Stairway To Heaven (23 page)

Zeppelin played before 28,000 fans at Sydney's Showgrounds, and after the concert we found the “girls” to be great company and even better after-night drinkers. We were in Sydney for almost a week and had the transsexuals hanging around us most of the time. “The press doesn't know what to make of this,” Peter chuckled. “A reporter asked me if all the members of Led Zeppelin were queers.”

In fact, the “girls” were just pure fun, which was exactly what we were after, too. Of course, they lost some of their attractiveness by about four in the morning when the stubble had grown on their faces. One morning, the “girls” started losing their tempers, and instead of calling each other Louise and Marilyn, they regressed back to Barney and Burt. It was a show in itself.

 

For our departure from Australia, we booked a flight on BOAC. At John Paul's urging, we had scheduled a stop in Thailand; he had heard our stories about the trip after the Japan tour, and we decided to stop there for three days to show him Bangkok before continuing on to England. At the Bangkok airport, however, we never got past the customs officials.

“Sorry,” one of them said. “Your long hair is unacceptable in Thailand. You are not allowed in the country looking like that.”

We were flabbergasted. “We were just here last year,” Robert said. “We probably had longer hair then. This is absurd!”

The Thai officials were inflexible, however. “We apologize,” one of them said, “but this is now a rule. No long hair in the country.”

We weren't used to not getting our way. Whether it was a first-class seat on an overbooked flight or the best table in a fashionable restaurant, the band expected that their name and notoriety could get them whatever they wanted.

But it didn't work this time. For more than half an hour, we argued with whomever would listen. We did everything but offer a bribe (which might have earned us time in jail). Nothing worked. Eventually, we realized that this was one debate we weren't going to win.

“You don't seem to understand,” Robert ranted. “We're going to spend
money
in your country!” Maybe they didn't need any more foreign currency in Thailand.

Within an hour, we were back on the plane, heading for London.

W
hen you're at the top, you can get away with making demands that people would have laughed at under different circumstances.”

That's how Peter Grant explained his strategy to go for the jugular when negotiating Led Zeppelin's concert contracts.

Actually, there was no real negotiating involved. In his sternest, most uncompromising voice, Peter would simply inform local promoters, “From now on, Zeppelin is going to get 90 percent of the box-office receipts. Period.” It was a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. The promoters protested—and then reluctantly signed on the dotted line.

In the early 1970s, a typical big-name band playing at an open-air stadium might receive a guarantee (perhaps $50,000) against 60 percent of the gate. But Led Zeppelin wasn't typical. According to Peter, Zeppelin's ground rules were going to be different.

“After we pay for the hall, the security, the limos, the sound, and the lighting, we're taking ninety percent,” Peter said. “We're not even going to bother with a guarantee.”

Not surprisingly, that kind of talk did not earn Peter a place at the head of the Christmas card mailing list of most local rock promoters and agents. Some felt he was arrogant. Others said that he and his band were suffering from a bad case of swellheadedness. Most thought he was simply being unfair. All of them were incensed. But Zeppelin reaped enormous financial rewards from Peter's kamikaze style of doing business.

Under the 90 percent arrangement, the band would usually take home at least $80,000 to $90,000, often more, on a single night in the early 1970s. Later in the decade, they could have used a Brink's truck to haul away a mind-boggling $500,000 on some nights. Every concert was a sellout, which triggered a Rockefeller-style financial avalanche. They would divide the receipts five ways, with Peter as an equal partner with the four musicians.

“Look,” Peter would argue with the stunned local promoters, “even when you're getting ten percent of our gate, you're making more money than you normally would for an average act where your cut is fifty percent. For us, all you're doing is handling the odds and ends anyway.”

Zeppelin's summer 1972 American tour was the first time that Peter had made his no-holds-barred, 90 percent demand, which pulverized the music business's standard operating procedures.

 

In the weeks before that American tour, while Peter was putting his 90 percent deal on the table in cities across the U.S., the band congregated at Stargroves, Mick Jagger's country home, to lay down the first tracks for its next album. They used Jagger's mobile recording studio and may have done more experimentation than at any other Zeppelin sessions to date. Jimmy arrived with a few songs on paper, fully written and arranged, like “Over the Hills and Far Away.” But there was a lot of improvising on most of the others. There was so much creative energy and everyone was feeling so up that Jimmy felt a quality album was going to come together, even without everything thoroughly prepared ahead of time.

That, at least, was Pagey's attitude at the beginning. But by the time the sessions ended, he was not content with the sound quality he was getting. Yes, he had been right about the creative energy, but he started thinking about rerecording some of the cuts elsewhere.

Still, the band had gradually made progress on the album at Stargroves. Bonzo had the original idea for “D'yer Mak'er,” a song into which he incorporated a doo-wop sound. When it was finally done, it had a bit of a reggae feel as well. In trying to bring “D'yer Mak'er” to fruition, the band would congregate on the Stargroves lawn and listen to each playback, moving to the beat, dancing with a step that looked like a cross between the jerky struts of Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx.

As with any Zeppelin gathering, there was some ongoing horseplay at Stargroves. It cut the tension that had built up, and seemed to regenerate the band's spirits for the following day's work. In a curious way, it was also how the band members showed affection for each other. They had really grown to care for one another, although none of them was particularly good at articu
lating their feelings. But engaging in playful activities together, whether sharing a bottle of champagne or planning a practical joke, was a way the band could demonstrate that affection.

At Stargroves, one of our technicians who we'll call Steve was the target of some of those high jinks. He had brought a girlfriend with him, and Bonzo snuck a microphone into the bedroom that Steve and his lady would be sharing. Then we all waited for them to retire for the night.

“Great!” Bonzo exclaimed, as he monitored the noise from their bedroom, pressing the headphones so tight over his ears that I thought they might meld into his skull. “They're making love! This is going to be wonderful!”

As their heavy breathing got serious, Bonzo captured their entire sexual celebration on tape. At the same time, he was turning dials and channeling the sounds from the bedroom through the house's speaker system. Over the next thirty minutes, every room in the house—except the bedroom where Steve and his girl were performing their physical acrobatics—got a very loud, very graphic play-by-play of the activities.

As the excitement level in the bedroom escalated, so did the cheering throughout the house. “Come on, Steve! Give it to her! Go, Steve, go!”

The next morning, Steve found himself the butt of some ruthless teasing—“Steve, that girl sure could moan!”—although he never seemed to have figured out how we had ambushed him and eavesdropped at 100 decibels.

 

Jimmy tried to keep the recording sessions themselves as businesslike as possible. He continued to insist that the band limit their recording expenses, and that meant approaching the sessions with the seriousness of a brain surgeon probing in a cerebellum. This time around, there was not the fast pace of the debut
Led Zeppelin
effort in 1968, which was recorded with the speed of the
Concorde
, but the mood was never lackadaisical, either. Jimmy demanded that the final product have decimal-point precision.

For that reason, we finally moved to the Olympic Studios in London. In a more formal studio setting, Zeppelin got a lot more accomplished. They plunged into songs like “The Crunge,” with Jimmy and John Paul following Bonzo's lead in weaving the music into a James Brown—funky sound-alike; Jimmy contributed a blues-oriented riff he had been fooling around with for seven years, finally discovering an appropriate place to use it. For “The Song Remains the Same,” Robert scribbled lyrics on a pad of paper in an inspirational flurry, driven by his vision of a common denominator for all peoples and things; Jimmy had carefully crafted the rich music over many weeks, initially intending it to be an instrumental number before merging it with Plant's lyrics.

 

While the band remained locked away in the studio, Peter and I began seriously discussing hiring a publicist to try to make some headway against a press that still treated the band with the same respect as the bubonic plague. A few weeks earlier on our flight home from Australia, Jimmy and Robert had first broached the subject, figuring that an experienced publicist might be able to extend an olive branch toward the press in hopes of getting fairer treatment.

“If you're looking for someone who can reach the media that appeals to young audiences, try B. P. ‘Beep' Fallon,” I told Peter. “He did a good job getting press attention for T. Rex. He knows what he's doing.”

Peter took my advice. With the band busy recording, he assumed the initiative and hired Fallon, who stayed with us for about a year. Beep was a little guy who didn't look like he had the right stuff to schmooze and manipulate the press. But operating from his office in London, he clearly had the skills and the savvy to open doors, particularly with the British press, even with those writers who had traditionally responded to Zeppelin with one big yawn.

Beep was the kind of fellow who could get on your nerves with his hyper-personality and a corny style of speaking. But as he got us the positive press we wanted, everyone agreed that he was earning his paycheck.

 

When the band finally emerged from the studio in late May, the American tour was set. With the intensity of their work on the new album, Zeppelin didn't feel they had gotten much of a respite during that spring at all. And they hadn't yet even done any real thinking about the upcoming concerts themselves—what they would play, what new songs they would introduce.

But they packed their bags and prepared for the flight west. They had enough confidence in themselves to feel that these Zeppelin concerts would be as good or better than any they had ever given.

F
or the summer 1972 tour, Peter and I agreed to charter a Falcon fan-jet to transport the band from one city to the next. With a fast, hectic schedule—an itinerary that included thirty-four dates in a little more than a month—I felt that the private jet was essential. So I flew to the U.S. ahead of the band to make arrangements for a rented nine-seater.

Ultimately, I negotiated a bargain price for it. Maybe I had overheard enough of Peter's phone conversations with local promoters in which he played hardball in getting the terms he wanted. With the charter line's representative on the other side of the table, I kept hammering for a lower price. He had brought out a bottle of gin as we began talking about the details of our lease, and after ninety minutes of bargaining—and boozing—he seemed willing to agree to just about anything.

“I'm not that familiar with your music,” he said, “but we'd be mighty honored to have you use this plane.”

At my insistence, he gave us 4,000 free miles and slashed $5,000 off the rental fee, although for that price, we had to do without a flight attendant. “That's fine,” I told him. “We'd rather have the extra seat on the jet for ourselves.”

In those final days before the tour's first concert, I also devoted much of my time to Led Zeppelin's security needs. The death threats on the band members had become a way of life during the previous swing through the U.S., but they were still hard to get used to. During the '72 tour, I sometimes
felt like the band was an easy target up on the stage; if some kook had wanted to take a shot at one of them, it wouldn't have been that difficult. Whenever I'd hear a loud popping noise—it could just have been a balloon bursting—I'd cringe and quickly glance to make sure the band members were okay. Without a doubt, my job was becoming much more stressful.

Throughout that tour, I tried to find ways to ease my own anxieties about Zeppelin's security. At the band's invitation, I routinely played the congas during “Whole Lotta Love,” which was a welcome diversion from the routine stresses, even if it was just for a few minutes.

One night at Madison Square Garden, just before I went onstage for “Whole Lotta Love,” Jerry Greenberg, a vice president at Atlantic and a former drummer himself, told me how thrilled he would be to perform with Zeppelin on that song. “Well,” I said, “if you want to play with 'em, promise to give me one hundred dollars, and you can do it! I'll give you the sticks, and you can go for it!”

Jerry didn't even hesitate. “It's a deal!” He took the stage during “Whole Lotta Love,” and I resorted to one of the only other ways I knew to ease the tension—taking a snort of cocaine backstage.

 

That Madison Square Garden concert was one of the rare instances in which the fans clearly became a risk to the band in the midst of a performance. It was the first of two electrically charged shows at the Garden, and midway through the concert, about two dozen spirited members of the crowd pushed their way toward the stage and then leaped over the crash barriers. Our bodyguards rushed to meet them head-on, either pushing them aside or disabling them with a well-aimed punch. As the mayhem escalated, some fans still in their seats started to panic. They began pushing their way toward the front of the stage, as if there were some type of haven there. The bodyguards were outmanned, and dozens of fans climbed onto the stage itself. There seemed to be no malicious intent on their part, but with their combined weight, a corner of the stage actually began to collapse.

While Zeppelin performed “The Battle of Evermore,” Peter became frightened. “Get the band off the stage,” he shouted, although they were just beginning to disperse on their own by that point. None of us knew how much more of the stage was going to buckle, and the concert ground to a complete halt. The houselights came on, and for the next fifteen minutes a construction crew feverishly went to work, trying to reinforce the stage. At the same time, the security forces mingled among the overenthusiastic crowd, hoping to restore a sense of calm. The concert resumed, and there were no more incidents. But those were the kinds of things that kept me awake at night.

For much of our security needs on that tour, we relied on Bill Dautrich, a
former Philadelphia cop. He recommended that we keep access to the band airtight. He would fly ahead of us from city to city, meeting with the chiefs of police to arrange for escorts for our limousine fleets to and from the airports and the concert halls. Bill worked for a company called Ogden Security in Boston, and he and the company had connections with the police departments in every major city in the country. “We speak the same language,” Bill would say. “They'll give me just about anything I want.”

For every concert, Dautrich planned the band's rapid exit after the last song. “When done right, the ‘escape' should take less than a minute,” Bill used to say. Every member of the band knew in advance the route he'd be taking from the stage to the limos at the end of each concert and which car was his. Jimmy, Robert, and Peter would duck into the head limo; at the same time, Bonzo, John Paul, and I would scramble into the second one. There would be a security man riding in the front passenger seat of each limo. The last of our three limousines would carry other important members of the “inner sanctum”—Steve Weiss, our lawyer, or, in later years, publicist/Swan Song president Danny Goldberg. Usually within just thirty seconds, the limos were moving, and when they hit the top of the ramp, the sirens would begin blaring, continuing for most of the ride back to the hotel or the airport.

 

The day after a concert in Winnipeg, we had nothing in particular planned. As we sat around the hotel, Peter was complaining about the idle time.

“Well,” I said, “why don't we go on a boat ride? Don't they have boats on the Assiniboine River?”

Peter looked at me as if I had lost my marbles. “Richard,” he said, “you're not arranging an outing for a bunch of Boy Scouts. Forget the boat ride. Get us some strippers!”

I opened the Yellow Pages and made some calls. An hour later, two strippers arrived at the hotel. By that time, room service had already delivered our order for sixty screwdrivers, a third of which were gone by the time the show began. “Even if the girls are ugly,” I had told Bonzo, “we can get drunk and pretend they're not here.”

The girls brought their own music and a few costume changes. Both of them were brunettes in their early twenties, one of whom was extremely thin while the other could have benefited from a ten-pound weight loss. “This is your party, guys,” the skinny one said as she turned on the music. “Let us know what we can do to entertain you.”

Within ten minutes, I was already bored. The girls were trying hard, but we had been entertained by strippers dozens of times before, and there wasn't anything particularly exciting about these bumps and grinds.

Finally, on the brink of dozing off, I strode into the bedroom, took off my
own clothes, and put on some of the apparel the girls had brought with them—G-string, bra, negligee, garter belt, nylons. Truthfully, I looked great. Gypsy Rose Lee would have been jealous.

I came back into the living room and began to strip, egged on by the band. “You're fantastic,” Robert shouted. “What moves! What incredible moves!”

The girls were astonished and sat down to watch the show. It took me five minutes and a lot of gyrating, grinding, bouncing, and prancing to get the clothes off. “These garter belts are murder!” I exclaimed.

The next day, Jimmy told me, “I think you better stick with managing tours. You almost made me ill dancing in that G-string!”

I took it as a compliment.

 

The strippers may have been a pleasant diversion, but Pagey found someone during that tour who quickly became a much more permanent fixture in his life. Her name was Lori Maddox—tall, willowy, very attractive, with dark hair, a dark complexion, an angelic face, beautiful brown eyes, and delicious, full lips.

Jimmy was still attached to Charlotte Martin, but he became infatuated with Lori the first time they met. Beep Fallon actually took the credit for bringing Lori into the Zeppelin touring entourage. About a year earlier, he had been in the States working with a band called Silverhead, whose lead singer was Michael Des Barres (at one time the husband of Pamela Des Barres). One afternoon, Beep was browsing through a magazine and spotted a picture of Lori, a teenage model whom he knew he had met a few months earlier, although he wasn't quite sure where. Beep eventually tracked her down and then showed Jimmy her picture. Pagey nearly started salivating. “She's magnificent,” he said. “Give me her phone number.”

Beep knew Pagey well enough that he figured Jimmy and Lori could be a perfect fit—and that the sparks wouldn't be dampened by the presence of Charlotte back in London. After all, in addition to Lori's alluring physical attributes, she was only fourteen years old. And Jimmy, who was twenty-eight at the time, still had a weakness for girls who were struggling with their first set of false eyelashes and wobbling on their first pair of high heels.

When we finally arrived in Los Angeles during the '72 tour, Jimmy called Lori, and when they initially met at the Hyatt House, Pagey could barely contain himself. She was better than her picture, he said. He claimed he felt some magnetism coming from her eyes, and when she smiled at him—well, this was a girl he found absolutely irresistible.

Immediately, the young teenager became a principal player in Jimmy's life, which didn't sit well with the dozens of groupies who would have given their push-up bras for a chance to spend time with him. Stories floated through the
L.A. clubs about Lori and Jimmy, catty stories from girls who were outraged that this fourteen-year-old somehow was living out all their own fantasies: “Have you heard that Jimmy found a junior high school girl to play around with?”…“My father wouldn't even let me look at boys until I was three years older than she is!”…“I'd like to see someone gouge her eyes out!”

There also were rumors that the other members of the band were angry at Jimmy over his courtship of this underage girl, which continued for most of the 1970s when we were in L.A. But that was hardly the case. As Bonzo quipped, “I'm just pissed off that Jimmy got her phone number before I did.” There were plenty of teenage girls to go around, and Lori wasn't the only one willing to submit to Zeppelin's spell.

Anyway, Bonham added, there were a lot of other things he wanted to do in Los Angeles besides flirt with the girls. His fascination with cars, for instance, seemed to peak during drives between L.A. International and the Riot House.

 

One afternoon, our limos were heading up La Cienega to Sunset Boulevard. As we passed a dealership called Old Time Cars, Bonzo and Jimmy insisted that we stop. To them, the sight of vintage automobiles—Alfa Romeos, Bugattis, Pierce-Arrows—in the window were as alluring as a beautiful girl. Well, almost as alluring.

Pagey left the limo and strode directly to an immaculate, 1937 Cord Sportsman 812. It was dark blue, with white sidewall tires and headlights sunk into the body. In less than ten minutes, he said, “I've got to have it.” The asking price was $17,000, which Jimmy negotiated down to $13,500. He had a deal.

Meanwhile, Peter had seen a black and blue Pierce Silver Arrow, one of the real luxury cars of the 1930s, that he decided was a “necessity.” He began bargaining over the price while Bonzo was sliding in and out of the driver's seat of a 1928 Duesenberg Model A, complete with running boards and a horn guaranteed to give cardiac arrest to the fainthearted. “I've gotta have it, I've gotta have it.” Bonzo sighed. The price tag, however, was $50,000, and he thought that was just too much. “If you come down to forty-five thousand, we can start talking,” he told the salesman. When that didn't happen, Bonzo backed off. “Well, we'll be back next year. If I still want it, I'll bring the cash and drive it back to England!”

Both Jimmy and Peter closed their deals within an hour, the ultimate impulsive shopping spree. Peter told me to call Atlantic Records and have them send a messenger over with a check for the cars. Both automobiles were shipped to England later in the week.

When that North American tour ended in late July, most of the band
quickly jetted back to London. But Jimmy wanted to stay behind. “If it's Lori,” I told him, “why don't you invite her to come back to England with us?”

He turned to me with a disbelieving look. “Lori will be just fine in L.A.,” he said. “I want to do some shopping. Let's spend a few days in New York.”

We got a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, and Jimmy began shopping for antiques and browsing through bookstores. Ultimately, I had to hire two additional limos just to transport his antiques to the airport for the flight home.