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What ever happened to Peter Grant?


Geno56

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:huh: Im interested in any stories about Peter Grant, Zeps tour manager back in the day. And what ever happened about the rip off from their deposit box in New York? Still haven't heard about the safety deposit box rip off in NY 1973. Thanks for all the info on Grant.
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He certianly was colorful wasnt he? He seemed such a strange fit for Plant, being that Robert is so layed back and Grant would scream and yell and swear and pick a fight over anything. Strange that they wound up with him in my opinion.

LOL, yes, colorful. but exactly why they needed him in that role. in my experience, i always found that people in management that put the fear of God into you were the ones who did the best job ultimately for everyone involved. people don't try to f*ck over a hard ass, y'know? the band needed to be protected.

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Peter Grant was a promoter with experience called into the Yardbirds to help them out. He made sure things got done.

His previous experience in the biz and the Yardies made him the 5th element of LZ.

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Grant was the way he was because the music business had become very exploitative, and many artists & bands of the 1950s/1960s never received their fair share. There are dozens of horror stories of folks who had huge hits and literally wound up broke, because the money they made went to someone else through very bad deals and contracts. Grant & Page saw the mistakes that were made with The Yardbirds, and the Led Zeppelin business model was constructed so that they would not fall into the same traps and pitfalls.

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if you haven't already, watch The Song Remains The Same...great footage of Grant. Ruthless in a good way. He needed to be.

When they showed that clip before the O2 performance, Grant got one of the biggest cheers from the audience - I kid you not.

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In '61 or '62 he was hired to transport The Shadows to their gigs. He took this job as his acting roles dried up.

In '63 promoter Don Arden hired him to manage UK tours for Bo Diddley, The Everly Brothers, Little Richard, Brian Hyland, Chuck Berry.

In late '63, Arden hired him to manage UK tours for Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, and The Animals.

Grant went on to independently manage The Nashville Teens, The Flintstones, all-girl group called She Trinity, and The New Vaudeville Band.

Grant then took The New Vaudeville Band on an American tour of the caberet circuit…they played Las Vegas and Reno among others.

Grant further independently managed Jeff Beck's early tours and Terry Reid.

Grant put together The Jeff Beck Group, produced their 'Truth' album…there was a studio session for the instrumental 'Beck's Bolero'.

In 1966, Simon Napier-Bell asked Grant to take over management of The Yardbirds upon Mickie Most's recommendation. Jimmy Page joined The Yardbirds for a rehearsal on June

19th or 20th 1966.

June 21st 1966: First live public performance of The Yardbirds with Jimmy Page on bass(7:30-11pm) (billed with The Clayton Squares) at Marquee Club in London

(venue located at 90 Wardour Street).

THE REST IS HISTORY!

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if you haven't already, watch The Song Remains The Same...great footage of Grant. Ruthless in a good way. He needed to be.

Yes, when he was a boy the Germans bombed the area where he lived in England. It's easy to appreciate why he would grow up understanding the need to fight for his rights or the rights of others.

Grant was born in South Norwood, south London, on April 5, 1935. He attended Sir Walter St John School in Grayshott when evacuated during the 2nd World War and returned to secondary school in South Norwood. South Norwood is an area I know well. Sandwiched between Croydon and Selhurst on one side and the more affluent Crystal Palace peering over it on the other side, it certainly isn't the worst place in London but it is nowhere near the best. I've tried to imagine what it would have been like to have grown up there in the 30s and 40s. Today, it is run down in areas, a place waiting to be reborn on the whispers that the tube network might extend there and breathe new life into its old bones. You can see its past majesty in some of the Victorian and Edwardian houses that still stand, testimony to the fact that once luminaries like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lived there and Lillie Langtrey came from there. Perhaps it was a half-decent place to live in the area during the years of Grant's childhood but the Croydon area as a whole has changed so much due to it being so heavily bombed during the war, and the ugliest grey skyscrapers and buildings known to man springing up, that it is so hard to tell. But let's put it this way: it wasn't a place Grant cared to live in once he had made some money!

www.leninimports.com/peter_grant

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Yes, when he was a boy the Germans bombed the area where he lived in England. It's easy to appreciate why he would grow up understanding the need to fight for his rights or the rights of others.

I've explored some private speculation that his bloodline included a Jew or a gypsy. The evidence has proven to be inconclusive. Oddly enough, similar speculation surrounds Adolf Hitler, who was of Austrian descent.

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I've explored some private speculation that his bloodline included a Jew or a gypsy. The evidence has proven to be inconclusive. Oddly enough, similar speculation surrounds Adolf Hitler, who was of Austrian descent.

One close friend that Peter confided in to a certain extent was Mickie Most, with whom he would enjoy a fruitful business partnership in later years. Says Mickie: "Peter was half Jewish. He told me he was half Jewish and I think his mother was Jewish.

Peter Grant: The Man Who Led Zeppelin by Chris Welch

There may not have been many Norman French 'Graunts' left living in South Norwood during the Thirties, but a hundred years earlier it was a happy hunting ground for roaming bands of gypsies.

Peter Grant: The Man Who Led Zeppelin by Chris Welch

books.google.com/books?q=peter+grant+the+man+who+led+zeppelin+chris+welch

I'm not sure if the following account is about the same Peter Grant who was Led Zeppelin's manager or not.

The places don't seem to match up; I didn't see Hull mentioned in the wikipedia account, but the timeline makes sense as he would have been 5 years old in 1940.

Bombs fell in London in 1940 so that part matches.

This is the first I have read about this story from the BBC archive of WW2 memories; wow, the following account may be from someone who knew him when he was a kid.

Or, it may have been a different Peter Grant, as there is a substantial distance between Grayshott and Hull. However, it makes sense that he may have been evacuated from Grayshott to Hull and then to Scotland.

Peter Grant, (April 5, 1935 – November 21, 1995) was an English music manager. Grant managed the popular English bands The Yardbirds, Led Zeppelin and Bad Company, amongst others, and was also a record executive for Swan Song Records. He is widely credited with improving pay and conditions for musicians in dealings with concert promoters.

Grant was born in the south London suburb of South Norwood, Surrey, England. His mother Dorothy worked as a secretary. He attended Sir Walter St John School in Grayshott when evacuated and returned to the secondary school in Norwood until leaving at the age of 13, when he became a sheet metal factory worker in Croydon.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Grant_(music_manager)

I talked to my friend, Peter Grant, who lived in Hull during the War. He was 5 years old at the time and his father was in the RAF. He told me that his Uncle died, and his neighbours were actually killed by a bomb landing on their house. Due to bombing, he had to spend time in the Anderson shelter and described it as being cold, damp, dark and bleak with only one torch. "It got you down quite a lot", he exclaimed, "the best you could do was to just carry life on normally".

Everyone still went to school but had to wear gas masks. Another thing that kept their spirits up was the fact that everyone was really close and kept track of the news, informing them what was going on. Peter thought the rationing was quite good, no-one had too much of anything, you had a bit of everything, even poor people could afford food! Another way of providing food was growing their own, e.g vegetables in the garden, chickens etc. Most of this happened in Scotland where Peter was evacuated.

His biggest fears in everyday life were people getting killed, especially since his dad was in the RAF!

Peter Grant - Evacuated from Hull to Scotland

by Rossett

Archive List > Childhood and Evacuation

Contributed by Rossett

People in story: Peter Grant

Location of story: Hull

Article ID: A2238167

Contributed on: 27 January 2004

www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/stories/67/a2238167

The government of the Third Reich authorised the bombing of civilian targets from the first days of the war. The British government ordered the RAF to adhere strictly to the Amsterdam draft international rules prohibiting attacking civilian infrastructure outside the combat zones, but this adherence was abandoned on May 15, 1940, one day after the Rotterdam Blitz. On August 24, 1940 some German aircraft strayed over London and dropped bombs in the east and northeast of the city.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World_War_II

There was a steady flow of evacuees during June 1939. The official evacuations began on September 1, two days before the declaration of war. From London and the other main cities, the priority class people boarded trains and were dispatched to rural towns and villages in the designated areas. With the uncertainties over registering for evacuation, the actual movement was also disjointed — evacuees were gathered into groups and put on the first available train, regardless of its destination. School and family groups were further separated in the transfer from mainline trains to more local transport. Accordingly, some reception areas became overwhelmed. East Anglian ports received many children evacuated from Dagenham. Some reception areas received more than the expected number of evacuees, and others found themselves receiving people from a priority group or social class different from what they had prepared for.

Almost 3.75 million people were moved, with around a third of the entire population experiencing some effects of the evacuation. In the first three days of official evacuation, almost 1.5 million people were moved — 800,000 children of school-age, 500,000 mothers and young children, 12,000 pregnant women, 7,000 disabled persons, and over 100,000 teachers and other 'helpers.'

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evacuations_of_civilians_in_Britain_during_World_War_II

Led Zeppelin's future manager, Peter Grant, was a boy of four years old when Britain began to evacuate its population to safety.

John Bonham, John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant were all either too young to remember the evacuation or born afterwards, but Peter Grant was old enough to recall living through the event himself.

From September 1944, the evacuation process was officially halted and reversed for most areas except for London and the east coast. Returning to London was not officially approved until June 1945. In March 1946, the billeting scheme was ended, with 38,000 people still without homes.

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