Robert Plant: A Life (19 page)

“We flew into Rhodes,” continues Cole. “It was tricky, because you can only land and take off there when it’s light. We went to the hospital and our doctors looked at all the X-rays. They were very complimentary to the Greek physicians but as soon as they were out of earshot they told me the bones weren’t setting correctly. Maureen’s pelvis was offset, so if she got pregnant in the future you wouldn’t have been able to pull the baby’s head through it.

“They told me we had to get them all out of there. Basically, we smuggled them out from the hospital. We had to work it out so that we got them to the airport and could take off right away.

“There were ambulances waiting on the tarmac at Luton airport. They were all taken to hospital in London. The children’s bones were mended and they took care of what they could with Robert. Maureen was in a bad way for a long time.”

Maureen spent several weeks in hospital. In the aftermath of the crash her heart had stopped beating for a brief, terrible moment.

His right leg encased in plaster, Plant was initially confined to a wheelchair. He was told it would be months before he would be able to walk without the aid of a stick. To this day he is unable to fully extend his damaged arm.

Days after being flown back to London Plant was gone again, leaving to continue his tax exile. The godfather of Cole’s insurance broker was a wealthy businessman named Dick Christian who was based on Jersey, an island in the English Channel. Christian offered Plant the use of his guesthouse on the island. For the flight out to Jersey the British Airways crew removed a row of seats in the first-class cabin so Plant could stretch his leg out.

“I sorted Robert out in Jersey and then the other lot flew in,” says Cole. “Afterward, they all went to Los Angeles. John Bonham wasn’t a tax exile then. He wouldn’t go because his wife was having a baby. He said he didn’t care about the money to begin with—but he started it later that year. It was a terrible year that one.”

“I saw Robert a very few days after he’d been flown back from Rhodes,” recalls Benji LeFevre. “The question was, ‘Is Robert going to stay next to Maureen and are they going to get better together, or is he going to be persuaded to carry on with the scheme?’ He decided to carry on with the scheme. He said to me, ‘You’re going to have to come with me, man.’

“Within a week, he was in Jersey. Why did he go? I really don’t know. It’s a very interesting question. For a time there, Maureen had died. It was exactly the opposite of the Robert who was a stable, family-loving gentleman.

“Presumably, when one has that sort of trauma one doesn’t think especially clearly. Maybe, because of the tax situation at that point, they had to do it as an ensemble. All I know is I spent the next nine months pushing him around in a wheelchair.”

11

DARKNESS, DARKNESS

Robert was sitting on the bed with his head in his hands.

The extent of Plant’s injuries forced Zeppelin to cancel a two-month-long North American tour planned for the summer of 1975, and after that a series of shows in Europe and the Far East. Not that the band intended to remain idle. At the end of September the four of them, together with Grant, flew out to Los Angeles, where work was due to begin on a new album.

Each of them rented a large beach house in the chic Malibu Beach colony, an hour’s drive from the city. Since he was still immobile Plant took Benji LeFevre with him as his nursemaid. As part of his recuperation he had been instructed by doctors to attend daily physiotherapy sessions, although to begin with he slipped more readily into the established routine of being on the road with Zeppelin.

“I don’t think he was aware of the potential permanence of his injuries, of certain parts of his body not recuperating properly,” says LeFevre. “We’d drive into Hollywood and do his physiotherapy, and then I’d also been given some exercises to do with him back at the house. On several occasions I said to him, ‘I think we should stop doing so much drugs—it’s not helping you. Why don’t we have a big old fucking line once we’ve done the exercises instead of before?’

“It was like being his fucking wife. We had our laughs but it was tough for sure. We certainly got to know each other. He couldn’t do anything. I had to push him, carry him and lift him. I had to put him in the bath and wash his willy.”

It was an impermanent, dislocated existence, the same as that of being on tour but without the anchor of having a show to do each night. Just as it did whenever he left home for the band, being in this self-absorbed state allowed Plant to separate his life into two distinct boxes. He was a rock star in one, a family man in the other, neither intersecting. Even now, so soon after the car crash.

“Yes, I think that’s true. And the more you do that, then the more natural it becomes,” says LeFevre. “In other words: ‘Yes, I’ll call you every day, darling, and I do love you.’ Then, as soon as you’re out the door, it’s like, ‘Yeah!’ He really didn’t talk very much about Maureen. It was strange.”

The mere fact of their being in Los Angeles added to the general air of anything goes, and they remained a magnet for all that was wild and unhinged about the city. Hollywood scenester Kim Fowley remembers driving out to a party at Plant’s Malibu pad during that long, hot summer.

“I was living with all kinds of lesbians and nymphomaniacs at the time,” he tells me. “This one girl I lived with, Denise, she and I had both fucked this astoundingly beautiful blonde bitch, Linda. I have these two girls in the car with me and another wildcat named Robyn.

“We got to Robert’s house, a giant place on the beach, and he’s in there with fifty or sixty women. You know that picture of Jimi Hendrix with all the naked women? Imagine that in someone’s living room. Robert was just sat there having a Napoleon Brandy. He was the sex object—not the girls. They were just waiting to be selected.

“I walked in and announced, ‘Tonight, for your pleasure, we will have a three-way. My bitches will eat each other’s cunts and fist-fuck each other.’ All these girls applauded and my girls did just that thing. Robert said to me, ‘I’ve seen this before, come outside for a moment.’ He told me he had $25,000 set aside to buy this one particularly rare record and did I know of anyone who had a copy? Then he said, ‘Are you in love with the blonde? No? Sure? OK . . .’

“He was fundamentally a very exceptional human being. He’s smarter in a different way to Jimmy Page, who doesn’t have all his cards out on the table. Robert brings his intelligence right out there with the haircut, the smile and the bravado. Like Errol Flynn or Douglas Fairbanks, all those swashbucklers.”

“One night, Robert and I came back to the house and the lights were on,” recalls LeFevre. “I went inside to check and there were these two Charlie Manson chicks sitting there—shaved heads, Tarot cards laid out on the floor. At that point I thought, ‘I get it.’ That’s why there was such apprehension about people who came to be around the band.”

Against this backdrop progress on the record was slow and halting. There was no longer a backlog of material to draw from since the band had exhausted that on
Physical Graffiti
. For the first time in years Plant and Page had to write an entire collection of new songs together. Problem was, even though they were living in such close proximity, the two men were barely seeing each other.

Page had vanished into his rented mansion, the curtains of which were permanently drawn to block all traces of light, sealing him inside.

“We occasionally went up to Jimmy’s house but there was no work done there to my knowledge,” says LeFevre. “The master plan had been interrupted by the accident but it couldn’t be put on hold. That wasn’t on the agenda. Yet things had changed within the band.

“Listen, man, if something has happened to you physically or mentally then that impinges on your relationships with other people. There’s no doubt Robert had lost that sense of invulnerability. Subject A, Robert, was reacting thus: getting his head around it and trying to get his body working again. Subject B, Jimmy, is affected in a different way . . . and maybe finds solace in other areas.”

On the odd occasions that Page did venture out it was into Hollywood and then by night. He went to see Michael Des Barres’s band Detective, signing them almost on the spot to Swan Song, although he was otherwise disengaged from the business of the record label he had founded.

“It was a pain in the ass, eventually,” admits Des Barres. “Jimmy was going to produce us and we had to wait a year for him in L.A. You give me a million dollars and put me in Los Angeles for that length of time—big trouble, obviously. I got strung out on everything.

“None of the Zeppelin guys was hands on with Swan Song, though. They were too involved in their own lives. At that time they were going through unbelievable pressures—continuing substance abuse and the question of where it is you go from the very top. It was a hard place for them to be. I don’t resent them for it.”

Bonham was also cut adrift on Sunset Strip. One night he was involved in an altercation with Kim Fowley’s assistant, Michelle Myer, at the Rainbow Bar & Grill when Bonham took exception to the way Myer had smiled at him. Later it was reported that he had punched Myer to the floor, although Fowley maintains the fracas was more of a wrestling match. “And believe me,” he adds, “Michelle could handle herself, especially against a guy that wasted.”

Somehow seven new songs materialized, all bar one of them credited solely to Page and Plant. The band regrouped at SIR Studios in Hollywood to knock these into shape. Bonham and Jones added their input to the shortest track, “Royal Orleans,” which ultimately sounded like a studio jam that had not found a point to coalesce around. Such was the tone of the whole record.

At the end of October they exchanged the West Coast heat for the bitter bite of winter in Germany. They were booked into Musicland Studios in Munich, although for just eighteen days, all the time they could squeeze before the Rolling Stones took over the complex to make their
Black and Blue
album. Arriving in the city, Plant balked at the hotel Cole had booked for them, stating the rooms were not big enough and promptly moving himself to the local Hilton.

Page did not leave the studio. In the event he succeeded in begging an extra three days off Mick Jagger, but even still, he and his engineer Keith Harwood had to work around the clock and without sleep. Nerves were frayed. Because he had to sit down to sing, Plant struggled to take in enough air to sustain the longest and highest notes. He was not alone in being handicapped. None of them could run from the hard truth that the band was sounding like a shadow of its former self.

Years later Page insisted that
Presence
was his favorite Zeppelin album. He was doubtless swayed by the fact that so much of the music on it had come from him, seeing it as a personal triumph against the odds. For his part, and at the time of its release, Plant said it was a record shaped by circumstance, a howl of pain. Most of all
Presence
amounted to a yardstick, one measuring just how much had drained from Zeppelin in the preceding two years.

It was not the work of a functioning band, at least not in the way their previous records had been. The landscape it covered was flat and unchanging. Ideas had formed but few were seen through into fully realized songs. The ten-minute “Achilles Last Stand,” “For Your Life” and “Candy Store Rock”—each of these was a rampaging Page riff looking for a tune to fasten on to. Each followed a straight, narrow line without ever taking the twists, turns and unexpected detours that inhabited Zeppelin’s greatest moments.

Sonically, it was pitched high and full of treble, hard at the edges and with a surface as cold as the point of a needle. Page left no space unfilled in the final mix, compressing everything to such a degree that it sounded wired and jittery. At the forefront he placed his own guitar, its tone sharp and grating.

Through this, occasional moments of power and clarity nonetheless emerged, such as “Nobody’s Fault but Mine,” another bruising blues epic, or “Hots On for Nowhere,” a frenetic boogie, Jones’s bass and Bonham’s drums dancing a fast-footed shuffle. The album, however, was summed up by its closing track, a second weighty blues titled “Tea for One.” On this, Page’s playing had the consistency of liquid and there was tangible conviction to Plant’s vocal, but its mood was morose and it extended for more than nine minutes, so that one was left wishing for it to end.

Throughout, Plant’s singing betrayed his physical state, his voice drawn in and limited. Yet his lyrics shone a light into the band’s darkest recesses. On “Hots On for Nowhere,” he reflected: “I’ve got friends who will give me their shoulder, event I should happen to fall/I’ve got friends who will give me fuck all.” While “For Your Life” found him pointing an accusatory finger as he sang of “cocaine-cocaine-cocaine in the city of the damned,” going on to sketch out a bleak and hopeless scene: “Down in the pits you go . . . The next stop’s underground.” It requires no stretch to imagine Plant working up these words in the hothouse atmosphere of Malibu Beach, his intended subject shuttered behind the walls of the house up the road.

The cover artwork proved to be entirely fitting.
Presence
was contained in an expanse of gray, at the center of which a family of four was pictured looking at a mysterious black object, their expressions fixed and inscrutable. Like the record inside, it was a curiously passionless affair. The album was released on March 31, 1976, to begin with selling faster even than
Physical Graffiti
but stalling just as abruptly.

A month after it came out, another four-piece band, this one from New York and an insouciant-looking bunch, released their eponymous début.
Ramones
also sounded as if it were jacked up, but on amphetamines rather than cocaine—cheaper, edgier and more urgent. Rushing by in an anxious blur, not one of its fourteen tracks lasted longer than three minutes. There was nothing dextrous about this and it sold the tiniest fraction of what
Presence
did, but soon enough it would power a challenge to the old order, the one that Zeppelin headed and epitomised.