by Richard Cole
Jimmy couldn’t stand it when he’d hear about the big-name bands that played only a fifty-minute set—and would sometimes cut it even shorter if the vibes just weren’t right. “They’re on and off before the audience can ever blink,” he muttered. “It’s just not fair to the fans.” Jimmy figured that maybe those bands just didn’t have much to say. By contrast, Zeppelin had a lot of different moods they tried to express during the night. You can’t do that in fifty minutes.
When the tour moved into the South—Memphis, Raleigh, Atlanta—we expected life to become a little more uncomfortable for us, although it had nothing to do with fan reaction. Particularly in the South, people in airports would stare, whistle, and chuckle over our long hair. It wasn’t anything we couldn’t deal with, although after seeing Easy Rider we had become a bit more anxious about how people responded to our hair.
“If you spot some rednecks driving in a pickup truck with a rifle rack in the back window, take cover!” John Paul nervously joked.
In Raleigh, the harassment escalated to a higher plateau. Henry Smith was in the restroom backstage just before the concert began and from the bathroom stall heard two cops talking about “planting some stuff on those Zeppelin bastards and sending them up the river for a while.”
Henry panicked and, while still buckling his pants, bolted out of the bathroom and darted through the auditorium until he found me. “They’re gonna get us!” he jabbered. “The cops are out to get us!”
I generally wasn’t as paranoid as Henry, but still became pretty unsettled by what he had told me. Not knowing quite where to turn, I found a pay phone and called the Raleigh offices of both Pinkerton’s and Brink’s, trying to arrange for some immediate security for the band.
“I’m the tour manager with the rock band Led Zeppelin,” I told the fellow who answered the phone at Brink’s. I wasn’t the kind of customer he was used to, and he was skeptical of my claim that Raleigh’s men in blue could have an evil plot in mind.
“Sorry, fella,” the voice at Brink’s said. “This story doesn’t sound right to me. We protect bank presidents, not guitar players.”
By this point, my own anxiety had escalated considerably. I had visions of the entire band ending up in jail by the end of the night, and I knew that was something I didn’t want to deal with. As a last resort, I called Steve Weiss, our attorney, in New York City. I told him what Henry had heard and the problems I was having hiring some local protection.
“You’re a lawyer,” I told him. “Maybe you’ll have more clout trying to get some security out here to help us. I just feel very unsafe at the moment and think we need some protection in place quickly.”
Steve agreed. “The band has a lot of assets—including its reputation—that need to be protected,” he told me. “I’ll see what I can do.”
From New York, Steve placed some calls, and within forty-five minutes, two security men—ties, coats, and short hair—arrived backstage. They were very businesslike, and if they felt out of place having to guard some longhaired musicians, they didn’t show it. “We’re here to make sure that your stay here in Raleigh is problem-free,” one of them said.
In fact, there were no problems. One of the security men positioned himself at the entrance to the band’s dressing room. Another one was in the wings of the stage, keeping the band itself under surveillance for anything suspicious. The night proceeded without a hitch. The extra security may have kept the Raleigh cops from making life miserable for Led Zeppelin.
Late that night, when I told the band about the whole incident, they were flabbergasted. “That’s fuckin’ amazing!” Bonzo exclaimed. “Don’t these cops have anything better to do than try to bust rock musicians? People are getting killed in the streets, and they’re trying to create a marijuana bust! How absurd!”
From that point on, I tried to be more careful with the illegal substances that we carried with us. We usually had some cocaine and some pills, and sometimes the anticipation of taking the drugs—and the rush of the drugs themselves—would blind me to any risks we were assuming. But when I was thinking more clearly, when I allowed the anxiety to overtake the craving, the thought of a bust hovered in the back of my mind. It was one more source of stress in my job.
20
HANDCUFFS
We’re back!”
The elderly woman in the gift shop at the Edgewater Inn in Seattle looked up at Bonzo. “Who are you?” she asked.
“We were here last year,” he said. “Don’t you remember? We’re some of your top fishermen!”
We had come down to the gift shop to get some fishing rods for the evening. I felt a little tense, wondering if the stories of the Shark Episode—which had spread literally throughout the world—had reached the Edgewater staff itself yet. This woman, however, seemed to have other priorities. Most immediately, her attention was devoted to straightening up the candy rack next to the cash register.
Within a few minutes, we were dipping our fishing poles into Puget Sound. “It’s good to be home,” Robert said.
Amazingly, we picked up right where we had left off the last time around. Bonzo caught a couple of mud sharks within the first half hour. Jimmy caught one, too. As the night progressed, we reeled them in like old pros.
“Someone must have just restocked the ocean,” Bonzo hypothesized.
As the night wore on and our fishing expedition continued, three rather foxy teenage girls, two blondes and a brunette, knocked on our hotel room door at about 3 A.M. They wore miniskirts, their tits were falling out of their blouses, and they had “Fuck me” written all over their smiles. It may have been early Sunday morning, but they didn’t appear to be on their way to church.
Bonham and I, however, were concentrating on our fishing. We looked at each other and shook our heads. “Sorry,” I said. “We’re fishing tonight. Come back tomorrow!”
Oddly enough, even the groupies bored us sometimes. As Led Zeppelin’s fame and fortune allowed us to live out our fantasies, we were constantly looking for something new to entertain us. The fishing was all we needed for the moment. These particular girls were seductive-looking and obviously in the mood for a little recreation. But there would be girls in other cities; the fishing was a “now or never” proposition.
By this trip to Seattle, we realized that the stench of the sharks could become crippling after a day or two of sitting in the hotel room. “It’s hard keeping the booze down when there’s this putrid, fishy smell everywhere,” Bonham complained.
“Maybe so,” I said, “but you’d need a room deodorizer the size of Cheyenne, Wyoming, to freshen up this place!”
We finally decided to rent an extra “fishing room” where we could toss our catches for the day. On this particular trip, we reeled in about thirty sharks over a two-night period and threw them in a pile in the middle of the room.
“What are we gonna do with these suckers now?” Bonzo asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Let’s try stacking them up in the closet. If we close the closet door, maybe the smell won’t be as bad.”
In a rather orderly fashion, Bonzo and I began to place one shark atop the other in the wardrobe closet, pausing every minute or two for another swig of booze. When they were finally perfectly arranged, we gently closed the closet door and turned in for the night.
The next morning, we were awakened by screams. A maid was running hysterically down the hallway, apparently having made a rapid exit from the fishing room. She had been cleaning the room and followed the odor to the closet. When she opened the closet door, a tidal wave of sharks—all thirty of them—collapsed on top of her, knocking her to the floor and sending her scrambling for her life. Perhaps she thought that she had been attacked by alien monsters.
A few minutes later, the hotel manager rushed into the room to inspect the damage. As he surveyed the carnage, he placed the palms of his hands on his balding head, apparently as a way of displaying his disgust. If he had had any hair, he probably would have pulled it
out, one clump at a time.
“Don’t you fellows have any sense of decency?” he said. “Don’t you have any respect for private property?”
I looked at John Paul and whispered, “I think the answer’s ‘no’ to both questions.”
John Paul and I headed back to our rooms to try to get back to sleep. “Has everyone in America lost his sense of humor?” he mumbled.
When we checked out of the Edgewater later that day, the hotel had charged us a $250 cleaning fee to wash the carpets and remove the fish stains from the closet.
Our reaction to the Edgewater incident was a classic example of the band feeling its power and perhaps exhibiting some of the snobbery that can come with success and wealth. It’s easy to start thinking that you can get away with things that the average person might not even consider doing, particularly since you usually can. The $250 damages charge really didn’t mean anything to us. It was a small price to pay for a little fun.
As Bonzo once said, “We’re in a place now where we don’t have to take shit from anyone!” That meant coming down hard on people who seemed to run counter to our own best interests. On the ’70 tour, that often translated into roughing up bootleggers when we caught them at work.
As the band’s popularity mushroomed, so did the demand for bootleg tapes and vinyl of their live performances. The two albums in the record stores weren’t enough. Many fans wanted a lot more of Led Zeppelin than we had given them.
During every concert on that North American tour, Peter and I were always looking for tape recorders in the crowd. “It’s money out of our pocket,” Peter complained. “Those bastards aren’t gonna get away with it.”
In the early minutes of our performance in Vancouver, Peter spotted a man crouched near the front of the stage, operating a sophisticated-looking recorder and holding a microphone overhead.
“Look at that bastard with the mike and the tape machine!” Peter growled. “He’s right out in the open. What a fool!”
Some members of the crew and I stormed over, grabbed the fellow by the shirt collar, lifted him to his feet, and shouted, “You can’t do that here, you asshole! If you want a recording, go to the record store and buy one like everybody else!”
The man was hoisted into the air and dropped in a heap onto the floor. We grabbed the recorder and smashed it against a security barricade, shattering it into a dozen pieces.
“Enjoy the rest of the show!” I bellowed as we turned and walked backstage.
Unfortunately for us, the man wasn’t making bootleg tapes. He wasn’t even an overzealous fan.
“There’s a stagehand who just told me that the guy we beat up is a government official!” I told Peter. “He works for the city and measures the music’s decibel level.”
Before the show was over, Vancouver police showed up backstage, and questioned us for nearly an hour. Fortunately, the cops didn’t seem eager to pursue a case that might draw a lot of headlines. We agreed to pay for the recorder, and the incident was forgotten.
As we left the Northwest, we made our way to Los Angeles by way of Denver. As much as we yearned to return to the Château Marmont in L.A., Peter insisted that we move down the street to the Continental Hyatt House on Sunset Boulevard. Since the murder of Sharon Tate and four of her friends by the Charlie Manson cult in 1969, Peter had become paranoid about security. The Marmont, with its isolated bungalows spread over the hotel grounds, seemed like too easy a target for someone with foul play on his mind. Peter felt that a self-contained, high-rise hotel would offer us greater protection.
On that first stay at the Hyatt House, Plant and Bonham had already renamed it the “Riot House”—for obvious reasons. Girls on a Zeppelin safari swarmed through the lobby and crowded into elevators that took them to the ninth floor where we hibernated. And with no fishing to distract us, we would have found it silly to resist their invitations. There were girls everywhere—in the lobby, in the hallways, and inevitably in our beds. Sometimes the band and I would round up a few girls and pile them into the back of our stretch limousine, weighing it down so much that the trunk would become stuck on the pavement of the Riot House driveway, requiring a push off the curb so the car could negotiate its way onto Sunset Boulevard. It was absolute madness there for almost a week.
One afternoon, a seventeen-year-old approached me in the hotel lobby. “We’ve heard about Jimmy’s whips,” she said. “Does he really use whips?”
“Do you like whips?” I asked.
“I love ’em!”
I had heard stories about Jimmy’s affection for whips, too, but I had never seen them. He carried a small black box with him, and I presumed that might be where he stored them. Miss Pamela, who was one of Jimmy’s girls in the U.S. during the early seventies, used to say that other girls claimed that Jimmy had used some whips from time to time, although they were never used on her.
I never found out whether Jimmy really had a weakness for whips. But there were other kinky paraphernalia that we used from time to time—most commonly handcuffs!
When we departed for a concert at the L.A. Forum, Bonham and I handcuffed two girls—a cute little brunette and her tall blonde friend—to the beds in our rooms. We wanted to make sure they’d be there when we returned. As Bonzo said, “We need something to slip into after a hard day’s work! These girls look perfect for the job!”
As we snapped the handcuffs in place, you might have expected a hysterical reaction from the girls, struggling against their confinement, pleading to be released. But it never happened. They never complained about their temporary confinement.
“I’ve already called room service,” I told the girls as we were leaving. “A valet will bring up dinner for you at eight o’clock. There are also a few joints sitting here if you want some. If there’s anything else you need, let room service know. Have a nice evening!”
When we returned from the concert, the girls were in the room waiting for us. They had eaten their dinner and, except for some minor irritation around their wrists, had no ill effects from their experience.
“Can we party now?” one of them asked.
“Why not,” Jimmy said, popping open a bottle of champagne.
The girls didn’t leave for another twenty-four hours. No handcuffs were needed to keep them around.
21
FRIENDS
In the final days of the spring 1970 North American tour, all of us were exhausted. Too much traveling, too little sleep, too much alcohol, too many drugs.
More than anyone, Robert seemed on the brink of collapse at times. He had been plagued by a cold for days, and his voice had taken a beating. It had become so ragged and hoarse that he could barely speak, much less sing. Professional pride would get him onto the stage each night, where he would push his voice as far as it would go. “Something’s got to give,” he said in a gravelly voice in Salt Lake City, with frustration written all over his face. “My voice is really shot; I don’t know how much longer I can last.”
We had humidifers operating around the clock in Robert’s hotel room to try to soothe and preserve his voice. But nothing seemed to help. Each night, he had to struggle a little more than the previous night to get through the show.
In mid-April, we were in Phoenix, staying at the Biltmore Hotel. “Maybe if I relax a little—get out of the hotel for a few hours—I’ll feel better,” he said. He asked me to schedule an afternoon of horseback riding.
Within an hour, he and a promotion man from Atlantic Records named Mario were out on a nearby trail with a couple of rented horses. Robert felt wonderful being out in the clean air. Ten minutes into the ride, however, it came to an abrupt end. Mario was thrown from his horse into a cactus. It took a doctor nearly half an hour to pull out all the thorns.
Later, Robert joked, “Actually, I did feel much better knowing it was Mario and not me who had to go through that ordeal.”
A physician in Phoenix examined Robert and didn’t like what he saw. He was worried about long-term damage and
insisted that we cancel the final concert on the tour, planned for the next night at the Las Vegas Convention Center. But Robert was reluctant. “Let me try it,” he said. “It’s just one more gig. What a shame to let down the fans.”
Like the rest of the band, Robert was troubled by the thought of disappointing an audience. In a voice that was barely audible, he said, “I’ll try drinking a lot of hot tea tonight, and maybe my voice will be good enough for one last performance.”
The next morning, however, Robert’s voice was no better. Peter stepped in and took control of the situation. “That’s it, Robert,” he said. “There will be no show tonight. You’ve sung twenty-nine concerts in thirty-one days. The doctor says that if you sing without a long rest, you could ruin your voice permanently. You’re not going to risk destroying your career for one concert. I’ve already made the decision. We’re going home.”
We flew directly from Phoenix to New York and then on to London. Following doctor’s orders, Robert barely uttered a word on the trip home.
Back in England, Robert couldn’t sit still. For a guy who often complained that the band didn’t take enough time off, he was getting antsy just a week after returning home.
Robert told us he had been fighting with Maureen. Yes, life on the road was hectic, but at home, it was hell, at least for the moment. He thought maybe if he and Maureen got away—and took Jimmy with them on a working vacation—it could take the edge off their marital conflicts.
So barely more than a week after arriving back in England, Robert called Jimmy: “I’m ready to go back to work. Let’s write some songs.”
In the year and a half since Led Zeppelin had been created, Robert’s talents seemed to have evolved more dramatically than the others. He not only sang with more confidence, but he began to believe in himself as a song-writer. No, he didn’t picture himself yet on a par with Jimmy—but he was on his way. He certainly didn’t feel intimidated or insecure, even though he was writing with one of the best.