, impossibly, ear-piercingly loud and the silver spot went on. And she's standing there, imperious, the self-styled `she-wolf' in a tiny, skin-tight, crotch-skimming black slip, and the bass crashes in. You had to be there.

Galas, Jones " impeccable on bass and pedal-steel guitar " and Attractions drummer Pete Thomas went through the album, but hearing Galas sing these `homicidal love songs' live shifted it into the primordial dimension of the Furies. Thomas's drumming managed to contain and control the emotional holocaust that poured out of Galas.

Hers is an awesome, incredible voice. She squeaks and gibbers and wails and sings glossolalia scat, shaking spasmodically like some voodoo adept. Suddenly she swoops right down to a batrachian croak, squatting in front of the audience, her witchy shock of black hair obscuring her face. Hollow-eyed, pearl-pale, she pounds her piano frenziedly or stalks the stage with the predatory authority of a dominatrix gone completely mad.

Highlights were `Do You Take This Man?' "`Husband, with this knife/I do hold. . . .' " and a heart-breaking rendition of the classic deep-soul ballad `Dark End of the Street.' Jones and Thomas had contributed to many of the lyrics, but Galas's own `Baby's Insane', with its deranged, blues-country edge, was particularly memorable.

The entire performance was so potent and visceral that it generated involuntary physical reactions amongst the audience; one's gorge rose quickly, unconsciously.

It all ended quite suddenly, like a clap of thunder. One encore and the bright lights came up, sending midnight's children tumbling out, back to the dark end of the street.

Edited by kenog
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kenog, I am gone for 2 days and I have so much to catch up on. Like Roger Berlins thread, this is one of the best threads here. Thanks for all the articles. Much appreciated! :peace:

Edit: saving for the weekend:-)

Edited by Deborah J
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Thanks Deborah J. :friends: It is always nice to hear that there a few people who read them. I'll be putting more up here as time permits. When I came across articles which were specific to John Bonham, I posted those on a Bonzo thread. I think I'll take the same approach when I get to ones which are specific to Jason.

In the meantime, have a great weekend.

kenog, I am gone for 2 days and I have so much to catch up on. Like Roger Berlins thread, this is one of the best threads here. Thanks for all the articles. Much appreciated! :peace:

Edit: saving for the weekend:-)

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hi Deborah J,

Happy Independence Day holiday.

Yes, I shall put more on this site within the next couple of days. What happens is I have to read through them all to make sure there is enough LZ content to justify inclusion, then I tidy them up a bit.

Sorry, I should have added more over the past few weeks, but I have been tied up at work.

Hi kenog!

Thanks again for your contibutions. I am being "selfish party of one" here :-) Any new articles coming soon? ;)

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Hi SAJ,

Happy Independence Day holiday to you.

Yes, I am happy to post them there when I reach that era. :thumbsup: I go through the articles in chronological order.

I invite you to feel free to post them to The Disregard of Scrapbooking thread I created to document Jason's life in music.

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Sam, I loved this^^ being in the hotel business I remember a famous person who wanted to dine in the 5 star restaurant with his children at a hotel I worked for. They had no jackets,so one of the banquet staff went to his house and got two jackets from his sons wardrobe and let the man borrow them as the Chef refused service without a tie and jacket.

Edited by Deborah J
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Interesting Bad Company Article posted on Pittsburgh Gazette website today

"It all fell apart when John Bonham died," Mr. Rodgers says of the Led Zeppelin drummer. "We lost a great friend and a great guy. I mean, everybody loved John, and it was such a tragedy. And I think the heart went right out of Peter at that point. And very soon after that I decided I was going to come off the road. So we put the band to sleep for a time."

http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/ae/music/preview-bad-company-still-on-the-run-695934/

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Interesting Bad Company Article posted on Pittsburgh Gazette website today

"It all fell apart when John Bonham died," Mr. Rodgers says of the Led Zeppelin drummer. "We lost a great friend and a great guy. I mean, everybody loved John, and it was such a tragedy. And I think the heart went right out of Peter at that point. And very soon after that I decided I was going to come off the road. So we put the band to sleep for a time."

http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/ae/music/preview-bad-company-still-on-the-run-695934/

^^^

Consistent with other prominent accounts of the time. Peter was devastated by the loss for years.

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How we made: Kenneth Anger on Lucifer Rising

The director of the 1966 occult classic talks about how an anti-British massacre paid for his film, and the debt it owes to Jimmy Page and a bunch of jailed killers

Chris Michael

The Guardian, Monday 22 July 2013 18.55 BST

This was the first really big film about black magic or white magic or whatever you want to call it. I'm a member of the OTO – Ordo Templi Orientis – an occult order founded by British genius Aleister Crowley, who was maligned by the gutter press. The Express's rightwing jerk editor Lord Beaverbrook sold a lot of papers calling Crowley a satanist, with headlines like "The man we want to hang", to provoke people to murder him. Crowley's like a bogeyman –, which was unfair. He wrote wonderful books and poetry. Lord Beaverbrook loved to call Crowley a cannibal: eating human beings makes good headlines, and Crowley couldn't countersue.

Lucifer Rising was about Egyptian gods summoning the angel Lucifer – in order to usher in a new occult age, in accordance with the principles of OTO. I used a bit of deception to film it in Egypt. I said I was doing a documentary on ancient Egyptian beliefs and needed to film in the actual settings: in front of the Sphinx, at Karnak, along the Nile where you see beautiful ruined temples. The authorities fell for it.

I'd taken pictures of Black Saturday, the anti-British riots in Cairo in 1952. When they burned down Shepheard Hotel, I filmed people jumping from the windows and being massacred in the street – they had their legs cut off by swords and were left to bleed to death because they were British. I sold those images to Picture Post, which paid for my trip.

Marianne Faithfull [the film's star, playing the goddess Lilith] says I hypnotised her and forced her to do things against her will. I didn't. When I took her to Egypt, she was addicted to heroin and had the nerve to carry some in her makeup box under the face powder, so it just looked like just another form of powder. If she had been arrested or discovered, we all would have been shot – that was the penalty then. I think all drugs are crutches – you don't need them to be creative. Lucifer Rising is not psychedelic, it's a film by Kenneth Anger. It's my style. I never said you should take LSD before watching it, that's a lie – one of the papers invented it.

Bobby [beausoleil, who acted and wrote the soundtrack] was a good kid who turned bad – he was a Scorpio. He was my protege at 19, which is approaching the legal age but not quite the legal age of 21. In other words, he lived with me in his own apartment at the so-called Russian Embassy, this wonderful listed wooden victorian building near Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. He was in a band called Love, had shoulder-length hair and very blue eyes, and the girls called him Cupid – he always wore an old top hat, which was part of the act. He managed to make some recordings – before the tragedy.

Bobby lied to me, and then he made a terrible mistake. He told me: "Kenneth, I need $700." In the 1960s, that was quite a lot of money. He said it was to buy amps for his act. He and came back with a large package wrapped in black plastic, which I assumed was speakers. Then he went out, and I noticed his dog sniffing at it. So I cut open a corner, and lo and behold it was a key [kilogram] of marijuana. When he came back, I picked up his package and said: "Take your fucking marijuana and get the hell out of here." The next time I saw him, he was on death row for murdering a musician on Charles Manson's orders. Manson never actually killed anyone himself, he just brainwashed these girls and Bobby, who were like his zombies, to kill. Manson was a funny little freak, a dwarf, very short. The good news about Manson in prison is that he's terrified of dentists so one by one, one by one, all his teeth have rotted and fallen out. He deserves it, he's evil and should have been executed. He completely ruined Bobby: Bobby would've been OK if he hadn't met Manson.

But Bobby created his own situation. He didn't have to accept the invitation to move in with the girls. His van broke down in front of the [Manson family's] Spahn Ranch, as if predestined by Satan himself, and the girls came out and said, "Well you're cute, why don't you move in?"So Jimmy Page did some music instead. He's a miser, which is a horrible thing. He wouldn't even pay for lunch. So I said: "Isn't it preposterous that you're so cheap?" And that of course insulted him. He was on heroin all the time – I hate all those druggies because their eyes get glazed and what they say is meaningless because they don't follow through. I said: "OK, Jimmy, I need exactly 40 minutes." But he only gave me 20. I said: "What am I supposed to do, play it twice? I need 40 minutes! I need a climax! Like, [the film] is the end and the beginning of the world – you've gotta give me that big music!"

In the end, I took a tape recorder in to Bobby in prison. He rounded up 12 other murderers who used to be musicians – there's a lot of musicians in prison who got mixed up with selling drugs, but I mean they still could play music. So I recorded Bobby playing with the "all-killer orchestra". Bobby said he was going to call his band the Powerhouse of Oz. I said: "You can't, because Oz means goat in Hebrew, but you're not violating the L Frank Baum Oz book copyright, because Baum was a secret occultist and the Oz books are full of secret little jokes for people that understand magic."

Edited by kenog
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Thank you Kenog for posting this. It was an interesting interview. Among other things, I didn't realize Kenneth Anger is still living. I also didn't know that Bobby Beausoleil had once been in Love nor that he recruited musicians who were also serving time in San Quentin to work on the Lucifer Rising soundtrack. I wonder if they receive royalty payments for their work on the soundtrack?

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Ever wondered what had happened to Bron-yr-Aur? Check out my piece, from the Birmingham Mail website - also published in a recent edition of the Sunday Mercury.. the cottage is in the hands of a couple of Zep fans, who have some major plans. They're lovely people, too.

http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/whats-on/music/led-zeppelin-fan-ruth-dale-4875086

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