by Richard Cole
“Richard, I’ll tell you what I fantasize about,” Jimmy said. “I’d like to have Joni Mitchell sitting on the end of my bed, playing the guitar and singing for me.” He didn’t elaborate on the fantasy any further, but I presumed that he would have liked a little more from Joni than guitar strumming.
I would often saunter down to the hotel lobbies where the young ladies would congregate and invite some of them up to our rooms. Even though Led Zeppelin and dozens of other rock bands were often accused of exploiting these girls, I thought it was a bum rap. We rarely went looking for them; they made themselves available to us. We never forced them into doing anything they didn’t want to. They were looking for some fun—and so were we. There was no emotional involvement on either side. As a blonde in Boston told me, “I just want a good time. If any of you guys want to have some fun, I’m available.” She was wearing her high school cheerleader outfit.
Some of the girls were hangers-on from the Yardbirds’ days. They had been fans of Jimmy’s and hadn’t broken their addiction to him. They also appeared to have created their own groupie hierarchy, determined to stay on the first team rather than slip down to benchwarmers. A few became madly jealous if they sensed a decline in attention from Jimmy. And their exchanges with each other often got bitter (“Jimmy always treated me like a lady, which is more than I can say for you!”). Occasionally, their hostile words would deteriorate into hair-pulling, eye-gouging free-for-alls.
The girls and the booze usually went together. But sometimes the liquor was enough. In a few cities in those days, we did two shows a night, usually at 10 P.M. and midnight, and during the hour break between the two performances, we’d uncork some champagne, sometimes several bottles of it. “The booze helps calm my nerves,” Bonzo would tell me. “I just feel better when I’ve had a drink or two.” In actuality, he would have ten to twelve drinks.
One night in Kansas City, after the second show at a club just south of the Missouri River, I drove the band back to our hotel, the Muehlbach, one of the finest old inns in the city. We went into the hotel bar, and after a few more drinks—Scotch, champagne, gin and tonic—John Paul, Robert, and Jimmy took the elevator to their rooms. Bonzo and I decided there was still more drinking to do. So we kept the bartender company.
Eventually, we became so intoxicated that I doubted we would ever find our way to our rooms. But we tried, weaving through the hotel lobby like a couple of drunks—which we were becoming. Bonzo couldn’t stay on his feet any longer and collapsed into an oversized chair and refused to budge.
“Go up without me, Cole,” he said, his speech slurring one word after another. “I’ll be fine here. I’ll be just fine.”
I wasn’t in any shape to argue. I just wanted to get some sleep. Once inside my room, I took a couple of Mandrax to help me doze off and crawled into bed, expecting to snooze peacefully until morning. But Bonzo had other plans. At about 3 A.M., the phone in my room jarred me awake.
“Richard!”
“Who is this?” I mumbled.
“Hey, Richard. You gotta get me outta here!”
I recognized Bonzo’s voice, but was still trying to orient myself.
“It’s me, Richard. Come down and get me.”
“Where are you, you cunt?”
“Where do you think? I’m in jail, that’s where I am. Come and bail me out.”
Bonham then apparently handed the phone to a cop, who proceeded to explain that Bonzo had been taken to jail for being drunk in a public place—namely, the Muehlbach lobby. He gave me the address of the jail, which was about two miles down the road.
I was furious, but my anger was related more to being awakened than to a concern over Bonham’s well-being. Cursing under my breath, I got dressed and stuffed $5,000 in cash into my pocket. Ten minutes later, I was in the police station.
“I’m here to get John Bonham,” I told the sergeant at the desk. “I’m his manager.” I figured calling myself his manager sounded more impressive than tour manager. “What’s it going to cost to bail him out?”
“Cost!” The sergeant snickered. “That son of a bitch isn’t going anywhere. He’s gonna sleep it off. Come and pick him up in the morning when he’s sober.”
So at nine the following morning, I returned. Bonham had a sheepish look on his face as they led him to the waiting area of the police station. His face was bruised with one contusion below his left eye and another on the cheek next to it.
“I think the cops roughed me up a little,” he whispered. “I really don’t remember.”
None of us learned much from experiences like that. There were many more drinking episodes during that tour. Particularly when Peter wasn’t with us, I was the only one to try to keep Zeppelin in line. And I was usually just as possessed with alcohol—if not more so—than the rest of the band.
In May—not long before Bonham’s twenty-first birthday—Zeppelin performed two shows at the Rose Palace in Pasadena. Barry Imhoff, the promoter of the event, knew what our life-style was becoming by then. So he chose a birthday gift that John couldn’t have appreciated any more—a four-foot-tall bottle of champagne!
Between the first and second shows that night, Bonzo single-handedly guzzled nearly a third of the bottle. When it was time for him to maneuver back into the drummer’s stool for the second show, he dragged the oversized bottle onto the stage with him. For a sober observer, it was probably a sad sight: There, like a weightlifter pressing a barbell, he raised the bottle over his head between songs and flooded his mouth and throat with alcohol. He was so drunk that he fell off his stool twice. By the time the performance ended, the bottle was empty.
Imhoff still had one more gift for us: Four live octopuses.
“What are we supposed to do with octopuses?” I asked.
“They make great bathtub companions,” he claimed. “They’re much more fun than a rubber duck.”
Back at the hotel, we had invited a couple of girls up to our rooms, and I figured they might be able to make better use of the octopuses than I could. “You girls look like you need a little cleaning up,” I told them. “Take off your clothes and climb into the bathtub.”
They agreed, and after they had jumped into the tub, Jimmy and I carried in the octopuses and tossed them into the water. “We figure you need something to keep you company,” Jimmy giggled.
The girls remained remarkably calm, considering there were these creatures swimming around them. As we watched them play, the octopuses somehow instinctively knew just where to congregate and just where to place their tentacles. One of the girls, a little brunette who Jimmy couldn’t take his eyes off, gasped and then sighed as one of the octopuses explored her genitals.
“Oh, my God,” she squealed. “I’ve gotta get one of these. It’s like having an eight-armed vibrator!”
“Maybe we oughta market these things,” I told Jimmy. “It would probably have even more universal appeal than music.”
We were in the Los Angeles area for almost a week, and at the Château Marmont we ran room service ragged with our appetite for booze. “Los Angeles is something special,” Bonzo used to say. “It’s different. It’s decadent.”
Back in England, Zeppelin lived quite normal lives with storybooklike families or girlfriends. But the road—particularly Los Angeles—was becoming a place of excess. Of course, we probably spent many more hours in the States sitting in airports, watching television or talking about music. There were many hours spent in recording studios and even more time onstage. But it’s some of the wild, reckless episodes that still stick most vividly in my mind. Seemingly overnight, we found ourselves in a position to do almost anything we wanted, and in L.A. there seemed to be a tidal wave of free-spirited girls who were always cooperative and compliant. For a group of working-class boys from London, it was like finding the Promised Land.
I was in John Bonham’s bungalow at the Marmont late one night, and each of us had a girl in tow. Although we certainly weren’t Casanovas, we still could have ad
ded several notches to the Marmont’s cluttered bedposts. By this point, we had devoured a few bottles of booze, and Bonzo and I were each occupying one of the beds in the room, with our clothes in a single pile on the floor.
While I was intertwined pretzel-like with my girl—a bird from Santa Monica named Robin—Bonzo decided to walk into the kitchen to catch his breath and grab a drink of water. While there, he spotted two large industrialsized cans of baked beans. The chef in him apparently took over.
Bonzo opened the cans, and then, while cradling one in each arm, he pranced into the bedroom.
“Dinnertime!” he announced. “Come and get it!”
As Robin and I looked up in horror, Bonham stood over us, held the cans over our heads, and then tilted them simultaneously on their sides, pouring their cold contents onto our naked bodies.
“You fucker,” I screamed, rolling to the opposite end of the bed in a futile attempt to escape the line of fire.
Within seconds, Robin and I were swimming in a gooey, sloppy puddle of beans that covered us from our eyebrows to our ankles. It was a scene out of Tom Jones.
Before Robin and I could come up for air, Peter Grant had walked into the bungalow and surveyed the scene. On occasion, Peter would show anger or disgust over incidents like this. But not that night.
“Peter,” yelled Bonzo, “grab a spoon and dig in!”
Peter chuckled and then was overcome with a mischievous urge of his own.
“Cole, you fucking slob, don’t you have any class?” he roared. “Let me add a little sophistication to your life.”
Peter grabbed a full bottle of champagne on the nearby dresser, shook and then uncorked it, and proceeded to spray Robin and me with its contents.
Bonham would become almost teary-eyed when we finally had to check out of the Marmont. On our last night there, he had been drinking pretty heavily and decided that he wanted to play doctor. He borrowed a white coat and a room service cart from a hotel valet and lifted a girl named Candy onto the cart. Candy was a pretty, blond teenager from Miami who we had met during the first tour. She showed up unannounced at the Marmont, salivating for some Zeppelin high jinks. We didn’t disappoint her.
Bonham undressed her on the cart, cackling as he removed each piece of clothing. Once she was nude, he proclaimed, “It’s time for some surgery, my dear.”
He scampered into the bathroom and returned with a shaving brush, shaving cream, and razor. “This won’t hurt a bit, sweetheart,” he told Candy, who lay there submissively as he applied shaving cream to her pubic hair.
For the next ten minutes, the band and I took turns shaving her vagina: Robert with vitality and broad strokes…Jimmy with the passion of Rodin or Michelangelo. All the while, Candy giggled her way through the procedure.
When it was over, as we admired our artistic efforts, Robert suddenly interrupted the festivities with a shrill, agonizing wail. “Oh, fuck!” he screamed. “Bonham, how could you? How could you?”
Robert picked up the shaving brush and waved it in the air. “This is mine. This is my fucking brush.”
Everyone in the room burst into laughter. John Paul patted Robert on the back. “Enjoy your next shave,” he said.
Not all the girls we ran into during that second tour were as pretty as Candy. And, of course, we were in a position to be quite selective. For the unattractive birds—the ones who were painfully hard on the eyes—well, as Bonham said, “If you let any of those dogs up to the room, you’re fired!”
The Plaster Casters were some of the most persistent girls, stubbornly overstaying their invitation despite our repeated pleas that they simply vanish. They were determined to make casts of the band members’ erect penises, perhaps someday displaying them in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. One day at the Marmont, Cynthia P. Caster explained to us how they created the casts that had made them so famous. “First we get the musician excited, any way we can,” she said. “Then my assistant does the actual casting while I keep the hard-on going. She’s quite talented. You guys should try it. This is really an art form.”
Maybe so. But Robert once joked, “There’s no way I could keep my dick hard around those fat chicks.”
I had known the Plaster Casters from my days with the Yardbirds. And they were still as hefty and as homely as ever. I think that Zeppelin would have chosen celibacy if the Casters were the only alternative. I know I would have.
One afternoon at the Marmont, we were sunning ourselves by the pool. The Casters were there, too, and they really began to torment us. They wanted to make some plaster casts; we wouldn’t even entertain the idea. They wanted to make small talk; we wanted them to shut up.
Finally, Bonzo had had enough. “The only way you bitches are going to clam up is to fill your mouths with water!”
He got up from his chaise lounge, walked toward Cynthia, and pushed her toward the edge of the pool. When she was just a step away, he shoved her with the full force of his body. Cynthia became airborne and plunged into the water with the force of a pregnant whale. The resulting tsunami drenched half of the surrounding patio.
Instead of sinking to the bottom of the pool like dead weight, however, Cynthia’s multiple layers of clothing—including a black velvet dress with obnoxiously gaudy frills—came to her rescue. The air trapped within her clothes kept her bobbing at the surface, providing enough support so she was able to keep her head above water, although not without a struggle and a lot of splashing.
“Get me out of here, you assholes,” she gurgled, barely loud enough to be heard over our laughter.
I leaped into the pool and towed her to the ladder, where she made a rather unladylike exit from the water.
Despite such zaniness, we never lost sight of why we were really in America. “We’re here to make music—that’s number one,” Bonzo would proclaim, often half drunk. Alcohol continued to cause some embarrassing situations, at one time or another affecting every member of the band.
Because of booze, we often became a nightmare to be with on an airplane, particularly when the crew made no efforts to limit the alcohol they served us. During that second tour, on a commercial flight from Athens, Ohio, to Minneapolis, Robert had devoured a few drinks and was feeling much too giddy for the confining quarters of an airplane. So he got up from his seat and began prancing up and down the aisle, looking like a cross between the Pied Piper and a Spanish matador. He was letting loose, allowing himself some temporary liberation from the demands of our touring schedule. He peered in one direction, then another, fluttered his arms and began singing an uncommon refrain:
“Toilets! Toilets! Toilets for Robert!”
He was so loud that the entire planeload of seventy passengers could hear him, and they stared dumbfounded at this bizarre man bounding through the plane like a raving lunatic.
“Where are the toilets? Robert needs a toilet! Toilets!”
Many of the passengers were noticeably disturbed, wondering just what might happen next. I wondered, too, but was more interested in waiting for my next drink than in helping Robert to the bathroom. Fortunately, a flight attendant took Robert by the hand and led him toward the bathroom. After he banged on the door and finally barged his way in, his “concert” came to an abrupt end.
At one point during the tour, as incidents like that began to multiply, I recognized that perhaps we all needed some R&R. I suggested that we unwind for a few days in Honolulu, where we already had a show scheduled. The vote in favor was unanimous.
There were two elegant mansions on Diamond Head, with breathtaking views of the Pacific and Waikiki Beach, that many rock bands rented from time to time. Peter was able to get us into one of them, a multimillion-dollar Spanish villa that might have made William Randolph Hearst jealous. During our four days there, we got burned to a crisp in the tropical sun and were treated to sailing expeditions and a luau. I remember relaxing on the beach, listening to Bob Dylan’s Lay Lady Lay, which had just climbed to the top of the charts. Perhaps inspired by Dylan, we sp
ent part of our Hawaiian visit leied with flowers and laid with female bodies.
In a sense, we found ourselves in a no-win situation. When our schedule kept us running nonstop, we yearned for a halt in the action, but during that Hawaiian stay, when there was finally time to relax, we soon found ourselves bored out of our minds. “It’s hard to figure,” Bonzo observed one day, popping the cap on a bottle of beer. “Either we’re running so fast that we’re ready to collapse, or we have so little to do that we’re going crazy.”
Even so, no one was better at creating something to do than Bonzo—and there was no better target for his practical jokes than Plant. Bonham played an occasional prank on John Paul, like the time he flooded Jonesy’s room in Hawaii by sneaking a garden hose through the sliding glass door. But John Paul was so easygoing that even when he awoke to find his room turned into a wading pool, he just took it in stride. Those kinds of low-key responses made him a much less attractive guinea pig for the tomfoolery that the rest of us savored. It was much more fun to harass someone like Robert, who would often have hysterical reactions to the pranks aimed in his direction.
From Hawaii, we flew into Detroit for a performance at the Grande Ballroom, a former mattress-manufacturing plant that had been transformed into the city’s premiere rock club. Our plane landed in the predawn hours, and it was barely daybreak when we checked into the Congress Hotel on the morning of the concert. We had flown through the night and had been drinking heavily while in the air. We were dead tired, irritable, and just wanted to check into our rooms and get some sleep.
But as we dragged ourselves and our luggage through the hotel lobby, something else besides the need for sleep captured our attention. “There’s blood all over the fuckin’ carpet,” John Paul exclaimed, tiptoeing his way around the still damp patches of blood.