Robert Plant: A Life (20 page)

With Plant still in recovery from his injuries, the band was returned to a suspended state and things continued to unravel. Page went back to his long-gestating
Lucifer Rising
soundtrack, for which he had managed to pull together less than half an hour of music, and this unsettling and incoherent. Grant also now had troubles of his own. His marriage had ended and he was slipping further into cocaine addiction. As he did, his grip on the band’s affairs was seriously loosened.

Dave Lewis, editor of the Zeppelin fanzine
Tight But Loose
, began working out of the Swan Song office on London’s King’s Road during this period. “I saw some amazing goings on,” he recalls. “For a young and impressionable teenager it was an eye-opener. There were a lot of hard drugs going around. I remember one afternoon Richard Cole coming running up the stairs with an axe stuffed down his trousers. I don’t know why he had it but he wasn’t happy.”

There seemed no escaping the aura of menace that had engulfed the band. That summer Plant went to see Bob Marley and the Wailers at Cardiff City football stadium. He first made himself as conspicuous as possible, sweeping on to the pitch in the afternoon sunshine and being surrounded by people, and then retired to the hospitality lounge.

“I was having a chat with Robert when this guy named John Lodge came over to join us,” says Bob Harris, who was compering the show. “John was bass guitarist in a band called Junior’s Eyes. Everyone knew him as ‘Honk.’ He was six foot eight and had a massive nose.

“I don’t know whether Honk was out of it but he was being kind of annoying. I had to excuse myself because I was due on stage. Five minutes after I left, and as I was walking down the steps to the stage, I heard a cry from behind me. It was Honk and he had blood pouring from his nose. Someone from Robert’s security had taken him to one side and asked him to cool it. Since Honk didn’t really listen this guy had head-butted him.

“I’m not at all sure Robert even knew this had happened. But it was an indication that the ice was very thin around the edges.”

The year ended on a low note for the entire band. In the U.S. that October—and in the U.K. the following month—Zeppelin finally premiered their film
The Song Remains the Same
. Critics drubbed it and also the accompanying soundtrack album, the one vanishing from cinemas as quickly as the other exited the charts.

Had Grant or Page still been on their game it is doubtful that either film or album would have ever seen the light of day. The film was a confusing shambles, almost grotesque in its self-indulgence, the record a document of Zeppelin’s worst on-stage excesses. Both made it seem as if the band had lost its last shred of self-awareness, that the four of them were now as remote from reality as they were becoming from each other. On screen and record, when Page brandished his violin bow during a tortuous “Dazed and Confused,” it might appear as though he were fiddling while all around him burned.

In the U.K. 1977 gave rise to two very different happenings: Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee celebrations and the breaking out of punk rock, one rising up as if in direct competition to the pomp and ceremony of the other. The Sex Pistols and the Clash opened Britain’s punk floodgates, setting loose scores of snotty, abrasive bands in their wake. The most popular narrative following on from this point is that punk levelled the cultural landscape at a stroke, the lumbering beasts of ’70s rock being swept aside and music democratized to such a degree that virtuoso guitar solos and stadium-rock extravaganzas were instantly rendered passé.

In this context Keith Richards’s arrest for possession of heroin in Toronto that February and the death of Elvis six months later can be seen as the last flailing of a bloated corpse. It is a dramatic account—but also a fiction. For no matter how hard punk impacted, and however much its influence has endured, it was no Year Zero. Even then, at the epicenter of the storm, the records that most engaged the mass audience had a familiar bombastic ring to them: Pink Floyd’s
Animals
, Fleetwood Mac’s
Rumours
, Queen’s
News of the World
and ELO’s
Out of the Blue.

The biggest cultural phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic that year was not
Never Mind the Bollocks
but
Saturday Night Fever
, in which white-suited John Travolta danced his nights away as Tony Manero to the Bee Gees’ euphoric disco soundtrack. True, the Sex Pistols did stir up controversy with their “God Save the Queen” single but this tilt at the windmills of tradition was still overshadowed by the Jubilee, millions gathering for street parties across the country on June 7.

Zeppelin were foremost among the “dinosaur” bands the punks took aim at. John Lydon of the Sex Pistols, then calling himself Johnny Rotten, scorned Plant for turning up to see the Damned with an entourage of minders, and Paul Simonon of the Clash claimed he felt sick just by looking at Zeppelin’s album covers. Plant was particularly sensitive to these charges. Yet no one was architect of Zeppelin’s downfall so much as the band themselves.

The end was begun with the announcement of a scheduled 51-date tour of North America set to start that February. From the start it was too much to ask of them. For although Plant’s physical injuries had healed, the band’s health was ailing and they were in no fit state for such an undertaking.

In the event the dates had to be pushed back a month when Plant contracted laryngitis but his illness was the least of the problems that were soon to beset Zeppelin. When the tour did begin it seemed mired in darkness from the start. At one of the early gigs at the Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati sixty people were injured and more than seventy arrested when fans tried to gatecrash the arena.

Around the band’s camp the mood also seemed blacker, its shifts more difficult to predict. The crew had swollen to include personal assistants for each member and for Grant, and also a greater security presence. To this Grant added John Bindon, a thirty-four-year-old Londoner who had first latched on to Cole.

A volatile character, Bindon was a professional bodyguard and part-time actor. On screen he had appeared in a pair of classic British gangster films: 1970’s
Performance
alongside Mick Jagger and as a crime boss in the following year’s
Get Carter
. The character he played in
Performance
was aptly named Moody, since Bindon had a hair-trigger temper and a reputation as a hard man.

“Bindon was just nasty, absolutely nasty,” says Dennis Sheehan, then working as Plant’s assistant. “He was well-built but good looking, and he could turn on the charm when he wanted. But a lot of the time you didn’t see that. If you looked into his eyes you’d see something very devious and . . . unacceptable. Not the sort of person to have on the road.

“Richard Cole went completely off the deep end, too. I would rescue him. I hate to put myself into that role, but there were times when he was about to do the Superman act out of the seventh-floor window of his hotel room. That’s where his head was at and what drugs were doing to him.

“Peter wasn’t tremendously well, either. He was suffering with a weight problem and from a bit of depression, too, I think, probably due to the amount of drugs he was taking. There were many occasions that I’d answer the phone in my room and he’d ask me to pop up to see him. What he wanted was for me to sit down and talk with him. He’d chat for hours about his wife, Gloria. It was quite sad. She was a lovely woman, but his drug-taking and other things had pushed the love away from their marriage.”

There had been no weakening in Zeppelin’s pulling power, more than a million tickets having been sold for the tour. They were playing six nights at both Madison Square Garden and the Forum in L.A. Business had never been better. Yet even though they could still lift themselves to great performances, it was getting harder for them to do so. And outside of the sound and fury of the shows, the fact was they weren’t the same band. Nor would they ever be again.

Page appeared frail and drawn, Bonham bloated. Page had never been seen to eat much of anything but now he actually looked starved. In Chicago, the third night of the tour, he came on stage in full Nazi regalia, wearing an SS officer’s peaked cap and black leather jackboots. It was as though he were attempting to be a physical manifestation of the cancer eating away at his band’s spirit.

“For me, that was just another element of rock ’n’ roll,” says Sheehan. “And he did end up with some incredibly good-looking and curvaceous women in leather leotards. I think you have to look at a more rounded picture of that tour. In reality, there wasn’t that much going wrong.

“Though the magic had gone at that point. There were moments when Jimmy wasn’t quite there. He’d be playing one thing and the rest of the band another. There were some occasions, dare I say it, when I found myself falling asleep.

“There were also a couple of people within the organization that had no need to be there. One was a pharmacist. His sole job was to make sure whatever drugs were bought were OK. Robert detested the fact that these people were around, especially the John Bindon situation. It brought out the worst—or even worse—in Peter and Richard Cole.”

“Sometimes it made me cry that Jimmy played so well,” says Benji LeFevre. “Other times it made me cry that he was so fucked up and just couldn’t play. Therein lay a problem for him and ultimately for Robert. Because when they started it was Page and Plant. They were so close. And that had changed.

“There was a certain inevitability about that tour. At the center of it, you’d got four characters, plus Peter and Richard, who didn’t have the same control over things they were used to having. It was all very different to the other tours I’d done with them and no longer as Zeppelin had been envisaged. It seemed to me that the camp was divided into Jim and Bonzo, and Jonesy and Robert. The first two,” he mimes nodding out, “and the other two,” he mimes looking at his watch and waiting around.

At least outwardly, Plant remained very much as the band’s former PR, Danny Goldberg, had once described him—Zeppelin’s “happy warrior.” According to Sheehan, he kept to a relaxed, carefree schedule. After a show he would head out to a club or bar, still enjoying being the center of attention.

“He’d order a brandy or a cognac and take it easy,” Sheehan says. “I’d last about an hour and then leave him to it. When he got back to the hotel, he’d usually drop a note under my door asking to be woken at 11 or 12 the next morning.

“On days off he would spend time with friends if he had them in the area. On the odd occasion that would be with a girlfriend. I don’t think he ever got into relationships that were intended to be anything other than mere flippancies—that wasn’t part of what he did in life. The problem was he liked people—and women more so than men.”

Still, trouble stalked the tour. On June 3 at Tampa Stadium a torrential downpour forced the band off stage after just two songs. The storm raged on and the show was cancelled, sparking a riot that led to nineteen arrests and dozens more injuries.

“It had been the loveliest evening,” recalls Sheehan. “All the families were there. Bonzo and Jimmy had been staying in Miami with their group. Robert and John Paul Jones were at the Disney resort in Orlando. The plane came and picked us all up, and it seemed the ideal situation.”

“There was an air of absolute disappointment, turning to hysteria,” Plant told me of that gig. “They sent a U.S. Air Force plane up to gauge how long the storm was going to last. It radioed back to security in the stadium so an announcement could be made. By the time that happened, kids were over the stage and going apeshit.

“We realized then that what they wanted was far more than we had. In real terms, what we had created in terms of expectation was something no amount of hype could ever hope to do.”

The first leg of the tour concluded later that month in Los Angeles. Here, the wounded beast steeled itself for one last, mighty roar. Across those six nights at the Forum, the last shows they would ever play in the city, Zeppelin summoned up the ghost of all they had once been. It was a magnificent spectacle, the more powerful for being so close to ruin.

“The adoration of those crowds, night after night, it was of biblical proportions,” says Michael Des Barres. “I was very privileged to be close to the inner sanctum but it was hard to be a part of it. For six nights, nobody slept. It was like being in an altered state.

“To be that near to them, it was shockingly fabulous and also dangerous. Peter Grant, Richard Cole and John Bindon—these guys were extremely aggressive and incredibly protective. Jimmy required that because he was—shall we say—compromised and needed to be protected. He was also shy and reclusive. And Peter was unquestionably in love with him.

“Robert was never a part of that extreme side of the band. He was a voyeur, perhaps, but not a participant. Robert, being a force of nature, brought the sun.”

After a three-week lay-off the tour resumed on July 17 in front of 65,000 people at the Kingdome in Seattle. Firecrackers rained down from the upper tiers of the enormous venue that night—another audience verging on the hysterical. Yet the band themselves seemed tired, sluggish. There was no lightening in the atmosphere offstage, either. To some of those closest to the band the air inside the bubble seemed heavy and ominous.

“The last section of that tour, everything about it felt strange,” insists Cole. “There were so many bodyguards around. Peter had his children with him and even they had bodyguards. There was loads of coke about. There may have been a bit of smack here and there, too, but I don’t think it had much to do with drugs. It was just this funny feeling.

“There was the odd fight. Not between the band members. It’s very easy for people to be judgemental but they don’t know what you have to fend off. You’ve got fucking lunatics banging on your door night and day. You know you’re vulnerable to things so you just have to take whatever measures you can.”

“We were staying at the Edgewater Hotel in Seattle, right on Elliott Bay,” says Dennis Sheehan. “As I was settling up the bill, the guy at reception told me that they were going to have to redecorate Mr. Bonham’s room because he’d completely destroyed it. He began to go through a list of everything that had been broken.