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http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article5037614.ece
The truth behind the Led Zeppelin legend
In the early 1970s, rock’n’roll debauchery reached its peak. And no band scaled that peak as eagerly as Led Zeppelin. Mick Wall reveals the truth behind the legends and gossip
If the first four years in the life of Led Zeppelin had been about empire-building, the next four (1972-75) would find them overseeing their kingdom with all the splendid pomp and inherent arrogance of pharaohs. Zep were now self-made millionaires so famous they hid behind armed guards, employed their own drug-dealers and flew by private jet. They were also at their creative zenith, taking their music far beyond the bounds of most other rock groups.
Indeed, only the Stones matched them at this time for musical promiscuousness, as both groups toyed, variously, with funk, reggae, country, West Coast . . . Arguably, Zep went even further, allowing jazz, synthesizers, folk, doo-wop and Asian raga influences to seep into their signature sound. They went further in terms of on-the-road outrage, too.
Keith [Richards] may still have draped silk scarves over his bedside lamps, carried guns and knives and shot up heroin, while Mick [Jagger] certainly kept the ladeez busy, but no one was busting up rooms, cars and jaws like [John] “Bonzo” Bonham; nobody was a bigger babe-magnet than rocket-in-my-pocket [Robert] Plant; and not even Keef could keep up with nocturnal [Jimmy] Page’s noneating, non-sleeping regime of smack, coke, Quaaludes, Jack Daniel’s, cigarettes, weed, wine, whatever. Plus, Page was the only one using whips and magic wands on any sort of regular basis.
Still basking in the enormous success of the untitled fourth album, it was now in 1973 that the feeling of invincibility that their manager, Peter Grant, had helped foster really began to take hold of the band. Of course, this was also the rock-fabulous age of colour TVs out of windows and white Rolls-Royces in swimming pools that bands like Zeppelin, the Stones and The Who came to embody. But no Seventies guitar god represented the extreme Byronic sensibility in person quite like Jimmy Page. He may have begun cultivating this dark mystique as a way of concealing his, in reality, more introspective, quietly spoken, earnestly-watch-ing-from-a-distance nature, but by 1973 things had started to change.
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For those that knew him, it was still just possible to tell the difference, but as the next few years skittered and jolted by, the mask would become harder and harder for him to peel off. While both Bonham and Plant invested in new farmhouse estates in the country – a 100-acre pile in Worcestershire for the former, which he employed his father and brother to help him develop into “a home fit for a king”, replete with livestock; a sheep farm in the Llyfnant Valley on the southern fringe of Snowdonia for the latter, where he took Welsh lessons and pursued his fascination with Celtic mythology at the National Library of Wales in nearby Aberystwyth – Page flitted between his own newly acquired 18th-century manor in Sussex (another riverside abode named Plumpton Place, replete with moat and terraces off into lakes) and flying visits to Boleskine House, intent on furthering his “studies” into Aleisteir Crowley and the occult. It was as though, having conquered this world, Page and Zeppelin now looked for dominion of the next.
Learning from the Stones – who had quickly shoehorned the new “glam” look of recent arrivals on the scene like Marc Bolan and David Bowie into the way they dressed on stage – the new Zeppelin show would be the first to feature a full-on professional lightshow, including lasers, mirror balls and dry ice, as well as a whole new set of stage costumes specially designed for each member – the most flamboyant being Page’s now famous glittering moon-and-stars outfit, the button-less, wide-lapelled jacket flapping open, his flared trousers boasting three symbols down the side of the leg, the top symbol, like an ornate “7”, representing Capricorn, his sun sign, a bastardised “M” representing Scorpio, his ascendant sign, and below that what looked like a “69” representing his moon sign.
Even the normally spotlight-avoiding John Paul Jones had his own specially designed suit, a commedia dell’arte-type jester’s jacket with little red hearts hanging from the frockcoat sleeves, while Plant became bare-chested, the lion in spring, his “third leg” showing prominently through his ultra-tight jeans, his shoulders squeezed into a powder-blue puffed-sleeve blouse; even Bonzo was now done up in a black T-shirt with a big shiny star sequinned upon it, the hair now very long indeed, hemmed in by a darkly sparkling headband.
“It’s a work of art, that suit,” Jimmy told me. “Originally, we saw the whole essence of our live performance as something that the audience listened to very carefully, picking up on what was going on, the spontaneity and musicianship. And you can’t do that if you’re running around the stage all night, or at least we couldn’t back then.” By 1973, however, “we were much more ambitious, in that respect. We really wanted to take the live performances as far as they could go.”
They now travelled by private jet, hired at a cost of $30,000 per tour and christened The Starship– a Boeing 720B 40-seater owned by former singer Bobby Sherman, one of the creators of the Monkees.
When they picked it up at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, it was parked next to Playboy boss Hugh Hefner’s plane, the words “Led Zeppelin” emblazoned down one side. Fitted with lounge-seats and dinner tables, a fully stocked bar and a TV lounge, there was also an electric Thomas organ which Jonesy would sometimes entertain the “guests” with, and, in a rear cabin, a double bed covered in shaggy white fur that became one of the most popular compartments on the plane – though few ever slept in it.
Back “home” in LA at the end of May, they had sold all 36,000 tickets for their two shows at the Forum within hours of the box office opening. The first show happened to coincide with Bonham’s 25th birthday. His present from the band: a new top-of-the range Harley-Davidson motorcycle. “He just tore up the hotel corridors and made an incredible mess, apparently,” said his old pal Bev Bevan, who had left the Move and now joined ELO. “But he paid the bill the next day then told ’em – ‘Oh, and keep the bike.’ Unbelievable, but that was John.” The Forum audience had also given him a birthday cheer during his 20-minute rendition of Moby Dick.
“Twenty-one today,” Plant had announced from the stage, and “a bastard all his life”. Afterwards there was a huge party thrown for him at the Laurel Canyon home of a local radio station owner. Guests included George and Patti Harrison, Roy Harper, B. P. Fallon, Phil Carson, and the usual gaggle of dealers, groupies and hangers-on.
Writer Charles Shaar Murray, who was also there, recalled “gallons of champagne, snowdrifts of cocaine, bayous full of unfeasibly large shrimp, legendary porn flick Deep Throat looping on a videotape player at a time when VCRs were hugely expensive items available only to the stupendously wealthy.” George Harrison crowned Bonham with his own birthday cake. Bonzo threw the former Beatle and his wife into the pool fully clothed, followed by anybody he could lay his hands on.
Jimmy, meekly complaining he couldn’t swim, was allowed to walk into the pool in his new white suit with the “ZoSo” symbol on the back. Harrison later claimed it was the most fun he’d had since the Beatles.
The LA music scene had moved on from the Laurel Canyon vibe the band had become so entranced by three years before. Just as in London and New York, the hip new sound of 1973 belonged to Bowie, T Rex, Mott the Hoople, Alice Cooper and Roxy Music – glam rock.
The complete opposite of the be-whiskered, down-at-heel ambience of the nouveau pastoralists, suddenly artists like Rod Stewart and Elton John were shaving their stubble and donning pink satin pants, stack-heeled boots and spraying their hair with glitter. The new cool hang out was Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco on Hollywood Boulevard.
Soon the walls of Rodney’s office at the club were decorated in pictures of him not just with Bowie et al but Phil Spector, Mick Jagger, John Lennon and, eventually, Led Zeppelin, attracted to the club not for the music but because of the teenage girls that packed the place seven nights a week. Although the glam scene had a large gay following, you’d never have known it sitting at Rodney’s table.
When Zeppelin hit LA now, they practically owned it. No longer content with booking the entire ninth floor at the Hyatt, they now took over the eleventh floor too, just a few steps from the rooftop swimming pool. They had permanently reserved tables at all the best-known Hollywood rock dives, not just Rodney’s but at their other favourite new hang-out, the Rainbow Bar & Grill, where they had their own special half-moon tables roped-off at the back. With a fleet of limos waiting kerbside, they also attracted star-name hangers-on such as Iggy Pop, sitting crosslegged in the corner of Jimmy’s suite, rolling joints as endless platoons of gorgeous girls wandered in and out, happy to trade “favours” in return for access to the Zeppelin magic kingdom.
Rejected by the Laurel Canyon sophisticates – much to Plant’s chagrin – who were offended by Zeppelin’s sleazy reputation, the band simply took over Rodney’s or the Rainbow and treated the places as they did the Hyatt: to use and abuse at will. For many chroniclers of the LA music scene, this was the beginning of its bleakest period. Writer Nick Kent, another visitor to Rodney’s, claims he’d “never seen anyone behave worse [there] in my life than John Bonham and [tour manager] Richard Cole.
“I saw them beat a guy senseless for no reason and then drop money onhis face.” Even Miss P (legendary groupie Pamela Des Barres) – still on the scene but now reconciled to a life without Jimmy after their brief affair, except for those occasions when he suddenly remembered her number – would later tell writer Barney Hoskyns: “As much as I really loved Zeppelin, they kind of f***ed things up in LA. The magic really went out of rock’n’roll.”
None of which fazed Jimmy Page, who was entranced by the city’s dark side, boasting to Kent about “one of his Hollywood girlfriends [who] bit into a sandwich that had razorblades in it”. There was also the city’s strong connection with the occult. As Angie Bowie commented in her autobiography: “Hollywood is very likely the most active occult area on the planet, and it’s been that way for decades. The black arts are established to the point of being ingrained, and in the mid-Seventies they were thriving as never before or since. There were almost as many occult bookstores as health food joints.”
Even Robert began to exult in “the recklessness that for me became the whole joy of Zeppelin . . . ten minutes in the music scene was the equal of 100 years outside it.”
Mostly, though, LA was about the girls. It was now that Page began the most notorious of his on-the-road relationships, lavishing attention on a 14-year-old habituée of Rodney’s named Lori Maddox. Tall, dark, skinny, with huge baby seal eyes, Lori and her friend Sable Starr were two of the best-known “dancers” at the club. She later recalled being “kidnapped” by Richard Cole one night, who drove her in a limo to the Hyatt, where she was taken to Page’s top-floor candle-lit suite.
“I saw Jimmy, just sitting there in a corner, wearing this hat slouched over his eyes and holding a cane,” she said. “It was really mysterious and weird . . . He looked just like a gangster. It was magnificent.”
But then, as B. P. Fallon, the band’s PR, says now: “The whole world was different then. Better or worse? You choose. The end of the Sixties, much of the Seventies, it was freer then, less uptight, less censorious. For a while it seemed anything was possible. And if you were a band on the road in America it was, quite simply, sex and drugs and rock’n’roll. Didn’t mean you were forced to partake but it was there on a plate – or a mirror – if you wanted it.
“You’d be locked up if you did that stuff now. Underage sex? Forget it, baby. Back then through the dented mists of time, rock’n’roll was a truly powerful potion! There were fresh enthusiastic girls everywhere going completely mad for it and there wasn’t the horror of Aids. You can imagine the Rat Pack at their height in Vegas all chasing women and going wild and being completely untouchable. Zeppelin were like that, with the volume turned up. There were placid moments but . . . c’mon! Wonderful.”
It wasn’t just in LA that the band enjoyed themselves. Out on the road, groupies and drug dealers were now everywhere. Three members may have been married but the concept of the “on-the-road lady” was still a valid one in the Seventies. In New Orleans, they stayed at the famous Royal Orleans hotel and hung out in the French Quarter where Jonesy got embroiled in “a spot of bother” with the local drag queens.
They all now regarded cocaine as “rocket fuel”, though wary of attracting too much attention had begun to employ a full-time “coke lady”, a mysterious Englishwoman whose sole purpose was to administer cocaine with her index finger to members of the band then dab their noses with a pinch of cherry snuff and a drop of 1966 Dom Perignon. None of which was considered addictive, but rather sophisticated, even elegant.
Was that part of the buzz, I once asked Jimmy. That different rules applied? “Sure, yeah, it was part of the reality of it. That’s the point, it’s part of the reality of it and that was exhilarating, yeah. But it was very apparent that we were right on the cutting edge of everything that was happening.”
Did it make it hard, though, for life away from the stage to match that kind of excitement and intensity? “No, I was still celebrating!” He grinned. “No, because things were in a balance. There was the intensity and energy and creativity that was going on, that was the slot for that. The rest of the time was preparation or recovery. You know, most of it was so cocooned. We used to leave the stage, jump into the cars and get whisked off to the aeroplane, which would fly us to the next gig. Our feet never really touched the ground.”
He paused. “There was always a lot of theatre. There always is on rock’n’ roll tours, though I think we might have pioneered a lot of it.
“In fact, I know we did . . .”
THE FISH INCIDENT
On July 27, 1969, the band played at the Seattle Pop Festival. The following day they decided to chill out at the Edgewater Inn, where guests could fish from their balconies. By 4am, a drunken Bonham had caught some red snappers and mud sharks, which Cole hung in a closet.
“So what are you going to do with them?” asked Plant the next day, holding his nose. “We’ll find something,” said Ricardo. Sure enough, that night they did, when one 17-year-old groupie named Jackie idly inquired: “Are you guys into bondage?” Cole led the way, inviting Jackie to strip off and lie naked on the bed, where he tied her hands and feet to the bedposts and the fish were brought out.
“What then happened was pretty disgusting”, recalled a witness, “It was nutso.” While such adventures have never been denied, it’s equally clear how little such tawdry scenes meant to the band. As Plant told me: “People forget when they tut-tut about this stuff what a laugh we were having.”
© Mick Wall 2008. Extracted from When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin, published by Orion at £20. Times readers can order a copy for £18 from Books First 0870 1608080
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