Stairway To Heaven

by Richard Cole

  Jimmy pushed the rest of the group along, determined to finish on time, but feeling the tension build from one day to the next. At one point during the sessions, just as he was feeling optimistic about their progress, the entire album was nearly sabotaged by an accident involving Robert. Though Plant was out of his wheelchair, the leg cast was such a burden that he always seemed off balance. “The poor bastard looks like the Leaning Tower of Pisa,” Bonzo wisecracked. One afternoon, that disequilibrium caught up with Robert.

  “I’ll be right back,” Plant said, rising from a chair and limping from the engineer’s room to one of the recording studios. But barely more than a dozen steps into his journey, he became entangled in an electrical cable. He lost his balance, stumbled, and fell. All his weight landed on his bad leg, accompanied by a horrifying cracking sound. Everyone in the room gasped. It seemed as though Zeppelin itself had crash-landed.

  “Fuck!” Robert shouted, sprawled on his stomach on the floor. He began moaning in pain as he rolled onto his side. “Oh, no!” he howled. “Not again! Not again!”

  Jimmy was the first to reach Robert, trying to support him with a hand on his shoulder. Initially, we thought about not moving him at all. But he was so uncomfortable, and he wanted to get up onto a chair. It took three of us to help him move there.

  That cracking sound was still ringing in my ears. I decided that Robert needed to be examined by a doctor. I summoned an ambulance, and he was taken to a hospital.

  “If I broke that leg again, I might as well forget all about walking,” Robert grimaced. “Why did this have to happen? Why?”

  No work was done the rest of the night, as we waited to see how badly Plant was hurt.

  Fortunately, it was a false alarm. There were no new fractures. Everyone heaved a sigh of relief, especially Robert. By the next morning, the band was recording again, although Plant had increased his dose of painkillers.

  Jimmy felt as if he were on an emotional roller coaster. “For a while, I thought we were back at square one,” he said the following day, still trying to calm down. He shook his head and added, “I’m beginning to wonder if we’ll ever get Robert’s accident behind us.”

  Despite that temporary setback, the album continued to come together. Jimmy hated the pressure, but realized that he worked incredibly well when he was under the gun, even when he was tired. He had an ability to focus completely on the project at hand and keep the level of originality high.

  Before long, the Stones were just two days away from arriving at Musicland. Jimmy placed a frantic call to Mick Jagger. “All we need is a little more time,” he said. “Can you guys come in three days late?”

  Mick agreed. He was only too happy to have a legitimate excuse for taking a few extra days off.

  When the sessions were finally over, Jimmy was delighted with the finished product. With some of the earlier albums, he would leave the studio feeling pangs of insecurity, convinced that there might have been something else he could have done to make the tracks even better. With Presence, however, he seemed perfectly content. Through a frail smile, he told me that not an ounce of energy had gone to waste.

  When the Stones finally showed up, we were clearing out our gear. “Thanks for the extra time,” Jimmy told Mick.

  “No problem,” Jagger said. “Did you get a few tracks down while you were here?”

  “It was more than a few tracks,” Jimmy said. “We’ve recorded everything for the album and finished the final mixes. The album is done.”

  Jagger was flabbergasted. “Wait a minute,” he said. “But you’ve been here only three weeks!”

  “Yeah, that’s all we needed,” Jimmy said.

  49

  THE JINX

  Does Jimmy seem anxious and moody to you?”

  Peter Grant was sitting across from me at a restaurant in L.A. Not long after the recording session in Munich had ended, Peter and I met in L.A. to take care of some business related to the completion and release of the movie, The Song Remains the Same. Jimmy joined us there a few days later. Almost immediately after Pagey’s arrival, Peter became concerned.

  “Something’s different about Jimmy,” he said. “He acts nervous and jumpy. Something’s not right.”

  Immediately, heroin came to my mind. Although we had seemed to weather the heroin storm in Munich and Jimmy certainly functioned fine in the studio, I was too preoccupied with my own use of smack to keep an eye on how much he was snorting.

  Later during that visit to L.A., Jimmy complained to me about having aches and pains. His nose was running, too, but I wasn’t about to give him a lecture about the risks of heroin. I told Peter I’d talk to Jimmy, although I really had no intention of doing so.

  Two days later, Jimmy and I flew to London together. He wanted to get back to England to see his daughter in a school play. On the drive to L.A. International, caught in the freeway traffic, he turned to me and said, “Chrissakes, Richard, don’t get into this shit.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Heroin. I think I’m hooked. It’s terrible.”

  “Have you tried to stop?”

  “I’ve tried, but I can’t. It’s a real bastard.”

  That was the last we talked about it during the trip home. At the time, I didn’t feel that I had sunk quite as deep as Pagey. I was using heroin regularly, but I still felt I was in control.

  After talking to Jimmy, I promised myself that heroin wasn’t going to get the best of me. I didn’t realize, however, that it probably already had. As soon as we were back in England and I got to my house in Pangbourne, I headed straight for the half gram of heroin that I had hidden in a gold goblet. That Christmas, I was literally out of my head from regularly snorting the stuff. One night, I became so ill at a Christmas party at Peter’s house that I spent most of the evening in the bathroom, vomiting repeatedly and praying for the night to end.

  Bonzo wasn’t doing much better. The last time we had been together in Paris, staying at the George V Hotel, Mick Hinton told me that Bonzo was languishing in bed. “What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Mick said. “He keeps eating Mars candy bars. That’s all he wants to eat.”

  I walked into Bonham’s room. “Get up, you fucking bastard,” I said.

  Bonzo looked pale, disoriented, and almost comatose. He didn’t seem to be in any mood to be harassed by me. “I couldn’t get out of bed even if I wanted to,” he said. “All I feel like doing is eating sweets.”

  “You know what your problem is, don’t you?” I said. “You’ve got a habit.”

  I wasn’t much help, however. I picked up the phone by the bed and called a dealer I knew in Paris. Within an hour, he had delivered an ounce of smack to Bonham’s room. We both snorted some of it and forgot all about the Mars bars for the rest of the day.

  Of all of us, John Paul and Robert had come through most successfully. Jonesy was nearly always able to avoid any traps that the rest of us got sucked into; he remained coolheaded enough to know when to jump in and when to back off. Robert was not quite that sensible, but while Bonham, Pagey, and I were struggling with heroin, Robert never really became caught up in it. Maybe after months of painkillers, he had taken enough drugs to last him a lifetime. When he finally got rid of his cane a few days after Christmas 1975—nearly five months after the accident—he felt as if he had been liberated. True, he still was in no shape to challenge Baryshnikov, but most of the healing was behind him. He wanted to get on with his life.

  Presence was finally released in late March 1976, but its arrival in the record stores was delayed by (what else!) problems with the cover art. That pillarlike object on the album jacket had fans conjecturing in perpetuity about its meaning. Some thought the obelisk was just an interesting work of art. Many more insisted that there was some symbolism behind it, that it had some link to Jimmy and his black magic rituals. Although Robert was as vague as possible when the press asked about it—“It means whatever you want it to mean�
�—fans pointed to the accident on Rhodes and figured that Jimmy’s fascination with the occult had somehow placed a spell over the band. The object on the cover of Presence was supposedly related to it all.

  “When you play with the devil, you pay the price,” a Los Angeles disc jockey speculated. “Led Zeppelin may be weighted down with a jinx that they can’t control.”

  That was the first time I had ever heard someone use the word “jinx” in reference to Led Zeppelin. It wasn’t the last. Jimmy thought that kind of conjecture was bullshit. It angered him, but he tried to ignore it.

  “Well,” Bonzo once asked me, “does anyone know what Jimmy does behind closed doors with all his supernatural shit?”

  Jimmy, of course, didn’t talk about it. I suppose it was really no one else’s business. But in his continued silence, the rumors started to spread.

  Certainly there was no jinx surrounding the new album. Presence soared to the top of the sales charts and became the first album in history to earn a platinum record through advance orders alone. Cuts like “Achilles Last Stand” received so much airplay—despite its ten-minute length—that some radio stations got complaints from listeners (“It’s a good song, but don’t you have anything else to play?”).

  Jimmy and John Paul felt relieved by the response of record buyers. After Robert’s accident, they had talked about just how strong the band could come back. Could Zeppelin rise from the ashes? Presence, they agreed, had put those concerns to rest.

  Some critics wrote generous reviews of the album. Rolling Stone, however, stuck its usual needles into its Zeppelin voodoo doll. Stephen Davis conceded that Led Zeppelin were the “heavy-metal champions of the known universe,” but before the review was over, he had digressed into lines like “Give an Englishman 50,000 watts, a chartered jet, a little cocaine, and some groupies and he thinks he’s a god. It’s getting to be an old story.”

  The negative reviews were an old story, too.

  50

  DESPONDENCY

  Cole, I need your help! You need to get over here quick!”

  I had just pulled my Jaguar up in front of a pub near my house and answered the ringing car phone. It was Peter Grant on the other end of the line. He seemed terribly upset.

  “I’ve got some real problems here,” he said. “Gloria has come back for some of her things, and there’s a guy downstairs with her.”

  “What can I do?” I asked.

  “Please come over. There might be a problem.”

  Frankly, I was in no mood to drive over to Peter’s house. I had just returned from the latest of several summer ’76 trips to New York and Los Angeles, where I had tried to resolve the ongoing problems with The Song Remains the Same, most of which centered around its sound and artwork. Peter would have normally handled these responsibilities, but he was despondent about his wife, Gloria, leaving him, and preferred to stay close to home. Fortunately, Frank Wells, head of Warner Brothers Pictures, was overseeing the Zeppelin film, and understood fully what the band wanted to do and say in the picture.

  After getting Peter’s phone call, I drove first to my home. I went to an upstairs bedroom, collected two guns, put them in the trunk of my car, and drove to Peter’s house. When I arrived, he was out front, talking in a raised voice to Gloria and her male friend. They didn’t seem on the verge of blows, however, and I decided not to interfere. My presence, I felt, might make things worse.

  I drove around to the back of the house. Peter’s property had a moat around it, and you could only gain access to the house by walking or driving over a drawbridge. From the back of the property, I was hoping I could somehow jump across the moat and sneak in a rear door. Perhaps I had seen too many Tarzan movies for my own good, but I decided to climb up a tree near one of the narrowest parts of the moat and maneuver out onto one of the branches. “If I can just get far enough out to leap to the other side of the water…,” I thought to myself.

  Unfortunately, I hadn’t noticed that the tree was rotting. As I hovered over the moat, the branch snapped and I belly flopped into the water. To make matters worse, Peter’s cesspool was malfunctioning and draining directly into the water. I was suddenly swimming in a sea of shit!

  As quickly as I could, I groped my way out of the moat. I was not a pretty sight—or smell. By the time I got cleaned up, Gloria and her friend had left.

  Peter was quite distraught that afternoon. He still couldn’t accept the fact that his marriage to Gloria was crumbling. Maybe he was overreacting, but I found it easy to be sympathetic. Marilyn and I were having difficulties again, and this time our marriage appeared terminal. She and I had had a terrible fight about the same things we had been arguing over on and off since almost the beginning—drugs, communication, faithfulness. Before long, we each had a lawyer working on dissolving our marriage.

  I hoped that with the release of The Song Remains the Same, we’d finally get some good news. The world premiere was scheduled for October at Cinema I in New York City, and it was a nerve-racking event for me. I had checked out the sound system at Cinema I, felt it was substandard, and knew the band would be furious with it. This was a movie that needed proper amplification to communicate the power of Zeppelin’s music. There were enough other problems with the film itself—occasional out-of-focus and grainy camera work, uneven pacing, a length of more than two hours. I wasn’t going to let poor sound quality cause any more difficulties.

  “If we can’t get a better system in there, I’m going to pull the film,” I warned a couple distribution executives at Warner Brothers. “Peter and the band are on a plane to New York right now. If this problem isn’t rectified in the next few hours, I will personally cancel the premiere.”

  The Warner Brothers execs were unhappy, but they took my threat seriously. They finally gave me the go-ahead to contact Showco in Dallas, which flew in one of its sophisticated quadriphonic sound systems. That was exactly what was needed. With that equipment in place, the classic Zeppelin songs—“Stairway to Heaven,” “Whole Lotta Love,” “Moby Dick”—sounded almost as good as being at a live concert. A few years later, an Atlantic executive told me, “By putting in that big system, you guys did LucasSound years before George Lucas.”

  However, when the West Coast premieres were held the following week in Los Angeles and San Francisco, the sound was absolutely abysmal. Jimmy was so embarrassed he almost cowered under his seat. “Why are you putting me through this?” he seethed.

  The publicity material for the movie promoted the film as the band’s “special way of giving their millions of friends what they have been clamoring for—a personal and private tour of Led Zeppelin.” It promised that the film would “reveal them as they really are and for the first time the world has a front row seat on Led Zeppelin.”

  Pagey, however, was never particularly enamored with the film. Even with Showco’s sound system, he didn’t feel that the Madison Square Garden concerts lived up to the band’s capabilities. After a while, he just didn’t like looking at the film at all. Bonzo had his complaints, too, and wondered why there wasn’t more humor in the film. Peter continued to call it “an expensive home movie.” Nevertheless, a soundtrack album from the film was released, and in just a few days it turned platinum.

  At the end of the year, Peter bought me an Austin-Healy 3000 as a Christmas present. It was a sign of just how far the band had come. In 1970, my Christmas present from the band was a 750 Triumph Chopper motorcycle. Now they could afford to give me the kind of classic cars that make the covers of magazines.

  During December, the band started planning its first live concerts since the Earl’s Court performances. Although this new American tour would not begin until the following April at Dallas Memorial Auditorium, rehearsals started four months before that in a refurbished theater in Fulham loaned to us by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.

  From the beginning, everything in those rehearsals jelled. Even months before the American tour, the band was starting to feel the kind of self-confidence
it usually reserved for midway through a tour, once everything has fallen into place. Although young bands like the Clash and the Sex Pistols had been trying to steal Zeppelin’s thunder, Zeppelin didn’t seem worried. They still felt they could create another youth-quake in America. Time would tell.

  51

  THE BEGINNING OF THE END

  John Bonham was bored. Led Zeppelin’s 1977 North American tour was barely a week old, and yet here he was, sitting alone in his hotel suite at the Ambassador East Hotel in Chicago, yearning for something new, something different to amuse him.

  “What’s there to do, Cole?” he whined over the phone. “I can’t sit still here. Isn’t there anything exciting to do in this fucking city?”

  Something was different about this tour, the eleventh that Led Zeppelin had made of North America. From the beginning, it just didn’t feel right to me. This tour should have been Led Zeppelin’s best. Fifty-one dates were on the schedule, the largest Zeppelin tour ever. About 1.3 million fans were expected to see the band in thirty cities. This was also the tour in which the band was rebounding from Robert Plant’s accident, and Robert himself felt he had something to prove to the live audiences.