Some of the local bands wouldn’t hire the brash John Bonham because he played too hard, too loud. He idolized Keith Moon and was awestruck by Ginger Baker, intent on imitating and outdoing the masters. His far-reaching goal was to be an equal member of an important rock band, not to be hidden away behind the front men. His reputation as a drummer to be reckoned with had begun.
John played a brief stint with Crawling King Snakes, featuring Robert Plant on vocals, but couldn’t afford to keep making the trip to Birmingham. For a while he went back to playing with A Way of Life, closer to Kidderminster, but when Robert formed the Band of Joy, the young singer convinced John to join. It didn’t last long. Early in 1968 John was offered a tour with singer Tim Rose and gratefully accepted the forty pounds a week it provided.
While John blissfully brought home the bacon, his friend Robert Plant was dancing on heady ground, being wooed by guitarist Jimmy Page. The former Yardbird and session man supreme was forming a new band, and after seeing Robert perform with his latest group, Hobbstweedle, had asked him to be the lead singer for this very important new project. Did Robert know any good drummers?
John hadn’t heard from Robert in three months, and when his old friend excitedly told him about the “New Yardbirds,” John wasn’t interested. He was finally being well paid for playing the drums and had even gotten a mention in the music press for his most recent Tim Rose gig. He thought the New Yardbirds sounded like a rehash, and besides, there were other possibilities. He had been offered jobs with Chris Farlowe and Joe Cocker. Why get involved with something untested and untried?
But after Jimmy Page heard John play with Rose at the Country Club in North London, he could see the future of his new band and was determined to hire the no-holds-barred, energetic firebrand.
John still couldn’t afford a phone and was stunned when the telegrams started to arrive at his local pub—eight from Robert Plant and forty from Jimmy Page’s infamous, imposing manager, Peter Grant. (There were none from Jimmy, already a notorious skinflint, who would soon be dubbed “Led Wallet.”) The drummer balked, weighing his options, finally deciding to take the job with the New Yardbirds. “I knew that Jimmy was a good guitarist and that Robert was a good singer,” Bonham said years later, “so even if we didn’t have any success, at least it would be a pleasure to play in a good group.”
For the first rehearsal Jimmy, Robert, and John were joined by session player/bassist John Paul Jones, and after pumping out a couple hours of old R&B classics, the foursome knew they had struck rock gold. John was a bit intimidated by the quiet, mysterious Jimmy, but he also knew the music they created together was supernatural.
A few days later the New Yardbirds left for a tour of Scandinavia, where they got an inkling about their potential. The music they played was sheer, mad magic, and it demanded a new name. In Richard Cole’s book, Stairway to Heaven (he would later be Zep’s road manager and constant companion), he recalled how the band name came from a conversation he had with two members of the Who: “Moon and Entwistle were growing weary of the Who and were kidding about starting a new band with Jimmy Page. Moon joked, ‘I’ve got a good name for it. Let’s call it Lead Zeppelin ’cause it’ll go over like a lead balloon!’” Despite being the butt of a good joke, Jimmy decided to use the name, changing it to “Led Zeppelin” so there would be no chance of mispronunciation. Wasting no time, Led Zeppelin went into the studio, where they cut their first record in thirty hours for a cost of less than five thousand dollars, including the cover art of the Hindenburg zeppelin sinking into the ocean. The album—full of forever-imitated raunchy riffs, Bonzo’s frenzied, primal attack, and Robert’s seductive caterwaul—sounds like it was recorded in a sweaty little club full of sweaty little girls. It’s still one of my favorite hunks of rock and roll, despite the lambasting it took from the critics.
While they waited for the record release, Zeppelin played a few club dates in England, but Peter Grant had his huge sights set on America, the land of the almighty dollar. After signing his band to an unprecedented deal with Atlantic Records, he booked Zeppelin’s American tour without the benefit of product in the stores. It was a risk that paid off beyond even Peter’s grandiose expectations.
America knew they were coming. I could certainly feel it in the air when a new British band was about to hit town, and January 2, 1969, Zeppelin clobbered Los Angeles with transcendental force. The Whiskey-a-Go-Go was full of sweaty little girls, ready for mischief. Haughty Robert Plant shrieked and preened, totally at home in his glory. Enigmatic John Paul winked at the agog audience, and Bonzo’s thrashing made us all thrillingly deaf. But even though his guitar raged, the frail darling Jimmy Page was ill with the flu. I can still see the damp ringlets clinging to his cheekbones as he was carried offstage by road manager Richard Cole. One of his red patent-leather slippers fell off and was quickly retrieved—one of those memorable rock-and-roll moments.
By the final date at the Fillmore in New York, the album was being played on the radio and the members of Led Zeppelin were amusing themselves with two-hour sets, setting new rock-and-roll standards. The show was so extraordinary that the headliner, Iron Butterfly, refused to follow them. But the bad press had started. Rolling Stone called Robert “a pretty soul belter who can do a good spade imitation,” comparing Zeppelin to the Jeff Beck Group in “self-indulgence and restrictedness.” Despite hundreds of protest letters, the press continued to slag off Led Zeppelin, creating such contempt within the band that they refused to do interviews for many years to come, which added to their burgeoning mystique.
Bonzo needed hours to unwind after one of his bombastic performances and, on that first tour, engaged Richard Cole in the first of many, many post-show antics. It all began innocently enough with raw eggs and half-eaten dinners sailing through hotel rooms, but soon degenerated to the lowest levels of rock-and-roll debauchery. From the outside, Zeppelin’s naughty road hijinks seemed almost decadently glamorous. In reality, the band had too much pent-up energy and too many hours to fill.
Zeppelin spent only two months in England before their second trip to America, opening at the Fillmore West with a three-and-a-half-hour set. In May they hit the American Top Ten, and most of the next year was spent on the road. Bonzo was playing with the biggest bass drum made, and his solo was evolving into the highlight of the show, sometimes lasting over thirty minutes. When he threw away his sticks and played with his hands, the crowds went insane. The rest of the band took to ambling back to the dressing room during Bonzo’s thrash fest, where Jimmy and Robert would do a bit of primping (and later a bit of boozing, popping, snorting, and sundry sexual favors).
Bonzo had a gigantic appetite for booze, often becoming belligerent, passing out, and sleeping it off in jail cells all over the world—and getting into reams of trouble in general. It was road manager Richard Cole, a mighty abuser himself, who was in charge of keeping Bonzo in line. Richard is a longtime friend of mine, and has been clean and sober for many years. He has plenty of tales about Bonzo dumping huge amounts of baked beans on Richard and his girl of the moment while they made love, then calling in Peter Grant, who doused them with champagne; trimming an adoring groupie’s pubic hair with Robert’s shaving gear; flooding John Paul’s hotel room with a garden hose; punching out complete strangers; or relieving himself in the most unlikely places.
The hedonistic concept of “free love” peaked with Zeppelin’s rise, freeing thousands of teenage girls to pursue these British cream-boats with rampant fervor. The band was besieged by packs of persistent dolls more than willing to sacrifice themselves to the hammer of the gods. “Percy” (as Robert was nicknamed), “Bonzo,” and “Jonesy” were married men but couldn’t always resist the teenage temptresses. In the middle of one night at the Chateau Marmont, Bonzo dressed himself up as a waiter and rolled a service cart featuring Jimmy Page as the main course into a roomful of underage girls the guitarist always fancied.
The Zeppelin “mudshark episode” at Seattle’s Edge
water Inn has become a torrid slice of rock-and-roll folklore. Though Richard Cole admits to being the ringleader, Bonzo was front and center with his fishing pole dangling off the balcony. “It wasn’t even a shark!” Richard asserts. “I caught this red snapper, and the chick was a redhead. It was still alive and I just pushed it in on her ginger pussy! Bonzo was in the room, but it was me that did it.” I am amazed that Bonzo didn’t assist. “No, he didn’t, but he brought his wife in to have a look!”
And then there was the octopus incident. “We were doing two shows that night and it was Bonzo’s birthday,” Richard tells me with a gleam. “Bonzo had a four-foot-high bottle of champagne next to him onstage. A lot of times on that second tour we did two shows a night, but had to stop them because we got so drunk during the shows—especially Bonzo—that the second show was always a fiasco.” After the mad second set, a friend took some of the boys back to a motel room where they were presented with four octopuses. “This guy had two girls in there, naked. There was all these mixed vegetables, fruit, turnips, and cucumbers in the bath, so we put the girls in there with the octopuses.” Apparently Jimmy was goo-goo-eyed as one of the sea creatures discovered the joy of sex. When I mention to Richard that Jimmy had always told me he avoided those kinds of naughty displays, he roars, “Jimmy’s always been full of shit. He was there. Bonzo was there. His wife, Pat, must have gone home. Jonesy would come and have a look, but that’s about it. He would get up to his own devious things that we’d never see. The only one that was ever documented was when he woke up with a drag queen and the room caught on fire!” (Jonesy always insisted that he hadn’t known he’d picked up a transvestite.)
The third tour of America was even more depraved. There was the “dog act,” in which a lovely young thing had various forms of sex with her Great Dane while members of Zeppelin cheered her on. Richard admits to frying up a pan of bacon and shoving the charred stuff into the appropriate place so the boys could watch the hungry mutt chowing down.
During a pop festival at the Singer Bowl in New York, a ravenously drunk Bonzo wearied of a Ten Years After set and paced backstage until he finally snapped. “He was very sweet, Bonzo, except when he got to a certain point in drinking and then he would turn nasty,” Richard says. “No one wanted to go near him except me. If he was drunk, the others would say ‘Leave Bonzo here!’ and I’d say ‘Fuck off! I’m not leaving ’im here!’ At least you knew where you stood with Bonzo.” On this particular afternoon Bonzo drank plenty enough to turn quite nasty, throwing a carton of orange juice all over Alvin Lee, Ten Years After’s front man, and his magic guitar, thoroughly ruining his eternal solo. For an encore, Bonzo dragged Jeff Beck’s drummer from behind his drums and took over the duties. After pounding out a stripper’s beat, Bonzo danced for the crowd, then peeled himself stark naked, and was hustled offstage by an enraged Peter Grant, narrowly avoiding the cops. Another time Bonzo saw fit to remove Chuck Berry’s drummer from behind his kit and slam-banged along with “Sweet Little Sixteen.” This time he received a compliment from the legendary Mr. Berry, who winked at Bonzo and said, “Now, there’s a real drummer!”
The Hollywood club in 1969 was Thee Experience, where anything and everything went—times ten. The owner, Marshall Brevitz, enjoyed the notoriety of having the rock wunderkinds under his roof and actually encouraged Zeppelin’s wickedness. I tried not to watch as Richard Cole carried a skinny, wailing girl around upside down, his face buried in her crotch, then had abandoned sex with her on the liquor-covered tabletop while the rest of the band observed like it was no big deal. In Richard’s book, Stairway to Heaven, he recalls a raging night at Thee Experience. “While we were waiting for our third round of drinks, two girls volunteered to crawl under the table and perform oral sex on the band. They did it in record time.”
In August Zeppelin had somehow managed to finish recording Led Zeppelin II in between all the madness. Featuring “Whole Lotta Love” and Bonzo’s showcase number, “Moby Dick,” Led Zeppelin II came out during the band’s fourth tour of America, knocking the Beatles and the Stones out of the number-one spot. And their first album was still in the Top Twenty.
Due to Peter’s unflagging faith and ferocity, and the lads’ willingness to work ridiculously hard, Zeppelin had become one of the highest-paid rock acts in history in a very short time. It irked Jimmy Page that the critics took to calling their thunderous sound “heavy metal,” but it couldn’t be denied that Led Zeppelin had altered the course of rock and roll forever.
Jimmy, Robert, John Paul, and Bonzo all bought homes in the English countryside. Besides buying his old farmhouse, Bonzo spent a fortune on cars, acquiring eight of them, including his first Rolls-Royce, by the end of 1969. He was at his happiest riding a tractor around his property wearing overalls and a huge pair of goofy galoshes, but Bonzo had two distinctly different personalities. The right (or wrong) amount of alcohol could turn the gentle homebody into a raving, violent monster. At a chichi press reception Bonzo yanked an expensive painting off the wall and crashed it over a pontificating critic’s head. I once saw him do the same humiliating thing to a photographer friend of mine before shoving a hot steak-and-kidney pie down his pants. I also witnessed Bonzo barrel through the door of the Rainbow Bar and Grill late one night, then haul off and slug my friend Michele Myer in the jaw before being wrestled to the ground by two huge bouncers. “Bonzo liked to drink and have fun,” Richard says ruefully, “but he was a bad drunk, especially if his wife had just left and he was morose.” Didn’t all the female attention make up for it? I ask. “I don’t think Bonzo was that interested in sleeping with the girls,” Richard insists. “He just wanted the company”
While I was cavorting with Jimmy Page, Linda Alderetti was Bonzo’s constant companion. She spent a whole lot of time on the road with Bonzo and concurs with Richard. “That was a strange thing. We slept together once or twice, but it wasn’t about sex for him. He wanted someone who was savvy and good-looking, someone in the light who everybody knew.” Linda was the cashier at the Rainbow Bar and Grill, Zeppelin’s favorite Hollywood nest. One night, while waiting for Linda to get off work, Bonzo got pissed off at a good friend who was spending too much time with Linda. “By the end of the night John was choking Steve Mariott on the floor. Nobody could pull him off! Bonzo was a big, overgrown baby. I witnessed him beat up so many people. Zeppelin happened to get away with all that wild stuff because of the times. Not only did anything go—it was all covered up! The more money they made for people, the worse damage they could do. You and I got to see a side of rock and roll that will never be seen again,” Linda says intently. “The insanity the overindulgence of every whim, everything being catered to in every way—we literally lived with twenty-four-hour security to clean up the mess we left behind.”
By the fifth American tour Zeppelin were getting bored with the same old hump and bump, the interminable travel, even the crush of the countless slavish girls. Richard was always looking for ways to keep his boys amused, once hiring several strippers to perform privately for Zep. After the girls frolicked, Richard put on a performance of his own by dressing in some of the strippers’ clothes, doing his own striptease, and having sex with one of the girls while sixty screwdrivers were ingested. “There’s nothing immoral in it,” Richard insists. “It’s just that most people wouldn’t dream of doing it. That’s the whole story of Led Zeppelin right there.” The alcohol consumption was getting ridiculous. Richard swears that, one night in Frankfurt, he, Peter, and the boys put away 280 drinks in one sitting.
Peter Grant was getting a reputation as a dangerous man. He had supposedly been involved with the British Mafia, and since he weighed over three hundred pounds, people tended to take him seriously. Nobody crossed him more than once. Even though some of the tales of aggro are shocking, I admired Peter’s sole devotion to his boys. He was always good to me. Sitting on his lap was one of the safest places in the world.
One night in Atlanta a couple of soldiers pointed a gun at Zeppel
in, spouting off about their long hair, and Peter picked them both up off the ground, bellowing, “What’s your fucking problem, Popeye?” But ask anything about those whispered stories of broken kneecaps, and people become strangely mum. Even Richard Cole. “I knocked a guy’s kneecaps once because he wouldn’t get out from under the revolving stage. The stage would have slid forward and the gear would have fallen off and crushed people. And I knocked three guys out in a hotel corridor,” he admits. “One of them said he was Pagey’s brother and his friend went for me, so I nailed all three of ‘em. They called the police but they didn’t know the police were working for us! They gave ’em another beating and threw ’em out!” I personally saw Richard kick a guy’s teeth out when he got too close to Robert at the Rainbow. “You see someone coming over with their eyes bulging and their hands in their pockets, you’re not going to take a chance,” he explains. “If you’re wrong, you’re wrong, but if you’re right …”
In May 1970 Zeppelin holed up in an old Hampshire country house with a mobile recording studio, and a few weeks later Led Zeppelin III was completed. In August they were back out on the road, hitting America for the sixth time in eighteen months. Thirty-six shows in seven weeks quickly became a blur. Fans were getting more demanding and unruly. Riots were becoming commonplace. Security had to be tightened. The boys spent more and more of their time sequestered in their rooms, getting royally bombed.
Led Zeppelin III went gold the day it came out, but the critics brutalized the band and their fans: The lyrics were meaningless drivel hidden by hollow, deafening bravado stolen from authentic bluesmen. Rolling Stone actually blamed Zeppelin for the acceleration of drug use among their audience members. Jimmy Page felt he was being personally attacked and took the band directly back to the studio, where they began work on their fourth album. Once again they used the mobile unit, staying at the country house in Hampshire, where Bonzo, dressed in his finest tweeds, would take full advantage of the local pub.
Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon Page 7