Stairway To Heaven

by Richard Cole

  The cruiser left from Victoria Harbor, but after just fifteen minutes in the bay, the captain seemed terribly nervous. Finally, he shut off the engine and announced, “There’s a leak in the boat, and we’re taking on water.”

  Taking on water!

  At least initially it was a toss-up as to who was panicking the most. We all began waving frantically for other boats to come to our rescue. After a couple of minutes, Jimmy was almost hysterical. “I can’t swim,” he whined. “If we have to go overboard, someone’s going to have to help me paddle to shore.”

  There was silence for a moment. “Don’t look at me,” John Paul said. “I can’t swim, either.”

  Peter finally volunteered me for an assignment. “You’re the best swimmer here, Cole. Why don’t you swim to shore and get some help?”

  “Fuck you!” I shouted. “I’m not swimming in there. What if there are sharks?”

  Fortunately, another boat began to approach us.

  “Don’t get too excited,” the captain told Robert as it got closer. “It’s just a Chinese junk that’s been turned into a floating market. He doesn’t want to rescue us. He wants to sell us oranges!”

  About ten minutes later, our captain finally got the bilge pump working and was able to start removing the water from the ship’s interior. The cruiser began to limp to shore, with none of us even getting our socks wet.

  There was a young blonde with an Australian accent aboard the cruiser whom I had noticed smiling at me through most of the trip. One of the crew members told me she was a friend of the captain’s, but a lot more of her attention was directed my way. Finally, as the boat headed for land, she approached me. “You don’t remember me, do you?” she said with a grin. “In Sydney earlier this year, you gave me a lift. And when you got mad at me, you shoved me out onto the street.”

  “Oh, my God, was that you?”

  “No hard feelings,” she said. “I had to walk back to the city, but I needed the exercise.”

  Then she pulled a small plastic bag out of her purse. “Would you like to try some of this?”

  It looked like heroin. As sick as I had been the night before, my first instinct was to grab it and toss it overboard. But there was something about the sight of drugs—and a pretty woman—that I found seductive. I decided to take my chances with both. We went to the back of the boat and shared a few snorts.

  Later that afternoon, Zeppelin had to catch a plane back to Japan. By that time, I was starting to feel the full effects of the heroin. As a real novice with this drug, I hadn’t known quite what to expect. But this time, more than anything, I was becoming incredibly anxious—even paranoid—as we waited for the inspection of our bags at the airport.

  “What’s wrong with you, Richard?” Jimmy whispered as we stood in line. “You’re sweating like a pig. You don’t have anything on you, do you?”

  “Hell, no,” I said. “I’m not carrying anything. I just have this feeling that everybody is watching me. I can’t explain it.”

  By the time we got on the plane, I was hyperventilating and feeling completely dehydrated. “Can we get some drinks?” I said to a stewardess after we sat down. I was feeling desperate for something, even just a glass of water.

  “You’ll have to wait until the plane takes off,” she advised us.

  “Fuck that!” I told Jimmy. I was breathing heavily as I walked over to the liquor locker, which they had padlocked shut. I picked up an empty food cart and began smashing it on the lock until I had broken it open. Passengers were looking on, wondering if they were getting onto a flight destined for some kind of insane asylum.

  I helped myself to a couple of beers and sat down again. “Sorry if I embarrassed anyone,” I said to Jimmy. “Sometimes my thirst just can’t wait.” If I had been smart, that was the day I should have sworn off heroin for good.

  After the Japanese tour, we decided to make another attempt at entering Thailand. Our hair was just as long as it had been the previous trip when we were turned away at the airport, but this time we had an important ally working on our behalf: The King of Thailand. A few days earlier in Hong Kong, I had complained to Andrew Yu about the inhospitality we had encountered in Bangkok. “Don’t worry,” he said with an air of confidence. “I know the King of Thailand personally. I’ll get him to write a letter that you can show to the customs officials. They wouldn’t dare turn you away.”

  It’s nice to know people in high places.

  At our hotel in Osaka, we received a message from Andrew that when we changed planes in Hong Kong on the way to Bangkok, a courier carrying the King’s letter would meet our plane. As promised, the letter was there waiting for us, and once Robert, Jimmy, roadie Ray Thomas, and I reached Thailand, we were escorted through customs with no questions asked. For the next three days, we got reacquainted with the decadence of Thailand.

  From Bangkok, we flew to Bombay, where Jimmy and Robert had made arrangements to do some experimental recording. Jimmy had brought with him a Stellavox quadriphonic field recorder that was several generations more sophisticated than anything the Indians had ever seen. The Stellavox had been custom-made to Jimmy’s specifications in Switzerland, and it produced a higher-quality sound than all of the eight-track studios in Bombay combined. Several of the Indian musicians offered to buy it, but it wasn’t for sale.

  Bombay’s top musicians, including members of the city’s symphony orchestra, were invited to participate in the recording session. Robert, Jimmy, and their Indian colleagues recorded raga-style renditions of some early Zeppelin songs, including “Friends” and “Four Sticks.” There were never any plans to release these recordings, and when the overall quality of the sessions did not rise to Jimmy’s perfectionist standards, there were no serious thoughts of changing those plans.

  Once we were back in England, Jimmy put the tapes from the Bombay recording sessions in storage at his house. He had recently bought a new home in rural Sussex, a majestic manor called Plumpton Place. Bidding good-bye to the Thames, he had moved all his belongings—including his prized antiques and prized girlfriend, Charlotte Martin—into the new house. There were moats, terraces, and three interconnected lakes on the fifty-acre property, which had been designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens. Most important to Jimmy, there was room in the house for a recording studio. He spent extravagantly to furnish the home, adding more antiques, as well as various items from our tours to the Far East, including Buddhas and the flying horse from Thailand whose wings extended ten feet to either side and which might have become airborne if it had been outdoors when the night breezes turned to gusts.

  John Paul spent the downtime after the Far Eastern tour with his wife and daughters at their home on a private estate in Northern London. It was a lovely house built in the 1920s, a cozy place that was perfect for a guy like John Paul, who was really just a homebody at heart. He remodeled it for his own needs, of course, adding a recording studio in which he spent an increasing amount of time. It felt so comfortable that he would have been quite content to rarely, if ever, leave home.

  Robert retreated to his three-acre sheep ranch near Kidderminster, where he was clearly enthralled with his new baby, who was now six months old. When Robert first bought the ranch, the house on it looked as though it could have been on the brink of condemnation. But he and Maureen put their hearts into rebuilding and renovating it and furnishing it with lovely old English furniture.

  Not far away, Bonzo was finding peace on his ranch in West Hagley, Worcestershire, although before long he bought a new, 100-acre spread called Old Hyde Farm. Bonzo rebuilt the existing structures there from the ground up, giving special attention to a game room, with a pool table as its centerpiece. He also began breeding and raising white-faced Hereford cattle, which immediately became a moneymaking enterprise for him as well as a source of real pride.

  For a guy who made his living banging away at drumskins, I was amazed at the affection Bonzo showed for the cattle. “It’s different from playing music, of course,” he
told me, “but I feel some of the same sense of accomplishment with what I’ve done with these bulls.”

  We were once on a commercial flight with Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones, who was accompanied by his girlfriend, Astrid. During the flight, Bill, Bonzo, and I were talking about Bonham’s Hereford bulls, which had just swept the top prizes at a local competition. “I love those bulls, just getting up in the morning and seeing them,” said John, beaming with pride like a father talking about his children. On the plane, he was wearing overalls and a wide-brimmed hat that any farmer could have put to use as a daytime shield from the sun.

  A few minutes later, Bonham went to use the bathroom and Astrid turned to me and asked, “Why did you guys bring that farmer with you?” She obviously didn’t recognize Bonzo. “All he talks about is those damn bulls! Does he work on one of the boys’ estates?”

  “Not exactly,” I said, breaking the news as gently as possible. “That’s our drummer! That’s John Bonham!”

  She seemed genuinely surprised. And embarrassed. Led Zeppelin were more than musicians, although it was hard for most people to see beyond their music.

  I had always felt that, more than the others, Jimmy was much too complex an individual to be living for music alone. I knew that his dabbling in the occult continued, although he still kept that side of his life very private. On occasion, he would mention the name Aleister Crowley to me. Crowley had been a part poet, part magician, part mountain climber who conducted rituals in black magic, many at his “satanic temple” on Fulham Road. Crowley had been a real mystery to people.

  I occasionally became Jimmy’s unofficial chauffeur on some of his Crowley shopping sprees. Despite Pagey’s love of automobiles—over the years, he owned cars like a Bentley, an Austin Champ Army Jeep, a Cord Sportsman, and an old Mercedes with running boards—he never had a driver’s license (“I just never bothered to get one,” he said). So several times he would call me and say, “Richard, I’m in the mood to go shopping for some Crowley artifacts.” We’d drive from auction houses to rare-book showrooms, where Jimmy would buy Crowley manuscripts or other belongings (hats, paintings, clothes).

  “What is it about this chap Crowley that fascinates you?” I asked Jimmy on one of our outings.

  “The guy was really quite remarkable,” Jimmy said. “Someday we’ll talk about it, Richard.”

  But we never did. If the public felt there was a certain mystery surrounding Led Zeppelin, they weren’t alone. As close as I was to them, I sometimes felt there was something within Jimmy that he never let anyone see. Particularly when it came to Pagey’s preoccupation with Crowley, séances, and black magic, I had a lot of unanswered questions.

  33

  HOUSES OF THE HOLY

  It got to be painfully monotonous. No matter where Led Zeppelin performed, no matter how much advance planning we had done, it seemed like security became an overriding, nerve-racking concern. In the later months of 1972 and into 1973, the band made swings through Britain and Europe, performing at sites like Oxford’s New Theatre and the Liverpool Empire and venues in Sweden, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Austria, and France. In France in particular, I began to wonder whether I’d ever have peace of mind again at a concert.

  We had our worst experience in Lyon, where the security was simply atrocious. The concert was at a basketball stadium that seated 12,000. But hours before the performance, dozens of kids had already broken into the arena and were roaming through the stands. Peter warned me, “If it’s necessary, you and the roadies are going to have to take matters into your own hands.”

  Shortly after the show began, that’s exactly what happened. Some fans began throwing debris, including empty bottles, from the highest deck of seats. One of the bottles sailed directly toward the band and shattered on the stage. Slivers of glass exploded onto Bonzo and his drums.

  That was all I needed to see. I looked up toward the stands, located the culprits, and then sprinted up to the top deck. A couple of our crew members followed me. We grabbed the thugs, dragged them into the aisle, and roughed them up. I think those fellas bore the brunt of years of anxiety and frustration that I had felt about the band’s safety. As we tossed them out of the stadium, one of them bleeding from a cut on his forehead, I realized that force seemed to be the only option that got the message across to fans who were intent on causing trouble. Touring was stressful enough without the added concerns of whether we were going to get through each concert without any harm to the band members.

  After a show in Nantes, we decided to unwind by doing some serious drinking. The band, the roadies, and a few other hangers-on—sixteen of us in all—crammed into a rented Volvo. We were literally hanging out the windows and the sunroof, with Benoit Gautier, who worked for Atlantic Records in Paris, at the wheel much of the time. It was a death-defying ride to the watering hole, and as all of us continued to shift postures, trying to find a reasonably comfortable position, we kicked in the dashboard and shredded the upholstery. Bonham and I were standing up in the trunk, leaning forward and literally pulling the sunroof off its hinges.

  Before we reached the bar, a cop spotted our car, with bodies extending out of every opening, and he pulled us over. He shook his head in disbelief and finally said in French, “I’m going to arrest all of you. You all have alcohol on your breath.”

  “Alcohol!” Bonzo shouted. “We haven’t even started partying yet. If you really want a good reason to arrest us, let us get in a few hours of drinking.”

  We were put into cells, and at my request, we began singing British drinking songs, doing our best to drive the cops nuts. In the meantime, realizing that there really weren’t any charges that could be pressed against us, the police captain called our hotel and asked the desk clerk if we were registered there.

  “They sure are,” the clerk said. “But we don’t want them back. The doors on their floors are all messed up, and someone threw a TV out the window!”

  The cop acted as though he hadn’t heard a word. “Well, we’ve had enough of them here. We’re sending them back to your hotel. Good luck!”

  A few minutes later, we were released and driven in police cars to the hotel. Once the cops were out of sight, we walked to a bar down the street and spent the rest of the night there.

  In March 1973, Led Zeppelin’s fifth album was finally released. It had been long delayed by endless problems with the cover artwork. Zeppelin kept looking at the prototypes coming out of the print shop and repeatedly rejected and sent them back, usually because of unacceptable, untrue, overly bright colors. Jimmy worried that the lavish colors on the album jacket would make it look like a cosmetics advertisement in a fashion magazine.

  The album was called Houses of the Holy, an apparent reference to the spiritual aura that the band romanticized as hovering over its concert halls and audiences. Again, Zeppelin’s name did not appear on the album cover. The jacket instead featured young, blond, naked children climbing up a boulder-filled mountainside. Ironically, the title song was saved for the band’s next album, Physical Graffiti, which was not released until 1975.

  The band was quite proud of Houses of the Holy. Five albums and more than four years down the road, they had a strong enough belief in themselves as artists to go in whatever new directions their musical instincts drew them. Firmly entrenched at the top of the rock music world, the band was expected by many fans to dig in and keep giving the public more of the same. But in Houses of the Holy, Led Zeppelin showed that they were willing to explore new ideas in their evolution as musicians, even if they were risky.

  In “The Rain Song,” John Paul single-handedly created a lush orchestration on his Mellotron that sounded as though it came from an entire symphony orchestra. “No Quarter” showed their flare for the mysterious and the dramatic. And John Bonham the songwriter was showcased on “The Ocean”; he received credit as a primary writer on the tune.

  Maybe the band felt they were growing as musicians, but the critics hadn’t evolved at all. Short
ly after Houses of the Holy reached the record stores, Rolling Stone unleashed a savage attack upon it. Gordon Fletcher called it “one of the dullest and most confusing albums I’ve heard this year.”

  With a big American tour set to begin in May, Zeppelin didn’t want to be crushed by a hostile press at every stop in the U.S. Beep Fallon was no longer working for the band, and Peter contemplated hiring a top-flight U.S. public relations firm with major media contacts to try to turn things around with the press. “The Stones are going to be touring in America at the same time as us,” Peter told me. “If we don’t actively go after some high visibility, the Stones will annihilate us in terms of publicity, even though we’ll outdraw them at the box office.”

  The Stones consistently got much more—and much better—publicity than Led Zeppelin, and that grated on the egos of the band. Of course, the Stones hung out with a different crowd than us, drawn to celebrities like Truman Capote, Andy Warhol, and Lee Radziwill. Jagger & Company were the darlings of the social register, and even though Mick had a devilish image, he seemed like a choirboy next to the way the media had portrayed Led Zeppelin.

  We were perfectly content to camp out relatively anonymously at local bars and strip joints, but those weren’t the kinds of social activities that got the publicity we felt we needed. For the most part, the press still treated us as though we were plotting World War III.

  So Peter made the initial contacts with Solters, Roskin, and Sabinson, one of the most prestigious, high-powered, and expensive PR companies in the U.S. Peter talked to Lee Solters, a straitlaced, middle-aged man who made a very nice living representing some of Hollywood’s biggest stars. “We’re on the final leg of a tour through France,” Peter explained. “I’d like you to fly over to meet the band. Despite their image, I think you’ll find them to be quite civil, quite bright young men.”