Stairway To Heaven (26 page)

W
ith the success of the opening concert, Led Zeppelin settled into a comfortable groove as the 1973 tour continued. More than in the last two American tours, the band ventured out, socializing at local clubs, drinking at nearby bars. The security risks were probably no fewer than they had been in the past. In fact, death threats surfaced almost from our first hours in America. But the band members discussed the issue and felt that
they
should call the shots and control their own actions, not the kooks who were making the crank calls. We often had a bodyguard with us on those late-night expeditions, so the band felt they had taken reasonable steps to ensure their well-being.

In New Orleans, we visited half a dozen local clubs, mostly in the French Quarter, where we created our own Mardi Gras parade down Bourbon Street, hopping from the Déjà Vu to the Ivanhoe to Fat City. We spent the most time in gay bars, where we found some of the same kind of decadence and bravado we had seen in Sydney the previous year. The New Orleans drag queens always seemed to be having much more fun than the people we'd meet in straight clubs.

As much as for any other reason, we went to gay bars because people just didn't disturb us there and we could concentrate on the alcohol. Danny Goldberg wasn't that enamored with our choice of night spots, but we also loved shocking people, and there was no better place to do that than a bar where it was often only us and a few transvestites!

One night in New Orleans, Bonham and I got so smashed that we literally couldn't remember what day it was. It was reminiscent of blackouts that Keith Moon had suffered years ago when I toured with the Who.

In the midst of a drinking binge, Bonzo suddenly began to panic and exclaimed, “Cole, what time do we go on? Are we onstage tonight?”

“Wait,” I said, giving myself a moment to collect my own thoughts. “I don't think so. Not until tomorrow.”

“Well, what did we do yesterday?”

I had no idea. “Maybe we were here drinking most of the day. We don't have to work until tomorrow, Bonzo. I'm pretty sure of that. Have another drink.”

In a more sober moment, I would have been disturbed by that kind of disorientation. The booze was taking a toll, but I was rarely clearheaded enough to recognize it.

One night, John Paul was chatting with a couple of drag queens in a New Orleans bar. The queens were flirting endlessly with him as if they had found their “catch” for the evening. One of the “girls” eventually ended up with Jonesy in his room back at the Royal Orleans. It seems they were smoking a joint or two. The joint suddenly started the bed on fire, and within minutes sirens were blaring and firemen were tearing down the doors and taking their axes to the place.

Later, Jonesy insisted that he hadn't known the transvestite was a man. He looked sincere during his explanation, but no matter what the truth really was, we knew we had caught him in a rather embarrassing situation. “We're not going to let Jonesy forget about this one for a
long
time,” I told Robert.

 

After Louisiana, we decided to look for less claustrophobic living accommodations when we reached Texas. On short notice, I rented a dude ranch outside Dallas, which had a private airstrip a mile away so we could easily get to and from shows in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, and San Antonio. We invited a few girls to stay with us at the ranch, and it was great fun. There was horseback riding and a swimming pool. We didn't ever want to leave.

One evening when we flew out to a concert in San Antonio, we left behind one of our bodyguards, Willy Vaccar, who wasn't feeling well. When we returned early the next morning, Willy was waiting for us on the steps of the house, and he was actually trembling. “The guy who owns this ranch has gone fucking mad,” he exclaimed.

“What do you mean?” Peter said.

“He came into the house waving a Bible, ranting and raving about the terrible things we're doing here.”

Sure enough, the owner—an elderly chap named Jim—showed up a few minutes later wearing an enormous Stetson hat, making all kinds of threats and
pointing a shotgun at us through the darkness. He definitely lacked the stability you'd want in someone with his finger on the trigger.

“I don't like having you boys on my ranch!” he said in a slow Texan drawl. “You've got girls here, too, don't ya?”

I was pissed off. “You bet we do. We paid for this place. We can use it any way we want!”

“Sorry, boys! I want you OUT!”

He disappeared, and fifteen minutes later we had other visitors. The local sheriff and his deputy drove up in a patrol car. They ambled toward the front of the house. The sheriff must have been at least seventy years old. He wore house slippers and was armed with a tiny silver pistol with a pearl handle. His partner was a Gomer Pyle look-alike. They were quite a sight.

The sheriff turned to the owner of the ranch, who also had returned by then. “Jim, are you having trouble with these gents?” the sheriff asked him.

In the next few minutes, we did our best to explain our side of the story. The sheriff had trouble deciding quite what to do. Then he finally told us, “You guys better just go to bed. If there's any more trouble here tonight, I'll come back and lock you all up. We'll deal with this whole situation tomorrow.”

At midmorning, Peter made a phone call to the promoters we were working with in Texas, who told him that they had overlooked sending a check to Jim. Since Jim hadn't been paid, his anger and erratic behavior suddenly became a bit more understandable.

“Why don't we get the hell out of here?” I asked the band. “Who knows what these guys are gonna do next!” We began to prepare to leave, whereupon Jim returned, standing outside waiting for us.

“I don't want you fucking me around!” he screamed. He threw a beer can into the air and fired his shotgun at it. He missed.

Peter turned to me and said, “Shit! This guy's crazy! He might've missed the fucking can, but he sure as hell ain't gonna miss me!”

Jim ran down to the gate and locked it, apparently so we couldn't leave without paying. I followed him and frantically tried to pry the gate open. But as I did, he raised his rifle and threatened to shoot me. He ordered me back into the house.

During all of this, John Paul was hiding in the bathroom, frightened that bullets were about to start flying. Robert, meanwhile, was trying his best to take things in stride, complaining that he needed a cup of tea before we departed, that he couldn't do anything until he had his hot morning beverage.

Finally, we rounded up the girls and all of us piled into our rented station wagons. I was behind the wheel of the lead car and pressed the accelerator to the floor, aiming it directly at the locked gate. I braced myself and could feel
my heart rate speed up. When the car slammed into the gate, the frame shattered. We were free.

We thundered down the highway, liberally exceeding the speed limit. Expecting trouble, I had contacted our pilot two hours earlier and had him park our chartered plane at Love Field rather than at the private airstrip. As we sped toward the airport, we caught a glimpse of the sheriff and his posse of cars with their sirens wailing headed in the opposite direction back to the airstrip where they thought they could find us. We never again saw Jim and the sheriff, but I presume we hadn't won them over as Led Zeppelin fans.

B
y the time the '73 tour reached Los Angeles in late May,
Houses of the Holy
had become the Number 1-selling album in the U.S. That left the entire band feeling almost giddy with excitement. Virtually everything was going our way in the tour thus far. We felt invincible.

But literally minutes after our chartered fan-jet landed at Los Angeles International, and we moved onto the airport tarmac, the mood changed. Fans had lined the fence as our plane landed, and Jimmy walked over to shake hands and sign autographs. “Give me ten minutes and then we'll be on our way,” he told me. Pagey reached over and through the fence, making contact with the fans. But as he did, he caught a finger on a protruding wire and quickly pulled away. In the process, he somehow sprained the finger.

“Oh, shit!” he shouted, as much in anger as in pain. He turned and walked to the limo with his left hand in a contorted position. “I think I'm in trouble,” he said as he slid into the car. He slumped down in the seat, with an exasperated look on his face.

Within an hour, Jimmy was being examined by a doctor. They concluded that he just couldn't effectively maneuver that finger on the neck of the guitar. “The best medicine for this kind of injury is rest,” the doctor recommended.

Jimmy was incapacitated, at least for the next day or two. We really had no choice but to do some quick rescheduling. One of our dates at the L.A. Forum was pushed ahead four days.

We were all upset by Jimmy's accident. However, by May 31—John Bonham's twenty-fifth birthday—Jimmy insisted that we not let his injury interfere with some celebrating. That was the night of the first Forum show, and after the concert the general manager of an FM radio station in L.A. hosted a party for Bonzo at his house in the hills above Hollywood with the help of Tony Mandich of Atlantic Records and New York FM jock J. J. Jackson. Bonzo showed up wearing swimming trunks and a T-shirt. George Harrison and his wife, Patti, were there, too.

George had seen the Forum show and seemed intrigued with Led Zeppelin. He had once talked to me about coming to see the band perform at Madison Square Garden and suggested that he “pop in during intermission.”

“Well,” I told him, “Zeppelin doesn't take an intermission.”

George was puzzled. “How long do they play?”

“Most shows run close to three hours. Never less than two and a half.”

“Holy shit!” he said, letting those numbers sink in for a moment. “With the Beatles, we were contracted to play thirty minutes max! Usually, we were off the stage and gone within fifteen!”

Harrison felt there was something special about Led Zeppelin. So when Bonham wanted his picture taken with George, the former Beatle was flattered—but he was also a little hesitant. After all, he knew about Zeppelin's reputation for practical jokes and was wary that Bonham might have something else planned besides a photograph. So George decided to strike the first blow. He walked over to the birthday cake, picked up its top tier, raised it over Bonzo's head, and dumped it on the drummer.

There were gasps from the party-goers. And then laughter. John chased after George, caught him within a few steps, and then lifted Harrison up and tossed him into the pool. Almost instantly, full-fledged pandemonium broke out. Bonzo was pushed into the water, and most of the other party guests followed close behind.

Jimmy, meanwhile, rather than risk being pushed into the pool, gracefully walked down the steps into the water, wearing an elegant white suit. “Hell, I don't know how to swim,” he said. “I'm going to stake out a place in the shallow water before someone pushes me in the deep end.”

 

On June 2, 49,000 fans squeezed into Kezar Stadium in the southeastern corner of Golden Gate Park for a Zeppelin spectacle. By this point, Jimmy's finger was still in some pain, but he was becoming more mobile each day. He had toughed it out during the L.A. Forum concerts; he knew he could do the same in San Francisco.

Bill Graham, the promoter for the Kezar Stadium gig, was amazed by the ticket sales. “We could have sold three times as many tickets, maybe more, if
we had the room,” he told me. Scalpers were out in force, initially determined to market their tickets for $25, but soon finding themselves offered much more…$50, $100, even $200 a ticket.

Graham opened the gates at Kezar at five-thirty in the morning, and more than 3,000 fans who had camped out in the park for two nights stormed through the gates like someone was giving away free money rather than the Frisbees and the balloons that Bill Graham had distributed. Zeppelin didn't take the stage until midafternoon, preceded by a trio of opening acts (Roy Harper, the Tubes, Lee Michaels) who only seemed to make the audience more restless, more impatient for the band they had really come to see.

Finally, beginning at three-thirty, and continuing for two and a half hours, Zeppelin shook the city that was already much too familiar with earthquakes. They began with “Rock and Roll,” and from that point on it was a foot-stomping feast of Zeppelin at their best. The crowd seemed to react most enthusiastically to “Dazed and Confused,” “The Song Remains the Same,” and “Whole Lotta Love.” But the band could have played “Chopsticks” and brought down the house.

Blocks away on Parnassus Avenue, patients trying to rest at the University of California Medical Center grumbled that the noise from the concert kept jarring them awake. At the Presidio, more than a mile away, soldiers on guard duty swore they could feel the vibrations. Maybe only 49,000 could squeeze into Kezar, but the whole city knew Zeppelin was in town.

When I added up Kezar's box-office receipts, the gross totaled $325,000. “That's better than we did in Tampa by nearly sixteen thousand dollars,” I told the band on the limo ride to San Francisco International.

“We gotta get Danny Goldberg on this story,” Bonzo exclaimed, waving his right fist triumphantly in the air. “I want the fuckin' Stones to hear about the kinds of crowds we're drawing. They can't come close to us. Not even close!”

On the flight back to L.A., however, Zeppelin forgot all about ticket sales and crowd bedlam, at least for the moment. The fan-jet had just taken off when it got caught in some turbulence created by the takeoff of a jumbo jet just seconds earlier. Our plane bounced, dipped, and shook, creating high anxiety within the cabin.

No one said very much, except for an occasional expletive that you'd even forgive Mother Teresa for under the circumstances. We gripped shoulder rests, felt queasiness in our stomachs, and began to perspire.

At one time or another over the years, all of us had experienced some frazzled nerves while flying. Bonham went through a period of such crippling fear that he wouldn't get on a plane until he had a drink. Jimmy never liked flying, either, sometimes looking as though he were about to faint during turbulent flights.

On that day above San Francisco, as soon as the pilot had stabilized the fan-jet, Peter became enraged. “I've had it with these fucking little planes! This is the last time we fly them. The last time!”

Before we had touched down in L.A., Peter had given me my orders:

“We've got a month's hiatus coming up in the middle of this tour. By the time the tour resumes, I want us to have a bigger plane. I don't care what it costs. Get us something so big that it won't seem like flying at all.”