Stairway To Heaven (8 page)

 

During that first tour, I had been given some amyl nitrate by a friend in San Francisco, and I introduced Bonzo to it. As he and I sniffed a few amyl nitrate “poppers” one afternoon, Peter called us from London. He spoke to all the band members, one by one, asking how they were doing.

When it came Bonzo's turn, he told Peter, “It's great up here, Peter. Richard is giving me Amy's nightdress!”

Bonzo hadn't gotten the name of the drug quite right, and Peter probably didn't know what to think.

“Amy's nightdress!” roared Peter. “Get that fucker Cole and put him on the phone!”

I clutched the phone, and gave Peter my most innocent tone of voice. “Yes, Peter, how are you today?”

“What the fuck are you doing to Bonzo?” he shouted. “Amy's nightdress!”

Perhaps Peter thought that a groupie named Amy—and her nightdress—had joined us in Sausalito. Unfortunately, it was nothing quite that exciting. Not yet, that is.

Eventually, Peter realized that our horseplay was on a very juvenile level. At times over the years, he even joined us in some of our capers.

 

It was not all fun and games, however. In mid-January, the first real fractures within the group emerged. It resulted from a joke that Robert took the wrong way and that created a lot of animosity between him and me—feelings that lasted for many months.

We had arrived in Miami Beach to play the Image Club and checked into the Newport Hotel on Collins Avenue. Within an hour after our arrival, Jimmy and I had headed for the hotel pool, where we met and were chatting with a couple of girls. A few minutes later, Robert approached us wearing street clothes. “I'm going to take a walk through the shopping district around here,” he said. “I'll see you in an hour or two.”

Half jokingly, I told him, “Before you come back, Robert, pick up some sandwiches for us. I'd like a tuna on rye.”

Maybe it was the way I said it, perhaps a bit too condescendingly for Robert's taste, particularly since I was supposed to be working for him, not giving him orders. “Pick up your own fucking sandwiches!” he seethed. Robert shook his head in disgust and walked away.

I learned that even in those days before Led Zeppelin had reached Olympian heights, Robert had a strong ego that I was better off not messing with.

For months after that, Robert and I were on a collision course. He seemed intent on harassing me, at times seeming to even belittle me, making it clear who was the boss and who was the employee. When we were in hotels, he would call my room with requests like “Richard, ring up room service and have them send up some tea and breakfast for me.” I wanted to tell him to call the hotel kitchen himself. But he appeared to get a kick out of making me an
gry. I would always make the calls for Robert just to get him off my back. But it made me furious. I began to feel that my long-term relationship with him might be a rocky one.

Zeppelin's first American tour ended in New York at the Fillmore East. We stayed at the Gorham Hotel on West 55th Street, a wonderful place that Chris Stamp had discovered when managing the Who and that became a favorite among cost-conscious rock bands, thanks to its reasonably priced, kitchen-equipped suites. By this time, New York was eagerly awaiting the debut of Zeppelin. The word had spread about the band's incredible power…electrified performances that headline acts were finding almost impossible to follow.

At the Fillmore East, Zeppelin—along with Delaney and Bonnie—were scheduled to open for Iron Butterfly. Butterfly was a huge band in the United States. Their second album,
In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida
, was a monstrous hit—it eventually stayed on the charts for 140 weeks—and their third album was just weeks away from being released. Their music would cut audiences down to size with a sound packing the heavyweight punch of a dozen Mike Tysons. But still, Iron Butterfly was nervous about playing after Led Zeppelin, and Peter sensed that.

Peter was the kind of guy who enjoyed flexing his corporate muscles, who would go for the jugular if he had the chance. “Led Zeppelin is capable of bringing
anyone
down to size,” he said. On occasion, he enjoyed watching them do it.

Although Zeppelin was scheduled to go on first that night at the Fillmore, followed by Delaney and Bonnie and then Iron Butterfly, Peter approached Bill Graham, Fillmore's impresario, for a special favor. “Bill, you have to let Zeppelin perform second,” Peter pleaded. “Do it for an old friend. I want to see Zeppelin and Iron Butterfly perform back-to-back.”

Graham shrugged his shoulders. “Sure, why not!”

Peter got his wish. But we heard that when the members of Iron Butterfly received the news, they freaked out. They knew the stories about Led Zeppelin rocking the rafters in one venue after another. The Butterfly's Doug Ingle and Erik Braunn, we were told by some of the backstage crew, were threatening not to take the stage at all. They were demanding that Led Zeppelin be dropped from the bill altogether.

“That's ridiculous,” Graham said he told Iron Butterfly. “You have a contract to perform tonight. Hell if you're going to back out of this because you don't like the opening act. I'm the one who decides the order of appearance, not you.”

Just before Led Zeppelin went onstage, Peter was almost out of control. In
the dressing room, he gathered the band together and told them what was happening with Iron Butterfly. “Go out there and blow them out of this place!”

That was quite an order, but Zeppelin did just that. On consecutive nights, their sets were absolutely incredible. As they left the stage, with the final chords of “How Many More Times” resounding off the walls, the crowd chanted, “Zeppelin…Zeppelin…Zeppelin.” Ingle, Braunn, and Lee Dorman were irate. The audience was still calling for more Led Zeppelin as Iron Butterfly began their set. For a headline act, it couldn't have been more demoralizing. For a new band like Zeppelin, it couldn't have gotten any sweeter.

“Iron Butterfly is a good band,” said Peter, letting some arrogance shine through. “But they were no match for Led Zeppelin. Nobody is a match for Led Zeppelin.”

J
immy Page was distraught. The first American tour had ended on a remarkable high that left the band feeling euphoric for days after returning to England. But back in Peter's office, Jimmy was stunned as he sifted through some reviews of the concerts. And from the way they read, you might have thought that Led Zeppelin had invented cancer or heart disease.

“This is absurd,” Jimmy muttered to himself. “These critics don't know a fucking thing about music. They're out of touch. Completely out of touch.”

Peter had been right about that first American tour. Fans in the U.S. were ready for a trailblazing band like Led Zeppelin. Ironically, however, the rock critics apparently weren't.

Jimmy felt that Led Zeppelin was
his
band. And the vicious, critical comments were like witnessing the torture of his own child. In disgust, he wadded up a couple of the reviews in a ball and slammed them into a wastebasket.

Peter tried to calm Jimmy down. He was almost as angry as Pagey, but figured there wasn't much to be gained by letting a few confused critics undermine the band's well-being or confidence level.

“Let's put things in perspective,” Peter said. “A lot of the press are still pissed off about all of Atlantic's hype about the signing of Led Zeppelin. And we're paying the price now.”

Much of the media had proclaimed that Zeppelin was a money-hungry band being shoved down the mouths of a gullible public. They seemed to ig
nore the fact that during that first American tour, we played for as little as $200 per gig and rarely more than $1,500. Yet the critics had soured on us before they had ever heard a note.

The media saved their most vicious attacks for Robert, perhaps not surprisingly. The lead singer of any band always has to bear his soul a little more than anyone else. And the press collectively wondered who this young, untested singer really was. He had never performed before big crowds on big stages. And, suddenly, he was in the spotlight, at the center of the hype, in the bull's-eye of the critics' target.

Peter and I panicked, trying to hide most of the vicious attacks from Robert. When we'd buy the newspapers or when the clippings were sent to the office, we'd get rid of the reviews that I knew would really hurt. It would have been ridiculous to upset him. But some leaked through, and they had a demoralizing effect.

At first, Robert got angry. Then he got defensive. And then smug. Frankly, I think he was scared. His apparent cockiness was one way of trying to hide the pain and pretend that the attacks didn't hurt. But they did. Later, Robert would say that, in the midst of the media onslaught, the band just decided that “the best thing to do was shut the fuck up and play.” Nevertheless, the press assaults bothered him a lot. You could tell it in the way he talked about reporters who used to try to corner him for backstage interviews. “Tell them no interviews until they learn something about music,” he would say to me. “A lot of them are ignorant people.”

When the band's debut album,
Led Zeppelin
, was released in the U.S. in early 1969, things didn't improve much. Actually, key FM radio stations throughout America already had advance test pressings of the album and had been playing them for weeks. Atlantic had also distributed seven-inch promo discs of two of the longer cuts on the album—“Babe I'm Gonna Leave You” and “Dazed and Confused.”

But even though the disc jockeys seemed to like what they heard—continuing to talk about the album's vibrancy, originality, and raw energy—the print media showed no mercy. Some critics insisted that Led Zeppelin was little more than a copycat of the Jeff Beck Group, which also had emerged from the Yardbirds, with Beck and Rod Stewart at the helm.

In
Rolling Stone
, John Mendelsohn ripped the new Zeppelin album apart, song by song: “The popular formula in this, the aftermath era of such successful British bluesmen as Cream and John Mayall, seems to be: add, to an excellent guitarist who, since leaving the Yardbirds and/or Mayall has become a minor musical deity, a competent rhythm section and a pretty soul-belter who can do a good spade imitation. The latest of the British groups so con
ceived offers little that its twin, the Jeff Beck Group, didn't say as well or better three months ago.”

Ouch!

Despite such attacks, album sales didn't seem to suffer. The record climbed the charts quickly, and as it did the same hostile press began hounding the band for interviews. They suddenly were eager for a Zeppelin headline, clamoring for any small bit of gossip. But no one in the band was particularly eager to sit through any interviews.

“It's ridiculous,” Jimmy said. “If they're going to swing hatchets at us, why should we have anything to do with them? Tell them we're busy. Tell them anything.”

Peter tried to stay above it all and not let it bother him. While the band was nursing its wounds from the press's barbs, he went to work planning Zeppelin's next move. Even with all the cries of commercialism, and even with all the audience enthusiasm, the band's first tour of the U.S. did no better than break even. Once we were home and tallied up the figures, I was surprised by the numbers.

Peter sat there, sifting through the expense records. “Plane fares…auto rentals…hotels…food…equipment upkeep…salaries. Whatever we made was gone before we got home.”

But Peter wasn't upset. By the reactions of bands like Iron Butterfly, he knew that Zeppelin was on the fast track. At this point, he wasn't concerned about the bottom line. It would change dramatically for the better very soon, he told me.

On a personal level, none of us was making much in those days. I was being paid only $100 a week. Robert and Bonzo were making the same—a flat salary that they sent home to their wives and kids to add to the record company advance. That check from Atlantic provided them a nice financial cushion—something they hadn't been used to. When the band was originally formed, Bonzo was so pressed for cash that he had asked Peter, “Can I drive the equipment truck for a little extra money…maybe about fifty pounds a week?”

Jimmy and John Paul weren't paid anything for that first American tour. The band was their investment, and they envisioned an enormous payoff down the road. Like Peter, they were familiar enough with everything else in the record stores to recognize that Zeppelin was about to blast off—at least with the fans if not the critics.

Jimmy was determined eventually to keep Zeppelin's profits where they belonged—with the band itself. He related many horror stories—tales that used to make him furious just in the telling—of being ripped off in the past, including his time with the Yardbirds. “On one occasion, the Yardbirds toured
the U.S. with the Stones, right after we had appeared in the Antonioni movie,
Blow-Up
,” he said. “We were at the peak of whatever popularity we had at that time. But after five weeks of touring, do you know how much each member of the Yardbirds got? A check for a hundred and twelve pounds! That's fucking all!”

“Who got the rest of the money that you earned?” I asked.

“Hell if I know! But it wasn't us!”

It's a common story among rock musicians. The bands may attract the paying customers, and have gold record on their walls, but their bank accounts are empty.

Jimmy and Peter, however, had a special chemistry between them that seemed likely to avoid those problems. When Peter took over the management of the Yardbirds in its waning days, Jimmy felt that he was actually looking out for his musicians, not just for himself. Peter was honest, and in the music business, that was almost unheard of. With Led Zeppelin, Peter acted like the fifth member of the band. Just as I was running interference for the group on the road, Peter was adamant about protecting the business side of their lives. His philosophy was simple: Since the band is drawing the fans to the concert halls, they should reap the financial rewards. It was a rare, refreshing attitude.

Jimmy was so used to having money vanish from sight that, even in Led Zeppelin's halcyon days, he couldn't break his thrifty habits. We were once in a London pub, drinking with a band called the Liverpool Scene. They were teasing Jimmy about his Jack Benny–like money management. One of them coined the nickname “Led Wallet” for Jimmy, and it stuck.

After the first U.S. tour, the phone began ringing constantly in Peter's office. American promoters eagerly asked about Zeppelin's availability—a sharp contrast to what was occurring in the U.K. There was still very little interest in the band back home. Zeppelin's first album wasn't even released in England until March, and there was no huge outcry for it before then.

So as eager as the U.S. promoters were to have us back, the big British promoters weren't interested. One London promoter put it bluntly on the phone: “Peter, there's a new band being formed in England with nearly every tick of the clock. So why do we need another one?”

Those kinds of remarks were painful. But on some level, Jimmy and the others understood what was going on. After the debut album was released in England, the band congregated for a meeting in Peter's office, where Jimmy analyzed things this way:

“In the U.S., FM radio stations are willing to play lengthy Zeppelin-style cuts. But British radio is still hooked on singles, and so it's harder for us to get airplay here. That's just a fact of life we have to live with.”

Even so, they desperately wanted acceptance at home. Although they didn't talk about it much, they resented the cold shoulder from the U.K.

To attract converts in England, the band launched a British tour in March 1969, confined to one-nighters at small clubs—Fishmongers' Hall and the Marquee in London, Mother's in Birmingham, Cook's Ferry Inn in Manchester, and Klook's Kleek in Edmonton. They were cramped little clubs, often bursting with audiences of no more than 300 or 400. Some had no dressing rooms. The fees were small, too—sixty pounds against 60 percent of the gross was typical, although they sometimes went as high as 140 pounds per night.

Amazingly, word of mouth helped sell out nearly every performance. But even with packed houses, no one would make much money. Peter was still frustrated, but insisted, “Things are going to turn around in England. In the meantime, maybe it's time to go back to the U.S.”

Perhaps Zeppelin really belonged in America.