Photo: Hulton Archive/Michael Putland
Led Zeppelin's 'Kashmir' became a band-defining track, but it started life in an Airstream trailer known as the Ronnie Lane Mobile Studio.
While 'Whole Lotta Love' and 'Stairway To Heaven' may be the better-known songs, there's a strong argument that 'Kashmir' — heavy, driving, melodic and mysterious — is the quintessential Led Zeppelin track. As the side-two closer of 1975's monumental double album Physical Graffiti, the sweeping, eight–and–a–half–minute epic featured guitarist Jimmy Page adopting a folk–style DADGAD tuning for its cyclical riffs, mirrored by the Mellotron and orchestral arrangements of bassist John Paul Jones, supported by the strident beats of John Bonham and topped by the yearning, desert fever dream vocal of Robert Plant.
The song started life under the working title of 'Driving To Kashmir', inspired by Plant's 1973 travels through southern Morocco — actually more than 7000km from the Indian subcontinent. But, as the singer later explained to US journalist Cameron Crowe, the concept was the dislocated beauty of a road journey, rather than the destination. Plant recalled one specific vision on his trip that sparked the idea for the lyric. "It was a single–track road which neatly cut through the desert," he remembered. "Two miles to the east and west were ridges of sand rock. It looked like you were driving down a channel, this dilapidated road, and there was seemingly no end to it."
In the years that followed, up to Bonham's death in 1980 (when they split) and beyond, the four members of Led Zeppelin would regard 'Kashmir' as one of their finest musical accomplishments. "The intensity of 'Kashmir'," said Jimmy Page, "was such that when we had it completed, we knew there was something really hypnotic to it. We couldn't even describe such a quality."
The Ronnie Lane Mobile Studio
The initial sessions for 'Kashmir' were conducted in a rundown Hampshire stately home, Headley Grange, which had earlier been the scene of recordings for Led Zeppelin's three previous albums, III, IV and Houses Of The Holy, using the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio. This time around, the band used a mobile recording truck built for the Faces' bassist Ronnie Lane by an American engineer, Ron Nevison.
In the US, Nevison had gained his early engineering experience working live, rather than in the studio, as the soundman for the likes of Derek & the Dominos, Jefferson Airplane (including for their appearance at Woodstock) and Traffic. But in spite of his success in this field, road life soon became a grind for him.
"You have to understand that with life on the road in 1969 or 1970 for a guy like me, I didn't fly around with my briefcase with the band on their private planes," says Nevison. "I was driving the frigging truck and loading up and watching the pretty girls walk out of the arena, while I was wrapping up mic cables and waking up people that were on acid and getting them to climb out of the big bass bins. It was a crazy time.
Ron Nevison in the mid-'70s."So, I was burned out. I'd finish up a gig at 11 o'clock at night and walk out of there at two in the morning, drive three or four hours and get six hours sleep and do the whole thing all over again. It was pretty nuts."
It was while Nevison was having a good old moan about his road dog life to Chris Blackwell, manager of Traffic — and, of course, boss of Island Records — that Blackwell suggested a move into studio engineering, offering Nevison a job as a recording assistant if he moved to the UK. "Chris said, 'Well, I happen to have a studio called Island,'" Nevison remembers. "It was on Basing Street [in West London] and the whole church building had been refurbished. It was the perfect setup for me and I took him up on it."
Given his background, Nevison took an unusual approach to studio engineering, in attempting to capture the excitement of live music directly onto vinyl. "For me, it was the live performance aspect of trying to record something," he says. "To make it sound like a performance instead of like a dry, tight studio atmosphere. I think everybody was going to concerts and watching their favourite bands, but when they got the studio album, sometimes it was not that exciting. So, I was just trying to make it as exciting as a live performance was, but without the visuals."
Subsequently sacked from Island (for the apparent sin of taking on another engineering gig one weekend), Nevison responded to a music paper ad placed by a studio-building company called Trackplan, which was co-owned by engineer/producer John Alcock and Pete Townshend of the Who. Nevison's first major project at Trackplan was to build a mobile studio for Townshend's friend, Ronnie Lane, in an Airstream trailer.
Nevison kitted out the polished aluminium Airstream with a custom-built Helios console, an eight-track Studer A80 tape machine and Dolby A noise reduction units. "It was just the shell, there was nothing inside," he remembers of the trailer. "Since I had been brought up with Studer tape machines and Helios consoles, I put in the 16-channel Helios console and the eight-track Studer and all of the Dolbys and all of the associated outboard equipment."
Original brochure for the LMS trailer.Named the LMS (for Lane's Mobile Sound), the studio was first employed in the recording of the Who's Quadrophenia, engineered by Nevison. At the time, the Who were in the process of trying to build their own Ramport Studios in Battersea but were running into problems.
"They had to start working on Quadrophenia, but their Helios control room console wasn't ready," says Nevison. "The studio was ready, everything was ready, the console was in there, but it was in pieces. So, Pete calls up Ronnie Lane and says, 'Hey, why don't you bring down the LMS and put it outside the studio, so we can get started? Pete figured, 'Well, the guy that built it, who worked for me, let's let him have a go. Who better than the guy who built the studio to run it for now?'
"I was a novice at this point," he points out. "I hadn't even done a whole album and here I am doing Quadrophenia. When I say I was a novice, I was a novice at recording. I'd spent years with microphones, preamps, signal paths, limiters. I knew quite a bit about the whole thing. But as it related to recording, I was still a novice."
Very quickly, due to the Who's towering ambitions when it came to recording the concept album, Nevison soon realised that he was running out of tracks: "Four tracks for drums, a track for bass, a track for guitar, a track for vocals. 'Oh, wow I have a track left. This will not work...'
"We needed more tracks," he adds. "So, over a weekend, if you can believe this, we converted LMS from eight-track to 16-track. We immediately found a problem because an Airstream is a cigar–shaped room and these machines with their eight additional tracks of electronics wouldn't fit in this curved shape, going up. Usually Studer did 16 [preamp modules] straight up above the tape machine. So, we put the extra eight underneath the tape machine. There was room for the eight channels, but there was a hum problem because they were close to the motor. So, we had to fly a guy in from Germany to fix that.
"The tape machine had to be changed from one-inch to two-inch, so the head stack had to be changed, the rollers and the tape guides had to be changed and the electronics had to be added, and it all had to be wired into the 16-channel board. So, it was a pretty big job. Then we went into a studio and took the tracks that we'd done in eight and copied them over to 16-track. So, unfortunately, there's a couple of the drum tracks on Quadrophenia that lost a generation on the drums, but we didn't really have a choice. But then we carried on and, at some point after the tracks were cut, the Helios in the studio was ready and we moved from the LMS into the main room."
As a mobile unit, the LMS was pulled by a Land Rover that Lane had sprayed silver to match. During the making of Quadrophenia, Townshend tasked Nevison with recording the sea sounds that opened the album. "The LMS was heavier than most trailers, so you had to be a little careful driving it," Nevison remembers. "I took it down to Cornwall and recorded quadraphonic sea noise. I pulled into a public beach and ran the mains into [the light socket of] this loo and put microphones on the beach by some rocks."
Headley Grange
Not long after, Nevison got a call from Led Zeppelin manager Peter Grant booking him and the LMS for sessions with the band down at Headley Grange. It was autumn 1973 and Led Zeppelin were in danger of falling apart, following the rigours of a recent, notoriously debauched American tour that had forced John Paul Jones to the point of considering quitting the group and becoming the choir master at Winchester Cathedral.
Nonetheless, the sessions began, with Page and Bonham initially jamming through old rock & roll songs. "I was pretty nervous about it, to be quite honest," says Nevison. "My recollection is that we were hanging out for a few days, even a week. John Paul Jones had some issues and couldn't make it, and I was never really told why. So, we were just doing old Elvis stuff and just messing around and finally we gave it up."
The sessions having collapsed, Peter Grant suggested instead that Nevison record an album at Headley Grange with his latest signing to Zeppelin's Swan Song Records, ex-Free singer Paul Rodgers' new band. Unnamed at this point, they were soon to become Bad Company. "We did that first Bad Company album in 10 days," says Nevison. "It just happened. It was ready to go. They were rehearsed, it was perfect, it was beautiful. We then took it to Olympic Studios, added some background vocals and some horns and a couple of little minor things, then mixed it."
By which time, Led Zeppelin had resolved their differences and were ready in November 1973 to properly start the sessions for Physical Graffiti at Headley Grange. "All of the furniture was put into a storage area in the back of the house and locked up," Nevison recalls, "except for maybe a dining room table and a couple of chairs here and there and some beds. When you walked into the entryway it was a marble kind of rectangular room and the stairway went up around from ground floor to first floor and second floors, which were the bedrooms."
John Bonham's famously heavy-duty and ambient drum sound, created in the ground floor lobby area of Headley Grange — as best showcased perhaps on 'When The Levee Breaks' from IV — had been the result of engineer Andy Johns experimenting with placing two Beyerdynamic M160 microphones on the stairway to the first floor above the drummer's Ludwig kit, with its 26-inch bass drum.
"I set up the drums where they had set up the drums before," says Nevison. "I started setting up mics around the drums and Bonzo said, 'No, no mics by the drums.' I said, 'OK.' Then I still tried to sneak some, but he wasn't going for it. There were just two mics that I used on the stairway about, I guess, 20 feet from the drums. [Neumann] U87 FETs in a stereo pair, just about a foot from each other. That was my left and right drums.
A brochure showing the layout and equipment list of the Lane Mobile Studio.
"Now, I mean, you could do that with somebody like Bonham who mixed himself. If you walk away from a drummer and you hear everything exactly the way you should — the kick drum, the snare, the hi-hat, the cymbals, the tom–toms — and they all sound mixed, well you can do that. If somebody has a weak foot, you can't. I thought that the drums in the entry hall were too boomy. I wouldn't have picked that for Bonham, but they already had something going with the previous recordings, so I just went with it."
In the LMS, Nevison used the built-in channel limiters in the Helios console, or a pair of Universal Audio 1176LN compressors. Reverb was provided by an AKG BX20 spring and tape delay by a Revox two-track. "I hung that on the wall of the LMS," Nevison says of the latter. "With the varispeed, you could speed it up and down to control the timing of the delay. So, I could get an Elvis kind of sound with that on Plant's vocal that he liked.
"Led Zeppelin weren't super-picky, like some bands are, about their sounds. From Jimmy Page I didn't really get, 'That's too bright or that's too this or that's too that.' But I was a decent engineer, so it worked out."
Generally, Nevison wasn't an engineer who would be constantly checking the meters, trusting his ears more than his eyes. "That was especially true with limiting," he says. "I think some engineers get scared when they see that meter move. I ignore the meters."
Kashmir
'Kashmir' originated from a late-night jam involving Jimmy Page and John Bonham. "It was just Bonzo and myself," Page remembered. "He started the drums, and I did the riff and the overdubs, which in fact got duplicated by an orchestra at the end, which brought it even more to life. It seemed so sort of ominous and had a particular quality to it. It's nice to go for an actual mood and know that you've pulled it off."
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Nevison has a very clear memory of the session: "I remember it especially because the roadies brought into the truck this Eventide [Clockworks PS 101 Instant] Phaser. I had heard about it, and up to then we only had tape phasing. I'd heard that it sounded really cool on cymbals. I had left and right drum tracks, so I took one side of the drums and I put it through the Eventide phaser. It came out on a third track and I recorded it, figuring we could erase it if they didn't like it. And they liked it.
"I was surprised that they kept it for the finished product. They didn't even redo it; they kept the one that I recorded. I can tell by where the phaser speed is on the cymbals at the end."
Less clear, however, is his memory of which guitar Jimmy Page used for the main riff of 'Kashmir', though it's likely that it was either his 1959 Gibson Les Paul 'Number One' or Danelectro 3021. For what Page called his 'electric trails' slide parts, he used an electric 12-string. "He had a bunch of guitars," says Nevison. "Sometimes it would be a 12-string, sometimes it would be two or three different six-strings. He played a lot of guitars. I was always using [Shure SM]57s mostly for guitar and I still do."
John Paul Jones, meanwhile, used his 1962 Fender Jazz Bass through his Acoustic 360 bass head and 361 cabinet. "I stashed people in different places," says Nevison. "I stashed Jimmy and Robert in the place where I'd had Bad Company's drums, in the dining room, and then I'd put the bass and the guitar amps in another room."
Ron Nevison in front of the LMS trailer's Helios console.
Typically, though, when Page and the rest of the band came into the LMS to listen back to the rough takes, the guitarist wasn't interested in hearing his own parts. "Jimmy would just run over and pull the guitar down," says Nevison. "Not because he didn't want to hear his guitar. He wanted to hear what the drums were doing or something. Sometimes he didn't want to hear a mistake that he did. And sometimes Plant would ask me to bring the vocal down because he didn't want to hear any mistakes he made. They wanted me to make cassettes for them, so he could write additional lyrics."
From the engineer's viewpoint, one aspect that made Led Zeppelin so special was that Bonham was creating drum parts that directly followed Page's riffs. "Bonham played the riff, is what he did," he stresses. "He didn't play in time with Jimmy's guitar, he played Jimmy's riff. So, they were tight just because he played the riff. He listened to what Jimmy was doing and played that. And that was one of the unique things about Led Zeppelin. But the thing is... he could do it."
Over time though, Led Zeppelin's nocturnal, cocaine-imbibing ways began to wear on Nevison. "Well, yeah," he laughs. "Y'know, we'd get started in the afternoon and then somewhere around six or seven o'clock at night, one of the guys would say, 'Hey, where's Charlie? When's Charlie coming?' And I'd come to find the band's mood totally changed after Charlie arrived.
"Sometimes Charlie would have the habit of keeping you up all night. So, a couple of times, they came in to my little room up on the second floor and woke me up: 'C'mon Ronnie, let's do it!' And that would ruin the next day. So, I had a chat with Peter Grant about that. He said, 'Well, lock it up and go back to London, mate. That's all you have to do.'
"I would drive back there and take the key to the LMS with me and come back in the morning and open it up. They knew they were being bad boys. But they wanted to create the atmosphere that would be right to do what they wanted to do. That's why they weren't in a [conventional] studio. I appreciated what was going on here, so don't get me wrong. I just wanted it to happen realistically."
In the end, with the beginning of the sessions for Physical Graffiti having been delayed, and with his duties to engineer the soundtrack of the Tommy film for the Who looming, Ron Nevison faced a difficult choice.
"Yeah, it wasn't just another album," he says of the Tommy soundtrack. "This was a whole year-long project that was happening in January [1974]. If Physical Graffiti had started when it was supposed to start, we would've gotten a lot of the work done.
"So, it was a real dilemma for me. No one had ever quit Led Zeppelin before. I told them and I remember they weren't too happy with me. In fact, Bonham grabbed the phone: 'Ronnie, you fucking c***! How can you do this to us?' It was a tough position for me to be in. Because if I'd have called up the Who, they would've found somebody else and probably went with them."
Coda
The sessions for Physical Graffiti continued, without Nevison, at Olympic Studios in London in February 1974, with the late Keith Harwood brought in as engineer. Prior to this, Peter Grant had played the work-in-progress 'Kashmir' to representatives of Swan Song Records' mother label, Atlantic Records, in Paris, with the incredible conclusion being that all considered it to be, in the manager's words, "a dirge".
But, then, at Olympic, John Paul Jones brought to life the orchestral and Mellotron MkII parts that Jimmy Page was imagining could complement his riff on 'Kashmir'. "I had thought of the riff in orchestral terms, with cellos doing it, and this cascading brass, for the different colours of the orchestra," Page later told The Guardian newspaper. "I didn't know it would work, but I knew it ought to theoretically."
Zeppelin road manager Richard Coles was dispatched to Southall in West London to try to find a Pakistani orchestra to handle the Eastern-flavoured shifts in the arrangement. In the end, though, a more traditional orchestra — never credited — supplied the strings and brass on 'Kashmir'. "Jonesy put it all together," Grant remembered, "and the final result was exactly what was needed."
Meanwhile, Robert Plant's vocal was enhanced with another Eventide product, a prototype of the H910 Harmonizer. "Eventide Clockworks gave me innovative bits of electronics and I just played with them," recalled Zeppelin soundman Benji Lefevre in Barney Hoskyns' 2012 book Trampled Under Foot: The Power & Excess Of Led Zeppelin. "Robert's voice would become a chorus of 10 voices, because I would feed things back into themselves. And then we had this harmoniser with an actual keyboard so I could make his voice sing chords. It was fantastic fun."
For the excommunicated Ron Nevison, hearing the final mix of 'Kashmir' was a revelation. "I thought that those strings were incredible, and they even used my phaser [on the drums]," he says. "It was great hearing it. I have to say it's one of the only things I didn't see 'til the end."
He was less happy, however, to see that Led Zeppelin had taken a dig at him in the credits of Physical Graffiti for 'The Rover', with the words: "Guitar lost courtesy of Nevison. Salvaged by the grace of Harwood."
"'The Rover' wasn't a song that I did at Headley Grange," he stresses. "So, they got that wrong. They never brought tapes from any other sessions to LMS for me to play. The only thing that I can think of was [that someone said], 'I didn't erase that, must have been Nevison..." It doesn't even say 'erase', it says 'saved', so that means it wasn't erased. So, it was distortion or something wrong with the guitar, cause if it was erased, it wouldn't have been saved. Whatever happened, I don't know anything about it."
Ron Nevison today.Photo: Mark St John
That gripe aside, Ron Nevison is clearly proud of the work that he did in helping to make 'Kashmir' become a classic track. "It's a mood track," he says. "It surprises me because it's so long, but it's got a great riff too. I hear this riff at football games and sporting events. It's just become that kind of thing."
For Robert Plant, 'Kashmir' represented everything that was great about Led Zeppelin. "It's so right," he later enthused. "There's nothing overblown, no vocal hysterics."
Ultimately, even if he was just a lowly paid engineer at the time, Ron Nevison's work with Led Zeppelin (and the Who) was to make his name in the future as a producer for the likes of Heart, Jefferson Starship and Kiss. "Because I wasn't a royalty artist for those three bands, the Who, Led Zeppelin and Bad Company, I made virtually nothing on those," he says. "I probably made £50 a week working on those records. However, having done those set my career up for life."