Robert Plant: A Life (16 page)

This sense of ease also allowed for slighter, airier fare, like “Dancing Days” and “D’yer Mak’er,” the latter’s title coming from an unfunny joke about Jamaica, the song itself more palatable than Led Zeppelin doing cod-reggae should have been. Far less appealing was “The Crunge,” a horrible homage to Otis Redding that failed gracelessly to locate a loose-limbed funk groove.

The record was given a lavish cover, designer Aubrey Powell being dispatched to the north coast of Northern Ireland to photograph cherubic infants scaling the Giant’s Causeway, a vast natural rock formation. According to the writer Mick Wall, when Powell informed Grant such a shoot would be expensive, Zeppelin’s manager fired back: “Money? We don’t care about money. Just fucking do it.”

Houses of the Holy
, as expected, raced to Number One in the U.S. and the U.K. Yet good as it was, it was not the all-conquering monster their fourth record had been and it fell off the charts before the end of the summer. In this regard Zeppelin’s thunder was stolen that year by another British rock band, Pink Floyd, their grandiose concept album
The Dark Side of the Moon
appearing the same month.

The reviews were also poisonous. Writing in
Rolling Stone
, Gordon Fletcher described
Houses of the Holy
as “one of the dullest and most confusing records that I’ve heard this year.” In response, Grant appointed the band a U.S. PR, twenty-two-year-old Danny Goldberg, a teetotal vegetarian. Goldberg worked for an upmarket New York agency, Solters, Roskin & Sabinson, which also handled the affairs of Frank Sinatra and
Playboy
magazine, and was briefed to improve the band’s standing among American commentators.

His first route to doing so was to emphasise the scale of their achievements. He sent out a press release describing the band’s forthcoming tour as “the biggest and most profitable in the history of the United States.” He found an instant ally in Plant, even now wanting to impress his success upon his father, still then convinced his son ought to get a “proper job.”

When it began that May the sheer size of the tour was self-evident. The opening night at Atlanta Stadium drew a crowd of 40,000, earning $246,000 in ticket sales. At the next show at Tampa Stadium Zeppelin set a new attendance record of 56,800. The production itself was grander—the band utilising louder PA systems, mirror balls and a battery of lasers. And Grant had forked out $30,000 to charter them a private plane, a Boeing 720, stocked with a bar, a bedroom and an organ for Jones to entertain them on. It was christened “the Starship.”

“Oh God, that tour was the biggest I’ve done,” says Cole. “It was intoxicating. I mean the band was enormous. The plane? Well, it was very luxurious but it was still about going to work. The band would get on it and have a few drinks. Coming back, they’d discuss the gig. Then they’d get off and get in the waiting cars and decide where they were going for the evening.”

Or, as Page told the writer Brad Tolinski, “Richard Cole ran into one of the air hostesses recently and she said to him, ‘You know, I made a lot of money off you guys.’ When people on the plane used to sniff cocaine, they’d roll up $100 bills to use as straws. Then, after they were high or passed out, they’d forget about the money. That might’ve been true, but I’ll tell you one thing: they never got any of my money.”

Presiding over the whole enterprise was Grant. He had made it his job both to seal the band off in their own bubble and to get them every penny they were owed. The bigger they got, the more forceful he became in enforcing each aspect.

“Everybody was shit-scared of ‘G,’ ” says Benji LeFevre. “But it must have been a very difficult period. Peter’s whole philosophy was to change the music industry from the promoters making all the money to the artists doing so—and then paying the promoters a fair share. All these guys were Mafiosi. There was only Bill Graham striking out on his own and going, ‘This is for the people, man!’ Peter must have encountered incredible resistance and probably violence.

“Plus when you work for someone who used to be a wrestler you’ve got to understand that physical intimidation is one of the responses in your arsenal. Especially in a country where people are allowed to carry guns. It’s a different order of watching your back, even though the band had security guards who were all off-duty FBI guys.

“Richard Cole was there to be Peter’s assistant and to make sure that nobody touched anybody. And a lot of dodgy things happened. But Richard had no capacity to make any decisions—that was Peter. And probably Peter and Jimmy, and then the rest of them, in that order.”

The shows themselves were electric. As a band they were riding high on the crest of a wave, on-stage revelling in their own glory. Audience reactions were wild, hysterical. I once asked Plant and Page how it felt, right then, to be in command of all that power.

“It was a question of communication between band and audience,” Page replied. “You sent it out and they sent so much back, and it just kept building. That’s how you made it into an event.”

“We needed a physical thing—a catalyst between the band and the audience,” Plant added. “A sense of power? We didn’t have it. It was just up there somewhere,” he said, waving his arms above his head.

The band invited their friend Roy Harper along to open the shows. Harper found himself attempting to quieten baying hordes with his lone voice and an acoustic guitar.

“It was like walking into the lion’s den,” he says. “I was in front of 50,000 people by myself. I remember being on stage at the Kezar Stadium in San Francisco. At the back, it was almost Falstaffian, debauched. At the front, there was a man who was completely stark bollock naked, except for the fact he was painted green and his pubes were scarlet. There’s no way of communicating with that many people, who were that out of it, in one place.”

For all the triumph of their shows, something rotten had begun to fester at the band’s core. The buccaneering spirit with which they had first caroused around America had turned meaner and more avaricious. Most often this change was embodied in Bonham, to whose roistering and acts of destruction there was now, often as not, a savage intensity.

The journalist Nick Kent recalled being in a club one night and seeing Bonham and Cole beat a guy to a pulp. There was no apparent reason for this and as they left the two of them tossed handfuls of dollars onto their prone victim.

“It makes me feel sick when I hear Robert Plant talking about what a great geezer Bonzo was,” Kent wrote. “Because the guy was a schizophrenic animal, he was like something out of
Straw Dogs
.”

Page, too, had started to withdraw into his own twilit world. Long before tragedy stained the band for him, it was this turn of events that sowed the seeds of discontent in Plant.

In
Hammer of the Gods
, his notorious biography of the band, the American music writer Stephen Davis purported to have lifted the lid on the crazed world Zeppelin inhabited on the road. Published in 1985, the book portrayed each of the band members as indulging in a non-stop orgy of excess and violence, with no fear of reprisal or thought for the consequences. Plant, Page and Jones were each at pains to distance themselves from Davis’s book as soon as it emerged, claiming it was wildly inaccurate and that the writer had known nothing about the band. Plant in particular was dismissive of it, suggesting Cole had been the source of most of the more outlandish stories in the book and that he had greatly exaggerated them.

“He [Cole] had a problem which could easily have been solved if he had been given something intelligent to do rather than checking into hotels, and I think it embittered him greatly,” Plant told Mat Snow of the
NME
in 1985. “A lot of the time he wasn’t completely well, and his view of things was permanently distorted one way or another.”

Plant maintained that many of Zeppelin’s extracurricular activities amounted to nothing more than youthful high jinks. This might have been true of their earlier tours, but there is no doubting the destructive turn things took the more omnipotent-seeming they became. Bonham was usually the central figure in this, with Cole and assorted hangers-on joining in or egging him on to carnage. Yet whereas Jones vanished himself at such times, Plant was frequently present, although more so as a voyeur than a participant, disapproving of the most extreme goings-on but remaining on the scene.

Revelling in his role as Zeppelin’s frontman he was hardly a shrinking violet, and he certainly did not abstain from the sex and drugs part of the rock ’n’ roll equation. But Plant also held to a set of values that were those of a peace-and-love-abiding hippy, and he grew increasingly weary of the darker forces that rose up in and around the band. These had very much taken root by the time of the American tour of 1973.

“That tour was crazy, absolutely crazy,” says Roy Harper. “Episodes going on backstage that weren’t always that kosher. The under-the-surface tensions, shall we say. I’m not going to tell any kind of story but it was actually deathly. It probably happens with a lot of bands, though not on that scale.

“Bonzo, though he was a friend of Robert’s, his high jinks were extreme. Although he wasn’t actually that violent a person, he was capable of being a rough boy. There were times when there was gay abandon in circumstances that others would have thought were close to the edge. More than once, Richard Cole gave me his watch and said, ‘Hold that for a minute.’ That’s the kind of world they inhabited and Robert detested it, I know he did. I think that’s one of the reasons why, after the fact, he never wanted to be involved with Zeppelin.

“Yet Robert would be in the middle of it, hating it, whereas John Paul Jones wouldn’t be seen at all. John Paul slept on a different floor to the rest of them at the hotels and so did Peter Grant. The others were all culpable because they were party to what was going on. In those days Robert was a peacemaker. He would make the way he was feeling obvious. You’d only have to look at his face to know it wasn’t what he wanted for himself, the band or the humanity surrounding them. There is an innate good person in him.”

Which is not to say that Plant did not have his own particular weakness. His was being an inveterate womanizer. Later on Danny Goldberg suggested he had never met anyone who relished being a rock star quite as much as Plant did.

“Where Robert used to come undone a lot was in his dalliances with the opposite sex,” says Harper. “It was kind of taking what you could. Though the thing is, he had so much opportunity and he didn’t take as often as he might have done. He was reluctant to let himself down in any capacity—even the one he was drawn to the most. He expressed guilt, yes. He was brought up a Roman Catholic.”

Benji LeFevre takes a rather different view: “Internally, I think Robert’s a very gentle, loyal and caring person, but he has that form of rock-star schizophrenia,” he says. “At Jennings Farm there was definitely a feeling of, ‘Come into my home, this is my family and I am a family man.’ Then, as soon as he’d closed the gate behind him and driven off, it was Robert Plant the rock star.

“Why not? Flying first class, having motorcycle cops as outriders and a string of young women after his knob.”

As ever it was Los Angeles that was the seat of Zeppelin’s operations. The band arrived in the city at the end of May to play two shows at the Forum and took over the upper floors of the Riot House. Their visit coincided with Bonham’s twenty-fifth birthday. The band’s present to their drummer was a Harley-Davidson bike.

“There were outlandish high jinks going on,” recalls Roy Harper. “Things being thrown out of windows. Bonzo, among other people, was riding a motorbike down the hotel corridors.

“At one point I said to Robert, ‘Do you think that I should throw this TV out of the window?’ He said, ‘No. Do you see that car down there?’ I leaned out the window and there was a big old American convertible below us. He said, ‘It belongs to Elvis.’ ”

“A number of the U.S. crew had served in Vietnam,” says LeFevre. “The Riot House was probably a bit like that for them.”

The atmosphere on Sunset Strip had also changed, however. The girls that flocked to it had got younger, more desperate, the drugs harder. Good times going bad. The center of the band’s nightly activities had moved to a new club on the Strip, Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco. An unprepossessing twenty-five-year-old with a high-pitched voice, Bingenheimer was a confirmed Anglophile and had discovered glam rock on a trip to London the previous summer. He opened up the club on his return.

“That place was a public toilet with a dancehall in it,” says Kim Fowley, Bingenheimer’s fellow scenester. “There were only a couple of bathrooms and the toilets overflowed all the time. It smelled so foul you thought you were going to die just sitting there.

“Zeppelin hung out there. The regular crowd would dance to exclusively British pop music. The guys were all trying to look like David Bowie. There were lots of mirrors hung around the place and all these thirteen-, fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls would dance around them. Of course, all of them had shaved cunts and no underwear on.”

The tour ended with a three-night stand at Madison Square Garden in New York that July. Grant had hired a young film director, Joe Massot, who had filmed the band’s set at the Bath Festival in 1970. Given barely enough time to assemble a crew, Massot was flown in from England to shoot the first two shows at the Garden and also backstage footage. So began the saga of Zeppelin’s ill-starred movie.

Back home the rhythm of life continued being set by the band. Benji LeFevre found out he was now expected to run errands for Plant—“Driving up and down the fucking motorway all the time,” he bemoans. Grant kept Plant and Bonham out of one drama of that time. Returning from the tour, Jones told his manager he would leave the band if things did not change. He was tired of being away from home for such long periods, and with short notice. Grant assuaged him and things rolled on.

By now it had been decided the film would be more than just a concert movie. Joe Massot was dispatched to film fantasy sequences with each of the band members and also Grant, no one thinking it necessary to provide him with a script. Plant’s self-aggrandising segment was shot at Raglan Castle in Wales, the singer casting himself in the role of a bold knight rescuing a damsel in distress.