by Richard Cole
As the tour progressed, we soon had to deal with problems other than Jimmy’s injured finger. Less than two weeks into the tour, Robert contracted the flu, with a high fever and a gravelly throat. At one point, he was feeling so ill that he literally couldn’t drag himself out of bed.
Peter impressed me with the way he reacted. He still saw Led Zeppelin as a long-term investment, and he insisted that Robert put his health before the tour itself. He called the local promoter in St. Louis and ordered a rescheduling of the forthcoming concert there. That gave Robert a few days to recuperate, which he both needed and appreciated. It also allowed the remaining band members to make an unscheduled invasion of Los Angeles.
At the Ambassador East Hotel in Chicago, Bonham first raised the possibility of leaving town during Robert’s recovery. “Let’s not hang around here. It’s boring as hell. We can have a lot more fun at the Rainbow Bar in L.A.”
John Paul protested. He wanted the Starship to fly them to the Bahamas, where he could already feel the warm sunshine and fantasize about the girls on the beaches. But Los Angeles held the promise of warm weather, too. We talked about it for an hour and finally reached a consensus. We gave the orders to rev up the engines of the Starship, and we headed west.
When the tour resumed, I sometimes felt that Led Zeppelin had become too big, too successful for its own good or at least for its own physical well-being. The audiences were so immense and so enthusiastic that there seemed no way to ensure proper crowd control. Sometimes bedlam broke out days or weeks before the band even reached town.
In Boston, in fact, the concert never got off the ground. Fans had lined up to buy tickets for the performance at Boston Garden, and because the weather was frigid, officials let them camp inside the building. During the night, however, the kids went berserk. They broke into the food stands and got drunk on the beer they had stolen. They ripped seats out of their moorings. They turned on emergency fire hoses. In all, there was more than $30,000 damage to the Garden. As a result, Boston mayor Kevin White ordered the cancellation of the Zeppelin show, fearing even more trouble at the concert itself.
Not knowing quite what to expect, I ordered that security remain extremely tight at those 1975 concerts. At the Philadelphia Spectrum, a fan approaching the stage with a camera during “Stairway to Heaven” was ambushed by two of our hired goons. They battered him with such ferocity that Jimmy nearly became ill watching the brutality in front of him. He moved toward the edge of the stage, as though he was going to intervene in some way. But as he got a closer view of the mayhem, he bowed his head and turned away. It was really more than he could stand.
“What the hell was going on out there tonight?” he shouted at me after the concert. “You have to find a less violent way of controlling these situations!”
I was more sympathetic toward the security team than Jimmy. I had done my time on the front lines at Zeppelin concerts and realized that when security attacked, it was usually for a reason, even if it was in response to their own fears and anxieties. At times, I had felt that crowds were going to overwhelm me, that it was going to be a fight for survival. Late in that same Spectrum concert, when dozens of fans began congregating near the front of the auditorium, I positioned myself underneath the stage and frantically began smashing them on the kneecaps with a hammer.
I learned a lot from the off-duty cops who usually provided the security at the concerts. At the Pittsburgh Civic Arena, one of them was particularly proud of his crowd-control tactics. “Let me loan you a blackjack in case you need to bash in a skull or two tonight!” he said calmly as he handed me one of the metal-laden weapons. He also showed me how to conceal small weights in a pair of gloves, turning them into a potentially lethal weapon. “Some cops here use them to rough people up,” he said. I made a mental note to keep a low profile in Pittsburgh.
By the midway point of the tour, I had become possessed with ensuring that the band’s safety was never in jeopardy. I never carried a gun in the U.S.—that’s where I drew the line. But a knife or a hammer had become a necessity. I just felt more confident with them in certain situations.
One night before our concert at Madison Square Garden, when the stress was starting to overwhelm me, I told Peter, “I feel like a guy working for the secret service, guarding the President and knowing that something terrible could happen in the next tick of the clock. Someday, we’re going to reach a point at which all the hassles are not going to be worth it anymore. We’re not there yet, but it’s gonna happen.”
44
DANCING DAYS
When the 1975 tour reached New York for six concerts at Madison Square Garden and the Nassau Coliseum, we parked ourselves at the Plaza Hotel. For Jimmy Page, his suite at the Plaza was much too pretentious, “something comparable to the Versailles Palace,” he complained. John Bonham really didn’t care whether his suite was gaudy or austere; in fact, as long as there was a pool table in his room (which he always had in New York and Chicago), he could do without just about everything else, including running water.
In New York and everywhere else Led Zeppelin traveled on that 1975 tour, our time clocks were never in sync with the rest of the city. We’d be up all night, still feeling a rush from the excitement and the tension of that evening’s concert. By the time we were worn out enough for sleep, the sun was just breaking through.
One night in New York, Mick Jagger called to see if any of us wanted to accompany him and Ronnie Wood to a club in Harlem. Jimmy, Bonzo, and I decided that it sounded better than spending the night in the hotel. I phoned for a couple of limos, and we went downstairs to meet Mick and Ronnie in front of the Plaza. Jimmy climbed into the front limo with the two Stones. Bonzo tried to join them, but they told him to get into the rear car with me, which didn’t make him very happy.
As we drove up to Harlem, our two drivers were talking to one another over their radios, chattering about the dangers of going into Harlem late at night. “Don’t you think we should stop and get some more armor, or do you think we have enough?” one of them asked. He didn’t sound as if he were joking.
As Bonzo listened to this conversation, his eyes lit up. He was still pissed off that he hadn’t been allowed to ride in the lead limo, and at a stoplight he told our driver, “Matty, I know you’ve got some guns up there. Give me one of them after you check to make sure it’s unloaded.”
Matty inspected a Beretta and handed it back to Bonham.
“Okay,” John said. “Now pull alongside their limo.”
When the two limos were next to one another, Bonzo signaled to Mick, mouthing the words, “Lower your window.” Mick smiled, happy to oblige. When both of their windows were down, John stuck the Beretta out and aimed it right at them. “I’ll teach you fuckers to leave me behind,” he shouted.
Even though I knew John had an unloaded gun, just the sight of a pointed weapon made me jumpy. In the other limo, they went absolutely berserk. There were screams from the backseat as Mick, Ronnie, and Jimmy simultaneously hit the floor. Their driver slammed down on the accelerator and sped through two red lights, convinced that Bonham’s insanity had turned him into a killer.
At the club in Harlem, Bonzo explained that it was all a practical joke. The others were still infuriated, having trouble seeing the humor in it.
A few evenings later, a particularly chilly night in New York, Robert began bitching about the weather. “Who planned this fucking tour anyway?” he grumbled, looking my way. “Whatever happened to summer tours? We could have run into warmer weather in Siberia.”
“Well,” Bonzo said, “let’s go back to L.A. tomorrow. We’ll sit by the pool and just drink. Or better yet, forget the pool. Let’s just spend the whole day at the Rainbow and fly back to New York at night.”
With the Starship, just about anything was possible. Other than the cost of the fuel, the trip to L.A. wouldn’t be too fiscally draining. And we could start drinking during the flight west.
The band assigned me the task of arrangin
g a quick exit to L.A. immediately after the next Madison Square Garden concert. I made plans for the limos to go directly from the Garden to Newark airport, where the Starship would be waiting for us. All we needed was a police escort, with sirens and red lights, to speed up the drive to the airport.
But there was a glitch. One of our security men, who we’ll call Kenny, told me he was unable to arrange for a police escort: “I’m doing the best I can, Richard, but the cops are telling me that the limos would have to go through the Lincoln Tunnel, and there are different police jurisdictions on either end of the tunnel. The police escort that enters the tunnel can’t be the same one that exits it. I don’t think it’s going to work out.”
I knew that Led Zeppelin wasn’t used to taking no for an answer. To a man, they could become contemptuous of just about anything that interfered with what they wanted. I could already hear Bonzo exploding in anger (“You really screwed this one up, Cole!”).
So I told Kenny to keep trying. “See what you can do,” I said. “If it’s going to take some money to change their minds, we’ll pay whatever they want.”
The night of the Madison Square Garden concert, Kenny approached me backstage, accompanied by a uniformed New York policeman. “Richard, let me introduce you to Alan,” Kenny said. “He’ll be your police escort tonight.”
A few minutes later, Kenny took me aside. “Alan’s going to need three hundred dollars.”
“No problem,” I whispered. “How in the hell did you arrange this?”
“Well,” Kenny said, “technically, Alan is off duty tonight. He ‘borrowed’ a police car from his precinct’s parking lot, and he’s willing to take you through the Lincoln Tunnel and to the airport for an under-the-table payment. Three hundred dollars is what he wants.”
“It’s worth it,” I told him. “For starters, it’ll probably save my job.”
The band laughed all the way to the airport. “I love getting away with things like this,” Jimmy said. “Do you think this cop realizes that we would have paid him one thousand dollars if that’s what he had asked for?”
That 1975 trip through America was the first Zeppelin tour in which heroin circulated freely among our entourage. Although alcohol and cocaine were still much more prevalent, I frequently nourished my own smack habit, and at one time or another, Jimmy, Robert, and Bonzo tried some, too. It was the first time I had seen any of them use it, although since I hadn’t toured with the band since 1973, they could have been snorting it for months or even years without my knowing. No one was using needles, and none of us really seemed truly hooked in those days, although I’m not really sure about myself. I certainly enjoyed the sensations of smack, although it seemed as though I could go a few days without it and not experience any of the classic withdrawal symptoms.
On some level, I think we all knew the risks associated with heroin. But Led Zeppelin was like a teenager riding a motorcycle without a helmet. We thought we were infalible, that nothing or nobody could topple us from the throne.
Peter knew better, even if we were just experimenting. One afternoon at the Plaza, when he saw me preparing to snort some heroin, he became furious. “You’re fucking mad to use that shit,” he said, insisting that I flush it down the toilet. I did, just to appease him. Later that day, however, I bought some more.
Before we left New York for the last time during the ’75 tour, Zeppelin’s attitude toward the media sunk to an all-time low. Bonzo was quietly reading a newspaper in his suite when one of our roadies showed him the results of the new Playboy music poll. The magazine had ranked Karen Carpenter as a better rock drummer than Bonzo.
“Oh, my God, no!” Bonham wailed. “Karen Carpenter! Karen Carpenter!” He paced his suite. He picked up an ashtray and bounced it off the far wall. “I can’t believe it! I give up! If Karen Carpenter is a better drummer, then I’m in the wrong business! I’m gonna get a job driving a taxi! Somebody help me, please!”
All of us were a little apprehensive of what the press would write about us next. When we got word that Rolling Stone was sending one of its writers, Cameron Crowe, to travel with the band during part of the ’75 tour, we didn’t know quite what to expect. And when we met Cameron for the first time, our first thought was, “Geez, he’s so young.” But as he mingled and talked with everyone in the band, our respect for him grew. All of us were surprised by his knowledge of rock and roll in general and Led Zeppelin in particular. He was obviously someone who did his homework, and knew what he was writing about (of course, he would later go on to direct rock and roll films like Almost Famous, and win an Academy Award for his script of that movie, based largely on his travels with bands like Zeppelin). When Cameron’s article on Zeppelin was published in Rolling Stone, it was quite complimentary of Zeppelin. And to Bonzo’s delight, it contained no comparisons of him to Karen Carpenter!
We continued to weave our way across the country, often inviting girls to fly with us on the Starship. Sometimes I just liked to see the amazed girls ooh and aah over how lavishly we traveled. Bonzo, however, could only take so much of that ogling. After a concert at the New Orleans Municipal Auditorium, we flew into Texas, accompanied by four girls who had been traveling with us for three days. “I’m getting tired of these birds,” Bonham told me. “Can’t we find some new ones?”
As we landed in Dallas, Bad Company was at a nearby departure gate, just minutes away from taking off on their own chartered twenty-seater, Viscount turboprop jet. Mick Ralphs, the group’s guitarist, ordered the stairs of Bad Company’s jet lowered, and we boarded it for a few minutes.
“Hey, can you take these damn chicks off our hands?” Bonzo pleaded.
Mick sounded interested. “I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “We’ve got two girls here that we don’t want! We’ll trade them for your four!”
So we swapped women. Too often, we treated girls like just another commodity, like exchanging one bottle of champagne for another. Plant tried to convince me, “The girls don’t seem to mind.” And those fresh faces from Bad Company’s entourage certainly raised the possibility of making life more interesting for us in Texas.
During our stay in Dallas, however, even those new girls got to be a drag. “Dump ’em!” Bonzo exclaimed. By that point, his interests had shifted across the street from our hotel, where he saw a parked 1966 Corvette Stingray that he instantly fell in love with. “I’ve got to have it,” he thought. “How can I find out who owns the sucker?” he asked me. “I’ll pay him anything!”
Back in his hotel suite, Bonzo called Jack Kelly, an ex-FBI agent and one of our security men. “Jack, do whatever you have to do to get that car for me. If you need to, have the owner arrested and don’t let him go until he agrees to sell me the fucking car!”
Through the license number, Jack tracked down the car’s owner, and Bonzo offered to buy it with cash on the spot. He ultimately paid $18,000 for it, and even though it may not have been worth that much, it really didn’t matter to him. It was a toy that he wanted. He drove it into the back of a Ryder rental truck and paid $1,400 for a driver to haul it to L.A., where it would be waiting for him at the Riot House when we arrived.
A week later in L.A., I was returning from the Rainbow Bar one night, driving with three girls in the back of a white limousine that I had nicknamed the “slutmobile.” We saw the Ryder parked in front of the Hyatt, with bright lights shining from the back of the truck. I asked the limo driver to pull to the rear of the Ryder, where I could get a better view of what was going on inside. Once I was close enough, I could hear sounds coming from inside.
“Roooar, roooar.” It was Bonham, sitting in the front seat of the Stingray, doing his best imitation of a sports car in third gear. Keith Moon was sitting next to him, making almost as much noise. Fortunately, neither of them had the keys to the car, since in their inebriated state they probably would have made a shambles of the L.A. freeways that night.
Los Angeles was our last stop on this American tour. Three nights at the Forum a
nd just as many at the Rainbow. As usual, by this stage of the tour, we were eager for it to end. Nevertheless, the temptations of L.A. made the stay a little more tolerable. We again had staked out the entire ninth floor and part of the tenth and eleventh at the Riot House—we called them the “havoc floors.” That gave us plenty of empty hotel rooms in which to stash the girls we had rounded up on any given night and allowed us to play musical beds from one room to the next. Bonzo kept repeating, “It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it!” It was a cliché, but an appropriate one.
One night, Jimmy and I brought a couple of underage girls back to our rooms. Apparently, the father of one of them tracked her down and called up to the ninth floor, where the security guards routinely screened all our calls before deciding whether to put them through.
This particular night, the girl’s dad sounded like he was on a rampage. “My daughter’s in the hotel with one of your musicians. I’m going to call the police!”
The security guard had a standard reply: “Don’t bother. You’re talking to an L.A. police officer. There’s no one fitting your daughter’s description up here. Try another hotel.”
We had no qualms about misleading—or was it lying?—to ensure that our party wasn’t disturbed. When you had the police covering for you, nothing seemed particularly improper. It just became the way Led Zeppelin operated.