For the fourth album Robert dug even deeper into romantic Celtic mythology, coming up with the classic lyrics for “Stairway to Heaven” while the rest of the band ran through the newly composed music. Years later Robert recalled the moment: “I was holding a paper and pencil, and for some reason I was in a very bad mood. Then all of a sudden I was writing out words … . I just sat there and looked at the words and then I almost leaped out of my seat.” With this song Jimmy believed that Robert had come into his own as a songwriter. Today “Stairway” is the most requested song all over the world.
Zeppelin shook up the record company when they demanded that the fourth album have no group name, no title, and no Atlantic logo. Instead Jimmy had each member of the band choose his own personal symbol from his Book of Runes. Robert chose the sign for peace. John Paul’s represented self-confidence. Jimmy designed his own symbol, which appeared to spell “zoso,” though he maintained it wasn’t a word at all. Bonzo’s three interlocking circles represented unity, but the band insisted it must have been inspired by the Ballantine beer insignia.
After five months of recording, Zeppelin wanted to thank their fans by playing small clubs around the British Isles. Richard tells me that Bonzo was not on his best behavior. “Unfortunately, I broke his nose twice. The first time was in Ireland. We had to go through the war zone, and the promoter had given us all a bottle of Jameson’s Irish whiskey each! When we got to the hotel, Bonzo went to the kitchen to order some sandwiches, and the next thing we knew, our chauffeur is running for me. ‘Bonzo is in the kitchen, and the chef has a knife!’” It seems that when Bonzo had been drinking, he became headstrong and refused to take no for an answer. The fact that the kitchen had been closed for half an hour made no difference to the hungry drummer. He was closing in on the chef, who was making threats with a huge carving knife. “Bonzo wouldn’t shut up,” Richard continues. “He wouldn’t leave the kitchen, so I gave him a whack on the nose and broke it, which was a lot safer than the chef sticking a knife in him! He went up to Peter’s room and said, ‘Richard’s broken my nose! I’m leaving the band!’ and Peter says, ‘Aww, fuck off, don’t wake me up to tell me that kind of bullshit! Go to bed!’”
In the fall of 1971 Led Zeppelin were at their pinnacle. Jimmy and I had broken up by this time, but Robert sent a limo for me when Zep played the Forum, saying that he wouldn’t go on until I got there. As I climbed from the plush den-on-wheels, Robert spotted me and bounded to the stage. It was a heady feeling. By this time the members of Zeppelin were making their own rules. “The doors had to open now,” Richard said. “If they didn’t we’d break them down. And that was it. We made our own laws. If you didn’t want to fucking abide by them, don’t get involved.”
The charm of America had turned into a grind for the band, and boredom created all sorts of tawdry scenarios. In the middle of a nostalgic fish-and-chips dinner with Bonzo, Richard was interrupted by two girls who wanted to play. When Richard and his friends retired to the bedroom, Bonzo tried to watch TV but couldn’t hear anything except orgasmic wails. “He picked up one of the girls’ shoes by the front door. ‘Let me really give her something to shout about!’ and proceeded to drop his pants … and shit in the shoe!” A lovely Led Zeppelin memento.
Linda shakes her head, recalling the war stories. “John did not grow up with much sophistication, and he was not very bright. But he was a sweetheart with a soft, soft heart, and that was his weakness and he knew it, so he never showed that to anybody.”
The members of the band tormented one another at every turn. On a tour of Japan, after splintering their own rooms with samurai swords, Richard and Bonzo hacked through Jonesy’s door, found him comatose in bed, and dragged him into the hallway, where he woke up the next afternoon. Traveling on a Japanese train, Jimmy Page’s geisha girl of the moment was stunned to find one of Bonzo’s repulsive offerings in her purse. When the poor girl realized what had happened, Bonzo leaned over to Richard and said joyfully, “It looks like the shit hit the purse!”
The fourth album came out in November, followed by a brief tour of England. The show at Wembley Stadium featured acrobats, clowns, jugglers, and a pig bouncing up and down on a trampoline. And three hours of very loud music. “You feel your eardrums being pushed inward like sails full of wind,” ranted Melody Maker. “It’s painful, but it rips out an emotion common to most everyone in the hall. Excitement, and something rude, something so alive it smells … .”
While Jimmy wrote the soundtrack for Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising, the rest of the band spent time with their families. Bonzo loved his farm and took serious pride in his car collection, which now numbered twenty-one, including a Maserati, a Jensen, and an AC Cobra. He would eventually own dozens of vehicles, one of his prizes being a Model T bread van. At his local pub, Bonzo gave Melody Maker’s Chris Welch a rare peek into his down-to-earth persona, admitting he never deliberately tried to be “one of the best drummers and I don’t want to be … .” Claiming he wasn’t “more exciting than Buddy Rich,” Bonzo explained that he only played what he liked. “I’m a simple, straight-ahead drummer and I don’t pretend to be anything better than I am.” When asked about the future of Zeppelin, Bonzo announced, “We might be on top next year, or I might be back on the buildings!”
The fifth album was recorded at Stargroves, Mick Jagger’s country home, and engineered by Eddie Kramer. Even though Bonzo’s pranks included crashing into the room Kramer shared with his girlfriend, yanking open his huge raincoat, and giving them the rare treat of his nude body, Kramer has nothing but praise for Bonzo’s brilliance. “His sound was so great it facilitated a monumental drum sound on record. You can’t describe it; you have to hear it. Bonzo sounded that way because he hit the drums harder than anyone I ever met. He had this bricklayer’s ability to bang the drum immensely hard. Yet he had a very light touch. In many ways, he was the key to Led Zeppelin … . Once he mastered his part, everything else would fall into place.”
Houses of the Holy, which includes my favorite raunchy ditty, “Dancing Days,” wasn’t released until almost a year later, March 1973, due to the usual cover-art hassles. The band geared up to tour again while Peter Grant entirely altered the business side of rock and roll, demanding 90 percent of the box-office receipts for his boys—and getting it.
With the exception of more money and a rented jet, Led Zeppelin’s eighth North American tour was just like all the rest. Although Jimmy Page kept getting older, his girls remained in their early teens. Bonzo bought more cars and trashed more hotel rooms. The band toured Asia, Europe, and the British Isles, selling 120,000 tickets in one day. Their brief drop of downtime was spent with their families. Jimmy bought a manor in Plumpton with a moat, Robert renovated his three-acre sheep ranch, John Paul relished time with his daughters, and Bonzo set about rebuilding his one-hundred-acre Old Hyde Farm. He began breeding Hereford cattle, showing great warmth for the animals, and taking great pride in his new enterprise. But the road always beckoned.
On a tour of France in March 1973, a security guard nicknamed Bonzo “Le Bête” (“The Beast”) after he totaled three dressing-room trailers with his symphonic gong mallet, and the name stuck. Bonzo was getting so blotto that he couldn’t remember if he was supposed to be onstage, in bed, or on the jet. Even though it was up to Richard to make sure Bonzo got from point A to point B, he wasn’t faring much better himself. “I don’t think anyone took as many drugs or drank as much as we did. We were in a hotel in Atlanta and I said, ‘What shall we drink?’ Bonzo said, ‘Brandy Alexanders.’ They brought out a tray, and while the bill was being paid, we drank them all. I said, ‘You’d better bring out a pitcher!’ By the time he came back with that bill, Bonzo shouted out, ‘You’d better bring four more pitchers!’”
At the request of the band, Richard procured a Boeing jet called the Starship, and Zeppelin traveled around the world in what Robert called “a floating palace.” A floating den of iniquity.
On the band’s next tour of A
merica, Bonzo’s twenty-fifth birthday was celebrated at a disc jockey’s home in Hollywood. George Harrison recklessly slammed the top tier of the birthday cake into the face of the Beast, who promptly hurled the Beatle and his wife, Patti, into the pool along with all the other party guests—except for Peter Grant and Jimmy Page. Glowering Peter was much too large to deal with. Jimmy, the nonswimmer, walked elegantly into the shallow end before he could be hurled into deep waters.
The Starship helped ease the endless sameness of touring, but as Bonzo told Richard, “It does get to be a real drag after a while.” Filming on the Zeppelin movie had begun with concert footage being shot for Song Remains the Same. Jimmy was weak and exhausted, and worried about all the strange death threats he was getting.
When Bonzo learned that individual segments of Zeppelin’s movie would be shot in and around their homes, he suggested taking the director to a pub so he could film the band “getting blotted out of our minds.” He got his wish. Bonzo’s segment featured his beloved farm, the prize bulls, his remarkable car collection, and his local pub. Sessions for the sixth album, Physical Graffiti, were in progress, and Zeppelin had decided to start their own record label—Swan Song. My ex, Michael Des Barres, signed his band, Detective, to Zep’s label. It seemed like a fabulous idea at the time. It turned out to be a nightmare.
On the flight to New York for the East Coast Swan Song inaugural wingding, a zonked-out Bonzo pissed in his first-class seat, then offered it to an innocent roadie, who was forced to suffer in damp humiliation while Bonzo snored comfortably back in coach. After the New York bash at the Four Seasons, Zeppelin hit L.A. for an absurdly lavish bash. Their first Swan Song single, Bad Company’s “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love,” went to number one. It seemed Led Zeppelin could do no wrong.
The L.A. party coincided with Elvis playing the Forum, and Zeppelin were thrilled to be invited. When the King announced his “favorite band” was in the audience and the spotlight landed on Zeppelin, Bonzo was out cold, snoring, having spent the night snorting coke with Richard Cole. Still, Bonzo was ecstatic when Elvis later asked for his autograph for Presley’s daughter, Lisa Marie.
The Pretty Things’ Silk Torpedo was Swan Song’s first album release in England, and the Halloween-night celebration featured fire-eaters, magicians, naked women gyrating in cherry Jell-O, and strippers dressed (briefly) as nuns and as virgins being sacrificed at Black Mass altars. At the end of the night, Bonzo and the roadies enjoyed a free-for-all Jell-O toss.
So much money was being made that Zeppelin had to go into tax exile at the beginning of 1975, spending the year abroad, most of it touring. All eight albums were still on the Billboard charts when the band’s double album, Physical Graffiti, hit the number-one spot. In America seven hundred thousand seats sold out in one day. The Ticketron outlets were chaotic mob scenes. Again the Starship was rented, which now accommodated forty-four roadies and a doctor wielding two black bags full of medications of all kinds. This time out, Bonzo dressed himself in a white boiler suit and black derby like the demented “droogs” in A Clockwork Orange.
Seemingly on top of the universe, Led Zeppelin had become jaded and used to extravagant excess. The lovely females had long become pests. When Bonzo and Richard met up with Bad Company in Dallas, they actually traded sweet young things. “Too often we treated girls like just another commodity,” Richard admits, “like exchanging one bottle of champagne for another.”
Rousing from his comalike sleep on the Starship one fine day, Bonzo attacked one of the stewardesses, tore open his robe to reveal himself, and threatened to take her from behind before Peter and Richard could struggle him to the ground. There was plenty of press on the plane, but Richard demanded silence, and got it. On another flight Bonzo yanked a fellow’s glasses from his face, broke them into smithereens, and squashed them into the carpet. He ordered a tour photographer to walk down the airplane aisle without the benefit of his clothing. The Plaza Hotel in New York insisted on a ten-thousand-dollar deposit before Bonzo checked in, but for some reason, the Hollywood Riot House always reserved several floors for Zeppelin, despite the incessant destruction. On the last day of the American tour, Bonzo hurled six TV sets to the ground and would have sent the piano sailing except it wouldn’t fit through the window.
It wasn’t fun anymore. There were too many dealers around, offering free merchandise just to breathe Zeppelin’s rarefied air. Pot and psychedelics had been replaced on the scene with escalating amounts of cocaine and heroin. Zeppelin had gone as high up as possible. Things were about to change dramatically.
There had always been mumblings about Jimmy Page’s supposed pact with the devil and about the members of Zeppelin trading their souls in exchange for mammoth success. I knew Jimmy was deeply enthralled with Aleister Crowley, “The Great Beast 666,” the hedonistic magician who practiced “sex magick” and lived by his own credo, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” Jimmy bought Boleskine House, Crowley’s castle in Scotland, and wore his long black cloak. I even helped with his obsession by locating an annotated Crowley manuscript at Gilbert’s bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard. A Southern Baptist minister claimed that when “Stairway to Heaven” was played at a very slow speed, the words “Here’s to my sweet Satan” could be faintly heard, but I never believed Led Zeppelin had signed papers with Lucifer.
The devil wasn’t around, but there were more and more drugs. “Everybody wanted to know Jimmy,” Linda tells me. “Dealers wanted to be around him. It was getting crazy. Jimmy was out there, and he loved drag bars. We would lose him halfway through the night and find him in the women’s bathroom, in the stall with three drag queens doing drugs.” Linda explains that Jimmy’s going to drag bars satisfied his curiosity about the scene. “That whole second-to-last tour was a nightmare,” she continues. “Robert didn’t want to be on the road. Jimmy was in his Nazi uniform, spending half his time at the drag clubs. John was withdrawn at the time—all he wanted to do was stay in and get loaded. He was drinking so much, shooting a lot of heroin.”
There was finally relief from the lunacy: family holidays in Switzerland and France. And Bonzo became a father for the second time—a sister Zoe for young Jason. The plan was to tour America again in the fall, but on the fourth of August, on the Greek island of Rhodes, Robert’s wife, Maureen, crashed their car into a tree, shattering Robert’s right elbow and leg. The doctors told him he wouldn’t be able to walk for at least six months. Everything was postponed while Robert took his healing process to Malibu.
Jimmy soon moved to Malibu Colony to write Zep’s next record with Robert. Bonzo and Jonesy followed in October to begin rehearsals. Angry about having to leave his family, Bonzo stomped around L.A. on the lookout for big trouble … and he found plenty. He had grown a full beard and had gotten fat, his drinking completely out of control. He was like a belligerent child who could have anything he wanted but had been blessed (cursed?) with more than he could handle already.
Jimmy had promised to produce Detective’s album, and they played a big-deal showcase for him at the Starwood. With much fanfare he arrived with Peter Grant and promptly nodded out. I sat there, mortified, attempting to rouse him to zero avail. When Detective turned up for their photo shoot with their errant, enigmatic producer, he was comatose. They sat in front of the rumpled bed and took the photos anyway.
Album number seven, Presence, was cut in Munich in eighteen days, despite the fact that Jimmy, Bonzo, and Richard were using heroin daily. After recording, Zeppelin finally completed the filming for Song Remains the Same, adding some footage of Bonzo race-car driving. In April 1976 Presence became the first album to go platinum on advance sales alone.
The overgrown teddy bear taking a dip. (ROBERT KNIGHT)
Bonzo frolicking in the pool, with a view of Robert Plant’s lovely backside. (ROBERT KNIGHT)
Another tax-exile summer for Bonzo was spent with his family in the South of France, followed by a little jaunt to Monte Carlo. “Pat had just gone
home with Jason,” Richard recalls. “We’d gone out to a casino and Bonzo had one of those gas guns in a shoulder holster and starts waving it about in front of all these wealthy people with their bodyguards! Before I could get the gun away from him, I half knocked him out, hit him on the nose, broke it for the second time, and then we got arrested. They took us down to the cells and I had all the fucking coke in my socks, and Bonzo says, ‘Get the gear out! Get the gear out!’ He wanted us to do the blow in the cell!”
The eleventh tour of the United States started on April Fool’s Day 1977—a month late due to Robert’s tonsillitis. Peter’s wife had left him. Jimmy was weak and listless. He, Richard, and half the road crew were strung out on smack. Bonzo, Peter, and one of the roadies pummeled a security man in San Francisco and, along with Richard, who had stood lookout, were charged with assault. Bonzo turned his Chicago hotel room into so much firewood. After a concert in Houston, fans rampaged, causing half a million dollars in damages. Forty were arrested. When Zeppelin got to New Orleans, Robert got a call from Maureen, who told him that Karac, his five-year-old son, had just died of a respiratory virus. Bonzo flew back to England with Robert on a private jet and was the only other Zeppelin member to attend Karac’s funeral.
Right from the beginning of the tour, Richard felt something was amiss. “It should never have happened. The whole thing just went then. That was it. It was never the same again. Never. The whole thing just erupted. It was like somebody said, ‘Here, you fuckers, have this!’”
Two months later Bonzo was bombed out and crashed his Jensen on the way home from his local pub, breaking two ribs. Robert continued his mourning, holed up with his wife and daughter. Jimmy got more strung out on heroin. The band rarely spoke to each other.
Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon Page 8