Led Zeppelin por Neal Preston

Un regalito navideño cortesía de la decadente Feria Internacional del Libro es esta joya que Omnibus Press publicó el año pasado, fresca para aquellos que necesitan una dosis revitalizante de Led Zeppelin ahora que andan muy en boga ya sea con Them Crooked Vultures o con otra joya que aún no conseguimos titulada It Might Get Loud.

Esta es la portada del libro



Neal Preston es un fotógrafo con una trayectoria más que larga, ha estado de gira con bandas como The Who, Queen, Bob Marley, Fleetwood Mac y un largo etcétera. Trabajado en revistas como Time, People, Newsweek y Rolling Stone.

A continuación algunos highlights de este libro que combina fotos con una entrevista bastante extensa con la DJ Californiana Cynthia Fox. Lectura obligada para fans tanto de Zeppelin como de la fotografía como del rocanrol.

CYNTHIA: Let's talk about specific photos. Right off the bat i have to ask you about the famous Robert Plant holding a dove shot. How did that come to be?

NEAL: Well, to begin with, that's a real dove. I've had people ask me if that was fake. I was on stage at Kezar Stadium, San Francisco '73. It was an outdoor gig during daylight. At the back of Bonzo's set up, there was this big cage with i guess a dozen white doves that were to be released at the end of "Stairway to Heaven". They let them go and one dove flew off and came right back and landed right in Robert's hand as he was standing there. It's fortunate that i happened to be standing in a position where he was facing me and i happened to have the right lens on the camera, and bingo.



CYNTHIA: How soon after a show would you be showing the band your shots and getting their feedback? Or how did that work?

NEAL: Good question. With Led Zeppelin, in those days the band would base themselves in certain cities. If they were playing New York, Philadelphia, Boston, you know that whole East Coast wing, we'd just stay in New York at the Plaza. We would take the plane from Newark Airport and fly to Philly or Boston or wherever.

CYNTHIA: That's just amazing to hear you say the phrase, 'We would take the plane'.

NEAL: Funny how i took for granted for so many years and not only with them. Lots of bands had planes. You name it, i flew on it. So, yeah, we would take the plane, and we'd depart the base city in order to get to the destination city with enough time for the band to prepare for the show. We'd fly to a city, limos would take us to right to the gig. You know, boom, play the gig, do a runner right after the last song, which means everyone is in the limos before the band comes off. And then the band literally comes off the stage, gets thrown into the limos, the motorcade with police escort goes straight back to the airport. You're literally back on the plane before the sweat even dries. You're back on the plane before the kid in the front row realizes the show's over. And then you're back at the hotel, and we're in the bar by 12:30.



CYNTHIA: But there's what i don't get. When did you develop your pictures? Did you have a darkroom in the hotel?

NEAL: No. I would have a photo lab set up in every base city, with a charge account i would have set up in advance. I would take the film from each day, put the film in envelopes, and write up the processing instructions. (Tour Manager) Richard Cole would let me take a limo to the lab because there was an hour before the band would shower and want to go out. So the limos were just sitting around the hotels doing nothing. As soon as my film envelopes were ready to go, he would let me take a limo to the lab, and drop the film in the lab's night drop slot, which they were expecting me to do, so it was waiting for the lab guys to process early the next morning. The lab would make six sets of proof sheets of every roll of black and white film, one for each member of the band, one for Peter, and one for me. When they were delivered to my room by noon the next day, on a rush, i would have to collate every set, and slip a set under everyone's doors. As far as the colour photos were concerned, the finished transparencies were sent back to me in boxes and i would load everything in the slide projectors and stay up all night looking at photos to do my edits.

CYNTHIA: What kind of direct feedback did you get from the band members on the shots?

NEAL: You know it’s funny. I always felt like Jonsey and Bonzo never even looked at any of the proofs. Robert would make little notations, ‘Like this. Don’t like this.’ Jimmy would make little notations, you know, ‘crow’s feets.’ It was all about the crow’s feet and a little paunch here, ‘Watch that. Watch that.’ I would also have a stack of prints made and they’d go through the prints and go, ‘Yes. No. Yes. No.’ When you start trying to figure out why rock stars like what they like and don’t like what they don’t like it’s a losing battle. The famous story, which is true, was that one night i went up to show Jimmy a whole bunch of colour slides in his suite. I had the big carousel trays on the projector and it was like a little travelling show. We’d use a white wall as screen and we’d sit there and have a slide show. Jimmy would reject all these pristine, beautiful, what i thought were just spot-on beautiful photos, technically perfect. And he would reject those in favour of you know, some kind of weird, ghostly image… i could never get a fix on what he liked. He seemed to change his mind by the hour. He wanted to look beautiful and glam and then he wanted to look weird and ghostly and dark and… i didn’t understand his choices.

CYNTHIA: Was he creating a mystique?

NEAL: I didn’t know. At one point i turned the projector off and said, ‘Tell me what you like. Give me some direction because i’m feeling lost here.’ And he said, ‘i want power, mystery, romance, and the hammer of the gods.’ That story ended up in Hammer Of The Gods and it became the title of the most famous book about them.



CYNTHIA: Tell me about Knebworth.

NEAL: I’ll tell you a funny story about Knebworth. There’s the photo of Jimmy in the helicopter. The reason i was there shooting when he flew in was because i went up in that helicopter after Jimmy disemarked from it. I was asked by the band’s PR guy to go up in the helicopter and shoot crowd shots. He was asked specifically by Peter to ask me. I said, ‘No problem. Let’s go!’.

So i got shuttled out to this makeshift helipad and right then Jimmy was coming in. I was to be going out next in his chopper. After he landed, and cleared the rotors, i climbed in and up we went. It was awesome. We did two passes around the crowd. I loved it. I love anything that flies, so i was in heaven…
I was told later in the week to just keep the negatives safe and sound and i’d be told what to do with them. It was kind of very, not cloak and dagger, but it was a little strange. So, sure enough about two months later i’m back in LA and i get a phone call from Shelly at Swan Song in New York. She says, ‘You still have those negatives right? From the crowd shots at Knebworth?’ ‘Yes,’ i told her. ‘There will be a gentleman coming to your house tomorrow afternoon. Will you be home? If not, when will you be home?’ I said, ‘Oh, i’ll be home.’ ‘You are to give him the roll of negatives. No questions asked.’

The next day, exactly at the appointed hour, a suit shows up at my front door and says, ‘Hello, Mr. Preston, i’m here for the envelope of negatives.’ I give this guy the envelope, and off he goes. I had no idea what was going on, i just did as i was told.

I found out later that Peter felt the promoter was trying to screw the band on the attendance figures. So he had me go up and shoot crowd shots. They took the negs from me to make some huge photographic prints. Apparently, NASA (this was 1979) had just perfected some software whereby they could take a huge blow-up of a crowd of people, split the crowd shot into quadrants and then run the visual information from the photo through a computer which would come up with a figure on how many people appeared in each quadrant, and by multiplying it by four they could estimate almost perfectly how many people were ther in the entire photo. So, of course, Peter figured out that the promoter was scamming the band by underreporting the amount of tickets sold. I seem to remember that there was a lawsuit about it and i believe he won the case. And that was why he wanted me to do the crowd shots. He was thinking ahead.

CYNTHIA: Did you ever feel as if you had to be on call while you were on tour? Always at the ready, so to speak, day or night?

NEAL: Yeah, well that’s it. There wasn’t a lot of sleep time anyway. I mean i wouldn’t sleep for a month. It would take me a month to recover. I would get two hours of sleep a night. More than that was not only a luxury, it was a fantasy, especially since the lab was always sending the finished proofs from the previous day over by noon, and I had to be ready to take care of that responsibility. One night in particular I recall I’d finally gotten to sleep about four in the morning -early by Zeppelin tour standards- settled into a wonderful, amazing deep sleep until all of a sudden my door is violently kicked in, my door from the next room, literally someone has put a boot right through the door, and knocked it down… and it’s Robert. Mr. Peace and Love has just kicked my door down. And he says to me, ‘The Prince of Peace has arrived! Do you have a joint?’ He knew I’d have one.

Más de Neal Preston, aqui.