Robert Plant: A Life (21 page)

“As he was doing so I looked out at the water and I could see a fridge floating away. Those were the days when hotel rooms didn’t have fridges and I’d rented some to put in each of their suites. Jimmy had decided that his never worked from the time he got there, so therefore it wasn’t worth shit and out it went.”

The following week Zeppelin descended upon California for two outdoor shows at the Coliseum in Oakland, both promoted by Bill Graham. At the first of these the brittle threads holding the tour together finally snapped. The catalyst for this was an incident that occurred backstage, the precise details of which have been disputed ever since.

This much is clear: one of Graham’s security staff, Jim Matzorkis, stopped Grant’s eleven-year-old son, Warren, from removing a wooden plaque posted outside Zeppelin’s dressing room. Doing so, Matzorkis, who probably had no idea who Warren Grant was, knocked the boy to the floor. This news was fast conveyed to Peter Grant, who was told his son had been struck. Together with Cole, John Bindon and Bonham, Grant headed out in search of Matzorkis. Finding him, the four of them hauled him into a portacabin and administered their own form of retribution. Testifying in court later, Matzorkis claimed he was savagely beaten.

“I was stood less than forty yards from the portacabin and I saw it happen,” says Sheehan. “I saw the security guard push over Peter’s son. I don’t think he meant it. He put his arm out to one side—Warren was a little off balance and fell. Then I saw the guy being taken to—or running to—Bill Graham’s portacabin.

“Again, that name John Bindon. There’s one thing about Peter going in there . . . He could be quite abrasive but I don’t think Peter could have managed that on his own. He would have been very vocal but eventually it would have petered out. The guy had said sorry and would continue to apologize. Having Bindon there made it a thousand times worse.

“Regarding what happened to the guy. There are stories saying that he was carried out on a stretcher and they broke his face. I was stood there when he walked out. Yes, he had a bloody nose and he was being helped by a couple of people, but he was walking on his own. He went to an ambulance that was parked up backstage and he was seen to. It was a sad business. It ruined two great shows and the band’s relationships in San Francisco.”

The next night the show itself passed without incident, but by the time the band returned to their hotel Graham had called in the police. Grant, Cole, Bindon and Bonham were arrested, charged and bailed. “Once we got let out of jail,” says Cole, “we had our pilots on standby and got the fuck out of there to another state.”

They flew to New Orleans, where the band’s next gig was due to take place on July 30. Touching down in the early hours of Tuesday July 26, the entourage was met by a fleet of limos and ferried to the city’s French Quarter. They checked in to the Maison Dupuy Hotel at 6 am. At the front desk Plant took a call from his wife Maureen back home. Their seven-year-old son, Karac, had been taken ill with a viral infection.

“After that, I went up with Robert to his room and asked if there was anything he wanted,” recalls Sheehan. “He used to use Flex shampoo—I remember he wanted to wash his hair. We’d known that Karac wasn’t very well. I asked him how he was doing and he said, ‘He seems to be alright.’

“Within half an hour I got back and went up to the room. Robert was sitting on the bed with his head in his hands. He’d just had the news that Karac had died.”

12

THE OUT DOOR

Bonzo saved me. And while he was saving me, he was losing himself.

For the rest of that day, July 26, time seemed to stand still. A numbing sense of shock reverberated through the camp. For Grant and his chief lieutenants there was the distraction of needing to get Plant home to his family as quickly as possible. Complicating this was the fact that they could not use the band’s private plane, the pilots being grounded on account of having flown in to New Orleans from San Francisco just that morning.

It took hours to make alternative arrangements and book commercial flights. Plant seemed on the verge of breaking apart. He asked that Bonham, Cole, Dennis Sheehan and Benji LeFevre accompany him. It was late afternoon before this party was able to leave New Orleans. They flew first to Newark in New Jersey and transferred to New York’s JFK International Airport, going on from there to London. Bonham sat next to Plant on the flight home. He kept his hand on Plant’s arm, few words passing between them.

“The feeling was one of absolute despair,” says Sheehan. “There are no words that can express what must have been going through Robert’s mind at the time. There wouldn’t be anything else that could be worse in your life.

“It was a very, very difficult journey. It was hard to have a conversation, to know what to say. As much as Robert was being comforted in the best way he could be, I don’t think his mind was on anything that was being said to him.”

“There was nothing you could say to him. Nothing at all,” adds Cole. “I thought it best to leave him be.”

In London a car was waiting to speed Plant and Bonham up to the Midlands. There, at Jennings Farm, Plant, Maureen and their eight-year-old daughter, Carmen, were left to mourn Karac.

Through the long days, weeks and months that followed, something else began to press down upon Plant. This was an awful, suffocating sense of guilt. It was stirred by the knowledge that he had been absent from his family when they had needed him most. He agonized over whether things might have been different had he been there. More bruising still was his understanding of what he had given himself up to: the state of the band during the time he was gone. When he reflected on everything that had surrounded that last tour—the decadence and violence, the arrogance and carelessness—it all seemed utterly pointless.

“Those were very dark times,” says Roy Harper, a friend of Plant’s. “He actually blamed Zeppelin for that. Not a particular person, just Zeppelin as an entity. For his being away at the time his son died and for not being there. I think he probably came to an end with the band long before the others did.”

“To be honest, I don’t believe that Robert ultimately has ever got over that feeling of guilt,” says LeFevre. “Karac’s death cut him and Maureen to the very bone. And after they’d only very recently been physically cut to the bone.

“I think he had all these thoughts within him. ‘What the fuck am I doing here with these people that used to be my mates and who can hardly function? I knew it was going to be like this and so why did I do it? I could have been there and saved my son.’ If he’s being honest, he’s probably still having them.”

The four men that traveled back with Plant from New Orleans also attended Karac’s funeral. The others remained in America. Jones was out of contact, having taken off with his family after the Oakland debacle, not intending to return until the scheduled gig in New Orleans. Page also disappeared off the radar and Grant flew with his children to New York, each man as dazed as the other.

“I was in Oregon and I called in to New Orleans,” Jones told the writer Mick Wall. “Anyway, Robert had gone home with Bonzo and I went on to Seattle. It was a very strange time. We just knew we had to give him time.”

“The way I see it, some people can handle these things and others can’t,” reflects Sheehan. “Maybe the others were at a loss. I truly believe that they felt the same as he did but it was their inability to express it. Sometimes people don’t know how to say, ‘Look, I just couldn’t handle it,’ regardless of how close they are to you.

“At least I’d like to think there was no reason other than them not being able to deal with it. Because you’d hate to have to hold that against anybody.”

“I don’t know or I can’t remember if Robert wanted them at the funeral,” says LeFevre. “My interpretation of it was that he wouldn’t have had Jimmy there for anything. I think that he felt something inexplicable in that way. I don’t know whether he could articulate that at the time but he just didn’t want any of that atmosphere being around him and Maureen in their grief.”

After burying his son Plant retreated to grieving, and through that the long process of healing himself and his family. He doubted he would be able to go back into his rock-star box and questioned whether he even wanted to. He went so far as swearing off drugs and applying for a post at a teacher-training college in Sussex—the Rudolf Steiner Center. An Austrian, Steiner was a social reformer who had pioneered an alternative learning system at the turn of the century based upon encouraging artistic and creative development. In 1934 a Steiner school was established in Stourbridge, the town in which Plant had grown up. His application was accepted, although by then he had decided not to pursue it.

Benji LeFevre, at that time going through a divorce, moved in to the guesthouse at Jennings Farm. “For whatever reason, Robert and Maureen welcomed me in to their home,” he says. “I spent the next few months with Robert drinking an inordinate amount of the local beer, Banks’ Bitter, every day and night. I put on four stone.

“I experienced all the sadness and grief that he and Maureen went through. I think Robert found himself expecting to be able to get over Karac’s death in some sort of way, but emotionally not quite making it. He seemed to me to do his best to recover as quickly as he could. Though one can’t imagine how he felt.”

“I used to have a little 8mm camera that took three-minute spools of film,” recalls Sheehan. “When I went through all of these after Karac had died I realized that I had seven or eight films of the whole family. Things that I’d taken when they were with us, bits and pieces. So I packaged them up and sent them to Robert. They were for him, not me.”

It would be more than a year before Plant even thought of removing himself from his family and returning to the band. The world he had departed from kept turning through 1978. The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan both hit the road again. The Sex Pistols ran their short course, imploding at a gig in San Francisco in January. Eleven months after the band broke up, the Pistols’ bassist, Sid Vicious, strung out and hopeless, was arrested in New York on suspicion of the murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. Keith Moon checked out that September, an overdose claiming the Who’s drummer at thirty-two.

For Plant there was a more a terrible echo closer to home. Carl Bridgewater, a thirteen-year-old schoolboy, was murdered at Yew Tree Farm, three miles from Stourbridge, on the morning of September 19. He was on his regular paper around when he disturbed burglars at the property. They shot him dead. If one were searching for a meaning to things, this offered none, save for the certainty that life was fragile, senseless and sometimes cruel.

Gradually, Plant stepped out. He and LeFevre produced a single for a local punk band, Dansette Damage. Their keyboard player, Eddie Blower, also worked as a photographer and had done some family portraits for Plant. The session took place over an afternoon at the Old Smithy, a new studio that had opened in Worcester, down the road from Jennings Farm.

Titled “NME,” after the music paper, the song was a basic two-chord stomp. The cover of the single featured a black and white photo of the seven-piece band and a suggestion to “Play Loud.” Plant was billed as the Wolverhampton Wanderer.

“Robert said he couldn’t have his name associated with the record,” says Mike Davies, a local journalist who was at the session. “He seemed to be really into it but he didn’t want it getting out that he’d been involved with a punk thing.

“None of Dansette could actually play. Robert was trying to get the singer, Colin Hall, to sing in tune and he joined in as well. You can hear him at the end of the track—they were all stood around one microphone. He was very affable, the sort of guy you’d go and have a beer with. Before he arrived Eddie had told us not to mention anything about his son.”

At Jennings Farm the wounds had begun to mend, although deep scars would remain. Maureen became pregnant again that spring.

“I went to see Robert a couple of times during that period,” says Sheehan. “Part of his life had been destroyed and he was trying to build it back up again. Maureen getting pregnant helped that process. It wasn’t a replacement for Karac, it certainly wasn’t, but it re-established the fact that life has to go on, it can’t be all about living in the past. Robert realized that.”

In October Page and Bonham convinced him to attend a band meeting at Clearwell Castle, an 18th-century mansion house in the Forest of Dean near the border between England and Wales. He was reluctant to go and, once there, soon regretted it. Although they tried playing together the band were still in a mess and so was their manager, none of the demons having been laid to rest. The meeting broke up and Zeppelin’s exile went on.

It would be many months before Plant saw Page, Jones or Grant again—but then, even at the best of times, he had had little contact with them when the band was not working. Bonham, however, was a constant presence at Jennings Farm. Most often he would come around with his wife Pat and a bottle of something, determined to pick his friend up and cajole him back to life. Not that Bonham was better able to look after himself. That September he had crashed his car driving home from the pub. This he had bounced back from, but he was also nursing a ruinous heroin habit.

“When I lost my boy it was Bonzo that came and fished me back out again,” Plant told me. “He lived nearby and we were much more, if you like, related than the others. There was nothing fey about the pair of us. We had our feet on the ground but at the same time we were also spaced out.

“In all the wildness of Zeppelin . . . you saw all these things. And when big things happen, you cave in and collapse. You think, ‘It’s all my fault, I should never have gone away.’ Bonzo saved me. And while he was saving me he was losing himself.”

“Bonzo used to do a lot of fucking drugs and mix up a lot of things, too,” says Trevor Burton, whose band Bonham took to jamming with on Birmingham’s pub circuit until he turned up at a show drunk and belligerent, and they had to throw him off stage. “Put it this way, he was a lot like Keith Moon. He thought he was invincible.”