The Devil In Mr Jones

ALL THIS promotion, I ve forgotten what it was like! exclaims John Paul Jones as he emerges dazed and blinking from the cosy confines of his custom-built studio. And there s only one of me. Normally you could always point to the blond curly one and say, Talk to him!
Sure enough, Mr. Jones might ve maintained a pretty comprehensive silence since Led Zeppelin s Knebworth swansong almost exactly two decades ago, but he s hardly been idle. He s taken on arranging and production duties for clients as diverse as Ben E. King, The Mission, Cinderella, Brian Eno, Heart, Diamanda Galas and Peter Gabriel, as well as scoring three tunes on REM s classic Automatic For The People album ( Michael Stipe wrote me a really nice handwritten two-page letter saying, y know, We fancy the strings coming in here, we like what you do, call us if you ve got any questions! ).
The reason for John Paul Jones re-emergence is the new instrumental album Zooma, his first ever solo outing. And no matter that his PR people politely warn that Jonesy would rather discuss this latest opus than rehash his halcyon days with the Zeppelin, the man s history is all over the new material. Or rather, it s a reflection of how integral a part of Led Zeppelin the bassist was tracks like The Smile Of Your Shadow and Snake throw substantial new light on hallowed titles such as No Quarter , Achilles Last Stand and Kashmir .
And, lest we forget, 1979 s In Through The Out Door was largely Jones baby, its core themes composed while Jimmy Page was (quite literally) exorcising his inner demons, and Robert Plant was grieving for his son Karac, who had died from a violent respiratory virus the previous year.
But Zooma is a surprisingly tough and hard-edged record, closer to a vocal-less Rage Against The Machine mangling Heartbreaker than the ambient experimentalism or symphonic grandeur one might ve expected.
I wasn t really sure which direction I wanted to go in, but that s the way I play rock n roll, he reasons. If I pick up a bass, especially eight or ten-string bass, I really like to make a lot of noise, I hit it hard. Once I d played two or three riff-tunes together, I thought, Wait a minute, this actually sounds like I ve got a direction . The rest of the job was to just think of that as the core and then balance it up with blues numbers and a little bit of acoustic type of thing.
Born John Baldwin on January 3, 1946 at Sidcup, Kent, the bassist could hardly have escaped the lure of a life in music his father played piano silent movies and later did the hunt ball/cocktail party/bar mitzvah/yacht club circuit with his own duo. Baldwin Jr. was playing piano by the age of six, and was on the road with his father by the time he was 13. Initially, though, the old man discouraged him from taking up the electric bass, reckoning that it would be a short-lived fad.
He gave it two years, Jones laughs. He said, Take up the saxophone, you ll always work. Of course, as soon as he found out that I could actually play the right notes, and play well, which was fairly unheard of for bass players, immediately he was like, Oh, alright, carry on doing that, and I m booking you .
So consequently I ended up doing a lot of work that perhaps a lot of younger musicians don t get to do, all the standards. Playing music for dinner is a very humbling experience, nobody has the slightest interest in what you re doing, none whatsoever. And it s good, you learn a bit of humility you learn to play so you don t upset their eating!
Not that Jones would cultivate an anonymous bass style as a result of this grounding. He formed his first band at Christ College boarding school, heavily influenced by jazz bassists such as Scott LaFaro and Charles Mingus.
My father used to affectionately call me Mingus, he recalls. He was a pianist, and it was like, Watch my left hand, son! I was about 15 and bristling. Mingus had a very sort of in-your-face way of playing bass, very upfront and forceful, he used to drive the rhythm section along just from the bass. Coupled with a good drummer, they were indomitable.
For the next three years, this young hotshot played military bases all over the south of England until, at the age of 17, he scored a job with ex-Shadows Jet Harris and Tony Meehan, in a line-up that also included a young John McLaughlin on rhythm guitar.
By 1965, he had established himself as one of London s leading session bassists, appearing on dates by Tom Jones and Dusty Springfield, and regularly running into the likes of Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. Following two years as a jobbing player, Jones then carved out a niche for himself as an accomplished musical director and arranger, after Mickie Most noticed that his ad hoc work on Donovan s Sunshine Superman was better than the original charts.
Within two years, he had arranged for Frangoise Hardy, Lulu, Herman s Hermits, The Yardbirds, PP Arnold and dozens of others, sometimes playing alongside the orchestras he conducted. He also worked extensively with Andrew Loog Oldham indeed, it was his string arrangements for The Rolling Stones She s A Rainbow from Their Satanic Majesties Request that really put him on the map.
I think they wanted more Bach but I gave them Mozart because the track was too fast, and people doing a baroque part would ve probably been overwhelming, he remembers. It was a lot of work at that time, I just remember going from arrangement to arrangement. Suddenly you d turn up in the middle of the night and Nicky Hopkins would be doing a track, and they d want some strings, and Andrew would be leaping in and out of the studio quickly describing what he wanted.
It was also Oldham who put him in contact with a pre-New York Nico. Jones still smiles when he remembers hearing the chanteuse s Teutonic drone (it later transpired that she was deaf in one ear) for the first time.
I did her first demo session, the first thing she ever sang on record, he explains. Basically Andrew said, Go in the studio with her and put something down we can hear . And we did Blowing In the Wind , which she sang in this deep Germanic voice I mean it was the first time I d heard anybody sing like that. And her son was there, who throughout the session proceeded to destroy the studio, microphone by microphone, and pull cables out of the wall. He was the most destructive child I d ever seen.
Presumably the experience prepared Jones for working with the New York Dolls?
Well, no, nothing can prepare you for the New York Dolls!

By 1968, Jones was married with two kids, and burnt out from arranging 40 to 50 pieces a month. When he heard that Jimmy Page was looking to form a band, he offered his services, and the guitarist jumped at the chance of having such a maestro on board. Enter a blonde blues wailer and a bruising beatkeeper from the Black Country. The rest is the stuff of (neo-Nordic) myth: nine Led Zeppelin albums (not counting posthumous releases), 26 tours and one film, all brought to a tragic end by John Bonham s death in 1980.
Yet, once the dust had settled on their legacy as one of the most critically reviled yet biggest selling behemoths in rock n roll, the band s influence began to be felt in both the most obvious (The Mission, The Cult, Lenny Kravitz) and unlikely (Puff Daddy, Sheryl Crow) places. Indeed, the first 16 bars of When The Levie Breaks became one of the most widely deployed drum loops in hip-hop history.
There was a certain poetic justice in this: Zep had long been lambasted for plagiarising the work of bluesmeisters like Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy, and the subsequent sampling of their own back catalogue was regarded as nothing more than the homies coming home to roost. Still, the question on every rock drummer s lips must be: What was it like to stand in the same room as Bonham and witness the Minotaurian wallop of tracks like Levee at close range?
Well for a start, the reason it sounded so good was we put him in the other room! Jones chuckles. He was too much to be in the same room with, and so we stuck him in the hall. And by putting a couple of mics up on the landings of this old broken-down house (Headley Grange in Hampshire), that s what made the sound. I don t even think there s a microphone on the bass drum, it s that powerful. I mean, I ve heard him on the kit that he bought Jason (Bonham s son, who succeeded his late father at Zeppelin s 1988 Atlantic Records reunion), which was tiny, like a kid s kit that Ludwig made him, and it sounded just the same.
Whatever he got on it, it made the drums appear about four times the size. He just played that way, he had this huge foot, this attitude on drums. He was bloody good and he knew it, and he was quite happy to demonstrate it for you if you wanted! And that was great, because attitude is so important in playing, it gives you authority on an instrument.
Such authority was exhibited every time Led Zeppelin hit the stage: few other stadium acts could stretch a doomy, hellbound blues like Dazed And Confused to its full 26-minute limit and keep the crowd onside. Jones attributes the band s improvisatory skill to the fact that they were very much an integrated quartet rather than one soloist with henchmen.
If you try and sound good at the expense of other people, then the band will sound crap and therefore you will too, he maintains. So when we were playing the bits you re describing, we were listening all the time, and constantly adjusting and tampering with the dynamic and just concentrating, as you said, on what was happening on stage, just keeping the ball in play. As soon as your mind starts wandering off, it ll start just falling off in intensity.
Has Jones recognised such chemistry in anyone else?
Diamanda Galas, he says, without hesitation. She s actually stunning. The voice and the musicality. I love her piano playing, and just the sheer, Fuck you, I m going for it! She s very professional, but she can just let herself go at something, it s very impressive. Somebody suggested we work together, and I d heard the Wild Women With Steak Knives single, which is pretty much as it sounds from the title.
One thing Diamanda told me, which I took to heart because she d done the same thing with collaborations was that if she was going to put that much effort into music, it might as well be her own.
By then I d done a few productions . . . I work really hard when I produce. I m very conscientious, and with the Butthole Surfers, I put so much into that record (1992 s Independent Worm Saloon), and by the time it came to be released, the guy that had signed them got fired from the company and it just fell by the wayside. And I thought, What am I doing this for? I didn t really want to be a career producer. And when I worked with Diamanda I thought, I can do this. I can t sing, but I can do an instrumental record and take it on the road.
Plus, as Jones acknowledges, with the advent of so many successful ambient and dance acts, the climate has changed enough for such endeavours to be accepted without question.
Definitely, he concedes. After the likes of The Chemical Brothers or Underworld or dance music in general, which doesn t have the regular song form, people are used to not expecting a lyric, or the persona. There s a lot of faceless, anonymous music around, and so it did occur to me that if I was going to do an instrumental album, now would be the time to do it.
And of course, Jones has worked with the father of faceless instrumental music, Brian Eno, on the Nerve Net and Music For Films 3 albums. How does he rate Eno s Oblique Strategies and production techniques?
Well they re legendary aren t they? he points out, I mean that s probably the main point about them! They seem to work. I mean it didn t do U2 any harm, did it? All I can do is take me hat off to him!
That Nerve Net piece on which Jones supplied spacey piano also featured guitar from none other than Robert Fripp, founder of the Discipline Global Mobile label, on which Zooma will soon be released. DGM specialises in instrumental/avant garde recordings and, as Jones outlines, employs some pretty unusual trading policies.
No contracts, and the artists own their masters and the copyrights, he explains. It s unheard of in the music industry. Although having said that, we didn t have a contract with (Led Zeppelin manager) Peter Grant for years, until Atlantic found out and they went apeshit. I mean, what s the point? If you re not getting on, then you don t really want to be with each other, and then it doesn t work!
What Jones doesn t mention is that Grant, together with road manager Richard Cole, was notorious for business practices that reputedly included beating security staff to a pulp and dangling publicists out of windows. When it came to protecting his act, Grant was a pitbull.
That s right, he was, the bassist confirms. He gave us this great space in which we could do whatever we liked. There was absolutely no, You should go more towards this or that . He said, You re the musicians, you take care of the music, I ll take care of the business. Fripp s label, DGM, is doing the same thing: Bring us the music and we ll work our arses off for it .

John-Paul Jones would be forgiven for feeling that his part in Zep-legend has often been overlooked in favour of urban myths concerning Plant s Viking cocksman shtick, Bonham s bad temper and Page s underage girlfriends, smack habit and demonic-dabbling. Not to mention tales of Seattle groupies being poked with bits of dead sharks in warm vats of baked beans. Indeed, the unbelievable truth about Zeppelin s most debauched on-the-road antics may never be heard Nick Kent s account of his experiences with the band was intended to form the centrepiece of his book The Dark Stuff, yet had to be pulled for legal reasons.
Mindful of the shadowy past he drags around behind him, then, Jones is grateful that the last 20 years of arranging and production work have gradually allowed him to become a person and a musician again rather than some horrible monster in some book.
The book he s referring to is, of course, Stephen Davis Hammer Of The Gods, the 1985 Led Zeppelin biog/expose that is rarely mentioned without the word infamous cropping up somewhere in the same sentence. Davis cast Jones as the outsider, the quiet one who kept his head while all about him were losing theirs. Is that an accurate character analysis?
Well, yes and no, he avers. I lost my head a few times. I just made sure that . . . especially that particular journalist I used to avoid like the plague, that s why he always said I was never there cos I used to see him coming! There s a couple of people I do that to: Oh, John Paul was never around, he was never a part of the band and they were never close . That s cos you didn t see me, mate!
And again, I wasn t quite so recognisable as Page and Plant, therefore I had a lot of freedom. When I got to a hotel I used to make sure my room was okay and then get out. I d end up meeting friends, or go out into the desert, smoke some dope and then turn up at the gig later in some mini-van. So I had a bit of a separate life only some of the time but I managed to keep clear of some of the hoo-ha that surrounds all that.
Nevertheless, the legends still circulate, and not all of them hearsay either. For instance, it s a matter of public record that Jimmy Page possessed a large collection of Aleister Crowley books, manuscripts and memorabilia, bought Crowley s Boleskine House on the shores of Loch Ness in 1970, and outbid Lucifer Rising director Kenneth Anger for the original manuscript of The Scented Garden. (The guitarist went on to produce 28 minutes of music for the Anger movie, a series of drones, chants, flute sounds and bowed guitar parts channeled through an ARP synthesizer, much of which echoed and/or anticipated Zep tunes like No Quarter and In The Evening .)
But the most infamous and outrageous of all the rumours held that all of Zeppelin bar Jones had made a pact with the devil, an old wives tale that only gained more horrible currency in the light of the tragedies that befell Page, Plant and Bonham in the late 70s.
Well you see, in those days everybody was misbehaving in one way or another, Jones rationalises. That s what rock n roll was about. I probably just did it on a more cerebral scale. That sounds pompous doesn t it? (Laughs). No, I used to take quieter drugs than anybody else.
Nevertheless, former business associates of the band who should probably know better including one-time Atlantic employee Benoit Gautier and Swan Song vice-president Danny Goldberg have alluded to the Satanic pact business when acknowledging that Jones was the only one to emerge physically and mentally unscathed. Does he have any time for such speculation?
Not really, he replies. They love all these myths, don t they? And in fact, I had sold my soul to the devil ages before that!
Well, he s aged a little better than his former colleagues, so he must ve done something.
I still have that picture in my cupboard! n
Zooma is released by Discipline Global Mobile on September 13th. John Paul Jones plays HQ at the Irish Music Hall OF Fame on September 29th & 30th.