Week Fifteen: Punk & Heavy Metal

Punk

December 2, 1976: They had worked long and hard to make themselves no­torious. But even a band as audacious as the Sex Pistols and a man­ager as mischievous as Malcolm McLaren were unprepared for the uproar they provoked in one minute and forty seconds of airtime on a live London television show.

Their appearance had been an afterthought. On December 2, 1976, EMI, the British record label that had just released the first recording by the Sex Pistols, learned that another of the label's bands, Queen, would not be available to do a scheduled live inter­view later that afternoon on the Today program. Today was a talk show aired over Thames TV in London weekdays at teatime. EMI hoped that a last-minute appearance by the Sex Pistols might help to boost interest in the band's new single, "Anarchy in the U.K.," re­leased the previous Friday. For McLaren and the Sex Pistols, the show was an opportunity—but also a risk. The Sex Pistols had al­ready achieved a certain measure of infamy for their vehement, sometimes violent live shows. Now they were being invited to charm, or somehow to outrage charmingly, a daytime television audience.

On the face of it, the odds of success were low. For much of the previous year, the Sex Pistols had been at the center of a gathering storm of controversy, more or less orchestrated by their manager McLaren, then thirty years old. An elfin figure with merry eyes and a shock of red hair, McLaren had gotten into rock and roll through the rag trade. In collaboration with Vivienne Westwood, his wife as well as a seamstress and designer, McLaren had opened a shop in 1971 called Let It Rock. Located on World's End, off the King's Road, the shop doubled as a retail outlet and a hangout for rock musicians, both aspiring and established. Four years later, bored with the idea of Let It Rock and fired with enthusiasm for bands like the New York Dolls and the Ramones from New York City's burgeoning post-Vel­vet Underground rock scene, McLaren and Westwood changed the shop's name to Sex, redesigned the interior, and added clothes with a fetishistic flair: rubber shirts, chain link necklaces, studded leather dog collars. Capitalizing on the evident appeal of the new look to a new breed of rock musician, McLaren lit on the idea of forming a band that would help publicize the store.

Thus was born the Sex Pistols. By 1976, as McLaren's band started to make its mark, McLaren and Westwood changed the look and name of their shop again, and Sex gave way to Seditionaries. While McLaren turned his attention to managing the band, West-wood produced a new look that visually elaborated the message of the new band's music. There was, for example, the "anarchy" shirt, produced in conjunction with the Sex Pistols' new song, "Anarchy in the U.K." Dyed with stripes, it was stenciled with slogans ("Only Anarchists Are Pretty"), stitched with a crazy quilt of politically con­tradictory patches (a portrait of Karl Marx, a Nazi swastika), and completed with an armband inscribed with a word that perfectly summed up the overall look of the shirt and sound of the Sex Pistols: CHAOS.

The band itself had formed around a nucleus of two longtime friends, Paul Cook, eighteen, a drummer and fan of rude-boy reggae, and Steve Jones, nineteen, an electric guitarist and accomplished thief who had stolen the public address system used by David Bowie at Ziggy Stardust's "farewell concert." Drawn to Sex after reading an article about the shop in a music magazine, Cook and Jones met McLaren, Westwood, and, through them, another aspiring young rock musician, Glen Matlock, eighteen, a bassist who proved to have a knack for composing catchy riffs. Sometime in the summer of 1975, this trio began to rehearse as a unit, and McLaren decided to complete the band by finding a suitable singer. Informed that John Lydon, another of the shop's customers, might be a possibility, McLaren asked him if he could sing. "Only out of tune," Lydon quipped—and according to legend, that clinched the deal.

Though he was the last to join, Lydon quickly became the band's focus of attention. He wore torn T-shirts held together by safety pins, a uniform of distress that set off handsomely a face of contorted ex­pressiveness. "He looks like a disgraced Angel Gabriel," journalist Caroline Coon wrote, exaggerating only slightly, in an early profile of the band: "Meningitis in childhood accounts for his slight stoop. He has ice-blue eyes, parchment black skin and a head of ginger/blond/yellow hair. It's all spikey and damp like the well-kissed fur of a child's teddy bear. But he can be as cold and as closed as a fist of steel."

When EMI signed the Sex Pistols in the fall of 1976, it seemed to be a coup. Critics for Britain's weekly pop papers had already been bowled over by the band's brutally simple style of hard rock—they called it "punk," borrowing the term from rock writers in America. The music was abrasive, the look repulsive, the concerts wild—a "Warhol monster mash," as one observer described the scene. Still, a good many critics agreed that the Sex Pistols stood at "the vanguard of a new youth culture," as Caroline Coon trilled.

And what a culture it was. At punk shows, the kids didn't exactly dance, they "pogoed"—leaping stiffly up and down, as if on a pogo stick. Because Lydon tended to expectorate when he sang, the audi­ence had gotten in the habit of spitting back—a ritual called "gob­bing." And then there was the fighting. Wherever they went, the Pistols took with them a threat of violence. One of John Lydon's pals was John Simon Ritchie, better known under his stage name, Sid Vicious. A quintessential punk long before he became a bona fide member of a punk band, Ritchie got ready for a Sex Pistols show by fortifying himself with a prodigious quantity of amphetamine sul­phate and liquor, often supplemented with heroin. Mild-mannered when sober, he was a monster when high. At one Sex Pistols show, he chain-whipped a writer suspected of harboring reservations about the band. At another, he expressed his irritation with a warmup group by hurling a glass that hit a pillar and shattered, wounding one bystander in the eye, and landing Ritchie in jail.

When McLaren and the Sex Pistols arrived at the Thames TV stu­dios on the afternoon of December 2, they were parked in a waiting room and plied with drinks—not a bright idea. Although they had been quizzed in the past by music writers and television reporters, this was to be the band's first—and last—live television interview.

Just how much the producers of the Today show knew about the Sex Pistols is unclear. Fortunately, Thames TV had aired a documen­tary on the punk scene just a few days before. So the Today show's presenter, Bill Grundy, began by introducing a clip from the film. "Chains round the neck," Grundy quipped breathlessly, scarcely con­cealing his contempt. "And that's just it, fellas, yeah, innit? Eh? I mean, it is, just that, fellas. Yeah? They are punk rockers. The new craze they tell me. They are heroes, not the nice clean Rolling Stones"—an utterly bizarre comment, indicative of the host's addled state. "You see, they are as drunk as I am. . . . They are a group called the Sex Pistols. And I'm surrounded by all of them. . . . Just let us see the Sex Pistols in action. Come on, chicks."

Shot, in part, at a Sex Pistols concert filmed in November, the clip gave viewers a glimpse of the deranged atmosphere created by the band. By the fall of 1976, Lydon had reinvented himself, performing under the stage name of Johnny Rotten. Wild hair framed a bug-eyed look of mad concentration. His hunched back gave him a grotesque profile. Wearing a filthy black shirt festooned with "I Survived the Texas Chain-Saw Massacre" stickers, he sang pitched forward, howl­ing at the microphone, twitching spasmodically. Those listening as he sang looked stylishly damaged, boys and girls wearing Gothic eye shadow, speed freaks in torn T-shirts, chains round their necks, hair gelled and dyed and carefully molded into strange shapes.

Once the clip was over, Grundy turned to face his visitors. Slouched into their seats and looking soused and sullen, the four Sex Pistols were joined on camera by four of their most telegenic fans, each one a work of art, not least Siouxsie Sioux (born Susan Janet Dallion), already an aspiring singer in her own right: with her zigzag eye shadow and platinum-blond thatch of spiky hair (though with­out the naked breasts and swastika armband that had already made her a London club legend), Siouxsie was a perfect example of punk style—edgy, inscrutable, a paragon of bored perversity.

Addressing the band, Grundy popped an obvious question: "Are you serious?"

"Oh yeah," answered Glen Matlock with mock earnestness.

"You are serious?"

"Mmmmm."

Bemused and evidently uncertain how to proceed, Grundy began again: "Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and Brahms have all died ..."

"They're all heroes of ours," sneered Lydon.

"Suppose they turn other people on?" parried Grundy.

Lydon, muttering, was barely audible: "Well that's just their tough shit."

Grundy: "It's what?"

Lydon: "Nothing. A rude word. Next question!"

A rude word: now there was something to run with. Grundy asked Lydon to speak up. What had he said? Lydon complied. "Shit."

Grundy next challenged Steve Jones to "say something outra­geous."

Jones: "You dirty bastard."

Grundy: "Go on, again."

Jones: "You dirty fucker!"

Grundy: "What a clever boy!"

Jones: "You fucking rotter!"

Grundy: "Well that's it for tonight..."

As a moment of history in the making, this pathetic telecast scarcely stands comparison with the great rock and roll events of the Fifties and Sixties, when first Elvis Presley and then the Beatles elec­trified vast audiences of viewers in America and England. By com­parison, virtually no one had seen the Sex Pistols on the Today show.

It didn't matter. An elemental modern taboo had been violated. Profanities had been indiscriminately televised. Even worse, they had been uttered at an hour—teatime—when innocent children might well be listening.

The next day, the British tabloids all ran banner headlines about the incident: "THE FILTH AND THE FURY!" "WHO ARE THESE PUNKS?" "THE FOUL MOUTHED YOBS" "ROCK GROUP START A 4-LETTER TV STORM" "THE PUNKS—ROTTEN AND PROUD OF IT!"

Before this onslaught of mainstream publicity, the recording of "Anarchy in the U.K." had seemed likely to turn the Sex Pistols into rock stars of a fairly conventional sort. The song used one of Mat-lock's simple riffs to accompany a jarringly half-rhymed call to arms, written by John Lydon: "I am an antichrist/I am an anarchist." Sung with malicious glee, and clearly enunciated in the kind of theatrical cockney that David Bowie had introduced into British rock, the blas­phemy of the lyric was hard to ignore, even in the finished recording, which partially buried Lydon's vocal beneath layer upon layer of buzzing electric guitars and thrashing drums. Still, the record was ac­tually rather elegant, as hard rock went, since it had been immacu­lately produced by Chris Thomas, a classically trained musician who had broken into the business by working with George Martin and the Beatles (and who would go on to work closely with one of the most musically gifted of the post-punk British bands, the Pretenders). As a critic remarked in one early review, for the British music weekly Sounds, "Anarchy in the U.K." had "so many of the traditional in­gredients of high-energy rock that it makes nonsense of all those hys­terical letter-writers who see the Pistols as a threat to Music As We Know It. Conversely, it also makes nonsense of any claims that the Pistols are revolutionaries."

This was before the band's appearance on the Today show. Punk till then had been a movement known only to a handful of London's trendiest young sophisticates. After the TV show, life began to imi­tate art. However conservatively structured it was as a piece of mu­sic, the song was still called "Anarchy in the U.K." Now, thanks to the uproar over the band's impromptu profanities, there really was a hint of anarchy in the U.K., not least among those still young enough to care about rock and roll.

That December, for example, an aspiring songwriter and singer named Declan McManus was working as a computer operator, punching cards in a big glass box in downtown London for the Eliza­beth Arden cosmetics company. He had been a youthful Beatles fan, and listened to a lot of different kinds of pop and rhythm and blues. Punk scarcely interested him, as either a form of music or a style of dress—until the Today show. "I was still working when the Sex Pis­tols went on television and said 'fuck,' " McManus recalled years later, "you know, and it was really outrageous. And I had to go to work that [next] day, and sit with everybody . . . middle-aged guys reading the newspaper, the steam coming out of their ears. It was re­ally funny."

Since he got the joke, McManus became, in effect, a punk, like it or not. And when the uproar over the Grundy show produced, as one of its by-products, a scramble among British record companies to sign edgy new talent, McManus got his break; under the stage name of Elvis Costello, and promoted as part of his record label's roster of punk acts, he went on to record some of that era's smartest rock and roll.

The Sex Pistols were meanwhile in a peculiar bind. After several days of hesitation, EMI, feeling pressure from the public and from some members of its board, ordered the record division to jettison the Sex Pistols, and to stop manufacturing and distributing "Anarchy in the U.K." Trapped like "flies in the amber of their own notoriety" (in the critic Jon Savage's bitter phrase), the band was banned from performing at most British venues. And when it did appear, mayhem and violence routinely resulted, as fans eagerly rose to the challenge of behaving as idiotically as the band had on the Today show.

The maelstrom left McLaren crazily exhilarated. His own vision of the band and what it could become had been marked by two dif­ferent experiences: the French student revolt of May '68 and the kinky decadence of the downtown New York rock scene. Apart from these overriding influences, McLaren subscribed to a simple set of imperatives: "Be childish. Be irresponsible. Be everything this society hates." As backward-looking in his way as either George Lucas or Bruce Springsteen, McLaren longed to recapture the purity of the pri­mal rock and roll event, the moment when "Rock Around the Clock" incited British youth to run riot. One of his heroes was Larry Parnes, the pioneering British rock impresario who had given his pretty boys stage names like Billy Fury. McLaren had taken the same basic idea, and turned it upside down, promoting an ugly squatter with a stage name to match his demeanor: Johnny Rotten.

"We wanted to create a situation where kids would be less inter­ested in buying records than in speaking for themselves," McLaren declared. And as the critic Greil Marcus has put it, one result of "An­archy in the U.K.," produced in the few days it was for sale, and re­inforced by its censorship, was the unplanned irruption of "a sort of giant answer record," a set of songs composed in response, "in dozens of languages, all over the world. It was a potlatch of yesses and noes that sounded" (at least to Marcus) "like a conversation in which everything was at stake—a potlatch that, for a time, sounded like a conversation in which everyone was taking part," where, as Marcus puts it, everyone was "destroying all limits on everyday speech, and turning it into public speech." In the months following the release of "Anarchy in the U.K.," a handful of new bands and novice musicians, inspired by its riotous spirit, produced a striking series of fresh-sounding rock and roll recordings, from the Adverts' "One Chord Wonders" to the Gang of Four's "Return the Gift."

But the unfettered creative exuberance of such acts was the excep­tion, not the rule. This was the heyday of so-called new wave, as the British industry labeled any new music more or less inspired by the Sex Pistols. In London, the hot venue was the Roxy, in Neal Street, Covent Garden. Steeling themselves for a night of gobbing and pogo-ing and shattering glass, talent scouts from the major labels crowded into the club, poised to sign up any band with the right sound and at­titude. As Music Week, one of the British trade magazines, put it, punk and new wave "might be THE NEXT BIG THING so long awaited." The bands came cheap—many of them consisted of utter amateurs, after all—and the recipe for success (as Jon Savage later summed it up) was blessedly simple:

"1!—A fussy drummer and 21—a bassist playing repeated single notes . . . 3!—a guitarist who turned up his amp to eleven and tried to keep up and 4!—a singer who barked angry lyrics (about media, TV, fascists and the like) in such a garbled fashion that only slogans were decipherable."

In the winter of 1977, meanwhile, the Sex Pistols, whose influence was ubiquitous, were missing in action. Their record couldn't be bought, and no British music hall was willing to book them. But McLaren, instead of devising a strategy to regain control of events, kept hatching new schemes to increase the level of chaos. "Once he wanted me to go to Madame Tussauds and set fire to the Beatles," Vivienne Westwood has recalled. Though she refused, the gesture is a telling symptom of McLaren's brand of anarchy: the target, after all, was not British society as such. It was waxen effigies of a rock and roll sacred cow.

In February 1977, McLaren capitalized on the discontents that were roiling his temporarily unemployed band to engineer the exit of bass player Glen Matlock, the group's most proficient musician and best-looking member. To replace him, McLaren hired John Simon Ritchie, aka Sid Vicious, who was perfectly ugly and also musically incompetent.

"I don't understand why people think it's so difficult to learn to play guitar," Vicious remarked to Caroline Coon. "I found it incredi­bly easy. You just pick a chord, go twang, and you've got music." With his spiky hair, leering attitude, and the needle tracks he flaunted on his bare arms, he at least had the right look.

Most of what followed was pure farce. There was, for example, the photogenic and very formal signing of the new band with Vicious to a new label, A&M, on March 10: the ceremony was staged in front of Buckingham Palace. From there the group was whisked by limousine to a press conference at the Regent Palace Hotel. Thrilled to discover an open bar, amply stocked with libations for thirsty re­porters, Vicious, who was a big baby of the purest impulsiveness, at­tacked the drink with unrestrained glee, swilling vodka by the bottle.

When the lads stumbled blindly into their limousine for the next stop on their journey to the top of the pops, they proceeded to the London headquarters of A&M. Here the aim was to schmooze with the staff and foster enthusiasm for the band among the company's publicists. En route, alas, a brawl erupted between Vicious and drummer Paul Cook. By the time the limo arrived, Cook had a bloody nose and Vicious had a bloody foot and no shoes (during the melee, they had been tossed out the window). Steve Jones was so drunk he staggered by mistake into the women's bathroom, creating instant panic among the female staff. Sid Vicious lurched into another room and, as McLaren later recalled, began to bark at a secretary: "My foot's bleeding, can you find a fucking plaster for me, you bitch!" Feeling ill, he dashed to a toilet. Before the visit was over, he had fallen out a window.

The Sex Pistols' contract with A&M was terminated the next day.

Once again, they were pariahs. Once again, the publicity was priceless. And once again, McLaren was exhilarated, perhaps because he assumed, rightly as events would show, that sooner or later a new record label would rise to the challenge of exploiting this fantastic new band of rock and roll outlaws.

Three months later, McLaren and the band signed their third con­tract in less than a year, this time with Virgin, at the time a relatively small, independent label run by Richard Branson, a swashbuckling young entrepreneur already on his way to becoming the most promi­nent British tycoon of his generation. In June, six months after the Grundy show, Virgin finally released the second single by the Sex Pis­tols, "God Save the Queen." Keeping the lads under wraps, a task made easy by the fact that they were still banned from most British venues, Branson had the satisfaction of seeing his gamble pay off handsomely. Another exquisitely produced piece of musical chaos, outfitted with another finely crafted set of incendiary lyrics, "God Save the Queen" was released to coincide with the Queen's Silver Ju­bilee, a nationwide celebration of Elizabeth II and her twenty-five years on the throne. Within days of release, "God Save the Queen" shot to the top of the British charts of best-selling records. An album (including both "Anarchy in the U.K." and "God Save the Queen") was belatedly released in November 1977. It, too, quickly became a number one album in England.

An American tour began a few weeks later, though the land of Bruce Springsteen showed even less interest in Johnny Rotten than it had in Ziggy Stardust. The first show was on January 3, 1978. Twelve days later, after a bizarre trek to a few improbably all-Ameri-can outposts, such as Tulsa, Oklahoma, the tour was over, and so were the Sex Pistols. On stage in San Francisco, Lydon uttered his fa­mous last lines as Johnny Rotten: "Ever have the feeling you've been cheated?"

By then, the Sex Pistols had in fact quite successfully realized a large number of Malcolm McLaren's basic ideas. The band had brought back to life the tumult and sense of shocked surprise that rock and roll had first provoked in the Fifties, and it had done so in a roar of raw noise with a threat of real violence. Even better, all this had happened in a way that was perversely puerile, just as McLaren had enjoined: "Be childish. Be irresponsible. Be everything this soci­ety hates."

But by behaving in this way, the Sex Pistols also helped to de­stroy the unified youth culture that had for so long fascinated McLaren. Once upon a time, rock impresarios as different as McLaren and Jon Landau, inspired by the examples of Elvis Presley and the Beatles, had hoped that rock and roll could inform a pow­erful collective force for social change, differ though they might about what change was desirable. But where the Beatles had urged a generation to "Come Together" in song, the Sex Pistols instead generated endless conflict: they polarized and repelled, inadver­tently accelerating the forces of fragmentation that had already be­gun to overtake the established global youth culture as a whole, and rock and roll in particular.

Although the Sex Pistols succeeded, briefly, as the Beatles had be­fore them in 1963, in galvanizing a genuine outburst of expressive freedom among a certain number of aspiring British musicians, what McLaren proudly came to call "The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle" was anything but liberating in its longer-term effects. Because McLaren insisted on demystifying the role that he and Westwood had played in the process of producing and promoting the Sex Pistols as a carefully designed package, selling images of teen revolt, he also reinforced the cynicism that was already a salient feature of the rock music business.

And there was, after all, a lot to be cynical about, at least if one was honest about the virtues of punk from a business point of view. If it was unruliness and noise that the kids wanted, the record com­panies were happy to oblige them, so long as the bands adhered to a minimal level of punctuality and professional courtesy. The trick was to snap up bands so new they could hardly play; make sure the musi­cians had a look that was stylishly repulsive; and never forget the paradoxical formulas that Andrew Loog Oldham had perfected ten years earlier with the Rolling Stones: in the kingdom of cutting-edge rock and roll, bad is good, ugly is beautiful.

The Ramones

The Ramones are the first punk rock band. Other bands, such as the Stooges and

the New York Dolls, came before them and set the stage and aesthetic for punk, and bands that immediately followed, such as the Sex Pistols, made the latent violence of the music more explicit, but the Ramones crystallized the musical ideals of the genre. By cutting rock & roll down to its bare essentials -- four chords; a simple, catchy melody; and irresistibly inane lyrics -- and speeding up the tempo considerably, the Ramones created something that was rooted in early '60s, pre-Beatles rock & roll and pop but sounded revolutionary. Since their breakthrough was theoretical as well as musical, they comfortably became the leaders of the emerging New York punk rock scene. While their peers such as Patti Smith, Television, Talking Heads, and Richard Hell all were more intellectual and self-consciously artistic than the Ramones, they nevertheless appealed to the same mentality because of the way they turned rock conventions inside out and celebrated kitschy pop culture with stylized stupidity.

The band's first four albums set the blueprint for punk, especially American punk and hardcore, for the next two decades. And the Ramones themselves were major figures for the next two decades, playing essentially the same music without changing their style much at all. Although some punk diehards -- including several of their peers -- would have claimed the band's long career wound up undercutting the ideals the band originally stood for, the Ramones always celebrated not just the punk aesthetic, but the music itself.

Based in the Forest Hills section of Queens, NY, the Ramones formed in 1974. Originally, the band was a trio consisting of Joey Ramone (vocals, drums; born Jeffrey Hyman, May 19, 1951), Johnny Ramone (guitar; born John Cummings, Oct. 8, 1951), and Dee Dee Ramone (bass; born Douglas Colvin, Sept. 18, 1952), with Tommy Ramone (born Tom Erdelyi, Jan. 29, 1952) acting as the group's manager. All of the group's members adopted the last name "Ramone" and dressed in torn blue jeans and leather jackets, in homage to '50s greaser rockers. The group played their first concert on March 30, 1974, at New York's Performance Studio. Two months after the show, Joey switched to vocals and Tommy became the band's drummer. By the end of the summer, the Ramones earned a residency at CBGB's. For the next year, they played regularly at the nightclub, earning a dedicated cult following and inspiring several other artists to form bands with similar ideals. All of the Ramones sets clocked in at about 20 minutes, featuring an unrelenting barrage of short, barely two-minute songs. By the end of 1975, the Ramones secured a recording contract with Sire; discounting Patti Smith, they were the first New York punk band to sign a contract.

Early in 1976, the Ramones recorded their debut album for just over 6,000 dollars. The resulting album, Ramones, was released in the spring, gained some critical attention, and managed to climb to 111 on the U.S. album charts. On July 4, the band made their debut appearance in Britain, where their records were becoming a big influence on a new generation of bands. Throughout 1976, the Ramones toured constantly, inaugurating nearly 20 years of relentless touring. By the end of the year, the group released their second album, Ramones Leave Home. While the album just scraped the U.S. charts, Leave Home became a genuine hit in England in the spring of 1977, peaking at number 48. By the summer of 1977, the Sex Pistols and the Ramones were seen as the two key bands in the punk rock revolution, but where the Pistols imploded, the Ramones kept on rolling. Following the U.K. Top 40 hit "Sheena Is a Punk Rocker," the Ramones released their third album, Rocket to Russia, in the fall of 1977.

Tommy Ramone left the band in the spring of 1977, although he produced the group's subsequent album. He was replaced by former Voidoid Marc Bee, who immediately changed his name to Marky Ramone. With their new drummer in place, the Ramones recorded their fourth album, Road to Ruin, which was released in the fall. Road to Ruin marked the band's first significant attempt to change their sound; not only were there stronger bubblegum, girl group, surf, and '60s pop influences on the music, it was the first of their albums to run over a half hour. Although their sound was more accessible, it didn't gain the band a noticeably larger following. Neither did Rock N' Roll High School, the 1979 Roger Corman film in which the Ramones had a pivotal part.

The soundtrack to Rock N' Roll High School and the U.K.-only live album It's Alive were the band's only releases of 1979. For most of the year, they were in the studio recording their fifth album with legendary '60s pop producer Phil Spector. The title song to the Corman movie was the first track released from the sessions, although the soundtrack album did feature a number of older Ramones songs remixed by Spector. End of the Century, the Spector-produced Ramones album, finally appeared in January of 1980 to mixed reviews. Despite the lukewarm reception to the album, the record's cover of the Ronettes' "Baby I Love You" became their only Top Ten British hit; in America, none of the singles made an impact, although the record became their biggest hit, peaking at number 44.

The Ramones continued their attempts at crossover success with their sixth album, Pleasant Dreams, which was released in 1981. Featuring a production by former Hollies and 10cc member Graham Gouldman, the record was a commercial disappointment in both America and England. The band was relatively quiet during 1982, spending most of their time touring. In the spring of 1983, the band returned with Subterranean Jungle, which was produced by Ritchie Cordell and Glen Koltkin, the heads of the American indie label Beserkley Records. Not only did Subterranean Jungle fail to gain the band the larger audience they desired, it continued the erosion of the band's diehard fan base, as well as their decline in the eyes of many rock critics. Following the album's release, Marky Ramone left the band; he was replaced by Richard Beau, a former member of the Velveteens, who changed his name to Richie Ramone.

With 1984's Too Tough to Die, the Ramones delivered a belated response to America's burgeoning hardcore punk scene that was largely produced by Tommy Erdelyi. The album helped restore their artistic reputation, as did the 1985 single, "Bonzo Goes to Bitburg," an attack on President Ronald Reagan's 1985 visit to Germany. Instead of continuing with the sound of Too Tough to Die, the Ramones began pursuing a more streamlined, stylized, and conventional take on their songwriting formula with 1986's Animal Boy. This was a direction the group followed for the remaining ten years of their career. Following the release of 1987's Halfway to Sanity, Richie Ramone left the band and Marky Ramone re-joined the group. In 1988, the career retrospective Ramones Mania appeared. In 1989, the Ramones contributed the theme song to the Stephen King movie Pet Semetary, and the track was included on Brain Drain, which was released in the summer of that year. After its release, the group's bassist, Dee Dee Ramone, left the band to pursue a career as a rapper called Dee Dee King; after his debut rap recording failed miserably, he formed the band Chinese Dragons. Dee Dee was replaced by C.J. Ramone (born Christopher John Ward).

In the early '90s, the Ramones sobered up, with both Joey and Marky undergoing treatment for alcoholism. The band returned to recording in 1992, first releasing the live Loco Live and then Mondo Bizarro, their first studio album in three years. Mondo Bizarro turned out to be a commercial failure, as did their 1994 covers album, Acid Eaters.

Following the release of Acid Eaters, the mainstream guitar rock audience in America finally embraced punk rock, in the form of young bands like Green Day and the Offspring. Sensing that the climate may have been right for the crossover success they had desired for so many years, the Ramones immediately followed Acid Eaters with Adios Amigos, claiming that unless the new album sold in substantial numbers, the band would call it quits after a final farewell tour. Adios Amigos only spent two weeks in the charts.

Nevertheless, the Ramones embarked on a long farewell tour that ran throughout the rest of 1995. The band was set to split in the beginning of 1996 when they were offered a slot on the sixth Lollapalooza, and they toured with the festival that summer. Following the completion of the tour, the Ramones parted ways, 20 years after the release of their first album. Just a few years later, Joey Ramone passed away on April 15, 2001, at age 49, the victim of lymphoma. Little more than a year after Joey's death, Dee Dee Ramone was found dead in his home in Los Angeles on June 5, 2002. Johnny Ramone passed away two years later on September 15, 2004 after a long battle with cancer. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide

The Clash

Joe Strummer (John Graham Mellor): vocals, guitar (date and place of birth: 21 August 1952, Ankara, Turkey)

Mick Jones: vocals, guitar (date and place of birth: 26 June 1955, London, England) Paul Simonon: bass, vocals (date and place of birth: 15 December 1956, London, England) Topper Headon: drums (date and place of birth: 30 May 1955, Bromley, Kent, England)

Mick Jones had a band called London S.S. with Bernard Rhodes who would become later The Clash's manager. Paul Simonon joined the London S.S. at its last legs. After, they decided to start all over again in a new band. Mick Jones decided to teach Paul Simonon how to play guitar, but as Paul had never played that instrument, it was too difficult for him. So they decided he should play bass, "because it's easier and has only four strings", as Paul said once.

They got Keith Levene as another guitarist and Terry Chimes as drummer. Bernard Rhodes was becoming the band's manager. Paul and Mick met Joe Strummer once, and Bernard asked him if he would like to join the band. Joe Strummer had another band (called The 101'ers) and was more musically experienced than the others by that time. He joined them on 31st May 1976, and Mick Jones said that it was a great deal getting Joe, because of that. Keith left the band, because the others said he wasn't into their project, so they voted him out. After, Terry Chimes left the band too. By that time The Clash consisted of only Mick Jones, Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon. Terry Chimes would be back only to record their first album.

Paul Simonon came with the band's name, he said that The Clash could be a good one. They recorded their first album, self titled The Clash (1977), which was one of the most selling import albums in the U.S.A., since it was released only later in America, but with some different tracks from the British one. After, Nicky "Topper" Headon joined in April 1977. Their second work was Give 'em Enough Rope. This was a hit (reached number 2 in the U.K.), and divulged The Clash's work to a great number of fans. But their greatest album in the opinion of The Rolling Stone Magazine (and music critics) was their third one, titled London Calling, which was rated the best album of the 80's decade and one of the best rock 'n' roll albums of all time.

The fourth work released was Sandinista!, which was a three record set album. Combat Rock came after and was the last album with Mick Jones and Topper Headon. Mick Jones started another band called Big Audio Dynamite. After that The Clash released their last album, Cut the Crap (1985), only with Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon from the original formation. After the end, Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, the ones who wrote almost all of the Clash's songs, started working together again in the Big Audio Dynamite's project.

The first two albums (The Clash and Give 'em Enough Rope are punk rock albums). London Calling is more pop rock. Sandinista! has a lot of music styles in it, Combat Rock is pop rock. The last, Cut the Crap, sounds more disco.

Although they've explored more than one musical style, The Clash was rated as a punk rock band, because it started as one, and their punk ideas never died, as it can be noticed in most of their albums. There were other albums released too, which are a review of The Clash's work with some previously unreleased tracks, demos, live tracks and remixes.

Joe Strummer said that their work is an attempt to show different feelings, like the union that must exist between people. He also said that The Clash was trying to teach new ways of feeling, thinking and being to their fans. The money wasn't really important to them, as they wanted to transmit their ideas. London Calling, a two record set album, and Sandinista! (three record set) were both sold by the price of a regular LP.

Heavy Metal

Led Zeppelin: Hollywood, 1973. It was only the second day of Led Zeppelin's stay in Los Angeles. Already, the word was out. Hordes of fans prowled the hallways of their hotel, the infamous Continental Hyatt House. The lobby was filled with photographers, groupies teetering on platform heels, even an impatient car salesman who'd come to deliver a hot-rod to drummer John Bonham.

The cold steel elevator door slid open to reveal the ninth floor. Two beefy security guards stood there, demanding a note of authorization. One had already reached in, ready to smash the button marked "lobby." Luckily, I had a note.

Nine floors up, there was no sense of the furor downstairs. Robert Plant, fresh from the shower, strode to the window of his suite and looked out at the billboards of Sunset Strip. He noticed the gloriously run-down hotel, the Chateau Marmont, where Zeppelin had first stayed upon their arrival in America back in 1968. Plant joked to Jimmy Page, the guitarist leader of the group, that his innocence looked like it needed a paint job. Page had something else on his mind. A representative of their record company, he said, had just called to report that the sales of the new album, Houses of the Holy, were spectacular. Page had been officially told that Led Zeppelin were the biggest-selling group in the world.

A silent moment of triumph passed between Plant and Page. Across the hall, an Al Green record played on Jones's portable stereo.

"Well," said Jimmy Page, turning to the visiting writer. "What do you want to know?" I wanted to say "everything." As a fledgling journalist still working at a record store, I'd fought for the opportunity to cover Led Zeppelin for the L.A. Times. The band had provided the soundtrack for my own adolescence, but I kept that to myself. I had a notebook full of questions, and as our interview progressed, Page and Plant seemed to warm from their notoriously press-wary stance. In the coming years, they would invite me to tour with them. We conducted innumerable interviews. Not many journalists were ever offered a front-row seat to the Zeppelin experience, and years later my files are still bulging with volumes of transcripts and passionately-scribbled notes I can barely read.

The Zeppelin attitude had something to do with Peter Grant, their brilliant and imposing manager. A little bit to do with the wicked humor of Richard Cole, their road-manager. Something to do with John Bonham thundering down the aisle of the Starship, performing Monty Python routines. With John Paul Jones, lost in dry-ice, playing "No Quarter." It had a lot to do with Page and Plant, side-by-side, sharing a single spotlight, ripping through "Over The Hills and Far Away."

The reverberations from those days run through most of what passes for rock and roll in the 1990's (and beyond). Led Zeppelin has never been more popular, more pervasive, more omnipresent. They broke up ten years ago, but you wouldn't know it by listening to the radio. Not since Elvis joined the Army has an audience so completely refused to acknowledge an artist's nactivity.

Decades after their formation, the warm glow of myth surrounds Led Zeppelin. Few other than Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, and John Paul Jones remember what a truly difficult road Led Zeppelin traveled in their time.

London, 1968. Noted British session guitarist Jimmy Page had taken an offer to join the Yardbirds, only to see the group splinter on an American tour. He'd vowed to continue the band as The New Yardbirds, and set about rebuilding the group from scratch. Fellow sessionmate, bassist-keyboardist John Paul Jones read an article in Disc Magazine after prodding from his wife and called Jimmy.

Page had also gotten a hot tip on a young blues-singer from Birmingham, and he traveled there to see him perform. "His vocal range was unbelievable," recalls Page. "I thought, 'Wait a minute. There's something wrong here. He's not known." Page laughs. "I couldn't figure it out. I thought, 'he must be a strange guy or something.' Then he came over to my place and I could see that he was a really good guy. I still don't know why he hadn't made it yet..."

At Page's home, they explored each other's tastes by playing favorite records—everything from Buddy Guy to the Incredible String Band to Muddy Waters and Elvis. Then Page broke out an odd choice. It was Joan Baez's dramatic version of the ballad, "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You." Page outlined a plan for a band that could play a song like that. "I'd like to play it heavy," he said, "but with a lot of light and shade."

It all made sense to Plant, who suggested they add his hometown pal and former bandmate, drummer John Bonham. The group's first get-together was in a tiny room below a record store on London's Gerard Street. The building has since been torn down, and the district reshaped as the city's Chinatown district, but Page remembers it vividly. "The room was about 18 x 30," remembers Page, "very small.

We just played one number, 'Train Kept a Rolling,' and it was there immediately. An indescribable feeling...." They rehearsed for several weeks at Page's home at Pangborne, on the River Thames. First on the agenda was a two-week tour of Scandinavia, a mop-up of some old Yardbirds commitments. Still playing under the name the New Yardbirds, they soon entered London's Olympic Studios.

It was Robert Plant's first time in a full-service recording studio. "I'd go back to the playback room and listen," he recounts. "It had so much weight, so much power, it was devastating. I had a long way to go with my voice then, but the enthusiasm and sparking of working with Jimmy's guitar...it was so raunchy. All these things, bit-by-bit, started fitting into a trademark for us. We finished the album in three weeks. Jimmy invested all his Yardbirds money, which wasn't much, into our first tour. We took a road crew of one and off we went...."

Their first British show took place October 15th, 1968 at Surrey University. They performed under a new name, Led Zeppelin, coined by the Who's drummer Keith Moon. (As in "you'll go over like a...") An early staple of the live show would be the song "Dazed and Confused", which featured an electric Page solo played in part with a violin bow. The bow later became Page's famous solo-signature, and it's an interesting historical footnote that the idea was first suggested to him during a session by the violinist father of actor David McCallum, of Man From U.N.C.L.E.

Zeppelin performed their intense, bluesy show at several stops around England. The response from the press was mild. America beckoned. Manager Peter Grant had a keen sense of U.S. audiences and the vast underground movement that was sweeping the country. Grant saw an opportunity when the Jeff Beck Group, managed out of the same office, cancelled out on an American tour with Vanilla Fudge. He called the upset promoters and talked them into a new group instead. Now all Grant had to do was convince the members of Led Zeppelin to leave their warm homes at the last minute, on Christmas Eve, for parts unknown. They agreed with gusto. Page and Jones felt like warriors embarking on a new campaign. For Plant and Bonham, it was a long long way from the hills of the Black Country. The band flew straight to Los Angeles for a series of shows at the Whisky A Go Go. They drove to the Chateau Marmont, and came upon a good omen. Keith Webb, a friend from Terry Reid's band, was standing out front in the 80 degree weather. He extended glasses of champagne.

"Oh I say, chaps," Webb intoned. "Come on in, welcome to America, and Merry Christmas." "Bonzo and I were amazed," Plant recalled in 1975. Seven years later, the sensations were still vivid. "We'd barely even been abroad, and here we were. It was the first time I saw a cop with a gun, the first time I saw a twenty-foot long car. The whole thing was a complete bowl-over. It was Christmas and Christmas away from home for the English is the end of the world. I went wandering down the Sunset Strip with no shirt on. There were a lot of fun-loving people to crash into...and we started out on a path of positive enjoyment. Frank Zappa's girl group, The GTO's, were upstairs. We threw eggs, had silly water battles and had all the good fun that a 19 year-old boy should have. We met a lot of people who we still know, a lot of people who've faded away. Some of them literally just grew up. I don't see the point in growing up...."

The first reviews of the album were surprisingly skeptical. It was a time of "supergroups," of furiously-hyped bands who could barely cut it, and Led Zeppelin initially found themselves fighting upstream to prove their authenticity. A critical drubbing by Rolling Stone would remain painful for years. It set an ominous tone for the group as they left Los Angeles and headed up to San Francisco to begin their tour.

Manager Peter Grant had a game plan. He'd avoided releasing any singles, and had studiously booked the group into key hotspots for progressive music. This group would not compete on AM radio with Gary Puckett or the Fifth Dimension. Led Zeppelin was more about an entire album. It would be a private experience, a word-of-mouth affair, something to be passed between friends like a good joint. The key piece of this plan would be their show at San Francisco's Fillmore West.

"The important thing," Plant said recently, "was that Peter told us if we didn't crack San Francisco, we'd have to go home. That was the place that was considered to be essential, the hotbed of the whole movement. It was the acid test, forget the Kool-Aid, and if we weren't convincing, they would have known right away. I said `I've been singing for years. I'd be happy to sing anywhere.' But he had his eyes set on something I couldn't even imagine."

The band was sharing the bill with Taj Mahal and Country Joe and the Fish. They arrived to find they'd been advertised only as "Supporting Act." The mission was clear—do or die—and Led Zeppelin took the stage that night with a vengeance. Jimmy Page could feel something happening in the audience, even from the stage. "It felt like a vacuum and we'd arrived to fill it," he explains. "First this row, then that row...it was like a tornado and it went rolling across the country."

By the time the band hit New York, they were headliners. The first album went top ten and stayed on the charts more than a year. They would tour the US three times in 1969 alone.

Led Zeppelin II was largely written and recorded on the road, no small feat considering the pace of their touring. The album sported more of a band personality—they were getting to know each other—and Plant had honed his vocal approach. "Whole Lotta Love," the explosive first single from the album, would be the first big hit.

Today, none of the band members is sure when the monster "Whole Lotta Love" riff first appeared. John Paul Jones ventures that it probably came from a stage improv during "Dazed and Confused." Says Plant: "Wherever it came from, it was all about that riff. Any tribute which flows in, must go to Jimmy and his riffs. They were mostly in E and you could really play around with them. Since I've been playing guitar myself, I've realized more than ever that the whole thing, the whole band really, came straight from the blues. Everything."

By 1970, Zeppelin's popularity had spread to England and parts beyond. They had even unseated The Beatles in the prestigious annual Melody Maker readership poll. Singles were rarely released in the US, never in the UK. Concert ads were rarely taken. To be a fan of Led Zeppelin was to be a member of an exclusive club. The information traveled not in newspapers, but in the back of cars, on the telephone and on the radio. "My basic attitude toward performing live is the same now as it was then," he told me in 1990. "I don't know if you can put it in print, but it's this—shit or bust. You do it. No nerves...you just do it."

Led Zeppelin toured for two-and-a-half years straight before finally taking a break. When a vacation was planned, it was a working vacation. Plant had the idea of traveling to a cottage in the mountains of Wales for a songwriting session with Page. (Plant: "I thought we'd be able to get a little peace and quiet and get your actual Californian, San Franciscan, Marin County blues without ever actually going there.") The name of the cottage was Bron-Y-Aur, so-called for the stretch of sun that crossed the valley every day. "Bron Y-Aur" would become a title for a certain kind of Zeppelin music—acoustic, bluesy, and soulful.

"It was the first time I really came to know Robert," says Page. "Actually living together at Bron Y-Aur, as opposed to occupying nearby hotel rooms. The songs took us into areas that changed the band, and it established a standard of traveling for inspiration... which is the best thing a musician can do."

Led Zeppelin III contained echoes of Sunset Strip, of the Byrds and the Buffalo Springfield, of-Joni Mitchell and Moby Grape. Crossbred with their essential blues foundation, this was a new direction that truly pushed the envelope of hard-rock. They were rewarded with their least-selling album yet. It didn't matter to Jimmy Page. The stage shows expanded to feature the new material in an acoustic set.

Led Zeppelin's concerts became legendary affairs. "Dazed and Confused," still the roller-coaster centerpiece, could last as long as 45 minutes. When the floodgates opened, it was sometimes difficult for Page to close them again. Likewise for John Bonham's nightly solo, "Moby Dick." The "boogie" section of the show came late in the set, and it tended to feature whatever music the band was listening to at the time. (Some of the surprise songs played by Zeppelin: "Woodstock," "Shaft," "Feelin' Groovy," and "The Star Spangled Banner.") There were few effects, no tapes, just brute musical strength. Zeppelin live was a direct descendant from Elvis's early shows. Raw, direct, a reminder of when rock was young.

Undaunted by the sales of the third album, Page kept to his original goal of bringing hard rock and musical drama to an essentially acoustic base. It was all about depth of feeling, he says today. In 1990, it's that same depth of feeling that keeps the many Zeppelin imitators just that. Like with a great comedian, you can retell the jokes but the laughs just aren't the same.

The next album, "Led Zeppelin IV", was a watershed moment in the band's history. The LP slipped into stores in 1971 with little fanfare. Here was a more "mature" work that also rocked as hard as any of their previous efforts. It was remark able music for a band that was still, essentially, a trio with a great singer.

Bonham and Jones had begun to feel their confidence. It was Bonham who spontaneously interrupted work on another (never-finished) track by playing the drum-part from Little Richard's "Keep A-Knockin'." And Jones had brought in another idea, inspired by the Muddy Waters album Electric Mud.

"I wanted to try an electric blues with a rolling bass part," Jones recalls, humming the part. "But it couldn't be too simple. I wanted it to turn back on itself. I showed it to the guys, and we fell into it. We struggled with the turn-around, until Bonham figured out that you just count four-time as if there's no turn-around. That was the secret. Anyway, we titled it after a dog that was wandering in and out of the studio. The dog had no name, so we just called the song 'Black Dog."

The highlight of the album, of course, was "Stairway to Heaven." The most-played track in radio history, it began like many Zeppelin classics...on a tape from Page's home studio. Recording at Headley Grange, a converted poorhouse in Hampshire, Page first played the track to John Paul Jones. "Bonzo and Robert had gone out for the night, and I worked really hard on the thing. Jonesy and I then routined it together, and later we ran through it with the drums and everything. Robert was sitting there at the time, by the fireplace, and I believe he came up with 80% of the lyrics at that time. He was just sort of writing away and suddenly there it was....

Plant picks up the story: "Yeah, I just sat next to Pagey while he was playing it through. It was done very quickly. It took a little working but, but it was a very fluid, unnaturally easy track. It was almost as if uh-oh—it just had to be gotten out at that time. There was something pushing it, saying 'you -guys are okay, but if you want to do something timeless, here's a wedding song for you."

Houses of the Holy came next. Released in May of 1973, this richly atmospheric album was not an easy first listen. ("It usually takes people a year to really catch up to our albums," Page once said.) The band hit the road again with the new material. Their popularity was now so great that they served as a test-case. They were selling out massive stadiums that had never hosted rock and roll before.

Records were breaking at every stop, yet in 1973, it was the Rolling Stones who were getting all the magazine covers. Led Zeppelin was still rock's best-kept secret. In the entire history of the band, they had never even hired a publicist. The lack of press accessibility had kept the band mysterious, but the mystery cut both ways. What press reports did reach the papers usually centered on a) riots over concert tickets, or b) motorcycles-in-the-hallway type road behavior. Peter Grant found himself involved in constant crisis management.

(Once introducing himself to Bob Dylan at an L.A. party, Grant offered a warm handshake. "I'm Peter Grant, manager of Led Zeppelin," he said. Dylan replied, "I don't come to you with my problems, do I?" It was the only time I'd ever seen Grant at a loss for words.)

The roguish reputation dogged Led Zeppelin for years. In 1972, Elvis Presley wanted to meet the band. Their mutual promoter at the time, Jerry Weintraub, took Page and Plant up to Presley's Las Vegas hotel suite. For the first few minutes, Elvis ignored them.

Page—who had first picked up a guitar after hearing "Baby Let's Play House" on overseas radio—began to fidget. What was going on? Did he really want to meet them? Should they say something? Elvis finally turned to them. "Is it true," he said, "these stories about you boys on the road?" Plant answered, "Of course not. We're family men. I get the most pleasure out of walking the hotel corridors, singing your songs." Plant offered his best Elvis impersonation. "Treat me like a fool, treat me mean and cruuuuel, but looooove me...." For a moment Elvis Presley eyed them both very carefully. Then he burst out laughing. Then his bodyguards burst out laughing. For two hours he entertained them in his suite. He had never heard their records, he said, except for when his stepbrother played him 'Stairway to Heaven'. "I liked it," said Presley.

Later, walking down the hallway from the hotel room, Page and Plant congratulated themselves on a two-hour meeting with the King. "Hey," came a voice from behind them. Presley had poked his head out the door. "Treat me like fooool...." The double-lp Physical Graffiti was recorded over several months at Headley Grange. The intention was to make a straight-forward rock album. One song stood out early on. The album was planned to culminate in the hypnotic new track, "Kashmir." Fifteen years later, all three members point to this song as quintessential Zeppelin, the truest of their many recordings. "It's all there," explains John Paul Jones, "all the elements that defined the band..."

The "Kashmir" riff first appeared on Page's home-studio work tapes. It was first a tuning, an extension of a guitar-cycle that Page had been working on for years. (The same cycle that would produce "black Summer," "Black Mountain Side," and the unreleased "Swan Song.") "The structure of it was strange, weird enough to continue exploring," remembers Page. Jones had been late for the sessions, and Page used the time to work on the riff with John Bonham. Plant added the middle-section, and Jones later added the ascending bass riff in overdubs and all the string parts.

Originally called "Driving to Kashmir," the lyrics were inspired by the long drive from Goulimine to Tan-tan in Southern Morocco, the area once called Spanish Sahara. "the whole inspiration came from the fact that the road went on and on and on," Plant explains. "It was a single track road which cut neatly through the desert. Two miles to the East and West were ridges of sandrock. It basically looked like you were driving down a channel, this dilapidated road, and there was seemingly no end to it. 'Oh, let the sun beat down upon my face, stars to fill my dreams...' It's one of my favorites...that, 'All My Love' and 'In The Light' and two or three others really were the finest moments. But 'Kashmir' in particular. It was so positive, lyrically.

"I remember at the time there were a lot of musicians who were really insensitive about their audience's interpretation of their work. You'd get all this negatively coming out, as if to be mysterious is to be negative, to be dark. Mystery is not about darkness. It's about intrigue. There's a fine line in between, of course. Not even a fine line... it's a gossamer thread.

"How on earth do you want to purport yourself? I believed that it had to be Light. Lyrically, you have to stand by your words! There was a lot of gloom purported by guys who went back and took off their stage-clothes and played golf. And I didn't want to be one of those guys. I wanted whatever I was saying to represent what I was doing. But 'Kashmir' was tremendous for the mood. A lot of that was down to Bonzo, what he played. Page and I couldn't have done it without Bonzo's thrift. He was a real thrifty player. It was what he didn't do that made it work...."

There are many successful bands who function like co-workers. They clock-in, they clock-out, they exchange cards at Christmas. Thank you, and see you on-stage. In my time around them, Led Zeppelin functioned like four very different brothers. It was the kind of closeness that allowed for friendly competition, for privately griping over another member, and for fiercely defending that same person in the next breath. Their camaraderie stood in direct opposition to the often-heavy image of Led Zeppelin.

Once on the road, Robert Plant popped into a McDonald's for lunch. Slowly, the patrons began to recognize him. The room began to tilt towards him. Before long he was surrounded by young fans, and it's a tribute to his disarming personality that soon they were treating him not as Robert Plant, but as a co-conspirator and a fellow fan of the band.

"Hey, what's Jimmy Page really like?" "He's my mate," Plant replied simply.

To this day, Page remains an inscrutable presence. He is ethereal, yet extremely forceful. Steely, yet soulful. Jimmy Page is one of the more powerful figures ever to be over-described as 'fragile.' One afternoon in Chicago in 1975, Page let the room go dark as the sun set. He quietly, defiantly, described his future.

"To be able to fuse all these styles was always my dream in the early stages," he said, "but now the composing side of it is just as important. I think it's time to travel again....it could be a good time for that now. We've been in all these hotel rooms, touring. The balance has got to swing exactly the opposite, to the point where you've got an instrument and nothing else. I think it's time to travel, start gaining some really right in there experiences. There's always this time thing. Everything, for me, seems to be a race against time. Especially musically. I know what I want to get down and I haven't much time to do it in. I've got a real wanderlust right now. I want to move."

By July 1975, Zeppelin had accomplished all they'd dreamed of. The world tour had been a mash. Physical Graffiti was a big hit, and all five albums re-entered the charts. The band had lived in each other' pockets for years, and their spirit was still strong. Now it me to travel, to recharge.

Within three weeks Page had flown to Marrakesh to meet up with Plant, who was traveling with his wife Maureen. Veering off the tourist paths, Page and Plant rented a Range Rover and drove deep into Morocco. The mission was to discover street music, to soak up the experiences that might enhance the next album. Bob Marley tapes blasting, they travelled through Ovazazatte, Zagora, Tafraoute, the Atlas Mountains, moving north through Casablanca and Tangier to meet up with the rest of the band in Montreux, Switzerland. Page took a brief break, flying to London to check the editing of the "Dazed and Confused" sequence for The Song Remains The Same.

(The band had all but decided to shelve the 1973 concert film in favor of something filmed on their upcoming summer tour.) He had planned to catch up with Plant in a few days. Their wanderlust tour wasn't over yet, and soon they would be gearing up to perform live again.

Bad luck struck when Plant's car plunged off a cliff on the Greek island of Rhodes. Plant's wife suffered a fractured skull, and a broken leg and pelvis. Plant fractured his elbow and broke his ankle. They were taken to a small local emergency ward. Just how pervasive was Zeppelin's popularity? "I was lying there in some pain," Plant says with understatement, "trying to get cockroaches off the bed and the guy next to me, this drunken soldier, started singing 'The Ocean' from Houses of the Holy."

Plant's accident would thrust the band into their darkest period. For 18 months, it wasn't known if he'd be able to use his leg again. Plant spent a lengthy period of time drinking beer and "tinkering on the village piano." Clearly, Zeppelin needed a new album, and needed to feel their ability to make a great one. The plan was to record fast, to push the limits, to paint themselves in a corner and dare themselves to escape.

Rehearsals for Presence began in Malibu, California. It was an odd sight - Led Zeppelin with Robert Plant in a wheelchair. The band soon moved to Munich for the sessions. Every waking hour was spent in the studio, located in the basement of their hotel.

In 1977, Page described the album with a real fervor. "The general urgency and the pent-up whoa was in all of us. The mechanism was perfectly oiled. We started steaming in rehearsals. We did a lot of old rock and roll numbers just to loosen up a bit. 'For Your Life' was made up in the studio, right on the spot. I particularly enjoyed the guitar playing on the blues things. The solos never had that coloring before. I was so happy about it... especially since I have to warm up to solo. I get nervous about that kind of guitar playing. Really, very insecure about it. But that's the way I can really concentrate. I'm usually at my best when I'm really exhausted or under pressure or both. When you're exhausted all you want to know about is what you have to do. The Golden question is why this was done so fast, and why the others take so long. The fact is that this one, we lived all the way through... under circumstances that were extremely frustrating. We weren't sure about Robert, weren't sure what was going to happen. Everyone managed to pull it all in...it was great."

If each Zeppelin album was, as Jimmy Page says, a concept album detailing the mental state of the band at the time... then this one was a story of anxiety and frenzy and blues and pain. Presence, he says, is the most important Zeppelin album. It's a snapshot of a time when the group was stripped of its legendary power. They were running on pure heart and soul.

A dangerous period of inactivity followed Presence. ("You gotta keep your mind active," said Page at the time, "you can never just 'go on holiday.") Plant continued therapy on his ankle. Jones tried farming. Page retreated to Switzerland to produce "Bonzo's Montreux" with John Bonham. Each member was being asked the same question with alarming frequency—had the band broken up?

The days of gardening would soon come to an end. Plant's leg improved, and the band held their collective breath when he elected to get up on stage with Bad Company at a New York concert. It was a triumphant evening for Plant. He found he could still move the way he wanted to on a stage. It was a little wobbly, but it would improve. Yellow lights were switched to green. A Led Zeppelin tour was planned for the next year.

Meanwhile, rock had changed. Punk was raging through England, threatening to sweep all the old-time arena-size acts under the carpet. While Page admired the work of the Sex Pistols and the Damned, he was surprised to see that some of the younger musicians had their guns aimed directly for Zeppelin. (Said a member of the Clash: "I don't even have to listen to their music. Just looking at one of their album covers makes me want to vomit...") After winning the Melody Maker poll at the outset of 1977, Page had earnestly explained that "Zeppelin is not a nostalgia band." They rehearsed for two months, carefully assembling the set that would prove it.

The 1977 Zeppelin show was a three-hour tour de force. Page's guitar blazed, Plant's soul was on nightly display, Jones and Bonham swung. It was a thunderous break in the two-year silence. For the first time, critics and audiences agreed. This was Zeppelin at their tightest and loosest. The response was overwhelming. As Plant joked on-stage at Madison Square Garden, plucking up some roses left by a fan: "I didn't know you cared."

In Los Angeles in 1977, Page gave a particularly stunning description of the Zeppelin alchemy: "The motto of the group is definitely 'ever onward.' If there ever is to be a total analysis, it's that. The fact is that it's like a chemical fusion...there's so much ESP involved in it. It sounds pretentious, but it's true. That's just what it is. When there are three people playing on stage, instrumentally, and I'm in the middle of a staccato thing, and Bonzo just for some unknown reasons happens to be there doing the same beats on the snare drum... that sort of thing is definitely a form of trans-state...it is a sort of communication on that other plane. People get so scientific about it, I experience it every day. There is such a creative thing there within all of us, you just want to keep going. People really bring it down to earth when they say 'Have you ever really thought of splitting up?'.

But things would never be easy for Led Zeppelin. Tragic news hit as the band was preparing to leave the U.S. at the end of the tour. Plant's young song Karac had died suddenly from a virus infection. The effect was devastating. Plant disappeared into the country to mend the wounds. His bandmates worried about him, wondered about the future of the group, but within a year Plant had re-emerged with new dedication.

In November of 1978, Zeppelin flew to Stockholm to begin recording a new LP. In Through The Out Door was an album of new sounds and wide style-shifts, odd directions and even the gorgeous Zeppelin ballad "All My Love." "The whole search is for the unknown," Page once said. "We're always looking..."

The band came roaring back to full-power in the summer of 1979. The seventies had been their decade, and they were closing it out in style. In August, two huge appearances at Knebworth had turned out to be emotional affairs for the homeland audiences. The band swept the Melody Maker polls again. "Fool in the Rain," a rare Zeppelin single, was released in December.

After Knebworth, what would be the next step for the biggest band in the world? The answer came that next July as the group stealthily began their first European tour in three years. "Zeppelin Over Europe 80" opened with little fanfare—it was almost a dream for the Zeppelin faithful. There was a playful and generous spirit about the show. (Page had even handled some of the stage introductions himself.) The set opened with "Train Kept A Rollin'," the first song the band performed together twelve years earlier.

Rehearsals quietly began for an American tour. The group had acquired a new motto for the States, "cut the waffle," as in no-frills and fewer solos. In early September they announced the U.S. dates with a press release entitled "Led Zeppelin—The Eighties."

On September 25th, the band was locked in rehearsals at Page's home. The work was over for the day. John Paul Jones and Zeppelin associate Benjie LeFevre had playfully decided to visit John Bonham's room "just to watch him sleep." They found him dead. Bonham had turned the wrong way, accidentally, after a night of drinking. The tragic sight, according to Jones, looked shockingly arbitrary.

The decision to end the band came instantly. In a group this close, the loss was immeasurable. When the three members met in a London hotel room, it was only a matter of wording the statement.

"It was impossible to continue, really," says Page today. "Especially in light of what we'd done live, stretching and moving the songs this way and that. At that point in time especially, in the early 80's, there was no way one wanted to even consider taking on another drummer. For someone to 'learn' the things Bonham had done...it just wouldn't have been honest. We had a great respect for each other, and that needed to continue ...in life or death."

On July 13th, 1985, the band performed at Live-Aid, at JFK Stadium. There were priceless moments, but I'll remember Page's smile when Robert sang his familiar added-line to "Stairway to Heaven" - "does anybody remember laughter." It was a look that came from way down deep, and it carried with it a memory of a hundred Zeppelin shows gone by. In subsequent years the band would sometimes perform with Jason Bonham on drums, popping up at the 40th Anniversary concert for Atlantic Records or at Bonham's own wedding party.

"I look back at it all and laugh," Robert Plant says today. "I was just 19 when I got off the plane. It's like having a child, and I'm part of that child. The answer to it all is growing up, developing a balance. So much of the time was like being in the middle of a knitting pattern which hadn't been finished. There were no instructions, and the pages were re-written every day...."

Black Sabbath: has been so influential in the development of heavy metal rock music as to be a defining force in the style. The group took the blues-rock sound of late '60s acts like Cream, Blue Cheer, and Vanilla Fudge to its logical conclusion, slowing the tempo, accentuating the bass, and emphasizing screaming guitar solos and howled vocals full of lyrics expressing mental anguish and macabre fantasies. If their predecessors clearly came out of an electrified blues tradition, Black Sabbath took that tradition in a new direction, and in so doing helped give birth to a musical style that continued to attract millions of fans decades later.

The group was formed by four teenage friends from Aston, near Birmingham, England: Anthony "Tony" Iommi (b. Feb 19, 1948), guitar; William "Bill" Ward (b. May 5, 1948), drums; John "Ozzy" Osbourne (b. Dec 3, 1948), vocals; and Terence "Geezer" Butler (b. Jul 17, 1949), bass. They originally called their jazz-blues band Polka Tulk, later renaming themselves Earth, and they played extensively in Europe. In early 1969, they decided to change their name again when they found that they were being mistaken for another group called Earth. Butler had written a song that took its title from a novel by occult writer Dennis Wheatley, -Black Sabbath, and the group adopted it as their name as well. As they attracted attention for their live performances, record labels showed interest, and they were signed to Phillips Records in 1969. In January 1970, the Phillips subsidiary Fontana released their debut single, "Evil Woman (Don't Play Your Games With Me)," a cover of a song that had just become a U.S. hit for Crow; it did not chart. The following month, a different Phillips subsidiary, Vertigo, released Black Sabbath's self-titled debut album, which reached the U.K. Top Ten. Though it was a less immediate success in the U.S. -- where the band's recordings were licensed to Warner Bros. Records and appeared in May 1970 -- the LP broke into the American charts in August, reaching the Top 40, remaining in the charts over a year, and selling a million copies.

Appearing at the start of the '70s, Black Sabbath embodied the Balkanization of popular music that followed the relatively homogenous second half of the 1960s. As exemplified by its most popular act, the Beatles, the 1960s suggested that many different aspects of popular music could be integrated into an eclectic style with a broad appeal. The Beatles were as likely to perform an acoustic ballad as a hard rocker or R&B-influenced tune. At the start of the 1970s, however, those styles began to become more discrete for new artists, with soft rockers like James Taylor and the Carpenters emerging to play only ballad material, and hard rockers like Led Zeppelin and Grand Funk Railroad taking a radically different course, while R&B music turned increasingly militant. The first wave of rock critics, which had come into existence with the Beatles, was dismayed with this development, and the new acts tended to be poorly reviewed despite their popularity. Black Sabbath, which took an even more extreme tack than the still blues- and folk-based Led Zeppelin, was lambasted by critics (and though they eventually made their peace with Zeppelin, they never did with Sabbath). But the band had discovered a new audience eager for its uncompromising approach.

Black Sabbath quickly followed its debut album with a second album, Paranoid, in September 1970. The title track, released as a single in advance of the LP, hit the Top Five in the U.K., and the album went to number one there. In the U.S., where the first album had just begun to sell, Paranoid was held up for release until January 1971, again preceded by the title track, which made the singles charts in November; the album broke into the Top Ten in March 1971 and remained in the charts over a year, eventually selling over four million copies, by far the band's best-selling effort. (Its sales were stimulated by the belated release of one of its tracks, "Iron Man," as a U.S. single in early 1972; the 45 got almost halfway up the charts, the band's best showing for an American single.)

Master of Reality, the third album, followed in August 1971, reaching the Top Ten on both sides of the Atlantic and selling over a million copies. Black Sabbath, Vol. 4 (September 1972) was another Top Ten million-seller. For Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (November 1973), the band brought in Yes keyboard player Rick Wakeman on one track, signaling a slight change in musical direction; it was Black Sabbath's fifth straight Top Ten hit and million-seller. In 1974, the group went through managerial disputes that idled them for an extended period. When they returned to action in July 1975 with their sixth album, Sabotage, they were welcomed back at home, but in the U.S. the musical climate had changed, making things more difficult for an album-oriented band with a heavy style, and though the LP reached the Top 20, it did not match previous sales levels. Black Sabbath's record labels quickly responded with a million-selling double-LP compilation, We Sold Our Soul for Rock 'n' Roll (December 1975), and the band contemplated a more pronounced change of musical style. This brought about disagreement, with guitarist Iommi wanting to add elements to the sound, including horns, and singer Osbourne resisting any variation in the formula.

Technical Ecstasy (October 1976), which adopted some of Iommi's innovations, was another good -- but not great -- seller, and Osbourne's frustration eventually led to his quitting the band in November 1977. He was replaced for some live dates by former Savoy Brown singer Dave Walker, then returned in January 1978. Black Sabbath recorded its eighth album, Never Say Die! (September 1978), the title track becoming a U.K. Top 40 hit before the LP's release and "Hard Road" making the Top 40 afterwards. But the singles did not improve the album's commercial success, which was again modest, and Osbourne left Black Sabbath for a solo career, replaced in June 1979 by former Rainbow singer Ronnie James Dio (b. June 10, 1949). (Also during this period, keyboardist Geoff Nichols became a regular part of the band's performing and recording efforts, though he was not officially considered a band member until later.)

The new lineup took its time getting into the recording studio, not releasing its first effort until April 1980 with Heaven and Hell. The result was a commercial resurgence.

In the U.S., the album was a million-seller; in Britain, it was a Top Ten hit that threw off two chart singles, "Neon Knights" and "Die Young." (At the same time, the band's former British record label issued a five-year old concert album, Black Sabbath Live at Last, that was quickly withdrawn, though not before making the U.K. Top Five, and reissued "Paranoid" as a single, getting it into the Top 20.) Meanwhile, drummer Bill Ward left Black Sabbath due to ill health and was replaced by Vinnie Appice. The lineup of Iommi, Butler, Dio, and Appice then recorded Mob Rules (November 1981), which was almost as successful as its predecessor: In the U.S., it went gold, and in the U.K. it reached the Top 20 and spawned two chart singles, the title track and "Turn up the Night." Next on the schedule was a concert album, but Iommi and Dio clashed over the mixing of it, and by the time Live Evil appeared in January 1983, Dio had left Black Sabbath, taking Appice with him.

The group reorganized by persuading original drummer Bill Ward to return and, in a move that surprised heavy metal fans, recruiting Ian Gillan (b. Aug. 19, 1945), former lead singer of Black Sabbath rivals Deep Purple. This lineup -- Iommi, Butler, Ward, and Gillan -- recorded Born Again, released in September 1983. Black Sabbath hit the road prior to the album's release, with drummer Bev Bevan (b. Nov 25, 1946) substituting for Ward, who would return to the band in the spring of 1984. The album was a Top Five hit in the U.K. but only made the Top 40 in the U.S. Gillan remained with Black Sabbath until March 1984, when he joined a Deep Purple reunion and was replaced by singer Dave Donato, who was in the band until October without being featured on any of its recordings.

Black Sabbath reunited with Ozzy Osbourne for its set at the Live Aid concert on July 13, 1985, but soon after the performance, bassist Geezer Butler left the band, and with that the group became guitarist Tony Iommi's vehicle, a fact emphasized by the next album, Seventh Star, released in January 1986 and credited to "Black Sabbath featuring Tony Iommi." On this release, the lineup was Iommi (guitar); another former Deep Purple singer, Glenn Hughes (b. Aug 21, 1952) (vocals); Dave Spitz (bass); Geoff Nichols (keyboards); and Eric Singer (drums). The album was a modest commercial success, but the new band began to fragment immediately, with Hughes replaced by singer Ray Gillen for the promotional tour in March 1986.

With Black Sabbath now consisting of Iommi and his employees, personnel changes were rapid. The Eternal Idol (November 1987), which failed to crack the U.K. Top 50 or the U.S. Top 100, featured a returning Bev Bevan, bassist Bob Daisley, and singer Tony Martin. Bevan and Daisley didn't stay long, and there were several replacements in the bass and drum positions over the next couple of years. Headless Cross (April 1989), the band's first album for I.R.S. Records, found veteran drummer Cozy Powell (b. Dec 29, 1947, d. Apr 5, 1998) and bassist Laurence Cottle joining Iommi and Martin. It marked a slight uptick in Black Sabbath's fortunes at home, with the title song managing a week in the singles charts. Shortly after its release, Cottle was replaced by bassist Neil Murray. With Geoff Nichols back on keyboards, this lineup made Tyr (August 1990), which charted in the Top 40 in the U.K. but became Black Sabbath's first regular album to miss the U.S. charts.

Iommi was able to reunite the 1979-1983 lineup of the band -- himself, Geezer Butler, Ronnie James Dio, and Vinnie Appice -- for Dehumanizer (June 1992), which brought Black Sabbath back into the American Top 50 for the first time in nine years, while in the U.K. the album spawned "TV Crimes," their first Top 40 hit in a decade. And on November 15, 1992, Iommi, Butler, and Appice backed Ozzy Osbourne as part of what was billed as the singer's final live appearance. Shortly after, it was announced that Osbourne would be rejoining Black Sabbath.

That didn't happen -- yet. Instead, Dio and Appice left again, and Iommi replaced them by bringing back Tony Martin and adding drummer Bob Rondinelli. Cross Purposes (February 1994) was a modest seller, and, with Iommi apparently maintaining a Rolodex of all former members from which to pick and choose, the next album, Forbidden (June 1995), featured returning musicians Cozy Powell, Geoff Nichols, and Neil Murray, along with Iommi and Martin. The disc spent only one week in the British charts, suggesting that Black Sabbath finally had exhausted its commercial appeal, at least as a record seller. With that, the group followed the lead of the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, putting the most popular lineup of the band back together for a live album with a couple of new studio tracks on it. Recorded in the band's hometown of Birmingham, England, in December 1997, the two-CD set Reunion -- featuring all four of Black Sabbath's original members, Iommi, Osbourne, Butler, and Ward -- was released in October 1998. It charted only briefly in the U.K., but in the U.S. it just missed reaching the Top Ten and went platinum. The track "Iron Man" won Black Sabbath its first Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance. The band toured through the end of 1999, concluding their reunion tour on December 22, 1999, back in Birmingham. In February 2001, Black Sabbath announced that it would reunite once again to headline the sixth edition of Ozzfest, Osbourne's summer concert festival, playing 29 cities in the U.S. beginning in June. More surprisingly, the group also announced its intention to record a studio album of all-new material, the original lineup's first since 1978.

Steppenwolf: In the chaotic world of rock 'n' roll, in which the lifespan of most bands can be measured in terms of a few years or a few months, John Kay and Steppenwolf have emerged as one of rock's most enduring and respected bands, delivering hard-hitting, personally-charged music for more than three decades.

In the late 1960s, Steppenwolf embodied that era's social, political and philosophical restlessness, building an impressive body of edgy, uncompromising rock 'n' roll that retains its emotional resonance more than three decades after the band's formation. Such Steppenwolf standards as "Born to Be Wild," "Magic Carpet Ride," "Rock Me" and "Monster" stand amongst Rock's most indelible anthems.

At last count, the band's worldwide record sales exceed 25 million units. Its songs remain fixtures on classic-rock radio, and have been licensed for use in approximately 50 motion pictures and an even greater number of television programs. And, in addition to being the first band to use the term "heavy metal" in a song (in "Born to Be Wild"), Steppenwolf's punchy style helped to establish the fundamentals of the hard-rock sound that would flourish in the 1970s.

Steppenwolf's remarkable resilience is largely a reflection of the fierce determination and never-say-die tenacity that's driven Kay for much of his life. He was born Joachim Fritz Krauledat in 1944 in the section of Germany then known as East Prussia. He never knew his father, who was killed fighting in Russia a month before John's birth. When John was less than a year old, he and his mother fled to what would soon become Communist-controlled East Germany. When he was four, they undertook a perilous midnight escape into West Germany.

Growing up in Hannover, West Germany, John was profoundly affected by the American rock 'n' roll he heard on U.S. Armed Forces Radio. Though he didn't speak English at the time, the music's primal energy touched something deep in him, instilling both a driving ideal of personal freedom and an abiding interest in American culture. That vision became a reality in 1958, when the teenager emigrated with his mother and stepfather to Toronto. There, he immersed himself in the rock, R&B, country and gospel music that emanated from late-night U.S. clear-channel AM stations, while learning English from the speed-rapping DJs who dominated the rock 'n' roll airwaves.

By 1967, The Sparrow had run its course and Kay was back in Los Angeles, where ABC-Dunhill Records staff producer Gabriel Mekler encouraged him to form a new group to record for his label. Towards that end, the singer reenlisted two old Sparrow bandmates, drummer Jerry Edmonton and keyboardist Goldy McJohn, and recruited 17-year-old guitar prodigy Michael Monarch and bassist Rushton Moreve. The new outfit was christened Steppenwolf, after Hermann Hesse's mystical novel of the same name.

Steppenwolf's self-titled 1968 debut album-recorded in a mere four days-introduced the band's iconoclastic approach, which combined a tough, blues-rooted sound, a penchant for topical lyrics and the gritty growl of Kay, whose brooding presence and trademark shades made him one of the era's most magnetic and identifiable figures.

Steppenwolf soon emerged as one of the few bands of the late '60s to successfully straddle the pop-oriented AM mainstream and the hip FM underground, scoring substantial success on both the single and album charts without tailoring its approach to pander to either constituency. "Born to Be Wild"-written by ex-Sparrow member Dennis Edmonton, aka Mars Bonfire-became Steppenwolf's first major hit, and was subsequently featured prominently (along with the band's pointed reading of Hoyt Axton's anti-hard-drug composition "The Pusher") in the seminal '60s film Easy Rider, cementing Steppenwolf's status as counterculture icons as well as earning the group a hardcore biker following.

"For the times, Steppenwolf was an uncharacteristically tight band," Kay notes. "In San Francisco, The Sparrow had been allowed to stretch out and experiment. But when Steppenwolf was created, I think Jerry and I had both come to the conclusion that the strong rhythmic element was what we really valued. Our philosophy was 'Hit 'em hard, make your point and move on.'"

Steppenwolf's aggressive image co-existed with a thoughtful lyrical stance that challenged mainstream values and counterculture platitudes alike. "That idea of speaking your mind in the lyrics is something I had picked up in the folk-music community, and from growing up in post-World War II Germany," Kay states. "We didn't see why you couldn't have music that worked on a gut level but still offered some food for thought."

The band's career momentum and musical progression continued with such best-selling albums as Steppenwolf The Second (which yielded another Top Five classic in "Magic Carpet Ride"), At Your Birthday Party (which spawned the Top Ten hit "Rock Me"), the ambitiously conceptual Monster (whose politically provocative title track became a surprise hit), Steppenwolf Live (which featured studio single "Hey Lawdy Mama"), Steppenwolf 7 and For Ladies Only. Along the way, various members came and went, with bassist Moreve leaving in late 1968; he was initially replaced by former Sparrow member Nick St. Nicholas, before being supplanted in early 1970 by George Biondo. Guitarist Monarch exited in 1969, replaced first by Larry Byrom and subsequently by Kent Henry.

"Steppenwolf was always kind of a work in progress," says Kay. "By our second album, we had become more confident in not having to mimic others in our attitude, in our look or in our music. We were really in uncharted territory to a great extent, because at the time there were very few models of how all this should work. You'd play some arena in Monroe, Louisiana, using the same public-address system that they used to announce basketball games, with no monitors. You'd spend a lot of time scratching your head thinking 'There's got to be a better way to do this.'"

Steppenwolf's popularity and influence continued unabated into the early 1970s. But, burned out from the endless album/tour grind, the quintet officially disbanded on Valentine's Day 1972, a day that L.A. Mayor Sam Yorty officially designated as "Steppenwolf Day." Kay then released a pair of critically acclaimed solo albums, Forgotten Songs and Unsung Heroes and My Sportin' Life, which found him exploring new musical and lyrical territory, with rewarding results.

Following Steppenwolf's highly successful 1974 European "farewell" tour, Kay reformed the band with Jerry Edmonton, Goldy McJohn, George Biondo and new guitarist Bobby Cochran. The group recorded three more albums-Slow Flux, which yielded the Top 20 hit "Straight Shootin' Woman," Hour of the Wolf and Skullduggery-for the Epic-distributed Mums label, before calling it a day once again in 1976. Kay then signed with Mercury Records and relaunched his solo career with 1978's well-received All In Good Time.

It was around this time that Kay learned that two of his former bandmates were touring with a bogus "Steppenwolf." The notion of the fake band playing low-rent club gigs-and tarnishing the legacy he'd spent nearly a decade building-aroused Kay's fighting spirit, motivating him and Steppenwolf co-founder Jerry Edmonton (who by then had retired from music in favor of a career in photography) to take steps to establish their legal claim to the band name.

In 1980 Kay launched an all-new lineup, now billed as John Kay and Steppenwolf, virtually starting from scratch to restore his band's good name. The new group spent the next several years working a punishing touring regimen, playing anywhere and everywhere it could to rebuild Steppenwolf's reputation as a class act.

"That was a real ego adjustment, and a real test-do you want to do this badly enough to rebuild this thing from the ground up?," Kay admits. "It was a tremendously humbling experience, grinding it out 20 weeks at a time, reconquering small chunks of real estate step by step. But it showed me that there were people out there who still felt a deep connection to Steppenwolf. By 1987 or thereabouts, we came up for air and looked around and saw what we'd accomplished. We didn't have any albums in the Top 40, but we had built this solid thing that was kind of like the Grateful Dead in miniature."

Indeed, the lengthy rebuilding period had put Kay and company back in touch with a large and loyal fan base-as well as an influx of younger listeners responsive to band's enduring appeal-that has kept Steppenwolf rolling ever since. Since then, John Kay and Steppenwolf-which now includes longtime members Michael Wilk (keyboards/bass) and Ron Hurst (drums) and relatively recent addition Danny Johnson (guitar)-have released seven albums and maintained a busy international touring schedule that keeps the band on the road for several months per year. The band also hosts Wolf Fest, an annual weekend-long festival that draws fans from around the world-fondly dubbed "the Wolfpack"-to the band's adopted home base in Tennessee.

In 1994, on the eve of Steppenwolf's 25th anniversary, Kay returned to the former East Germany for a triumphant series of Steppenwolf concerts; that trip reunited him with friends and relatives he had not seen since his early childhood. The same year, Kay published his autobiography, Magic Carpet Ride, which compellingly related the ups and downs and his and his band's history.

Today's Steppenwolf, operating without major-label financing, is the model of a successful cyber-age cottage industry. The band's self-contained operation incorporates an in-house 24-track digital recording studio, as well as an extensive website-http://www.steppenwolf.com - that serves as a cyber-clubhouse for fans around the world. The website also functions as an outlet for Steppenwolf music, allowing fans easy access to the group's recent work, as well as CD reissues of the entire Steppenwolf and John Kay album catalogue. The band continues to generate vital new music, with a number of recording projects in the works, including the recent John Kay solo effort, Heretics and Privateers.

Steppenwolf's dramatic and sometimes turbulent history recently became the subject of an episode of VH-1's documentary series Behind the Music. That much-talked-about broadcast underlined the band's ongoing stature and influence, but John Kay, now in his fourth decade with Steppenwolf, remains focused firmly on the future.

"There's a lot of truth in that old cliché about whatever doesn't kill you making you stronger," Kay concludes. "Looking back, I realize that it's the struggles that have taught us how to gain our independence and live the rock 'n' roll of life on our own terms.

Alice Cooper: The Alice Cooper story begins on February 4, 1948, in Detroit, Michigan, when Vincent Furnier, displaying the ear-splitting vocal calisthenics that would serve him well in the decades to come, came kicking and screaming into an unsuspecting world. After several years of living in the oppressive shadow of massive automobile factories, the family decided to change their environment by relocating to the desert ambience of Phoenix, Arizona.

This fortuitous move meant that Vincent would be fated to enroll at Cortez High School, where his naturally abundant supply of cheap wit landed him the opportunity to write for the school newspaper. "Get Outta My Hair," his wise-guy column, brought him the friendship of two fellow student journalists: soon-to-be lead and bass guitarists Glen Buxton and Dennis Dunaway.

As luck would have it, all three were looking for a way to score with the female Cortezians. And, hey, what better way to get to first base than by forming a rock `n' roll band, right? Not quite. Instead, Vince and Dennis decided to join the Cortez track team, of all things, whereupon their marathon running prowess made them instant varsity heroes.

This first exposure to fame was sufficient enough to embolden their self-confidence to the point where, along with fellow marathoner John Speer (on drums), Glen, and Glen's pal John Tatum (on lead guitar), they decided to don wigs and enter their lettermen's talent show as a Beatles parody. They even went so far as to hire several of the once-elusive Cortez beauties to scream for them from the foot of the stage during their mock performance. That little display of adulation, however bogus, was all it took to convince the future anarchists that this was the life for them.

So what if they didn't know how to play their instruments yet? Since when was musicianship a prerequisite of forming a rock 'n' roll band? They would learn. They were 16. They called themselves the Earwigs.

Michael Bruce, meanwhile, was making his own athletic mark as a member of Cortez's football team. An ace axe maniac, who liked nothing better than to run rampant over the frets as well as the turf, Michael was frustrated with his role as rhythm guitarist for a rival band called Our Gang. What he was looking for was music that better suited his more aggressive personality. He found it when he joined the 'Wigs, who were now calling themselves the Spiders.

With Michael replacing John Tatum, The Spiders began their evolution into a Stones/Yardbirds garage band, who were adept enough to actually record two singles--one of which, "Don't Blow Your Mind," was a big enough hit in Phoenix to establish the band as a minor attraction in the Southwest.

Fresh from this success, with high school now nothing but a memory (albeit a lasting one that would come back to haunt AM radio for months in 1972), The Spiders changed their name once again, this time to The Nazz (inspired by the Jeff Beck/Yardbirds classic "The Nazz Are Blue"), and began making treks to Hollywood to perform.

Like all up-and-coming bands, The Nazz suffered and starved for a long time. Their attempts to establish themselves on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles were offset by the reality of having to return back home to Phoenix from time to time in order to pay bills and ease severe ego deflation.

Despite their new surroundings and the somewhat encouraging fact that they were landing the occasional gig as the opening act for the likes of booze buddy Jim Morrison and The Doors, as well as The Yardbirds themselves (for whose audience they played nothing but Yardbirds covers), The Nazz had not yet even reached glorified bar-band status. Eventually, however, Hollywood became their new home.

By this time, due to creative differences, John Speer was replaced by Phoenix Camelback High alumnus Neal Smith. With Neal as their new drummer, the stage was now set for the unleashing of a phenomenally twisted and grandiosely incendiary rock 'n' roll assault on decency itself--a sharp, satiric bite from the dark side of life, the likes of which middle-class America had never seen before.

Still, there was one vital piece of the puzzle missing. When news from Philly arrived that a young whiz kid by the name of Todd Rundgren had the temerity to name his new band the Nazz, necessitating still yet another name change, that last piece finally fell into place. For little did Arizona's Nazz know that this time their new name would soon become universally synonymous with outrage, delinquency, and immorality on an international scale. It was 1968, and it was about time.

Just as there are a million stories in the Naked City, so are there at least as many theories as to how Vincent Furnier transmogrified into the legendary entity doomed to be revered and reviled the world over as Alice Cooper.

First and foremost of these is the story of what happened late one night while the group was visiting Dick Phillips (aka Dick Christian), their manager at the time. Phillips, a colorful character in his own right, had been urging the group to break out of their run-of-the-mill mold. That evening, just for laughs, his mother pulled out a Ouija board to do a reading. As soon as it began, however, the letter indicator began wildly skipping across the board, spelling out the name A-L-I-C-E C-O-O-P-E-R.

From that little incident, the boys concocted a tale that would only serve to enhance the Alice Cooper legend in the years to come: that Vince was the reincarnation of a young woman of the very same name--a woman who had been burned alive at the stake hundreds of years ago for being a witch!

Then again, Alice has been known to change his stories from time to time. . .

Sometimes he claims to have chosen the name because it had "a Baby-Jane/Lizzie-Borden-sweet-and-innocent-with-a-hatchet-behind-the-back kind of rhythm to it." At other times, he maintains: "Alice Cooper is such an all-American name. I loved the idea that when we first started, people used to think that Alice Cooper was a blonde folk singer. The name started simply as a spit in the face of society.

With a name like Alice Cooper, we could really make 'em suffer."

Regardless of which story you choose to believe, of far more importance is the fact that the word suffer doesn't even begin to describe the damaging, senses-shattering assault that these guys inflicted on the mores of common decency. The Alice Cooper manifesto was an unrelenting, rampant commitment to the wholesale slaughter of every civilized tenet known to society. They created a designed-to-shock dynasty of decadence by pushing the limits of both rock 'n' roll and theatricality. The Alice Cooper Group's relentless pursuit of a higher level of satirical sonic brutality took outrage to its inevitable extreme.

Keep in mind that, back in 1969, the only excuse a couple of rednecks needed to blow away Captain America and Billy at the end of Easy Rider was the fact that they both looked like a couple of hippies. Given how that was the climate across much of middle America at the time, it doesn't take a lot of imagination to see how well the spectacle of five tough lookin' cross-dressin' guys (one of 'em named Alice) with hair down to their waists, wearing mascara and jewelry--and grinding out a sonic exuberance of noise to boot--was likely to have gone down a full year earlier.

And just how they didn't end up with their brains shotgunned across some steaming macadam in one of the Southern towns they were so fond of invading is anyone's guess.

Which isn't to say that the reaction in Los Angeles was any more open-minded. By now, the group was performing an alarming Dadaist din that gained them the reputation of, in Alice's words, "the most hated group in Los Angeles." No less a connoisseur of chaos than Frank Zappa deemed the group's auditory abrasiveness to be so sufficiently twisted that it deserved a spot on his new record label, Straight, alongside such esteemed label mates as The GTO's and Wild Man Fischer.

How corrosive was the Alice Cooper Group? Just ask any of the Los Angeles audience who were inside the Cheetah Club the night Alice Cooper took the stage as the first act to perform as part of a memorial concert in honor of haunted monologist Lenny Bruce.

All it took was a couple of songs before the throng, almost as one, stood up and headed for the door in disgust. When the feathers had settled from the group's onstage pillow fight, there were only four people left. Alongside two of The GTO's and Zappa was an aspiring entrepreneur who was more than impressed by what he saw. Shep Gordon realized that any group capable of evoking so negative a reaction that it could clear a room of 2000 people in the space of a few songs was not only a force to be reckoned with but also a group destined for truly great things.

Consequently, along with Joe Greenberg (his partner at the time), Shep introduced himself to the group and offered to become their manager. When he promised them that he wouldn't give up hustling on their behalf until they were all millionaires, the fact that he knew absolutely nothing whatsoever about how to manage a rock group didn't matter.

He knew enough.

Just as the Coopers bucked tradition by being unconventional musicians, so was Shep an equally unconventional manager. Together they forever altered the dynamics of the traditional manager/artist relationship by reinventing the rules of how to generate outrage and create spectacle. Simply put, they were blissfully ignorant of the customary constraints the music business had placed in their way.

You are the only censor. If you don't like what I say, you have a choice. You can turn me off. That was the message heard at the beginning of the final track on Easy Action, the group's second recording for Straight. It was a sage piece of advice that the majority of record buyers across North America had already taken Alice Cooper up on. They stayed away from it--as well as their debut Straight release, Pretties For You--in droves.

Part of the reason was because both albums were too freakishly experimental and just plain weird to wade through. Some numbers, such as "Living," "Reflected," "Levity Ball," and "Return Of The Spiders," exhibited more than adequate proof of the group's songwriting potential. Others, however, had far too many key and tempo changes, which were beyond the audience's tolerance at the time.

Under the watchful eye of Zappa, the group, relying on its own ornate, twisted, and highly unconventional arrangements, self-produced their first album. And while it's true that Neil Young producer David Briggs managed to marginally improve the sound of their second album, there nevertheless was something else that was being lost in the translation from studio to stereo: the purity of the group's vision. Shep began looking for the right producer--someone who would be enthusiastic enough about the group to allow their ideas room to breathe, but tough enough to be able to nurture their strong points.

Kiss: Following the demise of Wicked Lester, Kiss were formed in 1972 by Paul Stanley (b. Paul Eisen, 20 January 1950, Queens, New York, USA; rhythm guitar, vocals) and Gene Simmons (b. Chaim Witz, 25 August 1949, Haifa, Israel; bass, vocals), who went on to recruit Peter Criss (b. Peter Crisscoula, 27 December 1947, Brooklyn, New York, USA; drums, vocals) and Ace Frehley (b. Paul Frehley, 22 April 1951, Bronx, New York, USA; lead guitar, vocals). At their second show at the Hotel Diplomat, Manhattan, in 1973, Flipside producer Bill Aucoin offered the band a management contract, and within two weeks they were signed to Neil Bogart's recently established Casablanca Records. In just over a year, Kiss had released their first three albums with a modicum of success.

In the summer of 1975 their fortunes changed with the release of Alive! , which spawned their first US hit single, with the reissued live version of 'Rock And Roll All Nite' climbing to number 12 in November. The appeal of Kiss has always been based on their live shows: the garish greasepaint make-up, outrageous costumes and pyrotechnic stage effects, along with their hard-rocking anthems, combined to create what was billed as 'The Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Show On Earth'. Their live reputation engendered a dramatic upsurge in record sales, and Alive became their first certified platinum album in the USA. Destroyer proved just as successful, and also gave them their first US Top 10 single, earning Peter Criss a major songwriting award for the uncharacteristic ballad, 'Beth'.

Subsequent releases, Rock And Roll Over , Love Gun and Alive II , each certified platinum, confirmed the arrival of Kiss as major recording artists. By 1977 Kiss had topped the prestigious Gallup poll as the most popular act in the USA. They had become a marketing dream: Kiss merchandise included make-up kits, masks, board games, and pinball machines. Marvel Comics produced two super-hero cartoon books, and a full-length science-fiction film, Kiss Meet The Phantom Of The Park, was even produced. The ranks of their fan club, the Kiss Army, had swollen to a six-figure number.

In September 1978, all four group members released solo albums on the same day, a feat never before envisaged, let alone matched. At the time, this represented the biggest shipment of albums from one 'unit' to record stores in the history of recorded music. The albums enjoyed varying degrees of success; Ace Frehley's record came out on top and included the US Top 20 hit single, 'New York Groove'. Gene Simmons, whose album featured an impressive line-up of guests including Cher , Donna Summer , Bob Seger and Janis Ian , had a hit single in the UK with 'Radioactive', which reached number 41 in 1978. After the release of Dynasty in 1979, which featured the worldwide hit single, 'I Was Made For Lovin' You', cracks appeared in the ranks.

Peter Criss left to be replaced by session player Anton Fig, who had previously appeared on Frehley's solo album. Fig played drums on the 1980 release Unmasked until a permanent replacement was found in the form of New Yorker Eric Carr (b. 12 July 1950, d. 24 November 1991), who made his first appearance during the world tour of 1980. A fuller introduction came on Music From The Elder , an album that represented a radical departure from traditional Kiss music and included several ballads, an orchestra and a choir. It was a brave attempt to break new ground but failed to capture the imagination of the record-buying public. Frehley, increasingly disenchanted with the musical direction of the band, finally left in December 1982. The two albums prior to his departure had featured outside musicians.

Bruce Kulick, who had contributed to the studio side of Alive II and played on Stanley's solo album, supplied the lead work to the four previously unreleased tracks on the Killers compilation of 1982, and Vincent Cusano (later to become Vinnie Vincent ) was responsible for lead guitar on the 1982 release, Creatures Of The Night . By 1983 the popularity of the band was waning and drastic measures were called for. The legendary make-up that had concealed their true identities for almost 10 years was removed on MTV in the USA. Vinnie Vincent made his first official appearance on Lick It Up , an album that provided Kiss with their first Top 10 hit in the UK. The resurgence of the band continued with Animalize.

Vincent had been replaced by Mark St. John (b. Mark Norton), a seasoned session player and guitar tutor. His association with the band was short-lived, however, as he was struck down by Reiters Syndrome. Bruce Kulick was enlisted as a temporary replacement on the 1984 European Tour, and subsequently became a permanent member when it became apparent that St. John would not be able to continue as a band member. Further commercial success was achieved with Asylum and Crazy Nights , the latter featuring their biggest UK hit single, 'Crazy Crazy Nights', which peaked at number 4 in October 1987 and was soon followed by another Top 40 hit single, 'Reason To Live'.

Hot In The Shade succeeded their third compilation album, Smashes, Thrashes And Hits , and included another US hit single, 'Forever', which reached number 8 in February 1990. Work on a new Kiss album with producer Bob Ezrin was delayed following Eric Carr's illness due to complications from cancer. He died on 24 November 1991, in New York, at the age of 41. Despite this setback, Kiss contributed a hit cover version of Argent 's classic 'God Gave Rock 'N' Roll To You II' (UK number 4, January 1992) to the soundtrack of the film Bill And Ted's Bogus Journey, and brought in replacement drummer Eric Singer (ex- Black Sabbath ; Badlands ). The album Revenge also provided them with their highest charting US album (number 4), and their first Top 10 release since Dynasty reached number 9 in 1979.

The Kiss My Ass tribute album was released in 1994, with contributions from Lenny Kravitz , Stevie Wonder , Garth Brooks , Lemonheads , Faith No More , Dinosaur Jr, Rage Against The Machine and others. The interest in Kiss My Ass led to a historic reunion for MTV Unplugged . A stable unit with Bruce Kulick (guitar) and Eric Singer (drums), together with Simmons and Stanley, appeared to be on the cards, but Frehley and Criss returned for a reunion tour. So successful was the tour that Kulick and Singer were naturally somewhat annoyed and both quit. Their irritation was further exacerbated by the fact that a new studio album, Carnival Of Souls , featured both of them. In 1997 Vincent sued the band, alleging that they owed him royalties.

A year later Psycho Circus marked the return of the original line-up to the studio, and became the group's highest charting US album when it debuted at number 3 in October. With a history spanning three decades, Kiss' impact on the consciousness of a generation of music fans, particularly in the USA, remains enormous.

Pink Floyd: In 1964, three friends; George Roger Waters (guitar), Richard Wright (keyboards), & Nick Mason (drums) (all students at the Regent Street School Of Polytechnics), formed a band called Sigma 6. Unsuccessful to get famous, The band changed their name to The T-Sets. Later in middle 1965, the band became The Abdads, with new members Clive Metcalf on bass guitar, and Keith Nobles and Juliette Gale on backup vocals. The band changed their name to both The Screaming Abdads, and The Architectural Abdabs. In 1966, Julliette Gale married Rick Wright and The Abdabs broke up.

Later that year George legally changed his name to Roger. In Autumn 1966, the band became Sigma 6 again, Roger switched to bass guitar, and they recruited 2 guitar players; Bob Close and Roger Syd Barret. Before long they changed their name to The Pink Floyd Sound.

Later that year, Bob Close left the band. The band finally had a chance to record their first single, Arnold Layne, a song about a crazy transvestite who steals women's clothes. Before long, they dropped the words "The" and "Sound" in the name and made their first album, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn. The studio rented out to make the album, was right down the hall from where The Beatles were recording Sgt. Peppers, so the band got to know The Beatles very well.

The band had a subsequent tour scheduled for the U.S.A., but Syd got very sick from being blasted on LSD (better know as acid). His LSD addiction helped his imagination to write songs, but around the time of A Saucerful Of Secrets, his drug habits were out of control.

By the end of 1967, Syd was becoming to spaced out for his writings. The band considered getting a replacement for Syd. They recruited David Gilmour, an old friend of Roger and Syd's. Syd got guitar lessons from David in Grammar and High School.

David was recruited to cover for Syd on stage. If Syd were to make a mistake, David would fill the gap, and fix it. That didn't work out. David would cover for Syd on stage while Syd stayed behind stage and wrote songs. That didn't work out.

The band tried as hard as they could to keep Syd in the band, but his acid addiction took control of him and he went crazy. The band finally decided to kick out Syd. Syd wanted to see their show that night but they didn't pick him up. Goodbye Syd Barret. He was institutionalized for drug abuse in 1974.

In 1968, the band continued on without Syd. This was a major tragedy in England, but not in America. Another major tragedy was when David Gilmour's Telecaster was stolen in Chicago. Later that year, the band played a gig in France, and one of the attendees of the show was famous French hippie movie director, Barbet Schroder. He asked Pink Floyd to do the soundtrack to his next picture, More, which would come out in 1969. The band also had an unreleased rock opera the played on-stage, called The Man and The Journey, which they took 3 songs from for the More Soundtrack; Sleep/Nightmare (which would become Cymbaline), Green Is The Colour, and Death (which both parts of the song became both Main Theme and Dramatic Sequence).

The album and movie would be a success in Europe and Britian. The band retired The Man and The Journey before being recorded, but used one song from the album called The Narrow Way. Barbet Schroder would ask the band to do another soundtrack for another movie in 1972 called La Vallee, known in America and Britian as The Valley Obscured By Clouds.

In late 1969, Pink Floyd released a Double Album called Ummagumma. The first disc consisted of live tracks from various live performances in 1969. The second disc consisted of solo studio tracks by each member of the band.

In early 1970, Pink Floyd released their newest album Atom Heart Mother, with an orchestra playing on the 23-minute-plus title track. The band toured extensively with the orchestra supporting the album.

In early 1971, Pink Floyd's executive producer Joe Boyd, made a compilation album of both released and unreleased material from Pink Floyd's past. It was called Relics. While this was going on, Pink Floyd was in the middle of making their new album Meddle with another 23-minute-plus song called Echoes.

In early 1972, Pink Floyd was asked again to do another soundtrack for a movie called La Vallee or The Valley Obscured By Clouds, hence the name Obscured By Clouds came about.

After Obscured by Clouds was finshed, Pink Floyd took a plane to Rome, where they took a bus to Pompeii, one of the 2 cities destroyed by Mount Vesuvius 2000 years ago. There they filmed a private concert, playing some of their best material. The video was called Live At Pompeii, which also included footage behind the making of the album of their new opus.

During the time that Floyd was making Obscured By Clouds, they had written a 45-minute opus of songs that they played live. This opus was called Eclipse. It was mainly focused on society and how it alienates, controls, and destroys daily life. The original name for the opus was supposed to be Dark Side Of The Moon, but the British Blues band Medicine Head released an album the previous year of the same name. So they let the name go, until they heard that the Medicine Head album flopped on Billboard charts, so they revamped the name Dark Side Of The Moon and also wrote an end song for the opus which was called Eclipse. They turned their opus into an album in 1973, called Dark Side Of The Moon. It is the second highest selling rock record in history, compared to Michael Jackson's Thriller.

To follow up their success to Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd made Wish You Were Here. The album was dedicated to original lyricist and guitar player Syd Barret. During late recording of the album, Syd actually showed up to congratulate them on their success with Dark Side Of The Moon, although at first they didn't recognize him because he had gained alot of weight. During that tour they wrote yet another opus, but this one was mostly instrumental. This opus turned out to be Shine On You Crazy Diamond. It was split into 2 halves because it was too long to fit on one side of the record. During this tour Pink Floyd performed Dark Side Of The Moon in it's entirety again.

After the success of Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd took off for a year and a half to make a new album. This album was based on the aristocratic and communist lifestyles in the world. Each type of person was loosely based on an animal. And this album became Animals. Dogs were the creepy rulers of industry, Pigs were the communist tyrants, Sheep were the common folk, always being brainlessly led by the Dogs and Pigs, and Pigs On The Wing was a love song that Roger wrote to his new wife, Carolyn, the niece of the Duke of York. For the tour the band recruited Dick Parry for saxophone and Snowy black on rhythm guitar. On July 6th, 1977 in Montreal, Quebec, the last show of the Animals tour, a fan was screaming relentlessy and climbing his way up towards the stage. Roger spit on him to show disgustment. After the show, Roger felt bad about this, and escaped back to his hotel room and started writing new music, about how much he and the audience have come apart.

In late 1978, Pink Floyd met together to discuss new projects, after David and Rick made solo albums. Roger presented 2 projects in demo form. The first project was rejected, that project turned out to be, Roger Waters' solo album, The Pros and Cons of Hitch-hiking. But the second project was taken, that project was The Wall. Roger had enough songs for 3 discs, but he had to get rid of a bunch of songs. November 30, 1979, The Wall is released in the UK, and the fans love it. December 5, 1979, The Wall is released in the US, and again, the fans love itt. For the tour they recruit Andy Bown on 2nd Bass Guitar, Snowy black on Rhythm Guitar in 1980, Andy Roberts on Rhythm Guitar in 1981, Peter Woods on Keyboards, Richard Wright on Keyboards, and Jon Joyce, Stan Farber, Jim Haas, & Joe Chemay on Backing Vocals.

February 26th, 1980, Pink Floyd premiers The Wall Tour in Nassau Coliseum, on Long Island New York. October 1980, Pink Floyd premiers The Wall Tour in Earl's Court in London. January 1981, Pink Floyd plays The Wall in Los Angeles. April 1981, Pink Floyd Plays The Wall Show 4 times in Westfallenhalle in Dortmund, Germany. August 1981, Pink Floyd plays The Wall at Earl's Court London again, and their tour is over by September.

In 1982, Rick Wright left the band for good. Pink Floyd recuited new Keyboard Players for a new project called, Spare Bricks, A Collection Of Unrealeased Songs intended for The Wall but were scratched. The new Keyboard Players were Michael Kamen on Piano, and Harmonium, and Andy Bown on organ, and synthesizer.

Roger had plans to tour for the new album in November 1983, but because of tensions between each member, Roger cancelled those plans, and changed the name of the album to The Final Cut, which it probably would be if David and Nick left, but they didn't.

In 1984, the band went their own seperate ways, Rick Wright made a solo project with Dave Harris called Zee-Identity, David Gilmour made a new solo album called About Face, and Roger Waters made The Pros and Cons Of Hitch-hiking. In 1986, David Gilmour talked to Nick Mason about getting the band back together. This caused a major law suit. Roger Waters, sued David and Nick for the rights to the music, and the band name itself. Roger lost the case because Pink Floyd was never anything put into writing, but Roger was given the rights to perform Pink Floyd music at his concerts and was given ownership of The Wall and The Final Cut.

In later 1986, Dave and Nick set out to make the new album, A Momentary Lapse Of Reason. They recruited an array of Musicians for the album like King Crimson's Bass Player Tony Levin, Roxy Music's Guitar Player Phil Manzenara, Vanilla Fudge's drummer Carmine Appice, Richard Wright on Keyboards and about 20 others. They took off for the road, in later 1987 under the name Pink Floyd. They recruited Gary Wallis for Drums and Percussion, Guy Pratt on bass guitar, Jon Carin on keyboards, Tim Renwick on Guitar, and the "cre`me de la cre`me" of the show, the return of Richard Wright. The 3-Year Tour concluded in August 1990, when Pink Floyd played at The Knebworth Festival.

The Band took a 3 year Hiatus from Touring and Recording in 1990.

Pink Floyd started recording in 1993 for their new album, The Division Bell. Richard Wright was finally back fully with the band. The band toured for 6 months. The Tour Ended after a series of 12 shows at Earl's Court London, and during their tour of Europe, David Gilmour married his girlfriend Polly Samson. For this tour they did something they hadn't done in about 20 years, they played Dark Side Of The Moon in it's entirety.

Pink Floyd released a live album and video on their Division Bell tour, both featured with live Dark Side Of The Moon. The band was successful once more.

In 1996, Pink Floyd was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame. Gilmour, Wright, and Mason performed Wish You Were Here with Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins. Floyd has done no concerts since then, but made a new live album in 2000. The band made this live album from many different recordings from The Wall Shows of 1980 and 1981 in London's Earls Court and Los Angeles, with Roger Waters. Roger Waters toured in 1999 & 2000, he made a new live album called In The Flesh.

In Late 2001, Pink Floyd including Roger Waters and Syd Barrett, with producer James Guthrie, made a new compilation album called Echoes. Although Floyd never did well with Compilations or greatest hits albums, this album was remastered as one continuous song like Dark Side Of The Moon, and did well in the charts.

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