Michael Lee, drummer with Led Zeppelin
Michael Lee was one of several drummers who
played with former members of Led Zeppelin and attempted to fill the
considerable shoes of the band’s original drummer, John Bonham.
The band broke up after the
drummer’s death in 1980 and when they re-formed in 2007 for a
one-off reunion concert, it was Bonham’s son Jason who took the drum
stool. But Lee played drums on record and on tour with the band’s
frontmen, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, in the 1990s. With his
unusually loud and driving style, he reproduced many of Bonham’s
best-known drum solos from tracks such as
Whole Lotta Love
and Rock’n’Roll.
He was born Michael Gary
Pearson in 1969. He came to prominence in his late teens when he
joined the Yorkshire-based hard rockers Little Angel in 1988. He
appeared on their albums Don’t Prey for
Me (1989) and
Young Gods (1991)
but was sacked when his bandmates discovered he had auditioned for
the Cult without telling them.
In the event his dismissal
was irrelevant for he passed the audition and landed the gig with
the Cult, joining the heavy metal band for its
Ceremonial Stomp
tour of Europe and North America in 1991-92. He left when Plant
invited him to drum on his 1993 album,
Fate of Nations.
He also backed the former Led Zeppelin singer on a
world tour of the same name, taking particular pleasure in
re-creating Bonham’s legendary crash-and-bash on the old Zeppelin
numbers which Plant was forced, somewhat against his better
judgement, to include in his set as crowd-pleasers.
With rumours growing of a Led Zeppelin reunion, in
1994 fans finally got at least part of what they had long been
demanding. It was not quite the full band reformation they had
hoped, because the former bassist John Paul Jones was not invited to
the party. But for the first time since Led Zeppelin’s demise 14
years earlier, Plant and the guitarist Jimmy Page worked together on
a full-time project.
Lee was invited to back them
on the Page and Plant album No Quarter,
a collection of radically rearranged versions of old Led Zeppelin
songs, which they also performed and filmed for MTV’s
Unplugged series.
Lee also joined the former Zeppelin duo on a 115-date world tour
which took up much of 1995, visiting 19 countries, with a set list
that contained no fewer than 34 Led Zeppelin songs.
The reunion went well enough
for Page and Plant — still without John Paul Jones — to record the
1997 album Walking into Clarksdale,
their first full collection of new songs together since 1980. Lee
remained a core member of the band, so much so that he was credited
as a co-writer on all 13 songs. The album won a Grammy for best hard
rock performance of the year — ironically, it was an award that Led
Zeppelin had never won.
Lee spent much of 1998
playing with them on the Walking into
Everywhere world tour but by the end of
the year Plant had tired of reliving former glories and pulled out
of further collaborations with Page.
For a while Lee continued to play with Page until
the guitarist, frustrated at being unceremoniously abandoned by
Plant, took off in 1999 on a tour of America backed by the Black
Crowes.
Lee returned to playing sessions with such outfits
as Echo & the Bunnymen and the re-formed Thin Lizzy, but was passed
over when Led Zeppelin emotionally re-formed to play the O2 in
London in December 2007.
Michael Lee, drummer, was
born on November 19, 1969. He died of unknown causes on November 25,
2008, aged 39