The four walls of a hot, tiny basement room on Gerrard Street in London’s West End neighborhood saw an exceptional display of hard rock alchemy as the band that was on the cusp of becoming Led Zeppelin played together for the very first time on August 12, 1968. Even in those first tenuous moments, the musicians knew they were dealing with something special, powerful, and potentially life-changing.
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It would only take one year for the band to realize just how correct they were.
Led Zeppelin Meets For Their First Band Practice
Misfortune can beget some of the best creative wins in the artistic world, and that is certainly true of Led Zeppelin’s origin story. Jimmy Page had recently found himself without a band after his fellow Yardbirds parted ways in the late 1960s. What was worse, he already had a tour booked, which meant he had to cancel the run or find a new band. He ultimately chose the latter.
Page had already worked with John Paul Jones, so he was an obvious ask. Manager Peter Grant suggested Robert Plant and John Bonham, who played together in Band of Joy, as Page’s singer and drummer. Page originally wanted Terry Reid and B.J. Wilson to fill those roles, but both musicians declined. Thus, the four men who showed up to practice that fateful August day were Page, Jones, Plant, and Bonham.
The group met on August 12, 1968, in a small, toasty basement room in what is now London’s Chinatown neighborhood. “There was just wall-to-wall amplifiers and a space for the door, and that was it,” Jones later recalled. “Literally, it was everyone looking at each other. ‘What shall we play?’ There was an old Yardbirds number called “Train Kept a Rollin.’” The whole room just exploded.”
The Group Knew They Had Something Special
On the same Led Zeppelin website listing that includes John Paul Jones’ recollections of the band’s first practice on August 12, 1968, Robert Plant added, “I remember the little room. All I can remember it was hot, and it sounded good. Very exciting and very challenging, really, because I could feel that something was happening to myself and to everyone else in the room. It felt like we’d found something that we had to be very careful with because we might lose it. But it was remarkable.”
Jimmy Page agreed. “At the end, we knew that it was really happening, really electrifying. Exciting is the word. We went from there to start rehearsals for the album.”
It didn’t take long for the musicians’ assumptions about their band’s promise to come true. The group performed as the Yardbirds for a handful of performances before settling on Led Zeppelin, which would also be the name of their debut album, released on January 13, 1969. Hits like “Good Times Bad Times” and “Communication Breakdown” helped propel the band to stardom.
By the one-year anniversary of their first practice on Gerrard Street, they were recording their second album, Led Zeppelin II, which they would release in October of that year to tremendous, chart-topping success.
Photo by Jorgen Angel/Redferns
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