When John Paul Jones has, for a while, abandoned the Led Zeppelin

John Paul Jones has almost abandoned i Led Zeppelin at the height of their fame and just before starting to record “Physical Graffiti“The album that many consider their masterpiece.

The tour in the stadiums of 1973 beat the record records throughout North America, but left the members of the band exhausted and somehow disconnected from reality. “We played for three hours in a row, and physically it was really hard. When I returned from the last tour I didn’t know where I was,” said guitarist Jimmy Page at the Crawddy Music Magazine in 1974.

“I didn’t even know where I was going. We closed in New York and the only thing I could relate to was the tool on stage. I was totally and completely out of my mind.”

Jones, who as Page had started his career as a highly successful study musician (as he tells himself in the film “Becoming Led Zeppelin”), began to miss a more peaceful family life and asked if he had had enough of the street.

At the end of 1973 the then 27 year old bassist of the quartet said to Peter GrantManager of the Zeppelin (disappeared in 1995), who was thinking of leaving the group.

“We were all very tired and under pressure and we came to the point,” Jones told Mojo in 2007. “I didn’t want to damage the group, but I didn’t even want my family to pieces.”

“I told Jimmy Page, who could not believe it,” said Grant as reported in the 2012 Dave Lewis book “from Whisper To A Scream: The Complete Guide to The Music of Led Zeppelin”. “It was the pressure. He was a family man. Moreover, at that point, the issue of security in the United States was becoming ridiculous. We began to receive death threats.”

Grant encouraged Jones to take some time before such an important decision.

The bassist jumped the registration sessions of the November 1973 group, the first for what would become the double album “Physical Graffiti”Of 1975.

“I thought the band would be fun for a few years,” Jones explained to Mojo. “I needed to do something musically free, fun and liberating, but then I would return to the most serious career in the studio.”

As an official excuse for the absence of the musician, the Led Zeppelin declared to the press that a disease had kept Jones away from the sessions, a story that they maintained even after the album release.

“John Paul Jones was not well and we had to do without him in the studio,” Page said to Rolling Stone in March 1975, before adding a comment that takes on a deeper meaning now that the real reason for the absence has been revealed : “Everything was messed up. It took three months to resolve the situation”.

Fortunately, the pause period was precisely what “the doctor had ordered” and Jones returned to the group at the beginning of 1974 for the sessions in which most of “Physical Graffiti” was recorded.

“In the end, I think he realized that he was doing something he really loved,” explains Grant. “He didn’t talk about it anymore.”

In fact, the sessions of January and February 1974 were so productive that the Zeppelin found themselves with almost three albums of new material of the highest level, so much so that they pushed them to go back in their archives and to fetter unpublished gems like “The Rover” And “Houses of the Holy“(discarded by the 1973 previous album of the same name) to create their first double album.

Jones has strongly contributed to many of the most innovative songs on the album, shining especially in the song “Trampled Under Foot“, led by the Clavinet (played by Jones who was also the group’s keyboard player) and in the song that opens the third side,” in the light“.

Jones then remained in the group until the dissolution, which took place shortly after the death of the drummer John Bonham in September 1980.

Due to page struggles against the abuse of drugs, Jones and the singer Robert Plant They played a particularly significant role in the group’s latest studio album, “In Through The Out Door” of 1979.

After the dissolution of the Zeppelin, Jones has embarked on the most eclectic solo career among the former members of the band, producing and providing arches of arches for groups such as the Rem and Buttonhole Surfers and collaborating with Dave Grohl and Josh Homme in Them Crooked Vultures, beyond to many other collaborations and experimental projects.