by Richard Cole
Even so, he was more short-tempered than usual offstage, caught up in the frustration of the incomplete recovery of his leg injury. A few minutes before the band took the stage at Landover’s Capital Centre, Robert cornered Johnny Bindon and me backstage and began raking us over the coals. “What do you bastards do to earn your money?” Robert boomed, punctuating his sentence by poking his finger into my chest and then into Johnny’s. “While I’m singing my ass off onstage, you guys don’t do shit.”
I didn’t appreciate the sentiments, particularly since I had devoted nearly nine years of my life to the band. “I go and collect the fucking money, that’s what I do!” I countered. “If I didn’t do that, you bastards would be hitchhiking out of here, not taking limos!”
Robert added, “Well, if you guys really want to make yourself useful tonight, go into the audience and get some nice girls for me.”
I was pissed. “What an arrogant son of a bitch!” I said to Bindon. Shortly after the concert started, Bindon and I decided to give Robert what he wanted—and drive him a little crazy, too.
We waded into the audience and spotted five gorgeous girls barely in their teens, sitting together in the front row. “How old do you think they are?” I asked Johnny.
“Who gives a shit!” he said. “As long as they’re out of diapers, that’s good enough for Robert.”
I leaned toward the birds, introduced myself, and said, “After the concert, girls, we’re going to get you a limousine and take you out to Led Zeppelin’s airplane. The band wants to meet you, and they’ll give you drinks and autographs.”
They started giggling with excitement. The one closest to me, whose braces seemed to be vibrating with the music, said, “Groovy, man!” I knew immediately that we weren’t lining the band up with a group of Rhodes scholars.
After the concert, I helped get the girls into the limo. Before I slammed the door shut, I told them, “There’s one thing I have to tell you. When you get on the plane, I don’t want you to talk to Robert. He gets temperamental sometimes, and if you say the wrong thing, you might be sorry. So if he tries to talk to you, don’t say a word. Just give him a blank stare. Okay?”
They seemed puzzled, but they all nodded their heads.
Once we had boarded Caesars Chariot, Robert saw the girls and, with a grin on his face, said to me, “They’re fucking beautiful. Richard, you’re finally earning your damn money!” Robert proceeded to flaunt himself as much as possible in front of the girls. He took his shirt off and smiled as he promenaded down the aisle.
When the jet took off, however, I suddenly became very alarmed. I had figured that we’d get the girls off the plane before we departed, but I’d been snorting some heroin and got distracted. It was suddenly too late. They were going with us to New York.
One girl in particular looked frightened and started to cry. “Where are you taking us?” she sobbed. “My dad’s gonna kill me!” I figured maybe I had gone too far this time. I didn’t have the nerve to tell them they’d be coming with us to the Big Apple.
Twenty minutes into the flight, one of the girls, a brunette with false eyelashes that almost grazed the tip of her nose when she blinked, walked up to me. “As long as we’re here, can we at least get Robert’s autograph or something?”
Since I had carried my scheme against Plant this far, I saw no reason to back down. “Listen,” I said sternly, “I don’t want you to have anything to do with him. If you talk to Robert, I’ll open the door of the plane and throw all of you out.”
She gulped and returned to her seat.
Sure, I was too hard on the girl. I even contemplated apologizing. But just then, Robert came over and tried to flirt with the girls. They kept looking over at me, and I shook my finger at them, warning them to keep quiet.
Just before we landed in New York, Robert finally gave up. “Those are the coldest little bitches I’ve ever seen. I’m trying to get something going with them, and they just sit there. Who the hell did you round up—a bunch of lesbians?”
When we touched down at J.F.K., I faced another dilemma—what to do with the girls. They had served their purpose in helping me piss off Robert, although I was feeling a little guilty about kidnapping them. They couldn’t have been any older than thirteen or fourteen, which was too young even for my demented tastes. I finally got them their own room at the Plaza for the night and put them on a flight home the next morning.
Several years later, a beautiful young woman approached me in a bar called the Cat and the Fiddle in Los Angeles. “Hi, Richard, you may not remember me. When I was fourteen, you kidnapped me and my girlfriends and flew us to New York. I got into terrible trouble for that. The father of one of the girls was a congressman. They had the police and everyone looking for us.”
Robert and I remained at odds during the tour. Whenever he was rude to me, I’d try to torment him in some way. I got another chance during one of the band’s six concerts at Madison Square Garden. A girl named Audrey had been following Robert from city to city. She was a bit of a pest, but rather harmless. Before the start of the first New York concert, I saw her in the audience, sitting in an aisle seat about twenty rows from the stage. Audrey, I figured, would be game for just about anything, particularly if it gave her a chance to get close to Plant. Once I had talked to her and looked at the thin, gossamer dress she was wearing, I fantasized about all kinds of possibilities.
I told our lighting crew, “When Robert sings ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ I’m going to have one of the roadies send this girl down the aisle. When I cue you, shine the spotlights on her. I think we’ll be able to see right through her dress.”
After “Achilles Last Stand,” the band segued into “Stairway to Heaven.” As Robert started singing, one spotlight stayed on him while the other four lit up Audrey, parading down the aisle like it was her wedding day. The girl was absolutely beaming. I had already alerted security to let her climb up on the front of the stage. With most of the spots on her, the dress became almost transparent. Nothing much about her figure was left to the imagination.
Everyone on the stage was hysterical—except Robert. Bonzo was laughing so hard he almost stopped drumming. As the girl shyly stood beside him onstage, Plant glared at me with an evil look that said, “Your days are numbered, Cole.”
When the show ended, Plant was furious. He chased me through the backstage dressing rooms, eager to score a knockout punch. He never caught me. With his bad leg, his sprinting was no match for mine.
When he finally cooled down, I asked him, “What makes you think I did it, Robert?”
“I know you well enough, Cole. Who else would it have been?”
When we reached L.A. for concerts at the Forum, I suddenly found myself on a different kind of hot seat over a problem with the band’s finances. At first, I thought it was some kind of retaliation by Robert. Then I realized it was more serious than that.
I had always been in charge of the band’s petty cash, which in the case of Led Zeppelin, was anything but petty. But my honesty had never really been called into question by the band, even during the ’73 robbery in New York. Something during the ’77 tour had made Peter suspicious, however, and one day in my hotel room in L.A. I got a call from Shelley Kaye, one of Steve Weiss’s associates. “Peter has asked me to make a complete audit of the cash that you’ve handled during the tour.” I was surprised and puzzled when she summoned me to Peter’s suite to review all the paperwork, although I knew I had nothing to hide.
We went over the books carefully, item by item. We determined that I had requested a total of $110,000 in cash from local promoters. But as we balanced the incoming and outgoing funds, there was $10,460 unaccounted for. I was baffled by where the money had gone. “Not again,” I thought, exasperated and thinking back to the New York robbery.
By this time, Peter had joined us. Like everyone else on this tour, he wasn’t in the mood to fuck around. “Where the hell is the money, Richard?”
“I can’t imagine,” I said
. “I really don’t know.”
At the same time, however, I was becoming paranoid that with all the cocaine and the heroin I had been using, perhaps I had made a major blunder without even realizing it.
Shelley and I went over each financial transaction again. “There has to be a mistake somewhere,” I kept saying. Finally, I thought I had found it. “Wait a minute,” I said. “It says here that I picked up ten thousand, three hundred dollars in Houston. But I didn’t. I remember I had originally requested it and then told the promoter there that I didn’t need it after all. You can check that with Bill McKenzie of Concerts West.”
There was no way I was going to rip the band off. Shelley called Bill, an accountant with Concerts West, who confirmed my story. Taking that error into account, we did some recalculating. This time, there was just $160 unaccounted for. It was such an insignificant amount that Peter said, “Forget about it, Richard. I guess I owe you an apology.” We shook hands. That was the end of the incident.
That night, with the stress of the financial misunderstanding behind me, I felt the need to let off some steam. After the Forum concert, the band, Johnny Bindon, and I decided to go to the Rainbow for some partying. About two hours after we had arrived, one of Rod Stewart’s roadies approached me with an invitation. “Rod’s having a party tonight. Why don’t you stop by? I’m sure he’d be glad to see you.”
I hadn’t seen Rod in a few years and figured we’d both enjoy reminiscing a little. Even more important, I knew his bar would be brimming with enough booze to give cirrhosis of the liver to half of California. So we got our limo drivers to take us up to Rod’s house. When we got there, however, and pressed the buzzer at the iron gate and identified ourselves, we received a rather cool reception: “Mr. Stewart would prefer that you leave.”
I was already drunk enough from a couple of hours at the Rainbow that I wasn’t interested in taking no for an answer. I got belligerent, and, along with one of our security men, began banging on the gate, finally lifting it off its hinges and tossing it onto the ground. We drove over it on our way up the driveway.
No one answered the doorbell—“Unhospitable bastards, aren’t they?” I said to Jonesy—so I began to climb up the drainpipe, figuring that every party needs a gate-crasher or two. But apparently Rod didn’t agree. He never opened the front door, but I could hear him screaming from inside: “Cole, I’m gonna call the cops if you and your asshole friends aren’t off this property in sixty seconds!”
Normally, I would have taken my chances and tried to burst through the door. This late in the tour, after so many hassles, it wasn’t worth pursuing. We turned around and headed back to the Rainbow.
For the last of those six Forum concerts, the band invited Keith Moon to join them onstage during the last encore. The crowd became delirious as Moonie played the congas and the kettle drums for “Whole Lotta Love.” In the excitement of the moment, however, none of us realized that Keith was standing directly on the part of the stage where the pyrotechnics crew had positioned the smoke bombs, which were programmed to ignite at the end of the song. As the last note of “Whole Lotta Love” drifted from the stage, the bombs exploded in something resembling a Fourth of July fireworks show—right under Keith’s ass. Poor Moonie must have leaped three feet into the air, letting out a scream and running off the stage with a look of absolute terror on his face.
“You cunts!” he screamed at us afterward. “You knew that was going to happen! You wanted to scare the shit out of me, didn’t you?”
During a three-week break in the U.S. tour, most of us flew back to London. But Jimmy planned to jet to Cairo with Mick Hinton, apparently to do some Aleister Crowley–related Egyptology research.
On the flight home, Bonzo said to me, “Do you know the reason Jimmy is taking Mick and not you to Egypt? He knows that if he decides to sacrifice someone, he’d find it a lot harder to do away with you than Mick!”
No problem, I thought. I had other plans in England, including renewing my heroin connections. At that point in my life, they were as important to me as anything else. That’s how far down I had slipped.
Bonzo stared out the window of the plane and said, “The longer you tour, and the more successful and the bigger you get, the more touring just becomes a fucking chore. It’s work. We make a lot of money, but we don’t have a life. With the bodyguards, we’re imprisoned by our own success. Sometimes I think it’s a fucking nightmare.”
53
LAST LEG
After three weeks in England, just a day before Zeppelin was scheduled to return to the States, I fell and broke a cap on one of my front top teeth. It was poor timing, and my dentist couldn’t do the repair work before I had to leave. “Why don’t you remove the gold stub that’s left,” he said, “and when the tour’s over, I’ll do the recapping.”
That’s what I agreed to do. With a gaping hole in the front of my mouth, I looked even meaner than usual during that last leg of the American tour.
On the polar flight to Seattle, I had taken three Mandrax and was pretty numb for the entire flight. I was probably a little obnoxious, too, and one of the first-class stewardesses took particular offense at a necklace I was wearing—it featured an artist’s palette that read, “Fuck off!” It wasn’t a gift you’d want to give Mom on Mother’s Day.
The flight crew alerted the Seattle police, who took me into custody as I walked off the plane, claiming I had been disturbing the peace on the flight.
“Let’s cut the crap!” I told the cops. “Maybe I was a little loud, but you can’t arrest me for that.”
Still they looked like they were going to—until Bob DeForest, one of our security advisers, stepped in. He was also a Seattle police captain, and he hated to see us get harassed. The whole incident may have been smoothed over behind the scenes, because I never heard anything more about it.
“Over the years, we should have kept count of the number of times we could have been busted but weren’t,” Bonzo joked. “We probably should have spent more time in prison than on the road!”
Zeppelin stayed at the Edgewater Inn in Seattle. As we had routinely done at the Riot House in L.A., we took over an entire floor of the Edgewater for security reasons. At times, when I’d hear unusual noises, I’d sometimes walk the halls or peer down from our balcony to see if the commotion was directed at us. It eased my anxiety, and, overall, things remained calm.
Late one night, however, I spotted a couple of unfamiliar faces exiting the elevator on our floor, and I cornered them. “I’m Jimmy Page’s brother,” one of the fellows said. He had a strong Southern twang, which didn’t help him make his case.
They didn’t realize that I didn’t find a breach of our security very amusing. A fan wanting an autograph could be politely turned away, but I saw these guys as troublemakers. They hadn’t started off on a good footing by lying about their place in the Page lineage.
“If you assholes know what’s good for you, you’ll get the fuck out of here!” I shouted at them. One of them began to turn to go, but Pagey’s “brother” was apparently insulted by my request. Without warning, he took a wild swing at me, missing by at least two feet. That showed poor judgment on his part. I took a step forward and, with two quick blows, knocked them both to the floor.
By this time, one of our security men, an off-duty cop named Charlie, had raced over to help me. We dragged the intruders out of the hotel and threw them into the parking lot.
“I’m getting tired of this,” I told Charlie. Frankly, I was pretty tired of just about everything having to do with this tour. Despite the hiatus in London, things still seemed out of kilter just days into the last leg.
I headed back to my room only to find that the hoodlums apparently hadn’t had enough. They had called the police, who arrived at the Edgewater and listened to these fellows explain how I had assaulted them. The cops, however, were aware of Led Zeppelin’s presence at the hotel and realized that some of their colleagues were part of our security team. They ca
lled me down to the parking lot to confront my accusers.
“So you guys are telling us that Mr. Cole assaulted you!” one of the cops bellowed.
“Yes,” one of them said meekly.
“Mr. Cole, show them your front teeth.”
I flashed them a big, toothless grin.
“You bastards knocked his tooth out!” the cop said. “You better get the hell out of here before I arrest you!”
For the first time in a while, I had something to laugh at. The cops escorted the blokes off the hotel property.
On our last day in Seattle, Bonham and I had wandered into Plant’s empty hotel room. We were on the balcony, gazing out on Puget Sound. I was lost in my own thoughts, and Bonzo was bouncing on one leg, either having an anxiety attack or in need of a quick stop at the bathroom. As it turned out, he was plotting a going-away present for Seattle.
“Let’s toss the room refrigerator into the ocean!” he snickered. Why not? We picked up the small refrigerator in Plant’s room, carried it onto the balcony, and heaved it over the side, sending it splashing into the Sound.
Robert happened to be in Pagey’s room down the hall and from his vantage point had seen the refrigerator doing a belly flop. “That’s great!” he shouted, moving out onto Jimmy’s balcony. Then he spotted us perched outside his own room, laughing hysterically. He suddenly realized that it was his refrigerator that had taken the dive.
“You assholes!” he screamed. “There were six bottles of Dom Perignon in that refrigerator! Damn you!”
“Oops!” Bonzo quipped. “Do you sense that Robert is angry? Why is Robert always so angry?”