Lyrics for Led Zeppelin Presence Royal Orleans (revised)
The lyrics came from the song book Led Zeppelin Presence Off The Record (ISBN 1-85909-253-5) Order Ref 2912A, isolated voice track and band member comments.
I have done the best I can to verify the lyrics are correct and I realize some will disagree so it is what it is.
In the song, Plant hints that a member of Led Zeppelin had a sexual encounter with someone they thought was a woman but who was actually a drag queen, although he never directly addresses John Paul Jones, who supposedly experienced the event. Yet, the bassist insisted that the events that were established in the song were all false. In fact, Jones did spend the night in a hotel room with a drag queen named Stephanie, whom he considered a buddy. Jones, however, was not fooled by Plant’s poetic invention that she was a mystery to him.
At least one thing Robert Plant got right regarding the night John Paul Jones and his crew spent in New Orleans is that Jones and Stephanie did go to sleep in Jones’ hotel room at The Royal Orleans after a fun evening on Bourbon Street. Jones was smoking a joint when he slept off; when the bassist and the drag queen awoke, the place was on fire.
“I fell asleep and set fire to the hotel room, as you do, haha … And when I woke up it was full of firemen!” Jones said. He also explained that he and Stephanie were both safe from harm during the fire.
As Plant sings his story about “a man I know [who] went down to Louisiana,” he mixes in references to both parts of the story. When he mentions “John Cameron,” that was the name of a rival of Jones’ from his session days in London.
14 окт 2023
