Stairway To Heaven

by Richard Cole

  Robert eventually decided that if he was going to get back onstage, he needed to ease into it slowly, not by leaping onto a stage before a Zeppelin-sized crowd of 50,000 or more. In July, he asked a band called the Turd Burglars if he could jam with them, and a small, surprised audience at a hall in Worcestershire saw him make his first public appearance in a year, performing songs like “Blue Suede Shoes.” He was nervous, he said afterward, but felt good. He had almost forgotten just how much he enjoyed singing for people. The next month, while on vacation on the island of Ibiza, he sang with a band called Dr. Feelgood at the Club Amnesia, and then in September he sat in with Dave Edmunds, a Swan Song act, at a concert in Birmingham.

  Throughout most of 1978, however, the band members rarely saw one another. Peter urged the others to continue to give Robert the space he needed and eventually he would come around. Occasionally, they would see each other socially, and Jimmy would try to feel Robert out about his readiness to return to the rock wars. But Pagey refrained from trying to put Robert in a pressure cooker, demanding a commitment on when the music would be reborn.

  In September, the entire band attended a reception at the Red Lion, a Fulham pub, to celebrate my wedding. I had gotten married for the second time, at the Chelsea Register Office, on the same day that Simon Kirke, Bad Company’s drummer, tied the knot as well. We had a joint reception, which was the last time I did any kind of rejoicing over that marriage. A few years later, a friend told me, “If there ever was such a thing as a ‘Zeppelin curse,’ your marriage was one of its victims.” Maybe he was right.

  I had met my new wife, Tracy, while on vacation in Marbella, where I had gone that summer to try once again to clean up from heroin. My first night there, drunk but free of smack, I smashed up my Austin-Healy 3000. It was a total loss, and if I had been smart, I would have cut my losses and gone home. But I hung around long enough to drink a hell of a lot of champagne and meet and bring home with me the young woman I would eventually marry.

  My first day back in London, I was already using smack again. And when my heroin dealer, Malcolm, told me he was getting married, Tracy and I decided to get hitched, too, almost on a whim. “I might as well have another crack at marriage,” I told myself. But Tracy and I hardly knew each other. It was a big mistake.

  Jimmy Page was my best man that day because, he said, “I’ve never been a best man before.” I had a good snort of heroin before the wedding, had a great time at the ceremony, and made love to my new wife that night. But I never had sex with her again. After that, heroin took over. That was all I really cared about.

  Nothing really brought me to my senses, not even the death of Keith Moon that same month. I had been out with Keith the night before he passed away. We had gone to a party that Paul McCartney had hosted at the Coconut Grove, celebrating the release of the movie The Buddy Holly Story and Paul’s involvement with the music in it.

  I was strung out on smack at the party. Moonie, on the other hand, was completely sober.

  “Richard,” he said, “I feel great. I’ve given up everything…drugs, alcohol, everything but women. And I’m getting married again. I’m real happy, Richard. This time it’s gonna last.”

  I wasn’t going to be outdone by my old drinking and drugging buddy. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “I’ve got everything under control. I enjoy heroin too much to give it up yet. But the day I want to quit, I will!”

  By this point, I was starting to wonder whether I believed myself or not. I knew that heroin wasn’t doing me any good. But since I had tried and failed to quit before, I didn’t know if I could ever pull myself out.

  As that night at the Coconut Grove wore on, I decided to drive to another club, Tramps, to start doing some heavier drinking. I didn’t feel real comfortable doing it around Moonie. “I’ll stay here at the party,” he told me. “You go ahead and I’ll talk to you soon.”

  The next day, I heard that Keith had died from a drug overdose—too much of a medication he was taking to help combat his alcoholism.

  At Moonie’s funeral, Pete Townshend came up to me. He was visibly shaken by the death of his friend. “What the fuck is going on?” he said, shaking his head. “Keith is dead and you’re alive. And your drug habits are worse than anyone’s.”

  I just smiled. I never was willing to recognize how much trouble I was in. I got into my car, reached into the glove compartment, and took out a bag of heroin. I took a snort, sat back, and felt relieved, even happy again. I put the key in the ignition, started the car, and drove away.

  In December 1978, a reunited Led Zeppelin finally became a reality again. Sixteen months after the death of his son, Robert felt he was ready to go back into the studio. “Maybe I waited too long,” he said, “but I just couldn’t push myself. I had to let the enthusiasm come back on its own. I’m anxious to get going and see what happens.”

  The band had begun formal rehearsals for a new album at the EZEE Hire in London. It seemed like an eternity since the Oakland Coliseum concert in July 1977—the last time the band had seriously played together. Even so, they wasted no time recapturing the Zeppelin chemistry. In the first few hours in the studio, they knew Zeppelin was going to come back. John Paul thought to himself, “We’re going to be as good as we ever were.”

  We flew to Stockholm to record a new album—In Through the Out Door—at Polar Studios, which was owned by Abba. It seemed like an odd place to go in the dead of winter, but Jimmy and Robert had heard wonderful things about the studio. We spent three weeks there, although we flew home on weekends. Robert still found it hard to be separated from his family for very long, as though he feared another tragedy might befall them when he was away. Each Friday, Jimmy would take the week’s tapes back with him to work on at his studio at home.

  At Polar Studios, Jimmy encouraged the band to drive themselves in new directions. So they experimented. Plant and Jonesy incorporated a samba beat into “Fool in the Rain.” In “Carouselambra,” John Paul took over and directed the ten-minute saga, opening the throttle on his own keyboards only to back away for Pagey’s double-neck guitar magic on his Gibson. From cut to cut, John Paul leaped from the Mellotron to the electric piano to the clavinet.

  Jonesy and Plant sat down and wrote “All My Love” together, one of the few songs in Zeppelin’s history in which Pagey did not receive songwriting credit. When they recorded it, John Paul performed a magnificent classical solo, but it was Robert’s singing that brought everyone to a standstill. Some people thought that “All My Love” was Robert’s tribute to Karac. Certainly Plant’s singing was never more emotional or touching. For that cut, Jimmy ended up using Robert’s first vocal track. Bonzo felt it was the best he had ever heard Plant sing.

  Pagey was convinced that “In the Evening” would shatter any skepticism that might exist as to whether Led Zeppelin could come back strongly. Robert sneered his way through the song as though he were daring the critics to ever again discount this band. The rest of the album, Jimmy felt, was icing on the cake.

  While the band was recording, I spent a lot of time scrounging around Stockholm, trying to find a steady source for heroin. I finally located a dealer whose house was right across the bridge from Polar Studios. When he turned the light on in his living room, that was my signal that he had some stuff for me. Sometimes I felt so desperate that I would dash down the escalator, out the front door, and literally sprint over the bridge to his house.

  On occasion, my drug contact didn’t have anything available for days at a time. I got by the best I could. Because I seemed to be able to deal with the situation for a while without any serious withdrawal symptoms, I began to feel that maybe I was in control of this drug after all. I never risked carrying drugs with me from London to Stockholm. I was still thinking clearly enough to realize that it was just too dangerous to bring them through customs. So I picked up heroin wherever I could find it and coped as well as I could when it wasn’t available. Mercifully, we were home by Christmas and obtaining heroin was
no longer a problem.

  In May, the rock press began running stories that Zeppelin was planning a return to the stage. The story had leaked that Peter was negotiating with promoter Freddie Bannister for the band to appear at Hertfordshire’s open-air Knebworth Festival at Knebworth Park in August. For a time, however, the discussions were stalled by Peter’s asking price: An astronomical one million pounds for two performances.

  Bannister was shocked by Peter’s demand. He didn’t think it was possible. But he also knew about Zeppelin’s drawing power. He wavered for days. Finally, he agreed. Bannister and Grant shook hands and signed the contract. Tickets went on sale for seven and a half pounds each.

  Zeppelin’s supporting acts at Knebworth included Fairport Convention, Commander Cody, Keith Richards’ New Barbarians, and Todd Rundgren’s Utopia. But the crowd—nearly half a million people for the two shows on consecutive Saturdays—was clearly most interested in Led Zeppelin. We didn’t cut corners, importing Showco’s most powerful outdoor equipment, including a 100,000-watt PA system, a 600,000-watt lighting system, and a complete laser network. Jonesy had his white grand piano, his synthesized Mellotron, and his clavinet trucked to the site, where Brian Condliffe and Andy Ledbetter—who had been flown in from the States—nursed his equipment into perfect shape. Mick Hinton checked and rechecked Bonham’s metallic Ludwig kit to ensure that everything was in order and properly miked. Ray Thomas propped five guitars for Jimmy in a line, poised to be pushed to their limits. Benji Le Fevre and Rusty Brutsche came in to run the sound equipment, and Chris Bodger directed the onsite video as he had done at Earls Court. J. J. Jackson had flown in from New York to provide moral support and lend a hand in any way he could.

  That first night, I could see the band’s tension and anxiety during the opening numbers—“The Song Remains the Same,” “Celebration Day,” “Black Dog.” But once they began to relax, they hit home runs with nearly every song. The show lasted three and a half hours. Robert, wearing charcoal cords and a long-sleeve, polka-dot shirt open almost to the belt, struck lofty poses and created high-voltage vocals like the Robert of old, before the personal tragedies that had crippled his body and mind.

  On “Stairway to Heaven,” the night became electric as the crowd spontaneously began to sing along—hundreds of thousands of voices harmonizing with one another. With wide eyes, Robert looked at Jimmy as though he could barely believe the incredible sound. It was like an entire city, a small nation, had joined together as one. It was a chilling, memorable moment.

  Even as the lengthy show was winding down well past midnight, the crowd pleaded with the band for more. Some had camped out for a week, living in tents and enduring rain showers, to ensure themselves a perfect view for the concert. After multiple encores in which Zeppelin played “Rock and Roll,” “Whole Lotta Love,” and “Heartbreaker,” they finally had spent their last ounce of energy and sprinted toward their limousines that sped them to a pair of waiting helicopters.

  Jimmy felt renewed after the Knebworth concerts. It had been four years since the band had last performed in the U.K., and it was as if nothing had changed. Pagey proposed that the band abandon thoughts of any more lengthy, summer-long tours in favor of selected gigs in large venues. “We can still reach our fans without the wear and tear on our own bodies and psyches,” he said. No one argued with him.

  In Through the Out Door was released in mid-August, about a week after the second Knebworth concert. Fans were starving for some fresh Zeppelin, and in America alone the new album sold a staggering four million copies. That stimulated renewed interest in the band’s earlier records as well, and by October all nine Zeppelin albums were in the Billboard Top 200. In an era when rock bands rise and fall with the speed of lightning, Led Zeppelin was more popular than ever, over a decade after it had taken flight.

  56

  BONZO

  I was absolutely furious at Peter.

  Here it was, the early months of 1980, and Zeppelin had a European tour planned for the summer through Germany, Holland, Austria, and Switzerland. These would be the first concerts in Europe in three years.

  But Peter was worried about me, or at least worried about my capability of still handling the job of tour manager. “Damn it, Cole, you’re so fucking wasted on heroin so much of the time, I don’t know what you’re capable of doing anymore.” Then his voice softened. He had made a decision. “I’m not going to put you on this tour. I’m making arrangements for someone else to manage it.”

  I was stunned, but within seconds the shock had turned to anger. “After more than five hundred and sixty concerts,” I thought to myself, “this guy doesn’t think I can do the job?” From my drug-warped perspective, Peter was the one who was out of touch, not me.

  Although I had spent a little time nearly every day in Peter’s office, I was much more dedicated to drinking in the nearby pubs and meeting with the dealers who supplied me with smack. I still loved Led Zeppelin, but my second wife had left me, and my interests were really elsewhere, caught up in a world where drugs were the most important thing in my life. While I floundered, Peter’s patience was running thin. He was simply fed up with my heroin habit and warned me repeatedly that I had to get clean or my job was in jeopardy. He even offered to assist me in getting some help.

  By then, because I wanted the drugs to work as fast as possible, a dealer had begun to give me heroin injections; I was frightened of using the needle myself, and I’d close my eyes while he did it. He always claimed he was injecting me with only “great stuff,” but I never believed him because all these suppliers were liars and crooks, so I’d talk him into giving me a little more smack with every fix. Within a week, I had OD’d twice, ending up in the hospital each time, where they had to pump saline into my system to revive me. If not before, I should have known by then that heroin did not agree with me.

  “Look,” Peter finally said, “while we’re on tour, I want you to go somewhere—whether it’s a rehab clinic or just a vacation—and get yourself off drugs. I’ll pay for it.”

  Looking back, I can see Peter had real concerns for my well-being. At the time, however, all I knew was that I was being replaced, that someone else was going to be the band’s tour manager, and that my ride with Zeppelin might be over.

  I was depressed, pondering just how all this had happened to me and how I was going to get out of it. But figuring my job was on the line, I reluctantly made plans to take a trip to Italy to get clean. In August, I headed for Rome, taking a girl named Susan with me. She was a punk rocker with spiked green and silver hair and a love for miniskirts, garter belts, and fishnet stockings. When we arrived in Rome, we checked into the Excelsior Hotel and immediately went drinking, concentrating on sweet stuff like Brandy Alexanders, which I knew might help me ease off heroin. “I’m really serious about cleaning up this time,” I told Susan. “Smack is ruining my life.”

  The next morning, something else almost ruined my life. Susan and I were awakened by a loud knocking on the door of our hotel room. I tried to ignore it, figuring it was the maid, but the banging got louder, accompanied by a voice shouting, “Police!”

  I wrapped a towel around me, opened the door, and a dozen cops with their guns drawn barged inside. “What the hell is going on?” I said.

  “Where are the weapons?” they shouted. “Where are the arms?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I asked. They pushed me against the wall and searched the room. They didn’t find anything, but that didn’t make them any more polite. They handcuffed Susan and me and led us down the elevators to some waiting police cars.

  I was thoroughly baffled and frightened by what was taking place. Down at street level, one of the cops signaled to marksmen on the roof of a nearby building to put down their rifles. In the police car, I told Susan, “Don’t worry; we’ll be back in a little while.” But I was wrong. Although Susan was released in a few days when the police conceded that there was no reason to hold her, I was taken to the local j
ail, then transferred to Regina Coeli Prison, a maximum security facility. My cell was divided into catacombs, and my first night there I went to sleep with three cell mates and awoke with twenty-two of them, mostly pick-pockets and other street criminals. “Welcome, boys,” I told them. “I hope you have good appetites. The meals here consist of bread and lettuce leaves—all you can eat!”

  Ironically, no formal charges were ever brought against me. But under the Napoleonic Code, I was technically “guilty until proven innocent.” To make matters worse, all the judges were on vacation in August, and when they returned they went on strike for two months. So in the meantime, I continued to sit in my jail cell, feeling more desperate each day and wondering if I’d ever get out.

  My lawyer, Julio, finally found out why I was there: They suspected me of blowing up the Bologna train station, which had been attacked by terrorists the day I had arrived in Italy. The cops and the prison officials desperately tried to get a confession out of me. They roughed me up. They promised me better treatment if I “cooperated.” “There’s nothing for me to confess to!” I told them repeatedly. “Why am I a suspect? I haven’t been to Bologna since nineteen sixty-seven!”

  When my luggage was finally sent over from the Excelsior, the prison officials had me go to a bomb-disposal room and unpack the bag myself. I could only think that they were worried there were explosives in it and preferred to have me—rather than one of them—pulverized. In fact, the bag contained only clothes that belonged to both Susan and me. As the prison guards had me unpack, they got quite a chuckle as, one by one, I dangled garter belts, bras, and panties before their eyes. One of the guards told me, “You’re the first cross-dressing terrorist we’ve ever had here!”

  As upset as I was about being in prison, particularly on suspicion of something I didn’t do, my living conditions at least became tolerable once they transferred me to a third facility, Rebibia Prison. By that time, I had already undergone a forced withdrawal from heroin, which was uncomfortable but not nearly as torturous as I had expected. I was so obsessed with my imprisonment and how I was going to get out that the withdrawal symptoms—the aches and pains, the diarrhea—almost seemed insignificant.