by Rees, Paul
“It was like being his fucking wife. We had our laughs but it was tough for sure. We certainly got to know each other. He couldn’t do anything. I had to push him, carry him and lift him. I had to put him in the bath and wash his willy.”
It was an impermanent, dislocated existence, the same as that of being on tour but without the anchor of having a show to do each night. Just as it did whenever he left home for the band, being in this self-absorbed state allowed Plant to separate his life into two distinct boxes. He was a rock star in one, a family man in the other, neither intersecting. Even now, so soon after the car crash.
“Yes, I think that’s true. And the more you do that, then the more natural it becomes,” says LeFevre. “In other words: ‘Yes, I’ll call you every day, darling, and I do love you.’ Then, as soon as you’re out the door, it’s like, ‘Yeah!’ He really didn’t talk very much about Maureen. It was strange.”
The mere fact of their being in Los Angeles added to the general air of anything goes, and they remained a magnet for all that was wild and unhinged about the city. Hollywood scenester Kim Fowley remembers driving out to a party at Plant’s Malibu pad during that long, hot summer.
“I was living with all kinds of lesbians and nymphomaniacs at the time,” he tells me. “This one girl I lived with, Denise, she and I had both fucked this astoundingly beautiful blonde bitch, Linda. I have these two girls in the car with me and another wildcat named Robyn.
“We got to Robert’s house, a giant place on the beach, and he’s in there with fifty or sixty women. You know that picture of Jimi Hendrix with all the naked women? Imagine that in someone’s living room. Robert was just sat there having a Napoleon Brandy. He was the sex object—not the girls. They were just waiting to be selected.
“I walked in and announced, ‘Tonight, for your pleasure, we will have a three-way. My bitches will eat each other’s cunts and fist-fuck each other.’ All these girls applauded and my girls did just that thing. Robert said to me, ‘I’ve seen this before, come outside for a moment.’ He told me he had $25,000 set aside to buy this one particularly rare record and did I know of anyone who had a copy? Then he said, ‘Are you in love with the blonde? No? Sure? OK . . .’
“He was fundamentally a very exceptional human being. He’s smarter in a different way to Jimmy Page, who doesn’t have all his cards out on the table. Robert brings his intelligence right out there with the haircut, the smile and the bravado. Like Errol Flynn or Douglas Fairbanks, all those swashbucklers.”
“One night, Robert and I came back to the house and the lights were on,” recalls LeFevre. “I went inside to check and there were these two Charlie Manson chicks sitting there—shaved heads, Tarot cards laid out on the floor. At that point I thought, ‘I get it.’ That’s why there was such apprehension about people who came to be around the band.”
Against this backdrop progress on the record was slow and halting. There was no longer a backlog of material to draw from since the band had exhausted that on Physical Graffiti. For the first time in years Plant and Page had to write an entire collection of new songs together. Problem was, even though they were living in such close proximity, the two men were barely seeing each other.
Page had vanished into his rented mansion, the curtains of which were permanently drawn to block all traces of light, sealing him inside.
“We occasionally went up to Jimmy’s house but there was no work done there to my knowledge,” says LeFevre. “The master plan had been interrupted by the accident but it couldn’t be put on hold. That wasn’t on the agenda. Yet things had changed within the band.
“Listen, man, if something has happened to you physically or mentally then that impinges on your relationships with other people. There’s no doubt Robert had lost that sense of invulnerability. Subject A, Robert, was reacting thus: getting his head around it and trying to get his body working again. Subject B, Jimmy, is affected in a different way . . . and maybe finds solace in other areas.”
On the odd occasions that Page did venture out it was into Hollywood and then by night. He went to see Michael Des Barres’s band Detective, signing them almost on the spot to Swan Song, although he was otherwise disengaged from the business of the record label he had founded.
“It was a pain in the ass, eventually,” admits Des Barres. “Jimmy was going to produce us and we had to wait a year for him in L.A. You give me a million dollars and put me in Los Angeles for that length of time—big trouble, obviously. I got strung out on everything.
“None of the Zeppelin guys was hands on with Swan Song, though. They were too involved in their own lives. At that time they were going through unbelievable pressures—continuing substance abuse and the question of where it is you go from the very top. It was a hard place for them to be. I don’t resent them for it.”
Bonham was also cut adrift on Sunset Strip. One night he was involved in an altercation with Kim Fowley’s assistant, Michelle Myer, at the Rainbow Bar & Grill when Bonham took exception to the way Myer had smiled at him. Later it was reported that he had punched Myer to the floor, although Fowley maintains the fracas was more of a wrestling match. “And believe me,” he adds, “Michelle could handle herself, especially against a guy that wasted.”
Somehow seven new songs materialized, all bar one of them credited solely to Page and Plant. The band regrouped at SIR Studios in Hollywood to knock these into shape. Bonham and Jones added their input to the shortest track, “Royal Orleans,” which ultimately sounded like a studio jam that had not found a point to coalesce around. Such was the tone of the whole record.
At the end of October they exchanged the West Coast heat for the bitter bite of winter in Germany. They were booked into Musicland Studios in Munich, although for just eighteen days, all the time they could squeeze before the Rolling Stones took over the complex to make their Black and Blue album. Arriving in the city, Plant balked at the hotel Cole had booked for them, stating the rooms were not big enough and promptly moving himself to the local Hilton.
Page did not leave the studio. In the event he succeeded in begging an extra three days off Mick Jagger, but even still, he and his engineer Keith Harwood had to work around the clock and without sleep. Nerves were frayed. Because he had to sit down to sing, Plant struggled to take in enough air to sustain the longest and highest notes. He was not alone in being handicapped. None of them could run from the hard truth that the band was sounding like a shadow of its former self.
Years later Page insisted that Presence was his favorite Zeppelin album. He was doubtless swayed by the fact that so much of the music on it had come from him, seeing it as a personal triumph against the odds. For his part, and at the time of its release, Plant said it was a record shaped by circumstance, a howl of pain. Most of all Presence amounted to a yardstick, one measuring just how much had drained from Zeppelin in the preceding two years.
It was not the work of a functioning band, at least not in the way their previous records had been. The landscape it covered was flat and unchanging. Ideas had formed but few were seen through into fully realized songs. The ten-minute “Achilles Last Stand,” “For Your Life” and “Candy Store Rock”—each of these was a rampaging Page riff looking for a tune to fasten on to. Each followed a straight, narrow line without ever taking the twists, turns and unexpected detours that inhabited Zeppelin’s greatest moments.
Sonically, it was pitched high and full of treble, hard at the edges and with a surface as cold as the point of a needle. Page left no space unfilled in the final mix, compressing everything to such a degree that it sounded wired and jittery. At the forefront he placed his own guitar, its tone sharp and grating.
Through this, occasional moments of power and clarity nonetheless emerged, such as “Nobody’s Fault but Mine,” another bruising blues epic, or “Hots On for Nowhere,” a frenetic boogie, Jones’s bass and Bonham’s drums dancing a fast-footed shuffle. The album, however, was summed up by its closing track, a second weighty blues titled “Tea for One
.” On this, Page’s playing had the consistency of liquid and there was tangible conviction to Plant’s vocal, but its mood was morose and it extended for more than nine minutes, so that one was left wishing for it to end.
Throughout, Plant’s singing betrayed his physical state, his voice drawn in and limited. Yet his lyrics shone a light into the band’s darkest recesses. On “Hots On for Nowhere,” he reflected: “I’ve got friends who will give me their shoulder, event I should happen to fall/I’ve got friends who will give me fuck all.” While “For Your Life” found him pointing an accusatory finger as he sang of “cocaine-cocaine-cocaine in the city of the damned,” going on to sketch out a bleak and hopeless scene: “Down in the pits you go . . . The next stop’s underground.” It requires no stretch to imagine Plant working up these words in the hothouse atmosphere of Malibu Beach, his intended subject shuttered behind the walls of the house up the road.
The cover artwork proved to be entirely fitting. Presence was contained in an expanse of gray, at the center of which a family of four was pictured looking at a mysterious black object, their expressions fixed and inscrutable. Like the record inside, it was a curiously passionless affair. The album was released on March 31, 1976, to begin with selling faster even than Physical Graffiti but stalling just as abruptly.
A month after it came out, another four-piece band, this one from New York and an insouciant-looking bunch, released their eponymous début. Ramones also sounded as if it were jacked up, but on amphetamines rather than cocaine—cheaper, edgier and more urgent. Rushing by in an anxious blur, not one of its fourteen tracks lasted longer than three minutes. There was nothing dextrous about this and it sold the tiniest fraction of what Presence did, but soon enough it would power a challenge to the old order, the one that Zeppelin headed and epitomised.
With Plant still in recovery from his injuries, the band was returned to a suspended state and things continued to unravel. Page went back to his long-gestating Lucifer Rising soundtrack, for which he had managed to pull together less than half an hour of music, and this unsettling and incoherent. Grant also now had troubles of his own. His marriage had ended and he was slipping further into cocaine addiction. As he did, his grip on the band’s affairs was seriously loosened.
Dave Lewis, editor of the Zeppelin fanzine Tight But Loose, began working out of the Swan Song office on London’s King’s Road during this period. “I saw some amazing goings on,” he recalls. “For a young and impressionable teenager it was an eye-opener. There were a lot of hard drugs going around. I remember one afternoon Richard Cole coming running up the stairs with an axe stuffed down his trousers. I don’t know why he had it but he wasn’t happy.”
There seemed no escaping the aura of menace that had engulfed the band. That summer Plant went to see Bob Marley and the Wailers at Cardiff City football stadium. He first made himself as conspicuous as possible, sweeping on to the pitch in the afternoon sunshine and being surrounded by people, and then retired to the hospitality lounge.
“I was having a chat with Robert when this guy named John Lodge came over to join us,” says Bob Harris, who was compering the show. “John was bass guitarist in a band called Junior’s Eyes. Everyone knew him as ‘Honk.’ He was six foot eight and had a massive nose.
“I don’t know whether Honk was out of it but he was being kind of annoying. I had to excuse myself because I was due on stage. Five minutes after I left, and as I was walking down the steps to the stage, I heard a cry from behind me. It was Honk and he had blood pouring from his nose. Someone from Robert’s security had taken him to one side and asked him to cool it. Since Honk didn’t really listen this guy had head-butted him.
“I’m not at all sure Robert even knew this had happened. But it was an indication that the ice was very thin around the edges.”
The year ended on a low note for the entire band. In the U.S. that October—and in the U.K. the following month—Zeppelin finally premiered their film The Song Remains the Same. Critics drubbed it and also the accompanying soundtrack album, the one vanishing from cinemas as quickly as the other exited the charts.
Had Grant or Page still been on their game it is doubtful that either film or album would have ever seen the light of day. The film was a confusing shambles, almost grotesque in its self-indulgence, the record a document of Zeppelin’s worst on-stage excesses. Both made it seem as if the band had lost its last shred of self-awareness, that the four of them were now as remote from reality as they were becoming from each other. On screen and record, when Page brandished his violin bow during a tortuous “Dazed and Confused,” it might appear as though he were fiddling while all around him burned.
In the U.K. 1977 gave rise to two very different happenings: Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee celebrations and the breaking out of punk rock, one rising up as if in direct competition to the pomp and ceremony of the other. The Sex Pistols and the Clash opened Britain’s punk floodgates, setting loose scores of snotty, abrasive bands in their wake. The most popular narrative following on from this point is that punk levelled the cultural landscape at a stroke, the lumbering beasts of ’70s rock being swept aside and music democratized to such a degree that virtuoso guitar solos and stadium-rock extravaganzas were instantly rendered passé.
In this context Keith Richards’s arrest for possession of heroin in Toronto that February and the death of Elvis six months later can be seen as the last flailing of a bloated corpse. It is a dramatic account—but also a fiction. For no matter how hard punk impacted, and however much its influence has endured, it was no Year Zero. Even then, at the epicenter of the storm, the records that most engaged the mass audience had a familiar bombastic ring to them: Pink Floyd’s Animals, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, Queen’s News of the World and ELO’s Out of the Blue.
The biggest cultural phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic that year was not Never Mind the Bollocks but Saturday Night Fever, in which white-suited John Travolta danced his nights away as Tony Manero to the Bee Gees’ euphoric disco soundtrack. True, the Sex Pistols did stir up controversy with their “God Save the Queen” single but this tilt at the windmills of tradition was still overshadowed by the Jubilee, millions gathering for street parties across the country on June 7.
Zeppelin were foremost among the “dinosaur” bands the punks took aim at. John Lydon of the Sex Pistols, then calling himself Johnny Rotten, scorned Plant for turning up to see the Damned with an entourage of minders, and Paul Simonon of the Clash claimed he felt sick just by looking at Zeppelin’s album covers. Plant was particularly sensitive to these charges. Yet no one was architect of Zeppelin’s downfall so much as the band themselves.
The end was begun with the announcement of a scheduled 51-date tour of North America set to start that February. From the start it was too much to ask of them. For although Plant’s physical injuries had healed, the band’s health was ailing and they were in no fit state for such an undertaking.
In the event the dates had to be pushed back a month when Plant contracted laryngitis but his illness was the least of the problems that were soon to beset Zeppelin. When the tour did begin it seemed mired in darkness from the start. At one of the early gigs at the Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati sixty people were injured and more than seventy arrested when fans tried to gatecrash the arena.
Around the band’s camp the mood also seemed blacker, its shifts more difficult to predict. The crew had swollen to include personal assistants for each member and for Grant, and also a greater security presence. To this Grant added John Bindon, a thirty-four-year-old Londoner who had first latched on to Cole.
A volatile character, Bindon was a professional bodyguard and part-time actor. On screen he had appeared in a pair of classic British gangster films: 1970’s Performance alongside Mick Jagger and as a crime boss in the following year’s Get Carter. The character he played in Performance was aptly named Moody, since Bindon had a hair-trigger temper and a reputation as a hard man.
“Bindon was just nast
y, absolutely nasty,” says Dennis Sheehan, then working as Plant’s assistant. “He was well-built but good looking, and he could turn on the charm when he wanted. But a lot of the time you didn’t see that. If you looked into his eyes you’d see something very devious and . . . unacceptable. Not the sort of person to have on the road.
“Richard Cole went completely off the deep end, too. I would rescue him. I hate to put myself into that role, but there were times when he was about to do the Superman act out of the seventh-floor window of his hotel room. That’s where his head was at and what drugs were doing to him.
“Peter wasn’t tremendously well, either. He was suffering with a weight problem and from a bit of depression, too, I think, probably due to the amount of drugs he was taking. There were many occasions that I’d answer the phone in my room and he’d ask me to pop up to see him. What he wanted was for me to sit down and talk with him. He’d chat for hours about his wife, Gloria. It was quite sad. She was a lovely woman, but his drug-taking and other things had pushed the love away from their marriage.”
There had been no weakening in Zeppelin’s pulling power, more than a million tickets having been sold for the tour. They were playing six nights at both Madison Square Garden and the Forum in L.A. Business had never been better. Yet even though they could still lift themselves to great performances, it was getting harder for them to do so. And outside of the sound and fury of the shows, the fact was they weren’t the same band. Nor would they ever be again.
Page appeared frail and drawn, Bonham bloated. Page had never been seen to eat much of anything but now he actually looked starved. In Chicago, the third night of the tour, he came on stage in full Nazi regalia, wearing an SS officer’s peaked cap and black leather jackboots. It was as though he were attempting to be a physical manifestation of the cancer eating away at his band’s spirit.