Stairway To Heaven

by Richard Cole

  That was the way Robert viewed my twelve years as Led Zeppelin’s tour manager. Although we had our differences from time to time, Robert seemed to see me as something of a patriarch and a protector and hadn’t lost his appreciation of the role I played for the band over the years.

  Some rock observers have said that Led Zeppelin was ultimately devoured by its own excesses—the “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” that make up much of the music business. Looking back, Zeppelin may have been hedonistic. They may have wrecked hotels and flexed their power and charms with girls, and they may have gone right to the edge with their use and abuse of drugs. Nevertheless, they never allowed their offstage antics to overshadow their craftsmanship onstage and in the studio. They never lost sight of their fans and the debt they owed them. In nearly three decades in the music business, I have never seen anyone else like Led Zeppelin. They were indisputably the greatest rock and roll band in the world.

  Looking back, I don’t have many regrets. Of course, the band and I misused drugs and paid an awful price for it; drugs were such an important part of the culture at that time, perhaps there was no way we could have avoided them.

  The almost instantaneous fame may have been tough for the band to handle, too. Overnight, these young men in their early twenties were turned into international stars. Yes, it may have gone to their heads at times, and they were guilty of the excesses that can accompany fame. But never at the expense of their music.

  To a man, the surviving members of Led Zeppelin are rightfully proud of what they accomplished. I don’t think they would have done very much differently. The tragedies that befell them were largely out of their control. The band exemplified everything that could go right—and wrong—in the presence of enormous success. A lot of the fun disappeared once we became “big business.” The booze and the drugs became a desperate way to keep the fun alive and the boredom from becoming too oppressive. In the end, rather than keeping the fun alive, it destroyed so much of what was good about the band.

  We all knew that Led Zeppelin would not go on forever. But none of us were ready for it to end, either. In a way, however, I suppose it hasn’t ended at all. Whenever a fourteen-year-old goes into a music store and buys his or her first Zeppelin CD, the band is reborn all over again. In that sense, Led Zeppelin has a long way still to fly.

  AFTERWORD

  Since Stairway to Heaven was published in the early 1990s, I’ve received many requests from readers and fans of Led Zeppelin to update my own story. Some asked what I’ve been doing since the book first arrived on bookstore shelves; many wanted more information about my successful battle to overcome years of drug and alcohol abuse. This new edition of the book has given me the opportunity to spend a few pages describing my own life since becoming sober, including the bands I’ve worked with in recent years, and a glimpse at how the lives of the surviving Zeppelin members have evolved.

  In the immediate post-Zeppelin period, you might think that I could have called my own shots. After all, I had spent twelve years as tour manager of the biggest rock band of all time, so it would make sense that I’d be besieged with offers to take over the reins of other major bands during their national and international tours.

  But that didn’t happen, and I really shouldn’t have been surprised. I had taken a vacation in Manila in January 1981, and then flew to Los Angeles to look for work. But I was so wasted by my continuing drug and alcohol use—and still had such a tough gangster image—that no one would touch me. It was frustrating, and left me increasingly anxious, but in those first months, I had no idea how miserable my life was going to become or how hard life would be in the “real world.” I had already gone from riding in Cadillac limousines to being “chauffeured” by friends in their battered old Toyotas. I had gone from sleeping in the grandest suites in the world’s finest hotels to crashing on the couches of friends.

  I remember awakening one morning in a strange house, with no job to go to, and feeling overwhelmed with despair. Immediately I sought solace and escape in a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, hoping it would smother my distress and give me the courage to start making phone calls for work. Instead I chose to make a connection for buying some cocaine, then heroin.

  It was a terrible time for me. I was living on credit cards and beginning to drown in my own misery and substance abuse. One night at the Rainbow Bar and Grill in West Hollywood, after an evening of drinking too much tequila and sake, a waitress tried to remove a drinking glass from my hand because it was closing time. Infuriated, I bit off a chunk of the glass and spat it at her. Let’s face it—I was self-destructing.

  Before long, I was in the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, bleeding from my mouth and rectum, and with a hole in my esophagus. Transferred to Los Angeles County Hospital (because I didn’t have insurance), alongside people who were shooting victims, I was treated in the “red room,” which one doctor described as a place from which patients usually don’t emerge alive. Somehow the doctors there patched me up, but when a friend visited me in my hospital room, my first question to him was, “What drugs have you got?” Within a few seconds, I was snorting speed in my hospital bed.

  All I seemed interested in was the next high. Before I was discharged from County Hospital, a doctor asked me what I drank on an average day, and then had the audacity to say, “Do you think you might be an alcoholic?” How dare he! At the time, his question really did offend me, and I let him know in a raised voice and with an onslaught of expletives. Of course, the doctor advised me not to drink again, but seven days after leaving the hospital, I was arrested for drunk driving on Sunset Boulevard.

  Amid this personal chaos, there were actually some positive things occurring in my life, although I was too stoned to fully appreciate them. I met Lea Anne, who was working at Barney’s Beanery, and she soon became the mother of my beautiful daughter, Claire. But with opportunities to snort heroin and freebase cocaine, I was usually preoccupied with drugs, at the expense of the people in my life.

  I had heard many stories of men and women losing everything, including their houses and their families, because of their drug and alcohol habits. But how could that possibly happen to me? Well, one “good” week of drug-taking cost me my beloved Austin Healy 3000, a Christmas present from Peter Grant in 1976, which went up in smoke in just days. Before long, I had received a letter from my accountants in London informing me that they had sold my house there to pay off my debts. I went to my friend Elliott, a pawnbroker on Santa Monica Boulevard, who was willing to let me pawn some of my gold and platinum Zeppelin records, some artwork, a watch or two, a few rings, and anything else I could find in exchange for some beer money.

  When Claire was born, I was hoping on some level that this wonderful addition to my life would make me a more responsible person, perhaps encouraging me to stay home more and give up alcohol and drugs. Maybe I’d even become sober enough to hold down a long-term job. But that wouldn’t happen for several more years of making myself and the people closest to me miserable.

  Before long, after getting two DUI citations (one in a car, one on a motorcycle) in a single week, I decided that I needed to fly to London to visit my mother, whom I hadn’t seen in three years. So with the proceeds from selling my motorcycle to Elliott, I headed to England. My ex-wife, Marilyn, met me at the airport, and I stayed with her for the first couple days of the trip.

  During that visit to the U.K., I called Peter Grant at his country estate. After a quick chat, he suggested that I catch a train to Sussex, where he would have a car waiting to take me to Horselunges Manor, his large period house surrounded by a moat that you needed to cross by bridge. When I arrived at the estate, Ray Washburn, Peter’s assistant, greeted me with a hug. Peter was sitting in his drawing room, surrounded by his growing collection of art nouveau and art deco paintings and decorative objects. As Peter gave me a hug, Ray asked the question that I yearned to hear: “What would you like to eat and drink?” For a few moments, as Ray wen
t to start the alcohol flowing, I almost felt time-machined back to the Zeppelin days, when I thought I was on top of the world. I told myself that, somehow, I had to get back as an active player in the music business.

  But I was a long way from a comeback. In fact, while in England I so desperately needed money that I took a job on the scaffolds, working as an erector—something I hadn’t done since 1966 when I had left the Who. My first job was at Amberly Road School, just a couple of bus rides from my mum’s home. The best explanation I could invent to tell the other men on the scaffold was that I had gone to live in America and was a little rusty. By the end of the first day, I was also pretty sore, and needed to plaster on the Ben-Gay to soothe my muscle pain.

  Actually, I was surprised that I hadn’t lost more of my skills to do the job—but my heart still wasn’t in it. In fact, at one point, after a day of hard labor, I was feeling unusually desperate. I bought some flowers and put them on my father’s grave. As I walked home along the canal bank, I began screaming at God for the life he had given me, wondering why I could not have been like the other kids I had grown up with, ignorant of the glitz and glitter I had once experienced, now with little hope of ever returning to that extravagant lifestyle. There were moments when I wanted to end it all, but that would have broken my mother’s heart.

  Then there was an unexpected turn of events. After I had been sober for three months, Caesar Danova, an old pal, sent me a telegram, asking me to call him collect in Tokyo about a job in rock and roll. I rushed to a call box as excited as if I were going to score.

  Caesar told me, “I’m going to stage a concert on the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, in collaboration with the Japanese government, and I want you to help me.” The details were sketchy at the time, but I didn’t care. As far as I was concerned, this was a gift from God. Caesar said, “I’ll put a few grand in your bank account, and send you a first-class round-trip ticket to Japan. I’ll see you soon.”

  I was ecstatic. I finally thought I had a foot back in the music industry’s door.

  The Hiroshima concert, however, never worked out—at least not before I resigned from the project because it seemed so disorganized. But before I left the Far East, I spent a couple of weeks becoming blind drunk in Thailand, and came home penniless. Because I had walked out, Caesar had taken back the home in Mayfair that he had allowed me to live in, so I went back to living with my mum and erecting scaffold. Nevertheless, the whole experience still gave me hope that perhaps I could find other work in rock and roll.

  I continued to go through some hard times, however. At one point back in London, my mum threatened to throw me out of her flat, convinced that I had become a “no-good alcoholic” (imagine that!). During the visit, I had even tried (unsuccessfully) to take some money from her purse without her permission. That’s how desperate I was for a drink.

  Then came the day that changed my life. It was January 2, 1986—my fortieth birthday—and I had pawned my Cartier watch and had joined my “villain” friends for a birthday drink at the Adelaide Pub in Chelsea. Halfway through a pint of beer, a voice in my head said, “That’s it, Richard. It’s over.”

  I put the beer down and haven’t picked one up since! But at that moment, I felt frightened and I quickly called my heroin dealer to buy a gram of heroin. I did half of it at his house, and the other half the next morning—the last time I ever used drugs. I went for a swim and then I called a close friend, composer Lionel Bart, who told me, “I’m going to Chelsea to a meeting of clean drug addicts.”

  Almost on a whim, I told him, “I think I’ll go too. I’ll meet you there.”

  When I walked up the stairs and into the meeting hall, it was like entering a room of old friends with whom I had drank and used drugs over the previous twenty years. I took my coat off and sat down.

  As I looked around, I felt as though the weight of the world had been lifted from my shoulders. I somehow knew I was home at last. I felt that I was in a safe place—and I was.

  That meeting in 1986 became the launch pad for my sobriety. Yes, at times I’ve struggled along the way, but have never taken another drink or used cocaine or any other drug since then. That afternoon, I finally recognized how important it was to get my life back on track. And I have. Sobriety has dramatically transformed my life for the better.

  Perhaps not surprisingly, once the word spread that I was sober my phone eventually began to ring. No, the ringing wasn’t constant, but I began to work again, and at times, the gigs have been steady and rewarding. Yes, I still erected scaffold for a while, and at one point sold some gold records to pay for a plane ticket to Los Angeles to visit Claire on her fourth birthday. But then one night I bumped into Patrick Meehan, a manager and old friend. He was so impressed that I had been clean and sober for almost a year that, on the spot, he offered me a job as tour manager for Black Sabbath. The offer came so quickly that it stunned me, and I actually began to panic a little. But I said yes.

  My first shows with Black Sabbath started in Athens, Greece, in 1987, and we then moved on to Sun City, South Africa, for two weekends. Next we were touring Germany and Italy. All the while I was going to plenty of sobriety meetings.

  The most surprising part of that tour for me was that everything seemed effortless—so much so that I thought I must have been forgetting things. Then I realized that in the past, most of my time had been taken up looking for and using drugs. Touring while sober was a lot easier and much less time-consuming. Instead of finding a way to score, I used the time to go to sobriety meetings.

  After working with Black Sabbath, it was much harder to land another job as a tour manager than I thought it would be. I moved to Los Angeles to be near Claire and to look for a job. Running out of money, I worked for a time for my friend Marcus, who had just launched a messenger service and needed drivers to make deliveries. So I rode a motorcycle all over Los Angeles delivering messages to offices, including those of people with whom I had worked in the Zeppelin days. One delivery was to Danny Goldberg’s office. Danny had overseen Zeppelin’s publicity for many years, and was now an owner of a management company.

  When I told Goldberg’s receptionist that I wanted to speak to Danny, she glared at me, figuring that this messenger boy had some nerve asking for the boss. But I gave her a look that said, “It would be in your best interest to tell Mr. Goldberg that I’m here.” In a few minutes, Danny came out to greet me, and was surprised to see me delivering messages, but was genuinely thrilled when I told him I was sober. “Call me anytime,” he said. “I don’t have anything for you at the moment, but please keep in touch, Richard.” Like working on the scaffolds, delivering messages was a quick way to learn humility.

  As I mentioned in chapter 57, Sharon Osbourne (Ozzy’s wife) had become one of my greatest friends in the music business. I had driven Ozzy to a few sobriety meetings, and this reunited me with Sharon, who invited me to help with some of the acts she managed, beginning as tour manager with Lita Ford. I began by working out of the Sunset Marquis Hotel, arranging Lita’s twelve-week tour that was intended to promote her new album (which became my first gold record while sober!). It was also my first-ever bus tour in the U.S., and because I was sober for the first time while touring in the States, I got to visit cities I had been to many times, but now saw through fresh eyes.

  With Lita, I had to get used to touring without a private Boeing 707 to transport us, and I had to become accustomed to sleeping on the bus so we could travel the distances we needed to cover from one venue to the next. The bus was an Eagle 10, accompanied by a U-Haul truck carrying the band’s instruments, and a team of crew members, each of whom had his own title (such as drum tech or guitar tech) and business card. All of us received a per diem for food—a far different situation than my experience with Zeppelin, where I just signed for anything that the band and I wanted.

  The tour with Lita was strange because for the first time in many years I was not with the headline band (Lita supported an old friend, Ted
Nugent, for part of her tour). But at least I was working and I was very grateful for the job. Times had changed in other ways, too. There was no trashing of hotels and dressing rooms—it just wasn’t tolerated anymore. With Zeppelin, I knew from the beginning that the band would become one of the greatest ever, and would never have to visit the small venues and clubs where we started, so I never worried about having to return to places that we had razed and ruined. But with Lita and other acts with whom I soon worked, it seemed sensible to keep on the good side of promoters. At the same time, because I was now sober my ego was not out of control, so it really didn’t matter to me that we weren’t staying in the best hotels and the fanciest suites in town. Frankly, in 1988—so many years after Led Zeppelin’s last concert—it was enough of a treat just to be out on the road again.

  Meanwhile, Sharon turned out to be one of the best managers in the business, providing the show contracts and then letting me get on with the job without any interference. Since my last U.S. tour with Zeppelin, however, there had been dramatic changes in the music industry. MTV had become a powerful vehicle for selling records, replacing much of the constant touring of the sixties and seventies that (along with radio promotion) was necessary to build up a fan base.

  Midway through Lita’s tour, her album turned gold, and its hit single, “Kiss Me Deadly,” was flooding the airwaves from coast to coast. But unexpectedly, the tour ended abruptly for me. Two days after returning from a concert in Montreal, Sharon told me that Lita no longer wanted me as tour manager. The reason? Lita claimed that I was too strict to work with. But Sharon assured me that the dismissal had nothing to do with the quality of my work, and that she would help me whenever she could.

  I was crushed by this unexpected news, and I wasn’t sure what my next move would be. But while I pondered my future, I needed a job—and went back to life on the seat of a motorcycle, delivering messages to pay the bills. Before my despair became too intense, however, Sharon called again.