Tweet your most random music fact.

— Bev Gooden (@bevtgooden) December 24, 2019

This is too long for a tweet so I’ll put it here.

Well, I looked it up in Ritchie Yorke’s Led Zeppelin: The Definitive Biography. There is this quote from Jimmy Page:

“We were sitting there kicking around group names and I suddenly remembered a name Keith Moon had come up with some months earlier. This goes right back to the days when Simon Napier-Bell, who was managing the Yardies, was trying to get solo discs from each member. Jeff Beck and I were collaborating and in those days with these solo diversions it seemed we should use other musicians. So there was Keith Moon, John Paul Jones, Nicky Hopkins on piano, myslef on twelve-string guitar and Jeff. We were doing ‘Beck’s Bolero’. After that session Keith Moon was really fired up - and I don’t blame him - and he said, ‘We must get a band together - how about it?’ He was fed up with The Who at the time, and he wanted to take the Ox - John Entwhistle - with him, with Jeff, myself, and all the rest of us. It didn’t happen because we couldn’t find the right vocalist. But Keith’s name for the band, Led Zeppelin, stuck in my mind.’ (p. 69).

“That’s the official version of events. However, John Entwhistle, bass player with The Who and a budding solo star in his own right, swears that he thought up the name. ‘There were several occasions during The Who’s career when both Keith Moon and myself were going to leave the band,’ Entwhistle claimed. ‘Once when we were in New York, I sat down with Keith and our chauffeur at the time, a guy called Richard Cole, and tried to come up with possible names for the new band we planned to form. That’s when I flashed on Led Zeppelin. I also came up with the idea for a first album jacket with a Zeppelin going down in flames. The reasons behind it are quite simple. In those days it was a favourite line among British rock bands. ‘How did you go?’ one group asked another, ‘Cor, we went down like a lead zeppelin,’ they would reply. Not long afterwards, the chauffeur Richard Cole went to work for Jimmy Page and Peter Grant and he must have told them the idea. But I was definitely the one who first thought of it. Later on Keith Moon claimed that he came up with it, which made me very angry. When I heard that Jimmy Page was going to use it, I was a bit pissed off about it. Later on, I didn’t care that much: after all they became an institution.’ (Ibid., p. 70).