by Richard Cole
After Louisiana, we decided to look for less claustrophobic living accommodations when we reached Texas. On short notice, I rented a dude ranch outside Dallas, which had a private airstrip a mile away so we could easily get to and from shows in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, and San Antonio. We invited a few girls to stay with us at the ranch, and it was great fun. There was horseback riding and a swimming pool. We didn’t ever want to leave.
One evening when we flew out to a concert in San Antonio, we left behind one of our bodyguards, Willy Vaccar, who wasn’t feeling well. When we returned early the next morning, Willy was waiting for us on the steps of the house, and he was actually trembling. “The guy who owns this ranch has gone fucking mad,” he exclaimed.
“What do you mean?” Peter said.
“He came into the house waving a Bible, ranting and raving about the terrible things we’re doing here.”
Sure enough, the owner—an elderly chap named Jim—showed up a few minutes later wearing an enormous Stetson hat, making all kinds of threats and pointing a shotgun at us through the darkness. He definitely lacked the stability you’d want in someone with his finger on the trigger.
“I don’t like having you boys on my ranch!” he said in a slow Texan drawl. “You’ve got girls here, too, don’t ya?”
I was pissed off. “You bet we do. We paid for this place. We can use it any way we want!”
“Sorry, boys! I want you OUT!”
He disappeared, and fifteen minutes later we had other visitors. The local sheriff and his deputy drove up in a patrol car. They ambled toward the front of the house. The sheriff must have been at least seventy years old. He wore house slippers and was armed with a tiny silver pistol with a pearl handle. His partner was a Gomer Pyle look-alike. They were quite a sight.
The sheriff turned to the owner of the ranch, who also had returned by then. “Jim, are you having trouble with these gents?” the sheriff asked him.
In the next few minutes, we did our best to explain our side of the story. The sheriff had trouble deciding quite what to do. Then he finally told us, “You guys better just go to bed. If there’s any more trouble here tonight, I’ll come back and lock you all up. We’ll deal with this whole situation tomorrow.”
At midmorning, Peter made a phone call to the promoters we were working with in Texas, who told him that they had overlooked sending a check to Jim. Since Jim hadn’t been paid, his anger and erratic behavior suddenly became a bit more understandable.
“Why don’t we get the hell out of here?” I asked the band. “Who knows what these guys are gonna do next!” We began to prepare to leave, whereupon Jim returned, standing outside waiting for us.
“I don’t want you fucking me around!” he screamed. He threw a beer can into the air and fired his shotgun at it. He missed.
Peter turned to me and said, “Shit! This guy’s crazy! He might’ve missed the fucking can, but he sure as hell ain’t gonna miss me!”
Jim ran down to the gate and locked it, apparently so we couldn’t leave without paying. I followed him and frantically tried to pry the gate open. But as I did, he raised his rifle and threatened to shoot me. He ordered me back into the house.
During all of this, John Paul was hiding in the bathroom, frightened that bullets were about to start flying. Robert, meanwhile, was trying his best to take things in stride, complaining that he needed a cup of tea before we departed, that he couldn’t do anything until he had his hot morning beverage.
Finally, we rounded up the girls and all of us piled into our rented station wagons. I was behind the wheel of the lead car and pressed the accelerator to the floor, aiming it directly at the locked gate. I braced myself and could feel my heart rate speed up. When the car slammed into the gate, the frame shattered. We were free.
We thundered down the highway, liberally exceeding the speed limit. Expecting trouble, I had contacted our pilot two hours earlier and had him park our chartered plane at Love Field rather than at the private airstrip. As we sped toward the airport, we caught a glimpse of the sheriff and his posse of cars with their sirens wailing headed in the opposite direction back to the airstrip where they thought they could find us. We never again saw Jim and the sheriff, but I presume we hadn’t won them over as Led Zeppelin fans.
36
CALIFORNIA BOUND
By the time the ’73 tour reached Los Angeles in late May, Houses of the Holy had become the Number 1-selling album in the U.S. That left the entire band feeling almost giddy with excitement. Virtually everything was going our way in the tour thus far. We felt invincible.
But literally minutes after our chartered fan-jet landed at Los Angeles International, and we moved onto the airport tarmac, the mood changed. Fans had lined the fence as our plane landed, and Jimmy walked over to shake hands and sign autographs. “Give me ten minutes and then we’ll be on our way,” he told me. Pagey reached over and through the fence, making contact with the fans. But as he did, he caught a finger on a protruding wire and quickly pulled away. In the process, he somehow sprained the finger.
“Oh, shit!” he shouted, as much in anger as in pain. He turned and walked to the limo with his left hand in a contorted position. “I think I’m in trouble,” he said as he slid into the car. He slumped down in the seat, with an exasperated look on his face.
Within an hour, Jimmy was being examined by a doctor. They concluded that he just couldn’t effectively maneuver that finger on the neck of the guitar. “The best medicine for this kind of injury is rest,” the doctor recommended.
Jimmy was incapacitated, at least for the next day or two. We really had no choice but to do some quick rescheduling. One of our dates at the L.A. Forum was pushed ahead four days.
We were all upset by Jimmy’s accident. However, by May 31—John Bonham’s twenty-fifth birthday—Jimmy insisted that we not let his injury interfere with some celebrating. That was the night of the first Forum show, and after the concert the general manager of an FM radio station in L.A. hosted a party for Bonzo at his house in the hills above Hollywood with the help of Tony Mandich of Atlantic Records and New York FM jock J. J. Jackson. Bonzo showed up wearing swimming trunks and a T-shirt. George Harrison and his wife, Patti, were there, too.
George had seen the Forum show and seemed intrigued with Led Zeppelin. He had once talked to me about coming to see the band perform at Madison Square Garden and suggested that he “pop in during intermission.”
“Well,” I told him, “Zeppelin doesn’t take an intermission.”
George was puzzled. “How long do they play?”
“Most shows run close to three hours. Never less than two and a half.”
“Holy shit!” he said, letting those numbers sink in for a moment. “With the Beatles, we were contracted to play thirty minutes max! Usually, we were off the stage and gone within fifteen!”
Harrison felt there was something special about Led Zeppelin. So when Bonham wanted his picture taken with George, the former Beatle was flattered—but he was also a little hesitant. After all, he knew about Zeppelin’s reputation for practical jokes and was wary that Bonham might have something else planned besides a photograph. So George decided to strike the first blow. He walked over to the birthday cake, picked up its top tier, raised it over Bonzo’s head, and dumped it on the drummer.
There were gasps from the party-goers. And then laughter. John chased after George, caught him within a few steps, and then lifted Harrison up and tossed him into the pool. Almost instantly, full-fledged pandemonium broke out. Bonzo was pushed into the water, and most of the other party guests followed close behind.
Jimmy, meanwhile, rather than risk being pushed into the pool, gracefully walked down the steps into the water, wearing an elegant white suit. “Hell, I don’t know how to swim,” he said. “I’m going to stake out a place in the shallow water before someone pushes me in the deep end.”
On June 2, 49,000 fans squeezed into Kezar Stadium in the southeastern corner of Golden Gate Park fo
r a Zeppelin spectacle. By this point, Jimmy’s finger was still in some pain, but he was becoming more mobile each day. He had toughed it out during the L.A. Forum concerts; he knew he could do the same in San Francisco.
Bill Graham, the promoter for the Kezar Stadium gig, was amazed by the ticket sales. “We could have sold three times as many tickets, maybe more, if we had the room,” he told me. Scalpers were out in force, initially determined to market their tickets for $25, but soon finding themselves offered much more…$50, $100, even $200 a ticket.
Graham opened the gates at Kezar at five-thirty in the morning, and more than 3,000 fans who had camped out in the park for two nights stormed through the gates like someone was giving away free money rather than the Frisbees and the balloons that Bill Graham had distributed. Zeppelin didn’t take the stage until midafternoon, preceded by a trio of opening acts (Roy Harper, the Tubes, Lee Michaels) who only seemed to make the audience more restless, more impatient for the band they had really come to see.
Finally, beginning at three-thirty, and continuing for two and a half hours, Zeppelin shook the city that was already much too familiar with earthquakes. They began with “Rock and Roll,” and from that point on it was a foot-stomping feast of Zeppelin at their best. The crowd seemed to react most enthusiastically to “Dazed and Confused,” “The Song Remains the Same,” and “Whole Lotta Love.” But the band could have played “Chopsticks” and brought down the house.
Blocks away on Parnassus Avenue, patients trying to rest at the University of California Medical Center grumbled that the noise from the concert kept jarring them awake. At the Presidio, more than a mile away, soldiers on guard duty swore they could feel the vibrations. Maybe only 49,000 could squeeze into Kezar, but the whole city knew Zeppelin was in town.
When I added up Kezar’s box-office receipts, the gross totaled $325,000. “That’s better than we did in Tampa by nearly sixteen thousand dollars,” I told the band on the limo ride to San Francisco International.
“We gotta get Danny Goldberg on this story,” Bonzo exclaimed, waving his right fist triumphantly in the air. “I want the fuckin’ Stones to hear about the kinds of crowds we’re drawing. They can’t come close to us. Not even close!”
On the flight back to L.A., however, Zeppelin forgot all about ticket sales and crowd bedlam, at least for the moment. The fan-jet had just taken off when it got caught in some turbulence created by the takeoff of a jumbo jet just seconds earlier. Our plane bounced, dipped, and shook, creating high anxiety within the cabin.
No one said very much, except for an occasional expletive that you’d even forgive Mother Teresa for under the circumstances. We gripped shoulder rests, felt queasiness in our stomachs, and began to perspire.
At one time or another over the years, all of us had experienced some frazzled nerves while flying. Bonham went through a period of such crippling fear that he wouldn’t get on a plane until he had a drink. Jimmy never liked flying, either, sometimes looking as though he were about to faint during turbulent flights.
On that day above San Francisco, as soon as the pilot had stabilized the fan-jet, Peter became enraged. “I’ve had it with these fucking little planes! This is the last time we fly them. The last time!”
Before we had touched down in L.A., Peter had given me my orders:
“We’ve got a month’s hiatus coming up in the middle of this tour. By the time the tour resumes, I want us to have a bigger plane. I don’t care what it costs. Get us something so big that it won’t seem like flying at all.”
37
THE STARSHIP
As the band headed for England for their planned hiatus, I spent most of the remainder of June trying to find a jet that would meet their extravagant tastes and ease their extravagant anxieties while making traveling more comfortable.
I contacted Lou Weinstock of Toby Roberts Tours, who used to arrange for planes for Elvis. Lou passed on a brochure to me about a Boeing jet called the Starship. It was a 720B—a forty-seater that had been customized specifically for rock stars, although no one had yet taken a long-term lease on it. Frankly, I doubted that anyone could afford it.
The Starship was owned by singer Bobby Sherman and one of the creators of the Monkees. And it was elegant. A lengthy bar. Televisions. An artificial fireplace in the den and a fur-covered bed in the bedroom. A Thomas organ built into the bar. A kitchen for preparing hot food. “It’s like Air Force One with satin sheets,” I told Peter.
“See what kind of price you can negotiate,” Peter said. “It sounds like a great way to travel. And Danny Goldberg can probably get us some great publicity out of it.”
After several lengthy phone calls, I finalized the deal. The price: $30,000 for the remaining three weeks of the American tour. Yes, it was expensive. But once the band got used to the convenience, comfort, and luxury, the price wasn’t important. As Robert said on our first flight, “It’s like a floating palace.”
When we picked up the jet at Chicago’s O’Hare airport in early July, it was parked next to Hugh Hefner’s plane. Thanks to Goldberg, the rock press was swarming all over the tarmac as we boarded the Starship for the first time. One reporter asked Peter, “How does your plane compare to Mr. Hefner’s?”
Peter thought for a second, and even though he had barely seen the interior of our own plane, he answered, “The Starship makes Hefner’s plane look like a dinky toy.”
The comment made headlines in the rock press, although Bonham later told me, “I’d like to get some of those Hefner girls on the Starship!”
“Don’t worry,” I told him. “We’ll have plenty of girls. I’ll see to that.”
The band not only fell in love with the Starship, but they enjoyed the status of having such an elegant plane, something that other rock bands would envy. Maybe the Stones got a lot more media attention, but no one had a jet quite like this one.
To take full advantage of the Starship, I devised a strategy to minimize the exhaustion—physical and mental—that had become an almost inevitable part of touring. For this and the remaining American tours, we based ourselves in a limited number of U.S. cities—New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Dallas, Miami, and Los Angeles—in hotels where we felt comfortable. From those launching pads, we would use the Starship to fly to concerts in Milwaukee, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Boston, and other nearby cities. There was no longer a need to move to a new, unfamiliar hotel every night.
On the flights to the concerts, the mood on the Starship was relatively quiet. But pandemonium reigned on the postconcert flights. No matter what the hour, no matter how tired we may have been, no one slept, not when there were hot meals to eat, beer to drink, and flight attendants and girls to flirt with.
Ironically, at a time when Zeppelin was firmly entrenched as the world’s biggest band, there were fewer groupies throwing themselves into our laps than during the early days. One seventeen-year-old blonde who we met at the Riot House in Los Angeles during that ’73 tour told me, “My friends didn’t even want to try to get to you guys. Your security is becoming so tight that they just figured they’d never get near you.”
Many of the old groupies had disappeared. Some had simply grown up. A few had gotten married. Too many had died of drug overdoses. Still, we would meet girls, often in L.A. clubs like the Rainbow Bar and Grill, and few of them ever turned down the invitation for a ride on the Starship. When they were willing, the bedroom gave us some privacy, too.
Among its other toys, the Starship had an on-board telephone, and whenever we’d be flying into Los Angeles, I’d call from the air to let the Rainbow know we were on the way. I’d usually get Tony or Michael, who ran the Rainbow, on the phone, and tell them, “We’ll be landing at nine-thirty, and then we’ll have a twenty-five-minute limo ride from the airport. Please have our tables cleared and some Dom Perignon ready for us.” The Rainbow never said no. They spoiled us rotten, but at this point in the band’s career, we expected—and almost always got—special treatment.
Linda
and Charlotte, who were our favorite Rainbow waitresses and “den mothers,” would cordon off an area for Led Zeppelin, and no one got beyond the line of demarcation unless one of us signaled for her safe passage. Usually, adolescent girls with layers of makeup, tight-fitting tops, short skirts, and spike heels had the best chance of winning admission to our asylum.
There were other diversions on the Starship. The refrigerators were always well stocked—plenty of champagne, beer, wine, Scotch, Jack Daniels, and gin. The belly of the plane was crammed with cases of Dom Perignon (1964 and 1966 vintage) and Singha beer. We’d drink just about anything, but at times we’d be in the mood for a particular type of alcohol—or drug—and that would become the “substance of choice” for that particular tour.
When he wasn’t in a corner playing backgammon, John Paul often would sit at the Thomas, and, with the booze flowing, we’d sing pub songs. We’d encourage the flight attendants—two girls and a guy—to join the partying, and while they took their in-flight responsibilities seriously, they began to feel like part of the Zeppelin family. We didn’t fuck around with the stewardesses, Susie and Bianca, because they wouldn’t stand for it. But there was a lot of teasing.
Susie was an attractive eighteen-year-old blonde; Bianca was twenty-two years old, with a dark complexion and a good sense of humor. Years later, Susie told me, “Back in nineteen seventy-three, when you guys would get off the plane and we’d be straightening things up, we’d find one-hundred-dollar bills rolled up with cocaine inside them. We knew we weren’t on a chartered flight for the Queen of England, but in the beginning I was shocked.”
One afternoon, on a flight to Cincinnati for a concert at Riverfront Stadium, the Starship had been in the air only fifteen minutes when I heard banging and shouts coming from the bathroom.
“Get me out! Get me out!”