Stairway To Heaven

by Richard Cole

  Peter thought it was important to improve our odds of avoiding arrest. But that didn’t mean insisting that the band keep away from illegal substances; it meant hiring some private security to serve as a buffer between us and the local police. At Peter’s request, I made a few calls, and by the next morning a local security agency had provided us with three barrel-chested, retired police detectives to accompany us on the rest of the tour.

  The Australian fans were more hospitable than those original cops. Every one of the Australian and New Zealand concerts was a record breaker. They drew the biggest crowds ever to see rock performances in those countries. To attract the largest audiences possible, we had scheduled every concert at an outdoor venue, and, according to Peter’s instructions, there was a rain date set for each of them. Peter adamantly refused to let the band play in the rain, fearing that with all the electrical equipment, wires, and plugs, there was the real possibility of someone being electrocuted. The Adelaide show, in fact, was postponed a day when a drizzle turned into a downpour.

  At all the Australian and New Zealand concert sites, I would arrive a few hours early to make sure the stage and the surrounding crash barriers were built to specifications. On occasion, the barriers were not high enough or strong enough, and I would grab a hammer and improve upon them myself. That’s what happened in Auckland, where the band was scheduled to play at Western Springs. I talked Bonham into coming out to the site early with me, and we pounded a few nails and got things into shape.

  Once the repairs were made, Bonham and I started looking for something to do until the gates opened. We raided the liquor cases backstage, and after a few beers Bonzo spotted a pair of Honda motorcycles parked near the stage. “Well,” he said, “don’t just stand there. Let’s take ’em for a spin.”

  The motorcycles belonged to Rem Raymond, the event’s promoter, who let us ride them for a few minutes. “There’s one more thing we should try,” Bonham finally suggested. “I’ve never played chicken before. Let’s do it with the bikes!”

  I gulped. “Forget it, Bonzo,” I said. “I don’t feel suicidal today.”

  “Richard,” he said. “Do it for your old pal. C’mon, Richard.”

  He was starting to whine, and I was starting to build up my courage. Finally, in a moment of total insanity, I gave in. “Okay, but I should warn you: When I play chicken, I don’t flinch.”

  Led Zeppelin often lived by an “anything for a thrill” credo. It was an “act first, think later” attitude. This was probably the ultimate example of it.

  As Bonham and I rode the bikes to an adjacent field, I told myself, “I have three beers to blame for this.” We positioned ourselves about a hundred and fifty yards apart, facing one another.

  “If one of us dies,” I mumbled, “I hope it’s me. If it turns out to be Bonzo, Peter will have me killed anyway.”

  I gunned the engine, turned up the throttle, and, like a couple of lunatics, Bonham and I sped toward one another. Rolling at about thirty miles per hour, we were nearly on top of each other almost immediately. But about twenty feet away from Bonzo, despite my promise, I must have flinched. My bike skidded into the dirt, and I rolled over it.

  “Damn it!” I shouted, turning to look at Bonham, who by this time was fifty yards past me, obviously amused by my ungraceful landing. Other than some torn jeans and bruised pride, I was unhurt, but the motorcycle did not fare as well—either during or immediately after the crash. “It must have been the bike’s fault!” I yelled to Bonham.

  Just then, I spotted an ax lying near some tools about twenty yards away. I walked over, picked it up, and hovered over the bike for a few seconds. “It’s like a horse with a broken leg,” I said. “You gotta put it out of its misery.”

  Flailing the ax, I systematically dismantled the motorcycle, swing by swing. Paul Bunyan couldn’t have been any more vicious.

  Rem Raymond was despondent when I told him what had happened. “Sure, I got a little carried away,” I explained. “But there must be a good repair shop around here. Send us the bill.”

  Once we were out of Rem’s earshot, Bonzo mumbled, “Sure, send us the bill. We won’t pay it, but go ahead and send it anyway!”

  In Auckland, people traveled up to 900 miles by train to see the group perform, coming from the farthest reaches of the island. They became part of a crowd of 25,000 that paid an average of four dollars to see the band rock to the point of collapse. Western Springs was a stadium usually reserved for stock car races, but it had never seen as much horsepower as Zeppelin generated that day.

  Even though Robert was a little under the weather—some mild indigestion, he said—that Auckland show was still one of the band’s best concerts of the tour. “Stairway to Heaven” primed the crowd for what was to come. Then the place went nuts over “Whole Lotta Love,” now part of a medley with some old rock ‘n’ roll songs and Zeppelin tunes (“Good Times Bad Times,” “You Shook Me,” “I Can’t Quit You”). For a full sixteen minutes, the band pushed “Whole Lotta Love” to the point of no return, and the audience responded with its own eruption of emotions, reacting as though they were seeing history being made. As far as they were concerned, they were.

  Those kinds of performances left the band feeling absolutely euphoric. They were reminiscent of the earliest American tours when fans were seeing Zeppelin for the first time. Bonzo came away from the concerts so energized that he proclaimed, “I won’t be able to sleep for days.” Sometimes it seemed as though he didn’t.

  In Adelaide, Creedence Clearwater Revival had performed the night before us and were still in town when we checked into our hotel. Creedence’s drummer, Doug Clifford, had a practice drum kit in his hotel room, and Bonham and he took turns pounding out a thunderous beat until almost daybrak. Amazingly, no one from the hotel complained.

  For the most part, however, except for the music itself, this tour was pure drudgery. When we had checked into the White Heron Hotel in Auckland well past midnight, not much went right. The night desk clerk had difficulty figuring out what rooms we belonged in and ended up putting Peter and me in the same suite. To be more accurate, he put Peter, me, and a married couple whom we had never met in the same suite!

  When Peter and I turned the key and entered our room, the fellow was in bed with his wife, looking as though the last thing he wanted was two late-night visitors. Frankly, I couldn’t blame him.

  “What the hell are you doing in my room?” he shouted as his wife grabbed a blanket to cover herself.

  “I was about to ask you the same fucking question!” Peter yelled back. “We’d appreciate you getting the hell out of here!”

  We went down to the front desk to try to straighten the matter out. Much to our surprise, however, our roadie Mick Hinton was working at the switchboard.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I asked.

  “I bribed the fucking desk clerk into going into the kitchen and fetching some food for us,” he said. “He told me to take care of things while he was gone.”

  Just then, the phone at the front desk rang.

  “Front desk,” Mick said as he picked up the receiver, trying to sound as if he knew what he was doing. It was our “roommate” on the other end of the line, complaining about the unannounced appearance Peter and I had made a couple of minutes earlier.

  Mick sounded angry. “Look, if you don’t like things around here, then go fuck yourself!” he shouted.

  The hotel guest apparently tried to reason with Mick, which was a futile effort. “You asshole,” Mick hollered into the phone, “this is the way we run our hotel! I suggest you get the hell out of here!”

  Fifteen minutes later, the man and his wife checked out.

  When we reached Sydney in the first week of March, we stayed at the Sobell Townhouses, and, for a change, we really tried to be on our best behavior. One night, I asked the desk clerk to point us toward some clubs that could withstand a Zeppelin onslaught. Our second stop was at Les Girls, owned by an American named Sammy L
ee. “It’s full of female impersonators,” the desk clerk had told us.

  Actually, Les Girls was much more…it had a stage show featuring transsexuals who were really quite talented—good singers, even better dancers, and they were pretty attractive, too. About midway through the show, Bonzo asked a waiter the question we all were interested in. “Are they men or women?” he said.

  “Well, they’ve had their dicks cut off and their breasts enlarged,” the waiter answered. “As far as they’re concerned, they’re women now!”

  “Yeah, that sure doesn’t sound like they’re men anymore!” Robert said with a bit of understatement.

  We found out that the “girls” at Les Girls were actually quite famous in Australia. And once they heard that Led Zeppelin was in the audience, they came over to greet us. We invited them to our concert the following night and then to go drinking with us after it.

  Zeppelin played before 28,000 fans at Sydney’s Showgrounds, and after the concert we found the “girls” to be great company and even better after-night drinkers. We were in Sydney for almost a week and had the transsexuals hanging around us most of the time. “The press doesn’t know what to make of this,” Peter chuckled. “A reporter asked me if all the members of Led Zeppelin were queers.”

  In fact, the “girls” were just pure fun, which was exactly what we were after, too. Of course, they lost some of their attractiveness by about four in the morning when the stubble had grown on their faces. One morning, the “girls” started losing their tempers, and instead of calling each other Louise and Marilyn, they regressed back to Barney and Burt. It was a show in itself.

  For our departure from Australia, we booked a flight on BOAC. At John Paul’s urging, we had scheduled a stop in Thailand; he had heard our stories about the trip after the Japan tour, and we decided to stop there for three days to show him Bangkok before continuing on to England. At the Bangkok airport, however, we never got past the customs officials.

  “Sorry,” one of them said. “Your long hair is unacceptable in Thailand. You are not allowed in the country looking like that.”

  We were flabbergasted. “We were just here last year,” Robert said. “We probably had longer hair then. This is absurd!”

  The Thai officials were inflexible, however. “We apologize,” one of them said, “but this is now a rule. No long hair in the country.”

  We weren’t used to not getting our way. Whether it was a first-class seat on an overbooked flight or the best table in a fashionable restaurant, the band expected that their name and notoriety could get them whatever they wanted.

  But it didn’t work this time. For more than half an hour, we argued with whomever would listen. We did everything but offer a bribe (which might have earned us time in jail). Nothing worked. Eventually, we realized that this was one debate we weren’t going to win.

  “You don’t seem to understand,” Robert ranted. “We’re going to spend money in your country!” Maybe they didn’t need any more foreign currency in Thailand.

  Within an hour, we were back on the plane, heading for London.

  30

  BEDROOM PLAY-BY-PLAY

  When you’re at the top, you can get away with making demands that people would have laughed at under different circumstances.”

  That’s how Peter Grant explained his strategy to go for the jugular when negotiating Led Zeppelin’s concert contracts.

  Actually, there was no real negotiating involved. In his sternest, most uncompromising voice, Peter would simply inform local promoters, “From now on, Zeppelin is going to get 90 percent of the box-office receipts. Period.” It was a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. The promoters protested—and then reluctantly signed on the dotted line.

  In the early 1970s, a typical big-name band playing at an open-air stadium might receive a guarantee (perhaps $50,000) against 60 percent of the gate. But Led Zeppelin wasn’t typical. According to Peter, Zeppelin’s ground rules were going to be different.

  “After we pay for the hall, the security, the limos, the sound, and the lighting, we’re taking ninety percent,” Peter said. “We’re not even going to bother with a guarantee.”

  Not surprisingly, that kind of talk did not earn Peter a place at the head of the Christmas card mailing list of most local rock promoters and agents. Some felt he was arrogant. Others said that he and his band were suffering from a bad case of swellheadedness. Most thought he was simply being unfair. All of them were incensed. But Zeppelin reaped enormous financial rewards from Peter’s kamikaze style of doing business.

  Under the 90 percent arrangement, the band would usually take home at least $80,000 to $90,000, often more, on a single night in the early 1970s. Later in the decade, they could have used a Brink’s truck to haul away a mind-boggling $500,000 on some nights. Every concert was a sellout, which triggered a Rockefeller-style financial avalanche. They would divide the receipts five ways, with Peter as an equal partner with the four musicians.

  “Look,” Peter would argue with the stunned local promoters, “even when you’re getting ten percent of our gate, you’re making more money than you normally would for an average act where your cut is fifty percent. For us, all you’re doing is handling the odds and ends anyway.”

  Zeppelin’s summer 1972 American tour was the first time that Peter had made his no-holds-barred, 90 percent demand, which pulverized the music business’s standard operating procedures.

  In the weeks before that American tour, while Peter was putting his 90 percent deal on the table in cities across the U.S., the band congregated at Stargroves, Mick Jagger’s country home, to lay down the first tracks for its next album. They used Jagger’s mobile recording studio and may have done more experimentation than at any other Zeppelin sessions to date. Jimmy arrived with a few songs on paper, fully written and arranged, like “Over the Hills and Far Away.” But there was a lot of improvising on most of the others. There was so much creative energy and everyone was feeling so up that Jimmy felt a quality album was going to come together, even without everything thoroughly prepared ahead of time.

  That, at least, was Pagey’s attitude at the beginning. But by the time the sessions ended, he was not content with the sound quality he was getting. Yes, he had been right about the creative energy, but he started thinking about rerecording some of the cuts elsewhere.

  Still, the band had gradually made progress on the album at Stargroves. Bonzo had the original idea for “D’yer Mak’er,” a song into which he incorporated a doo-wop sound. When it was finally done, it had a bit of a reggae feel as well. In trying to bring “D’yer Mak’er” to fruition, the band would congregate on the Stargroves lawn and listen to each playback, moving to the beat, dancing with a step that looked like a cross between the jerky struts of Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx.

  As with any Zeppelin gathering, there was some ongoing horseplay at Stargroves. It cut the tension that had built up, and seemed to regenerate the band’s spirits for the following day’s work. In a curious way, it was also how the band members showed affection for each other. They had really grown to care for one another, although none of them was particularly good at articulating their feelings. But engaging in playful activities together, whether sharing a bottle of champagne or planning a practical joke, was a way the band could demonstrate that affection.

  At Stargroves, one of our technicians who we’ll call Steve was the target of some of those high jinks. He had brought a girlfriend with him, and Bonzo snuck a microphone into the bedroom that Steve and his lady would be sharing. Then we all waited for them to retire for the night.

  “Great!” Bonzo exclaimed, as he monitored the noise from their bedroom, pressing the headphones so tight over his ears that I thought they might meld into his skull. “They’re making love! This is going to be wonderful!”

  As their heavy breathing got serious, Bonzo captured their entire sexual celebration on tape. At the same time, he was turning dials and channeling the sounds from the bedroom through the h
ouse’s speaker system. Over the next thirty minutes, every room in the house—except the bedroom where Steve and his girl were performing their physical acrobatics—got a very loud, very graphic play-by-play of the activities.

  As the excitement level in the bedroom escalated, so did the cheering throughout the house. “Come on, Steve! Give it to her! Go, Steve, go!”

  The next morning, Steve found himself the butt of some ruthless teasing—“Steve, that girl sure could moan!”—although he never seemed to have figured out how we had ambushed him and eavesdropped at 100 decibels.

  Jimmy tried to keep the recording sessions themselves as businesslike as possible. He continued to insist that the band limit their recording expenses, and that meant approaching the sessions with the seriousness of a brain surgeon probing in a cerebellum. This time around, there was not the fast pace of the debut Led Zeppelin effort in 1968, which was recorded with the speed of the Concorde, but the mood was never lackadaisical, either. Jimmy demanded that the final product have decimal-point precision.

  For that reason, we finally moved to the Olympic Studios in London. In a more formal studio setting, Zeppelin got a lot more accomplished. They plunged into songs like “The Crunge,” with Jimmy and John Paul following Bonzo’s lead in weaving the music into a James Brown—funky sound-alike; Jimmy contributed a blues-oriented riff he had been fooling around with for seven years, finally discovering an appropriate place to use it. For “The Song Remains the Same,” Robert scribbled lyrics on a pad of paper in an inspirational flurry, driven by his vision of a common denominator for all peoples and things; Jimmy had carefully crafted the rich music over many weeks, initially intending it to be an instrumental number before merging it with Plant’s lyrics.

  While the band remained locked away in the studio, Peter and I began seriously discussing hiring a publicist to try to make some headway against a press that still treated the band with the same respect as the bubonic plague. A few weeks earlier on our flight home from Australia, Jimmy and Robert had first broached the subject, figuring that an experienced publicist might be able to extend an olive branch toward the press in hopes of getting fairer treatment.