by Richard Cole
“Are you all right?” one of my cell mates, Pietro, finally asked over the din of a nearby transistor radio.
“I’m not sure,” I told him. “One of my friends has died.”
My cell mates tried to be comforting, but I wasn’t particularly receptive to their words. Finally, with an onslaught of emotions rushing through me, I snapped. Throwing a pillow against one of the walls, I shouted, “Damn it! Here I am rotting in this fucking jail for something I didn’t do! I wasn’t even with my friend when he died!”
I began pacing the cell. “Maybe I could have done something to help him. Maybe I could have kept him from self-destructing.”
It had already been a difficult two months in that prison cell. I had been put through a forced withdrawal from a heroin addiction, enduring many uncomfortable days and nights of nausea, muscle cramps, body aches, and diarrhea, while trying to figure out how I was going to extricate myself from the bum rap that had put me behind bars. One minute, I had been relaxing at the Excelsior, one of Rome’s most elegant hotels; the next, policemen with their guns drawn had burst into my room, accusing me of a terrorist attack that had occurred 150 miles away. Since then, my day-to-day existence had become difficult—even before the stunning news about John Bonham.
In the days and weeks after Bonzo’s death, I received several letters from Unity MacLaine, my secretary in Zeppelin’s office. “The coroner’s report,” she wrote, “says that Bonzo suffocated on his own vomit. It says he had downed 40 shots of vodka that night. They call it an ‘accidental death.’”
Bonham had died at Jimmy’s home, the Old Mill House, in Windsor—a home Pagey had purchased earlier in the year from actor Michael Caine. The band had congregated there on September 24 to begin rehearsals for an upcoming American tour, scheduled to start in mid-October 1980. Beginning early that afternoon, John had started drinking vodkas and orange juices at a nearby pub before overindulging in double vodkas at Jimmy’s home. His behavior became erratic, loud, and abrasive. He bitched about being away from home during the nineteen-date American tour.
When John finally passed out well past midnight, Rick Hobbs, Jimmy’s valet and chauffeur, helped him into bed. Rick positioned the Zeppelin drummer on his side, placed a blanket over him, and quietly closed the bedroom door.
The next afternoon, John Paul Jones and Benji Le Fevre, one of the band’s roadies, tiptoed into the bedroom where Bonham was sleeping. Benji shook Bonzo, first gently, then more vigorously, but was unable to arouse him. Panicking, Benji feverishly checked Bonham’s vital signs. But there were none. He wasn’t breathing. He didn’t have a pulse. His body was cold.
When the ambulance arrived, the attendants repeatedly tried to resuscitate Bonham as his fellow musicians looked on in horror. Nothing worked. He may have been dead for hours.
After a lengthy voyage that began in 1968, Led Zeppelin had crash-landed. This was the band that had redefined success in rock music, whose record sales and concert receipts turned them into overnight millionaires and the biggest drawing card in rock music. This was the band that played such high-spirited, dynamic, wall-to-wall music—and performed with such confidence and such charisma—that concert tours were sold out just hours after tickets went on sale. Standing ovations and endless encores became ordinary. Harems of excited young girls—whose adrenaline would surge at the mere mention of Led Zeppelin—fought for the chance to fulfill the band’s every sexual fantasy and fly with them on their private jet, the Starship, where a bedroom provided privacy, and drugs and booze helped heighten their senses.
I had been Led Zeppelin’s tour manager from the beginning, since their first American concert at the Denver Coliseum in 1968, where they opened for Vanilla Fudge. Over the course of the next twelve years, I had been with them on every tour and at every concert until almost the end—scheduling flights and hotel accommodations, helping to choose concert sites, planning details from the size of the stage to the height of the crash barriers, providing show-no-mercy, paramilitarylike security, escorting girls to the rooms of the band members, and keeping Zeppelin nourished with drugs. In the process, I had seen them evolve into a powerhouse force in the music industry.
But John Bonham’s death proved that there was nothing omnipotent about Led Zeppelin. Their music might live forever, but they had paid a terrible price.
2
THE DOWNFALL
I saw John Bonham for the last time just days before I had left for Italy in summer 1980. We met at a pub called the Water Rat on the King’s Road, after an evening rehearsal in which the band was preparing for a summer European tour. While John and I drank Brandy Alexanders, I grumbled about Peter Grant, the band’s manager, sending me to Italy to kick my heroin habit rather than accompanying the band on their upcoming tour.
“Don’t worry,” John said, “you’ll get off that shit and be back with us before the summer’s over.”
When we left the pub, John took me for a ride in a Ferrari Daytona Spider convertible he had bought two days before. As he dropped me off in front of the pub, I turned to Bonzo.
“Do you realize that this European tour will be the first Zeppelin gigs I’ve ever missed?” I told John. “I hope you bastards miss me.”
Bonzo smiled. “Very unlikely, Cole,” he quipped. “Don’t count on it.” Then he asked, “How pissed off are you at Peter?”
“Very pissed off. But I also know that I need to get off smack once and for all. And so do you, Bonzo.”
Bonham laughed. “It’s not a problem for me,” he said with exuberance. “If it becomes a problem, I’ll just quit!”
Even though I wanted to go on the European tour, I also recognized that I was losing interest. As good as Led Zeppelin’s music continued to be, I could see the organization beginning to suffocate in its own personal turmoil. For me, the hassles were starting to outweigh the joys.
In the early years of Zeppelin, we had been a close, six-man unit, with Peter and me providing the support for the four musicians. There was real joy in seeing the fame of the band mushroom so quickly, which translated into enormous financial rewards and the chance to live an incredible fantasy lifestyle that a bunch of musicians from mostly working-class backgrounds found irresistible and intoxicating.
But from the inside, the signs of Led Zeppelin’s disintegration began to surface in the late 1970s. Jimmy, Bonzo, and I were becoming increasingly caught up in the quagmire of drugs, enough to really anger Robert and John Paul. “You’re one of the people in charge of this operation,” Robert once told me. “And it makes us nervous to see what’s going on. Can’t you see what’s happening?”
I thought Robert was crazy. From the earliest years, Zeppelin’s concert tours had always been drenched in alcohol…champagne, beer, wine, Scotch, Jack Daniels, gin…and brimming with drugs, even though we rarely paid for any of the illegal substances. Drugs for the band were often given to me by fans, by friends, who would knock on my hotel room door, hand me a bagful of cocaine or marijuana, and say something like, “We have a present for you.” The band rarely turned anything down.
When Bonzo, Jimmy, and I began using smack, no one aggressively intervened, even when it started having a noticeable impact. Jimmy became so caught up in his drug habit that he sometimes showed up an hour or two late for rehearsals. Bonzo’s behavior, already unpredictable, became more volatile. As for me, I was buying heroin from dealers within a few hundred feet of Peter’s office in London and was becoming less attentive to my day-to-day responsibilities in the Zeppelin organization. I still felt I was in control, but I wasn’t; I’m sure Bonham and Pagey were deteriorating, too.
By 1980, Peter and I were constantly at each other’s throats. Peter never fired me, but we weren’t getting along at all. He was fed up with my heroin habit and gave me an ultimatum.
“Pick where you want to go to clean yourself up, and I’ll pay for it,” Peter said. “But you’re not going to bring down this organization with you.”
At times, the thought of
getting away actually sounded appealing. Particularly while we were on tour, Peter wanted to know where I was and what I was doing at every moment of every day. I felt I was on the spot all the time, and I didn’t like it. “Why are you bugging me?” I would scream at him. My drug use was making me paranoid.
I even thought of quitting. But at the same time, I was unwilling to give up the glamorous life-style of limousines, luxurious hotel suites, drugs, and groupies.
Peter was an intimidating presence, a mammoth man, overweight, with an unkempt beard and a fast-receding hairline. More important, he was a hands-on, loyal manager who knew every twist and turn of the music industry. He deserved nearly as much credit for the band’s international success as the musicians themselves.
As for Bonham, I began seeing a very nasty side of him at times—an anger built on frustration—that grew out of his own mixed feelings about Led Zeppelin itself. He loved playing with the world’s number one band, and he glowed when critics called him the top drummer in the business. But with increasing frequency, he resented having to go out on the road or showing up for a particular concert when he just wasn’t in the mood. Like the rest of the band, Bonham no longer needed to play for the money. So when his state of mind just wasn’t in sync with catching a plane to the next gig—when his big heart and his loneliness for his family would make him ache to be back home—he would say to me, “It’s becoming harder to be somewhere where I don’t want to be. I’ll follow through because people are depending on me. But someday soon, I’m going to give it all up. I have to.”
Bonham’s thirty-minute drum solos—which sometimes left the drumskins torn and his hands bloodied—were a way of getting out all that anger and all that pain.
Jimmy Page was just as complex, although his commitment to the band never wavered. Because Zeppelin was his baby, his creation, his enthusiasm remained strong. But his health was a constant worry to those of us around him, thanks to a vegetarian diet that sometimes bordered on malnutrition. He appeared frail and was more prone to colds than the rest of us. Still, his passion never ebbed onstage.
Jimmy and I were very close during the early days of Zeppelin, although we spent much less time together in the later years. Offstage, we had once shared an excitement for art collecting, but as I began spending more of my money on drugs, I could no longer afford to indulge my own artistic interests, and so Jimmy and I drifted apart. He never seemed particularly impressed with his own wealth, perceiving it as a means of buying him seclusion—and maintaining his cocaine and heroin habits. But more than anything, music and Led Zeppelin were his real loves.
Through all the band’s travails, John Paul Jones somehow emerged unscathed. When he dabbled in drugs, it seemed to be more out of curiosity than anything else, and never to excess. He was almost always level-headed and in control. He was also reclusive, even on the road, often content to be by himself, away from the chaos and the excesses that he may have seen bringing Led Zeppelin down. He avoided much of the band’s craziness, and his marriage survived intact after all the years of touring; his wife and children seemed to be enough for him.
“Richard,” he would sometimes say on the road, “here’s the phone number where I’ll be for the next forty-eight hours; unless there’s an absolute emergency, don’t tell anyone—and I do mean anyone—how to reach me.”
Peter would become outraged when John Paul would disappear. But perhaps Jonesy was smarter than any of us, keeping his distance while the rest of us were gradually sinking in the quicksand.
Until Bonham’s death, I had always felt that Robert Plant had borne most of the brunt of any negative energy that may have surrounded Led Zeppelin. From the beginning, through his soulful singing, I knew there was a sensitive side to Robert. So I wasn’t surprised to see him emotionally devastated in 1975 when his wife, Maureen, nearly died from internal injuries and multiple fractures in an automobile accident on the Greek island of Rhodes or two years later, when his son, Karac, died of a serious respiratory infection. At Karac’s funeral, Robert was stoic and composed through the services. But later that afternoon, Bonham and I sat with him on a grassy field on Jennings Farm, Robert’s home near Birmingham. As each of us drank from a bottle of whiskey, Robert opened up, bewildered by the tragedies in his life and where Led Zeppelin was headed.
Clearly, Robert was hurt that Jimmy, John Paul, and Peter hadn’t been by his side during his son’s burial. “Maybe they don’t have as much respect for me as I do for them,” he said in a pained, monotone voice. “Maybe they’re not the friends I thought they were.”
A few minutes later, Robert pondered all of our pasts and futures. “We couldn’t ask for any more success than we’ve had,” he said. “Professionally, we couldn’t ask for more. But where the hell has it gotten us? Why do these terrible things keep happening? What the hell is going on?”
They were questions without answers.
And then Bonham died. In my prison cell, I found myself reflecting upon the talk of a Zeppelin “jinx” that had haunted the band for years. It was something that disc jockeys and fans discussed much more than any of us did. When the subject did come up, we mostly just scoffed at it.
“It’s bullshit,” Jimmy once said angrily. “People take my interest in the occult and give it a life of its own.”
Because the band rarely made efforts to court the press and discuss the intimate details of their lives with reporters, there was a mystique that surrounded the band that tended to fuel the rumors of a curse. “Let them think whatever they want,” Jimmy said. “If the fans want to believe all the rumors, let them. A little mystery can’t hurt.”
The most ominous rumor was elevated to mythological status. It proclaimed that in their earliest days, the band members—except for John Paul, who refused to participate—had made a secret pact among themselves, selling their souls to the devil in exchange for the band’s enormous success. It was a blood ritual, so the story went, that placed a demonic curse upon the band that would ultimately lead to the deflating of the Zeppelin. And perhaps to the death of the band members themselves.
To my knowledge, no such pact ever existed. Jimmy was a great one for spinning yarns, especially with young ladies who were fascinated with the “dark” side of the band, so maybe that’s how the story got started. But despite Jimmy’s preoccupation with the supernatural, he rarely discussed his dabbling in the occult with the rest of the band. One of our roadies once said to me, “I tried to broach the subject once, and Jimmy went into a rage. I’d never raise the issue again.”
Jimmy was fascinated with the whole idea of black magic, and in the hours after learning of Bonzo’s death, I began to wonder just how powerful his obsessions were. Jimmy owned a home that once belonged to Aleister Crowley, the British poet who experimented with spells, rituals, séances, heroin, and “sexual magick.” Jimmy’s neighbors were convinced that the house was haunted, and they told stories about a young man who was once decapitated there, with his head rolling down the stairs like a basketball.
After Bonzo died, the London tabloids had a field day. They blared with headlines like “A Jinx Haunts Led Zeppelin.” According to one British reporter, “Bonham died as retribution for guitarist Jimmy Page’s obsession with the occult.”
Jimmy became furious with that kind of journalism. “They just don’t know what they’re talking about,” he roared. “They should keep their ignorance to themselves.”
As I sat in my cell, my thoughts kept returning to the possibility of a hex. Was Led Zeppelin susceptible to cataclysms because of some type of undefinable evil force? Was Jimmy’s fascination with the occult somehow responsible? Or had our own hard living and personal excesses finally caught up with us?
Whatever the reason, I knew that Led Zeppelin would never be the same, if the band survived at all. Even before Bonham’s death, during those first few weeks in the Italian prison, I had tried to deal with my predicament by repeatedly telling myself, “This is going to be over any day. I’ll be
out of here, I’ll be off heroin, and I’ll join the band for their American tour. Things will be good again, just like they had been in the early days.”
But John Bonham’s death forced me back to reality. Not only would I have to deal with my grief over the loss of a friend, but I knew Led Zeppelin itself was finished. Over the years, even though the band had never talked about anyone dying, they realized there was the possibility that one of them might decide to leave the group.
“If that happens,” Jimmy said matter-of-factly, “that will be the end of Led Zeppelin. The organization will close down. Why bother going on after that?”
Bonham was such an integral part of the band. He and Robert in particular had known each other as young musicians, years before Led Zeppelin. And although they had their fights and disagreements—usually over petty matters like who was going to pay for the petrol in one of their cars—they had a strong emotional bond. I couldn’t imagine Robert singing with anyone other than Bonham behind him. It would be like trying to drive a car with three wheels. When Karac died, Robert had put his arms around Bonham at the funeral and said, “You’re my oldest mate, Bonzo; I can count on you to always be there for me, can’t I?”
Jimmy put it bluntly: “It would be an insult to find a replacement for John Bonham in order to keep Led Zeppelin aloft.”
3
ROBERT
Robert, why would you want to waste your life in a rock band? You have an opportunity for a wonderful education and a good career. Don’t let yourself get sidetracked. Don’t blow it.”
The words were spoken by Robert Plant, Sr., whose son was itching for a life as a rock singer. For the elder Plant—a civil engineer who felt more comfortable with Beethoven than the Beatles—his son’s musical ambitions were becoming his own nightmare. He could not tolerate his boy wasting his life chasing impossible dreams.