Stairway To Heaven (34 page)

D
oes Jimmy seem anxious and moody to you?”

Peter Grant was sitting across from me at a restaurant in L.A. Not long after the recording session in Munich had ended, Peter and I met in L.A. to take care of some business related to the completion and release of the movie,
The Song Remains the Same
. Jimmy joined us there a few days later. Almost immediately after Pagey's arrival, Peter became concerned.

“Something's different about Jimmy,” he said. “He acts nervous and jumpy. Something's not right.”

Immediately, heroin came to my mind. Although we had seemed to weather the heroin storm in Munich and Jimmy certainly functioned fine in the studio, I was too preoccupied with my own use of smack to keep an eye on how much he was snorting.

Later during that visit to L.A., Jimmy complained to me about having aches and pains. His nose was running, too, but I wasn't about to give him a lecture about the risks of heroin. I told Peter I'd talk to Jimmy, although I really had no intention of doing so.

Two days later, Jimmy and I flew to London together. He wanted to get back to England to see his daughter in a school play. On the drive to L.A. International, caught in the freeway traffic, he turned to me and said, “Chrissakes, Richard, don't get into this shit.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Heroin. I think I'm hooked. It's terrible.”

“Have you tried to stop?”

“I've tried, but I can't. It's a real bastard.”

That was the last we talked about it during the trip home. At the time, I didn't feel that I had sunk quite as deep as Pagey. I was using heroin regularly, but I still felt I was in control.

After talking to Jimmy, I promised myself that heroin wasn't going to get the best of me. I didn't realize, however, that it probably already had. As soon as we were back in England and I got to my house in Pangbourne, I headed straight for the half gram of heroin that I had hidden in a gold goblet. That Christmas, I was literally out of my head from regularly snorting the stuff. One night, I became so ill at a Christmas party at Peter's house that I spent most of the evening in the bathroom, vomiting repeatedly and praying for the night to end.

Bonzo wasn't doing much better. The last time we had been together in Paris, staying at the George V Hotel, Mick Hinton told me that Bonzo was languishing in bed. “What's wrong with him?” I asked.

“I don't know,” Mick said. “He keeps eating Mars candy bars. That's all he wants to eat.”

I walked into Bonham's room. “Get up, you fucking bastard,” I said.

Bonzo looked pale, disoriented, and almost comatose. He didn't seem to be in any mood to be harassed by me. “I couldn't get out of bed even if I wanted to,” he said. “All I feel like doing is eating sweets.”

“You know what your problem is, don't you?” I said. “You've got a habit.”

I wasn't much help, however. I picked up the phone by the bed and called a dealer I knew in Paris. Within an hour, he had delivered an ounce of smack to Bonham's room. We both snorted some of it and forgot all about the Mars bars for the rest of the day.

Of all of us, John Paul and Robert had come through most successfully. Jonesy was nearly always able to avoid any traps that the rest of us got sucked into; he remained coolheaded enough to know when to jump in and when to back off. Robert was not quite that sensible, but while Bonham, Pagey, and I were struggling with heroin, Robert never really became caught up in it. Maybe after months of painkillers, he had taken enough drugs to last him a lifetime. When he finally got rid of his cane a few days after Christmas 1975—nearly five months after the accident—he felt as if he had been liberated. True, he still was in no shape to challenge Baryshnikov, but most of the healing was behind him. He wanted to get on with his life.

 

Presence
was finally released in late March 1976, but its arrival in the record stores was delayed by (what else!) problems with the cover art. That pillarlike object on the album jacket had fans conjecturing in perpetuity about its
meaning. Some thought the obelisk was just an interesting work of art. Many more insisted that there was some symbolism behind it, that it had some link to Jimmy and his black magic rituals. Although Robert was as vague as possible when the press asked about it—“It means whatever you want it to mean”—fans pointed to the accident on Rhodes and figured that Jimmy's fascination with the occult had somehow placed a spell over the band. The object on the cover of
Presence
was supposedly related to it all.

“When you play with the devil, you pay the price,” a Los Angeles disc jockey speculated. “Led Zeppelin may be weighted down with a jinx that they can't control.”

That was the first time I had ever heard someone use the word “jinx” in reference to Led Zeppelin. It wasn't the last. Jimmy thought that kind of conjecture was bullshit. It angered him, but he tried to ignore it.

“Well,” Bonzo once asked me, “does anyone know what Jimmy does behind closed doors with all his supernatural shit?”

Jimmy, of course, didn't talk about it. I suppose it was really no one else's business. But in his continued silence, the rumors started to spread.

 

Certainly there was no jinx surrounding the new album.
Presence
soared to the top of the sales charts and became the first album in history to earn a platinum record through advance orders alone. Cuts like “Achilles Last Stand” received so much airplay—despite its ten-minute length—that some radio stations got complaints from listeners (“It's a good song, but don't you have anything else to play?”).

Jimmy and John Paul felt relieved by the response of record buyers. After Robert's accident, they had talked about just how strong the band could come back. Could Zeppelin rise from the ashes?
Presence
, they agreed, had put those concerns to rest.

Some critics wrote generous reviews of the album.
Rolling Stone
, however, stuck its usual needles into its Zeppelin voodoo doll. Stephen Davis conceded that Led Zeppelin were the “heavy-metal champions of the known universe,” but before the review was over, he had digressed into lines like “Give an Englishman 50,000 watts, a chartered jet, a little cocaine, and some groupies and he thinks he's a god. It's getting to be an old story.”

The negative reviews were an old story, too.

C
ole, I need your help! You need to get over here quick!”

I had just pulled my Jaguar up in front of a pub near my house and answered the ringing car phone. It was Peter Grant on the other end of the line. He seemed terribly upset.

“I've got some real problems here,” he said. “Gloria has come back for some of her things, and there's a guy downstairs with her.”

“What can I do?” I asked.

“Please come over. There might be a problem.”

Frankly, I was in no mood to drive over to Peter's house. I had just returned from the latest of several summer '76 trips to New York and Los Angeles, where I had tried to resolve the ongoing problems with
The Song Remains the Same
, most of which centered around its sound and artwork. Peter would have normally handled these responsibilities, but he was despondent about his wife, Gloria, leaving him, and preferred to stay close to home. Fortunately, Frank Wells, head of Warner Brothers Pictures, was overseeing the Zeppelin film, and understood fully what the band wanted to do and say in the picture.

After getting Peter's phone call, I drove first to my home. I went to an upstairs bedroom, collected two guns, put them in the trunk of my car, and drove to Peter's house. When I arrived, he was out front, talking in a raised voice to Gloria and her male friend. They didn't seem on the verge of blows, however, and I decided not to interfere. My presence, I felt, might make things worse.

I drove around to the back of the house. Peter's property had a moat around it, and you could only gain access to the house by walking or driving over a drawbridge. From the back of the property, I was hoping I could somehow jump across the moat and sneak in a rear door. Perhaps I had seen too many Tarzan movies for my own good, but I decided to climb up a tree near one of the narrowest parts of the moat and maneuver out onto one of the branches. “If I can just get far enough out to leap to the other side of the water…,” I thought to myself.

Unfortunately, I hadn't noticed that the tree was rotting. As I hovered over the moat, the branch snapped and I belly flopped into the water. To make matters worse, Peter's cesspool was malfunctioning and draining directly into the water. I was suddenly swimming in a sea of shit!

As quickly as I could, I groped my way out of the moat. I was not a pretty sight—or smell. By the time I got cleaned up, Gloria and her friend had left.

Peter was quite distraught that afternoon. He still couldn't accept the fact that his marriage to Gloria was crumbling. Maybe he was overreacting, but I found it easy to be sympathetic. Marilyn and I were having difficulties again, and this time our marriage appeared terminal. She and I had had a terrible fight about the same things we had been arguing over on and off since almost the beginning—drugs, communication, faithfulness. Before long, we each had a lawyer working on dissolving our marriage.

 

I hoped that with the release of
The Song Remains the Same
, we'd finally get some good news. The world premiere was scheduled for October at Cinema I in New York City, and it was a nerve-racking event for me. I had checked out the sound system at Cinema I, felt it was substandard, and knew the band would be furious with it. This was a movie that needed proper amplification to communicate the power of Zeppelin's music. There were enough other problems with the film itself—occasional out-of-focus and grainy camera work, uneven pacing, a length of more than two hours. I wasn't going to let poor sound quality cause any more difficulties.

“If we can't get a better system in there, I'm going to pull the film,” I warned a couple distribution executives at Warner Brothers. “Peter and the band are on a plane to New York right now. If this problem isn't rectified in the next few hours, I will personally cancel the premiere.”

The Warner Brothers execs were unhappy, but they took my threat seriously. They finally gave me the go-ahead to contact Showco in Dallas, which flew in one of its sophisticated quadriphonic sound systems. That was exactly what was needed. With that equipment in place, the classic Zeppelin songs—“Stairway to Heaven,” “Whole Lotta Love,” “Moby Dick”—sounded almost as good as being at a live concert. A few years later, an Atlantic execu
tive told me, “By putting in that big system, you guys did LucasSound years before George Lucas.”

However, when the West Coast premieres were held the following week in Los Angeles and San Francisco, the sound was absolutely abysmal. Jimmy was so embarrassed he almost cowered under his seat. “Why are you putting me through this?” he seethed.

The publicity material for the movie promoted the film as the band's “special way of giving their millions of friends what they have been clamoring for—a personal and private tour of Led Zeppelin.” It promised that the film would “reveal them as they really are and for the first time the world has a front row seat on Led Zeppelin.”

Pagey, however, was never particularly enamored with the film. Even with Showco's sound system, he didn't feel that the Madison Square Garden concerts lived up to the band's capabilities. After a while, he just didn't like looking at the film at all. Bonzo had his complaints, too, and wondered why there wasn't more humor in the film. Peter continued to call it “an expensive home movie.” Nevertheless, a soundtrack album from the film was released, and in just a few days it turned platinum.

 

At the end of the year, Peter bought me an Austin-Healy 3000 as a Christmas present. It was a sign of just how far the band had come. In 1970, my Christmas present from the band was a 750 Triumph Chopper motorcycle. Now they could afford to give me the kind of classic cars that make the covers of magazines.

During December, the band started planning its first live concerts since the Earl's Court performances. Although this new American tour would not begin until the following April at Dallas Memorial Auditorium, rehearsals started four months before that in a refurbished theater in Fulham loaned to us by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.

From the beginning, everything in those rehearsals jelled. Even months before the American tour, the band was starting to feel the kind of self-confidence it usually reserved for midway through a tour, once everything has fallen into place. Although young bands like the Clash and the Sex Pistols had been trying to steal Zeppelin's thunder, Zeppelin didn't seem worried. They still felt they could create another youth-quake in America. Time would tell.

J
ohn Bonham was bored. Led Zeppelin's 1977 North American tour was barely a week old, and yet here he was, sitting alone in his hotel suite at the Ambassador East Hotel in Chicago, yearning for something new, something different to amuse him.

“What's there to do, Cole?” he whined over the phone. “I can't sit still here. Isn't there anything exciting to do in this fucking city?”

Something was different about this tour, the eleventh that Led Zeppelin had made of North America. From the beginning, it just didn't feel right to me. This tour should have been Led Zeppelin's best. Fifty-one dates were on the schedule, the largest Zeppelin tour ever. About 1.3 million fans were expected to see the band in thirty cities. This was also the tour in which the band was rebounding from Robert Plant's accident, and Robert himself felt he had something to prove to the live audiences.

Nevertheless, I told one of our roadies that to me this seemed like the beginning of the end for the band. The soul that had driven Zeppelin since 1968 just seemed to have weakened, and drugs played too much of a role in everyone's life. It wouldn't be fair to say that the music suffered; the sellout crowds never seemed disappointed, at least from my backstage vantage point. But I just felt that the passion and the camaraderie weren't as strong as they had once been. By the end of the tour, the band had performed more than 550 concerts over its life span of nearly nine years. Maybe some burnout was inevitable.

The Zeppelin entourage had grown to ridiculous numbers, which was one of our problems during that spring and summer tour. Each band member traveled with his own personal assistant: Dennis Sheehan, who had been a roadie for Maggie Bell, joined us as Robert's assistant; Dave Northover, a pharmacist and a rugby player, helped John Paul; Rex King, who had one of the meanest right hooks in England, came on board to keep an eye on Bonzo; and Rick Hobbs, Jimmy's chauffeur and butler in London, worked with him. I even had an assistant, Mitchell Fox, who came out of our New York office, and Peter had help from Johnny Bindon. As a result, there were multiple divisions within the organization, with all of us relying less on each other for support and companionship. Mitchell spent most of his time trying to control the other assistants so I could have contact with the band members themselves. Cliques were formed, and a very tight organization became fragmented.

I still tried to make life as tolerable as possible for Led Zeppelin. For instance, I had reserved Bonzo a two-bedroom suite at the Ambassador East, just as he wanted it, with one of the bedrooms furnished with only a pool table, no furniture. But after hours of billiards, the novelty of the pool table had worn thin.

“We're checking out later today,” I told him. “Calm down and we'll be out of here before you know it.”

Probably more than anyone in the band, Bonham still had difficulty relaxing in the aftermath of a concert. He'd become hyper and fidgety and sometimes feel the need to bang away at something long after he had left his drum kit. This particular afternoon, after I had returned to my own room down the hall, Bonham decided to unwind by methodically demolishing his hotel suite.

Chairs crashed against walls. Couches soared out of shattered windows. So did lamps and end tables. A television set followed close behind, exploding on an airconditioning unit more than a dozen stories below.

Hearing the commotion, I sprinted down the hall, joined by a couple of our own security men. The door to Bonham's suite was ajar, and as we stormed inside he was hovering near the pool table, plotting his next move.

“Well, don't just stand there!” he roared. “This table is as heavy as an elephant. Give me a hand!”

What the hell! There wasn't much in the suite to save by this point. The four of us each gripped a corner of the pool table, lifted it off the ground, tilted it to one side, and then ceremoniously dropped it on the floor, propelling splinters in half a dozen directions. The impact shook the entire room, perhaps the entire city. Before the reverberations had ebbed, there may have been a tidal wave in Lake Michigan.

“Time for an encore?” Bonzo asked, nodding his head in answer to his own
question. We repeated the destructive maneuver again and again—raising the table and then letting it explode on the floor—until it resembled firewood.

Of course, in other tours, Bonzo had rarely shown any respect for hotel property. As in the past, maybe it was boredom that was driving him this time, too. But I just felt that it was more, that everything was just coming apart at the seams.

A few minutes after the pool table had crashed into the floor for the last time, the hotel manager showed up at Bonzo's door. He gasped as he surveyed the carnage before him. He hurriedly strode over to the phone and summoned his secretary, who arrived a couple of minutes later with pen in hand. He asked her to note all the damage in the suite, and as she did, Bonzo stood just to her right, playfully helping her make her inventory (“Don't forget the damage to the floor!” he exclaimed). The total bill for the outburst was $5,100.

At one point, when the manager could no longer contain his exasperation, he directed our attention to a mirror that had somehow survived Bonzo's onslaught. With sarcasm oozing from his lips, he exclaimed, “Oh, my God, you missed a mirror!”

Bonham chuckled. “Don't be so sure of that!” he growled. He strutted across the room, lifted the mirror off the wall, and hurled it to the floor. It burst into dozens of pieces.

 

Despite my own concerns, every concert continued to play to standing-room-only crowds, and the scalpers struck pay dirt, turning six-dollar tickets into seventy-five-dollar sales. In Pontiac, Michigan, 76,229 fans crammed into every breathing space of the Silverdome and the three-hour concert grossed a phenomenal $900,000 for a single night of music. We also sold out four concerts at Chicago Stadium, four at the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland, six at Madison Square Garden, and six at the Los Angeles Forum. From April through July, Zeppelin showed that it was still the biggest drawing card in rock music.

Peter hadn't lost any of his commitment to the fans. By this point, he could have become hardened to the whole process, developing a “let them eat cake” attitude. After all, he knew that each show would be a sellout, no matter how much extra effort and showmanship he put into it. But even amid the personal problems he had experienced in recent years, he never lost sight of the fact that it was the fans who had made this all possible. As we planned this 1977 tour, he was adamant that every fan would get his money's worth. In large venues, he insisted that an oversized video screen be installed, so that the people sitting in the nosebleed sections would feel just as much a part of the action as those in the front row.

 

We did without the
Starship
in '77, but we certainly didn't rough it. About ten days before the tour began, I got a call informing me that the jet had been grounded at Long Beach airport when one of the engines nearly came off in flight. With the band already often tied in knots over flying under any circumstances, I figured that giving them a report on the
Starship
's engine problems would send them running for the nearest Amtrak station. So without going into any great detail as to why the change was made, I went ahead and arranged to use Caesars Chariot, a 707 owned by Caesars Palace. It was just as luxurious as the
Starship
, although it didn't have a Thomas organ.

No one seemed to care about the Thomas, however. Most of us were much more interested in engulfing ourselves in booze and drugs within minutes after the plane was off the ground. For that tour, we consumed Singha beer by the case and drugs as though they were cotton candy.

Robert was taking painkillers as well. His leg, still not fully rebounded from the 1975 accident, was keeping him from functioning at 100 percent. Of course, he was on his feet during most of every concert, strutting like a peacock as the band stampeded over the crowd with “Rock and Roll,” “Whole Lotta Love,” and “Stairway to Heaven.” There were moments, however, when his body seemed to be tied in knots, incapable of emoting the kind of body English that had become a Plant trademark. Sometimes, I could see him grimacing in pain. Pagey tried to pick up the slack, drawing the audience's attention to his own swaggering, straining, and strumming and seeming quite content to lay claim to most of the stage.

Some nights, Robert's leg and ankle literally screamed for mercy from the wear and tear of the grueling concert tour. He appeared relieved as the acoustic set of each three-hour show would begin, when he could actually sit down at center stage next to Bonzo, Robert, and Jimmy and extend his leg in front of him for songs like “Black Country Woman” and “Going to California.”

“Sometimes I envy you, Bonzo,” Robert said one night, “just sitting on your drummer's stool for the entire concert. Let me know if you ever want to change places.”

At one point during the tour, Robert told me that the audiences were sometimes the only thing between him and just throwing in the towel. Their cheering motivated him to grit his teeth and push through the pain as though it didn't exist. The fans were his support, his inspiration.

 

While Robert never bailed out during the tour, the weather intervened at an outdoor concert in Tampa, forcing a cancellation—a decision that didn't sit well with many fans. Maureen Plant and Mo Jones had traveled to the States with their children to visit Disney World and spend a little time with the
band. We had flown into Orlando to pick them up, then headed for Tampa, where 70,000 tickets had been sold for the performance at Tampa Stadium. As Caesars Chariot approached Tampa, it was raining steadily. Peter was gazing out the window near his seat with a concerned expression. I knew his policy was never to let Led Zeppelin go near a stage in damp weather, and to have an alternate rain date available.

In 1972, tragedy had struck Stone the Crows, one of Peter's acts. Maggie Bell was the powerful lead singer of the band, and as the press began comparing her to Janis Joplin, Stone the Crows attracted a growing following. But during one of their performances in Wales, guitarist Les Harvey was electrocuted. Other members of the group, including keyboardist Ronnie Leahy and bass player Steve Thompson, tried desperately to revive Harvey, but he died onstage. Stone the Crows never recovered emotionally from the tragedy. I don't think Peter did, either. In 1973, the band broke up.

An investigation showed that Harvey had been electrocuted when a short occurred in his equipment. After that, Peter decided the risks were too high to let anyone ever perform in circumstances, including rain, that might increase the risks of electrocution. Peter became very protective of his musicians. He spent a lot of money on special transformers capable of absorbing shocks before they could ever cause any harm to Led Zeppelin. Even so, the no-rain policy became an inflexible rule for all of his acts.

Ten minutes before our plane landed in the Tampa rain, I was looking at the tickets for that night's show. “Oh, shit!” I exclaimed. “Peter, look at this. It says that the concert will go on, rain or shine! Who the hell put that on the tickets?”

Peter was outraged. He had never permitted a concert with a rain-or-shine policy, and he had no intention of changing his game plan. Terry Bassett of Concerts West was on the plane with us, and Peter let him know how unhappy he was. “Bassett,” he yelled, “what the hell has happened here?”

For the moment, Terry was at a loss for words. Just then, the plane landed with such a jolt that it took everyone's mind off the matter at hand. Peter's fury was put on hold, at least temporarily.

The rain stopped an hour before the show was scheduled to begin, and the skies seemed to be clearing. Peter decided to let the show move ahead as planned. The band opened with “The Song Remains the Same,” bringing down the house. But after two more songs and in the middle of “In My Time of Dying,” the sky exploded with thunder. Within two minutes, rain began falling in torrents. Peter didn't hesitate. He immediately ordered the band off the stage and the equipment covered with tarps. “If we can, we'll wait it out,” he said. The fans didn't budge. A few had brought umbrellas, but most of them were getting drenched. Nevertheless, no one's spirits seemed to be dampened.

We waited backstage patiently for the rain to stop, but it showed no signs of doing so. Finally, Peter grumbled, “Let's get the hell out of here.”

Before the crowd was notified of the cancellation, police escorts guided our limos out of the stadium. Then an announcement was made, asking the crowd to disperse peacefully—an announcement that brought a chorus of boos that lasted more than ten minutes. Some of the fans didn't seem to believe it. Others were angry.

Despite the continuing rain, much of the crowd remained at the stadium. They chanted, “We want Zeppelin! We want Zeppelin!” They threw bottles at the stage, where our roadies were trying to dismantle the equipment before the entire stadium became a monsoon.

Then the scene got ugly. Fights broke out in the audience, fans fighting with fans. Forty policemen in riot gear, most of whom had been stationed outside the stadium, dove into the crowd, flailing their billy clubs. The concert had turned into a full-fledged riot. Fists swung and blood flowed. Sirens blared from police cars and ambulances. Sixty fans ended up in the hospital. So did a dozen cops.

When we reached the airport and were boarding Caesars Chariot, one of our security men got word about the mayhem at Tampa Stadium. It brought back memories of the horrifying riot in Milan back in 1971. All of us were crushed, but Robert seemed to take it the hardest. “It's so unbelievable,” he said. “People come to hear music and they get their heads bloodied.”

Maybe there was something in the air in Florida. When tickets had gone on sale for the concert, hundreds of overzealous fans had forced their way into the Orange Bowl—one of the sites where tickets were being sold—and proceeded to tear out seats, rip apart offices, and steal food from concession stands. A SWAT team from the Miami police department was called and finally brought the disturbance under control by hurling tear gas at the fans. The
Miami Herald
ran the following headline about the disturbance: “Black Sunday for Real at the Orange Bowl: Last Time a Blimp, Now the Zeppelin.”