by Mick Bonham
John was nowhere to be found, so it was back to the bar to figure out what to do next. Our thoughts were soon interrupted by a huge cry of “What the fuck was that?” echoing across the hall. It was in response to a loud crashing sound from somewhere outside the hall and everyone headed towards the exit door. Now, I think it’s time I should let you know about the parking arrangements that had been made for the band. John had driven to the gig in his Rolls Royce, so for protection it was decided it would be best parked in an enclosed courtyard, which had large wooden doors to secure it. Well that’s what the loud bang had been. John had stormed out of the building, jumped into his motor and driven it straight through the large doors while they were still closed, leaving a passable impression of a large mousehole behind him.
It was at this point that the evening descended into some kind of sub-Wacky Races farce, as everyone jumped into their cars and set off after John ‘Dick Dastardly’ Bonham. It’s a real shame I don’t have any photographs of this night, but the following should give you some sort of idea.
John’s attire for the evening had been a very loud check suit and the largest rainbow coloured bow tie you have ever seen. So here’s the picture: we’re looking for a young rock drummer with long hair, a heavy beard and is dressed like Coco the Clown, driving a Rolls Royce at high speed down the M6 motorway on his way home. Except we’re heading one way down the M6 south and John, who has joined the Motorway by the wrong slip road is heading North to Scotland.
We later found out that he realised what he’d done when he saw a sign for Liverpool so he’d taken another slip road and managed to get off the motorway. However, before he could turn back he needed to find a garage for his gas-guzzler.
Sadly, it was too late, and as he headed towards Liverpool the heart-sinking sound of an engine running out of fuel was heard. ‘Bollocks’ is the only word I can imagine John to have said as the car spluttered to a halt. Now it’s Sod’s Law that a car without petrol will always end up at the farthest point possible from a garage, and tonight was no exception.
The cold dark night was none too inviting, but this was the era well before mobile phones so John had little choice. Luckily he hadn’t been walking too far when he saw a wagon parked up in a lay-by. Even better, a light was on behind the curtains, which hopefully meant the driver was still awake. John’s pace quickened until he was stood below the driver’s door. Reaching up, he knocked on the window and waited. As the curtains parted, John could see the face of a man who looked like he shaved with broken bottles and wiped his arse with hedgehogs – you know, the ‘happy-go-lucky truckie’. Undaunted, John stood his ground and was still standing there as the truck disappeared down the road. It turned out that the driver was not as tough as he appeared. He took one look at the nutter stood outside his lorry, fired up the engine and got the hell out of there.
Eventually, having walked further down the road, John found a phone box and called home. The ever-faithful Matthew set off, post-haste, up the M6 to retrieve the missing drummer. It wasn’t the first time during the five years he had worked for John that he’d had to leave his bed in the early hours to go looking for him. It wasn’t the last either.
The next morning Jacko and I swapped our guest list garb for woolly hats and welly boots and got on with the job in hand. We didn’t see John that day, but as you can imagine we weren’t allowed to laugh about this for sometime (well, only behind closed doors). We kept our heads down for the next few days and if John popped in, well, nothing was mentioned about our night out.
We never did find out what upset him.
Chapter 15
THE ELUSIVE MOBY DICK
It was during the time we spent building ‘The Old Hyde’ that John regained his love of fishing, so on several occasions he would arrive on site to see if Matt and I fancied a day’s sport on the riverbank. “Bloody right”, would be the reply, because no matter how bad the fishing was, it always beat working. Don’t get me wrong, I loved working on the farm, but a rod in one hand and a beer in the other feels a lot better than a shovel in one hand and a blister on the other. These trips would only happen about once a year, mainly because we were so bad at it. After watching a float do bugger all throughout the day, it would be at least a year before anyone fancied going near the river for a while.
Late in the summer of 1973, John was recuperating after a gruelling 36-date tour of America and arrived on the farm seeking fishing partners for the next day. Of course Matt and I were up for it, so we spent the rest of the afternoon planning a fishing trip. Matt delved into the darkest recesses of the garage to find John’s fishing tackle, while I was despatched off to the tackle shop to pick up a variety of baits to entice the fish. Most of the evening was spent hunting around at home in search of my thermos flask and preparing sandwiches for the big day.
The alarm clock exploded on the bedside table at the unearthly hour of 3.30am – time to be river bound. We’d arranged to meet at 4.30am in the car park near where John’s boat was moored. When I arrived it was still dark but morning was slowly breaking in the distance, lending an eerie silhouette to the roofs and chimney pots of the old town of Stourport on the other side of the river. John and Matthew arrived shortly afterwards and, gear in hand; we made our way to the boat.
Straws would be drawn to see who fished where and to my delight, I was to fish off the boat, while John and Matt fished off the bank. John seemed none too impressed with this but it was too late as I was already on the boat sorting out my armchair. As I set my rod up I realised why I loved fishing so much. Dawn’s early light catching the mist rising off the river was a sight to behold and the fish were beginning to jump to catch flies and feeding on other morsels floating downstream. On a morning like this it would soothe even the most savage beast, and it was going to need to by the time we were finished.
I whistled loudly to signify the match was underway. Honour was at stake and a lot of money was on for who would win the day. The usual stakes applied – £1 for the biggest fish, £1 for the most fish and £1 for over-all weight. Sometimes one catch would snare all three prizes. Time dragged at snail’s pace; by 7.00am not a fish had been landed, nor had anyone even had a bite. It was times like these that I wondered who had come first, the Three Stooges, or us. Then, like a bolt out of the blue John was up, cutting the morning air like Zorro. The trouble was that when John’s float had dipped under the water he’d used a little too much power to hook the fish, thus catapulting the small fish into the next field and his float and hook into the top of a tree. By now I was having to bite a hole in my lip to stop myself from laughing ’cos knowing John I would have ended up at the top of the same tree. Thankfully I remembered that there was a café nearby so I beat a hasty retreat to get some bacon sarnies for everyone. When I got back John had sorted his problem and was fishing again, but I could tell from the look on his face that the last 15 minutes had well pissed him off. Shortly after the sandwiches, John said he was off to the café to use the loo, and if things hadn’t got any better by the time he came back we might as well pack up and go back to work.
Matthew and I stood there like two kids who’d just been told Christmas had been cancelled and what made it worse was that we had about a quarter of an hour to come up with an idea, which for us was about as rare as rocking-horse shit. Still, what we came up with was this; we tied my line to John’s line and waited for him to come back. As he appeared I gave my line a sharp tug, making it look like he’d hooked a big fish. At this John dived down the riverbank, grabbing the rod. Of course, there was no fish, but he was encouraged to stay a little longer. Luckily for Matt and I, the fishing did improve, so much so that John won the competition.
John’s fishing career took its final blow when we were invited by a friend of ours to accompany him to a pool where he claimed we would “catch a lot of big fish”. I do believe anyone stupid enough to make such a claim should be named, and as this story shows, a certain chap named Mick Lanfear should not be listened to.
The two of us started catching fish quite soon, but after a couple of hours John hadn’t moved and didn’t look best pleased. We couldn’t understand why he wasn’t catching fish but it didn’t really matter because he stood up, slowly and neatly packed away all his tackle and then threw the lot into the middle of the pool. As we sat watching the basket sink through tears of laughter in our eyes, John kicked a large piece of meat into the water. Stunned, we sat and watched a bloody big pike swim out from under the landing stage John had been sat on and gulped the lot down. Now we knew why there were no big fish. That sorted and smelling like a shithouse door made of fish boxes, we set off for the pub to drown our sorrows. Moby Dick would live to fight another day.
It wasn’t until some years later, when I took my young son James with me on a fishing trip, that he said we should call it rodding, because fish didn’t enter the equation. From the mouths of babes, I realised I was one shit fisherman.
BONZO ON TOURING
“There are some bands who tour America as many times as possible, but although we could do this, the result would be that the audience would go along for the sake of going to a concert and not because it’s an event. Before long your prestige goes and you burn yourself out. You must create your own demand.”
“Sometimes touring gets a bit wearing, but that’s only because I’m married with kids at home. I’ve never gotten pissed off with the actual touring. I enjoy playing – I could play every night. It’s just being away that gets you down sometimes. I still enjoy going through different towns that we haven’t been to before. But you get fed up with places like New York because they’re not interesting anymore.”
On touring in the USA:
“The restaurant scene in the South can be unbelievable. We’ve stopped for a coffee and watched everybody in the place get service. People who came in after we did. Everybody sits and glares at you, waiting and hoping that you’ll explode and start a scene.”
On touring in the USA:
“We even had a gun pulled on us in Texas. Some guy was shouting out and giving us general crap about our hair and all: we simply gave it back to him. We were leaving after the show and this same guy turned up at the door. He pulls out this pistol and says to us, ‘You guys gonna do any shouting now?’ We cleared out of there tout de suite.”
“We enjoy playing. Every gig is important to us. In this business, it doesn’t matter how big you are, you can’t afford to become complacent. If you adopt that attitude, you’re dead. That’ll never happen to us.”
Chapter 16
DOWN ON THE FARM
“If we’d have said we were not upset, they would have thought we were so rich it meant nothing to us, and if we say we’re upset about it, they’ll say money is all we care about.”
– John Bonham
(On the theft of $180,000 from concert ticket sales in New York in 1973)
Towards the end of 1972, Brian Treble, a young man from Lincolnshire, had come through an interview with flying colours and had become the new farm manager at Old Hyde. Brian and his young wife Lin had moved into the newly renovated cottage and were hard at work putting the farm back together. The main order for Brian was to eventually breed Hereford cattle and produce the Rushock Herd of Pedigree Hereford Cattle. Brian worked with such enthusiasm that it didn’t take him long to have the Old Hyde ticking over like a working farm should.
With work on the house going well to plan, John went back to work with Jimmy, Robert and John Paul and on 3 March began their third European tour. On the French leg of the tour an Atlantic Records employee, Benoit Gautier, joined them. After spending a couple of days with the band, he would remark that Led Zeppelin looked, “like the cast of Robin Hood, being played by the inmates from an asylum!” He had also noted that when Bonzo was drunk, he would often groan, and thus referred to him as ‘Le Bete’, or The Beast.
John made a couple of flying visits to the farm during April, before going on to rehearsals at Shepperton Studios, readying themselves for the biggest tour of the States Zeppelin had yet undertaken. Between 4 May and 29 July the band would pass through 33 cities, playing to audiences larger than anyone could have imagined. On the opening night of the tour, 49,000 people crowded into the Braves Stadium in Atlanta. That was topped the very next day at Tampa Stadium, Florida, when Led Zeppelin would enter into the Guinness Book of Records having played to an audience of 56,800, the largest attendance (at the time) for a single performance in history, which netted the band over $309,000. With the large amounts of money rolling in – the tour grossed $4.5million and The Financial Times reported in May of that year that Led Zeppelin had grossed $30million that year – Peter hired The Starship to fly the Zep entourage around America. The plane was a Boeing 720B converted into a flying hotel, with bedrooms, bar and innumerable other luxuries. It was just marvellous for having parties whilst flying to gigs.
Above
John Bonham, Peter Grant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones
The tour culminated in three nights at Madison Square Garden, where the band shot live footage for a film they were planning. During his stay at the Drake Hotel in New York, someone did a runner with $200,000 of the band’s money, which was supposedly stolen out of the hotel’s safety deposit box. The group returned home and would not gig again until January 1975.
Down on the farm everything was running to plan. The house was well underway and Brian had accrued a small herd of Hereford cows and one frisky bull called Bruno, whose job it was to just saunter around the field occasionally awarding the ‘ladies’ a portion.
After a couple of weeks’ rest, John arrived at the farm, this time closely followed by a complete film crew. They were there to film John’s fantasy sequence for the forthcoming film The Song Remains the Same, but to John it was no fantasy. He just wanted to do what he enjoyed the most, which was being on the farm with his family, playing a game of snooker down the local Conservative Club, racing fast cars and having a pint down his local. The film would include two of his latest acquisitions; a Model T Ford Ice Truck that had been turned into a work of art, and a chopper bike built in America but with a British-built 650cc Bonneville engine. Instant T, as the rod was called, had won the Oklahoma Custom Car Show and was powered by a 7-litre engine with a ‘blower’ which would propel the vehicle up to 60mph in just under 3 seconds. The bike was no slouch either, as John and Mathew found out as they left The New Inn. Too many revs had been applied, as John kicked the bike into gear, and he was sent flying straight across the road and through the hedge. Fortunately this was not caught on film.
During a sequence filmed in Blackpool the local police had to be informed of what was going on. Their only stipulation was that John had to wear a crash helmet, which tended to spoil the desired shot. The finale, you see, would feature John powering down Santa Pod drag strip in Clive Skilton’s AA Fueler, a segment with some of the best editing I have ever seen, when the engine is firing in time with John’s drum solo.
The other form of transport seen in the film was a horse and cart, which is used to take John and Pat out on a country ride, but the horse in question, Old Sam, could only make it to the front gate and back again. Sam had been sold to John as a young horse in his prime but doubts were soon aired when John had hitched him up and travelled on him to the local pub about a mile away. A horsebox had to be dispatched to pick Sam up because he was totally knackered. When the vet was called out to examine him he reckoned he was old enough to have led the Charge Of The Light Brigade. Another clue to his true age was that every morning when we arrived for work he would be lying flat out in his field, sound asleep, and would not rise until after 10.00am.
Although Led Zeppelin was not touring, the band kept busy with several projects. Record
ing of their next album, ‘Physical Graffiti’, was underway at Headley Grange, and they were also setting up their own record label, Swan Song. Acts signed to this label included Bad Company, featuring Paul Rodgers, Boz Burrell, Simon Kirke and Mick Ralphs, The Pretty Things and Maggie Bell. Swan Song was to be run from offices in the Kings Road, Chelsea, ironically situated across from The World’s End pub, and the label was launched with big parties in New York and Los Angeles.
As all this tooing and froing was going on, all Brian’s hard work and sleepless nights had paid off. A healthy bull calf had been born, much to the excitement of everybody working on the farm. As a celebration, we invited Brian over to the Conservative Club along with Pete and Stan, to wet the baby’s head, and although Brian didn’t drink he was so chuffed about the calf he came over just to be with his workmates. As the night progressed Brian was looking tired so he left early to go to bed. Nothing could have prepared us for the news we received the next morning. As Jacko and I were getting ready to go to work we received a phone call saying that Brian had been killed in a road accident on his way home from the club. Everyone was devastated, as Brian had become such an integral part of the project with his enthusiasm and hard work. The added tragedy was that he had left his young wife Lin expecting their first child.
The news of Brian’s death had upset John immensely, and he didn’t want anyone else running the farm, so for a short while Mathew and I took over. Our first problem was that we knew nothing about farming, but the local farming community all rallied around to help. One man who would be an incredible asset to us was a chap called Am. Of Italian descent, Am owned a farm a couple of miles away and would come down every morning to show us what to do and then go back to his own farm. Another major problem was that it was the start of the lambing season, Mathew and I camped in the unfinished house so we could keep an eye on the sheep throughout the night. If we spotted a ewe in trouble we had to go and help with the birth. The only trouble with this for me is that I’m what you might call a bit squeamish, so when it came to a hands on situation, I just pulled my hat down and followed Matt’s instructions. After two solid weeks on the farm, 24-hours a day I was awarded a day off. Upon my return the following day I found an irate Bonzo fuming because I was a bit late. A few short, sharp exchanges later and I was fired. Again!