From something I saw on the internet, so it must be true.
Led Zeppelin is the greatest rock band ever. I will not debate this.
"It wasn’t easy to get John Bonham on board to join Led Zeppelin. The drummer hadn’t had a major break yet, but his powerful style was already getting him noticed in the British rock scene. When Jimmy Page and manager Peter Grant approached Bonham with the offer to join their new group, Bonham already had a proposal from Joe Cocker on the table. “I got so enthusiastic that I hitched back to Oxford and chased after John, got him to one side at a gig and said, ‘Look mate, you’ve got to join The Yardbirds,’” Robert Plant recalled in Led Zeppelin in Their Own Words after finding out Page and Grant were after his Band of Joy bandmate. “He wasn’t easily convinced,” Plant continued. “He said, ‘Well I’m all right here, aren’t I?’ He’d never earned the sort of bread he was getting with Tim Rose. So I had to try and persuade him.” “I had suggested to Jimmy Page that the drummer that he’d lined up was just nowhere near the dynamism of — John Bonham was a totally different thing altogether,” Plant later told Rolling Stone. As it turned out, Bonham had another voice in his ear trying to keep him from joining Led Zeppelin: his wife Pat. “And so once John’s wife finally gave him permission to come to a rehearsal — because Pat always said, ‘Keep away from Plant, because you’re just going to end up broke and in trouble,’ — so when the two of us drove down to London in John’s mum’s van, which we borrowed, in that room … I knew that I was in a room full of giants, really, and that was it,” Plant recalled. Bonham didn’t have to immediately accept or decline the offer – he still had a spot in Tim Rose’s band on hold for him. But Page had a contractual obligation to bring The New Yardbirds to Scandinavia in September of 1968. The band’s first time playing together was in August, so a decision had to be made. In the end, Bonham decided to forgo his spot in Rose’s band and decline the offer from Cocker, deciding that he enjoyed the music being made by Zeppelin more. After the New Yardbirds tour, the band settled on their own moniker, Led Zeppelin. A speedy singing to Atlantic Records (largely based on Page’s previous success with The Yardbirds) gave Led Zeppelin a quick influx of cash and the green light to record their first studio album. Pat Bonham would eventually get her own dedicated drum solo from John, ‘Pat’s Delight’, even though she initially tried to steer him away from the group."