• • •
We were in Buffalo for the second time that summer. August 8th was the final show of the tour. Mick sheepishly asked me if I remembered what he wore at the first Buffalo show. I told him yes, sadly, I did. The night before the last show was one of maybe two or three times I hung out in Keith’s room. First, you had to be invited. Then, you needed to be really hardcore to put in the time. There was no way you could respectably leave before dawn. On that night in the Sheraton East Hotel, Mick was in Keith’s room—along with Woody, Annie, Billy Preston, Christopher and me—and we were listening to the new Rod Stewart album. Slow songs, Stax Records’ influences. “It sounds a bit old fashioned,” said Mick, who clearly was making a pitch for Ronnie to stay with the Stones rather than go back to the Faces. Listening back to the tapes I made in the room that night, there is a clinking of glasses, reggae music, Frankie Valli on the TV, shrieks of laughter, a water pipe being passed around, coughing and general hilarity. I taped hours of this stuff; what was I thinking? Mick made jokes about a variety of things on TV: Jim Dandy, Frankie Valli—then he spiralled into remarks about Ian Anderson, Eric Clapton and John Lennon. My notes note that Mick danced around by himself. At eight a.m., I must have called room service for breakfast for everyone, because I still have the order written out on a piece of the hotel stationery: four orange juices, one half grapefruit, two poached eggs on toast, two corned beef hash, two cinnamon toast, two English muffins, two blueberry pancakes, one order fried eggs over easy, one hashed brown potatoes, one order of bacon, and four coffees. Around nine or ten, after everyone left, still determined to get another promised interview with Keith, I was going nowhere. Keith went into the bathroom and didn’t come out for a very long time. After about an hour, I knocked on the door, concerned that he wasn’t going to come out. Ever. He shouted something indecipherable. Another hour passed. At around noon, after having been up all night, I called Jim Callaghan and told him he’d better come check on Keith. I went back to my room and went to sleep.
*
At the end of the tour, I asked Mick why he thought the British musicians had been so affected by American blues and rock and roll. He said that when the Stones first came over to America, he and Keith used to go to the Brooklyn Paramount and to the Apollo to see Joe Tex, Little Richard and James Brown. And Keith, who was then, and is still, obsessed with the guys he first heard play guitar, told me in 1975, “You learn the guitar because you have this burning desire. Nothing matters more in the world than to find out how this guy you heard before played that thing. These guys were gods to you. And the most important thing has always been if you passed a little bit on. It’s an incredible reproductive thing, music; you don’t have any control over it, you get hooked. It’s a very pure ideal, and that’s why music has lasted. And whether you perverted it later on from your own needs, or to make a living, or became successful, or gave it up, the fact is—to start doing it is very pure.”
• • •
“Any art that comes from rock and roll is accidental,” Mick told me. “It’s entertainment, funny entertainment. It’s played now in these sports arenas, which makes it a very un-artlike event. But no, I don’t want to go back to those small clubs; we are too big for them and I have no nostalgia for them at all.” Mick may not have wanted to go back to playing small clubs, but every time they did—like the El Mocambo Club in 1977, or Toad’s in New Haven in 1989, they were great. They were great too in rehearsal—whether at that airplane hangar in Newburgh in 1975 or fourteen years later at a school gymnasium in Massachusetts. Stu, who was always cynical about the “caravan” that traveled with the Stones, might have preferred for them to still be in a van on the English M1 highway, slogging around to club gigs. In 1975 he told me, “In rehearsal, or on a good night, when you get a concert that swings the way a good one does sometimes, you realize how good a band they are. What doesn’t get to me is all the bullshit that goes with it. Mick believes in it all and obviously he’s right, but to me, when it all becomes a big machine, it gets to be a routine. It certainly takes some of the excitement away from it. I wouldn’t want it to be chaotic the way it was when we first went out, but at least all sorts of unexpected things used to happen. You’d get yourself in a lot of trouble and you’d have riots and all that sort of thing. It used to keep it interesting.”
*
That summer of 1975, Mick was often funny, and, especially around me, very campy and gossippy. Once in awhile he was drunk, and not very good at holding his liquor. And sometimes he was just another musician who was capable of staying up all hours of the night with Billy Preston discussing synthesizers. I once asked him what it meant when the songs said “Written by Jagger/Richards.” He replied, “It means we share the money.” Jimmy Page had talked to me a lot about money, often bitching that he was paying ninety-eight percent tax. “One day you’re playing the blues,” Jimmy told me in 1973, “and the next day there’s a knock on the door and you’re in the realm of high finance.” In my 1975 interview with Ian Stewart, he said, “The Stones are getting to be part of showbiz now, which I don’t think was ever the idea in the first place. But that’s the way Mick wants it—he wants to have a theater production. I suppose one can be very proud of the stages in New York and L.A. They spent a million dollars and it opened up and the kids loved it and the Stones were on the stage and then it closed up and it is the best rock and roll prop. But . . . so what? The money’s got them in trouble. They can’t even live in their own country.”
And Mick talked to me about the band’s peripatetic life. “I’d love to be England’s biggest teenage idol, which I’ve already been, but I can’t. I mean, I love England, but I can’t see why I should give them all the money I earn. If you’re not careful, you can pay 102 percent in tax. I don’t mind paying half of what I earn but I don’t see why I have to give them all of it, I think it’s a little bit unfair. The unfortunate thing is, the whole thing we all built up over the last ten years—first the Beatles, then the Stones, Zeppelin, Elton John, the Faces, Eric [Clapton]—that whole group of London musicians has broken up. We all interchanged ideas living in London, which is where we’d like to live, but the tax laws hit London so much that you can’t anymore. If I do fifty-five concerts, I have to give the proceeds of fifty-four of them to the English government. All we want to do is live and have our musical community there—however banal it is. Maybe they’re right, maybe we should just be content with earning $8,000 a year. But you can’t tax people [so much] so that they leave. Then you get nothing.”
“In the early days,” Mick continued, “the ’60s working-class kids didn’t have a lot of money. There was this hangover idea of ideal English country life, which was to buy a house, and have land around it to support the house, and support you. You have cattle, wheat, whatever. The idea continued so far into the 20th century that English rock and roll singers dreamed not just of having cars, but of having estates in the country. All the [musicians] you know have them, but now they’re being taken away because they don’t have enough money to run them. That dream was sold by the upper classes and it just continued. We all did it, we all got big houses in the country we would come to when we were really young—like twenty-two, twenty-three—huge houses. And the plan was to live there when we retired . . . like at thirty-five. . . . I was thrilled when I got mine, what do you think? And I’ve spent ten days there in the last eight years.”
*
A year after the 1975 tour, I was talking to Mick, when suddenly he said, “You know, I defend you all the time.” I beg your pardon? “Yes,” he said, “you know all these rock singers who don’t want to be taken too seriously, but when they’re taken frivolously, they get very upset,” he laughed. Well, I said, you’re the one who likes to gossip and agreed with me that rock and roll should be fun and it should be about pink socks and white suits. . . . “Well,” he said, “it definitely needs that. And it’s not a personal thing with you—it’s that level I’m talking ab
out.” That’s OK, I said, I defend you all the time as well. “From what?” he asked suspiciously. From all the people who say you were much better ten years ago.
Two
At first, I wasn’t interested in Led Zeppelin. Then, I was scared. In 1970, when they performed an afternoon concert at Madison Square Garden, I sat way in the back. The sound mix was terrible; they were loud, and the singer was screeching. It wasn’t dark and sexy and interesting like the Velvet Underground; it didn’t seem . . . smart. It sounded like music for boys. Then, when the respected music journalist Ellen Sander went on the road with them to report for Life magazine, she wrote about how they attacked her and tore her clothing. She compared them to animals in the zoo.
So, in 1973, when their publicist Danny Goldberg asked me to come see the band in Jacksonville, Florida, and write something about them for my column in Disc and Music Echo, I initially declined. Most of my so-called colleagues dismissed Zeppelin as a cheesy heavy metal band. They got terrible reviews. Clearly, I was invited on tour with the hope that I would just write some softball, complimentary stuff about them, which they wanted—no, needed—back home in England. But when Zeppelin started selling out stadiums, I was intrigued. Plus, in those days, to get a free airplane ticket someplace—anyplace—was a treat for a rock writer such as myself who was earning about $40 a week. So, in May 1973, I went to Florida to see Led Zeppelin up close, in concert.
*
I will never forget the stench in Jacksonville, Florida, when I got off the plane. The city had paper factories or something like that, and the smell and the heat were overwhelming. I took a taxi to the arena, and, for the first time, witnessed a band with an entourage, a security detail, and passes that allowed all-access from the main hall to the band’s dressing rooms. Backstage, the band’s manager, Peter Grant, was yelling his head off at someone about bootleg t-shirts being sold by someone outside the venue. There was a kerfuffle too, about the cops using undue force to throw someone out of the arena, and Peter was in a fury. (Years later, Peter would tell me he remembered meeting me that day, and said he was angry because the cops had dragged a girl out by her hair and were beating her up. It had, he said, made him question touring in this country. This, from a man whose staff famously beat up a member of Bill Graham’s staff at Oakland Stadium four years later.) An angry Peter Grant was a really scary man. A baroque, bearded, 300-pound former rock bodyguard, tour manager and professional wrestler who had gone by the name of Prince Masimo Allessio, Peter was straight out of the sleazy, East End of London, Expresso Bongo school of music management. (In that classic 1960s British movie about the music business, the manager, played by Laurence Harvey, said to the “act,” Cliff Richard, “From now on, half of everything you make will go to you.”) Peter was a foreboding, intimidating presence who reportedly once held someone out of a window upside down by his heels until the guy agreed to whatever Peter wanted. Real thug stuff.
• • •
I was the only journalist to go with Led Zeppelin on and off the road for all five of their U.S. tours between 1973 and 1977. I heard about the shenanigans that went on before I ever accompanied the band, but I never saw anything like Jimmy Page being wheeled into an empty hotel ballroom on a room service table—covered in whipped cream to be licked off by groupies. Nor was I there for the famed shark episode, when a girl reportedly was violated with a shark in 1969 at Seattle’s Edgewater Inn. (“It wasn’t a shark,” Zeppelin’s tour manager Richard Cole told me years later. “It was a red snapper. And it wasn’t some big ritualistic thing; it was in and out and a laugh and the girl wasn’t sobbing, she was a willing participant. It was so fast, and over and done with, and no one from the band was there. I don’t think anyone who was there remembers the same thing.”) The offstage things I remember were scenarios like Jimmy Page sitting in the dark, on a sofa in a corner suite at New York’s Plaza Hotel in 1975 with a cadaverous David Bowie by his side, watching the same fifteen minutes of Kenneth Anger’s film Lucifer Rising over and over again—snorting line after line of cocaine. Like that.
*
At the time of their ascent in the early 1970s, Led Zeppelin’s reviews were devastating. One critique of the band’s first album stated, “Robert Plant sings notes that only a dog can hear.” Zeppelin was labeled derivative, a joke. But in Jacksonville, when I saw them perform onstage, I was, frankly, shocked and surprised to discover that I actually loved their music. I thought it was exciting, complex, and majestic. I did. My notes are filled with superlatives—as if I’d never seen a big rock show before. In fact, I hadn’t seen a big rock show like this before. At the very beginning of my relationship with Richard Robinson, I’d seen the Stones at Madison Square Garden in 1969 from the third row, and again from the audience in 1972, but it wasn’t like this. The Stones were a great, raucous, blues band. This was . . . massive. I heard strains of blues and American roots music and a combination of everything from the 1960s Eastern-influenced British band Kaleidoscope, to the acoustic, hippie-ish Incredible String Band, to Willie Dixon—who, of course, they blatantly ripped off. They were bigger and more complex than Pink Floyd or Cream. Today, because Led Zeppelin’s music is used in car commercials and “Stairway to Heaven” is played at weddings and funerals, it seems hard to imagine that then, it sounded like something new. It was a heavy, sexy, hard rock spectacle. Of course, now, forty years later, Led Zeppelin is almost universally considered the greatest and one of the most innovative hard rock bands of all time. But at that time, this was not the majority opinion. Onstage, Jimmy was the embodiment of the foppish, decadent pop star. He wore bejeweled chokers and velvet suits embroidered with moons and stars and all sorts of symbolic, astrological nonsense. He had a cigarette dangling from his lips. He looked angelic. He wasn’t. Robert Plant wore a blouse (it could be called nothing else) unbuttoned to his waist. His blue jeans were faded and extremely tight. He was all twinkly and sparkly with a slightly born-too-late flower child persona. From the getgo, I thought all of his hair-flinging and chest-baring was hilarious. Despite the mystical references, the posing, and that nightly shtick—the plaintive “Does anyone remember laughter?”—his charm was evident. But because Jimmy would prove to be the more elusive and mysterious of the two, and because it really was Jimmy’s band to begin with, I initially underestimated Robert. Forty years later, Robert would wind up as the one with all the power.
*
Following the show in Jacksonville, Zeppelin went to Miami and was ensconced in the Fontainebleau Hotel. In the 1960s, Miami was the place where rich Jewish families from New York City went for winter vacations. My family wasn’t rich and my left-wing, intellectual, Upper West Side parents wouldn’t have dreamed of going there. But once, on a school vacation, I was invited to go with a friend and her family and we stayed in the Fontainebleau. The Morris Lapidus–designed, curved, white hotel had large modernist glass lighting fixtures in the lobby, a grand winding staircase, the Court of the Sun King restaurant with elaborate blue and gold painted wallpaper, and a huge pool with bikini-clad waitresses bringing tropical drinks to oiled-up, tanned sunbathers. To me, this was the height of luxury and glamour. But by 1973, it was fading—no longer Frank Sinatra and sleek kitsch. It would take almost thirty years for Miami to become happening again with its nightclubs packed with rappers and basketball stars. Still, for rock and roll, it was a big step above a bare-bones Holiday Inn. (Mind you, in those days I was thrilled to even stay in a Holiday Inn; any hotel or motel was fun. It still is.)
In the 1970s, those of us who worked primarily for rock magazines couldn’t afford to stay in hotels or buy plane tickets to get to a hotel. If a band wanted you there to write about them, and they had enough money to pick up the tab, they paid. So, on May 7, 1973, I was in my room at the Fontainebleau courtesy of Led Zeppelin when I got word that the band thought I was hiding, afraid to meet them. I went down to the pool. Robert Plant, dressed in a red nylon Speedo, was holding court, along with the band’s
tour manager Richard Cole, members of their crew and a fully dressed Jimmy Page. They were thin, they were sexy, they were in their twenties. They couldn’t have been more adorable. And they were in the U.S. to make music, to make money, but also, to go crazy. They were randy. They marauded. They were rough. These were not people who had been positively affected by women’s liberation.
*
The entire history of rock music in the last forty years would have been different with the existence of cellphones, email, or texting. The absence of such telecommunication devices served Led Zeppelin—who rarely traveled in the U.S. with their wives and children—well. Especially in a warm location, and especially around a pool or in a nightclub or near cute girls. There was nothing new about girls waiting in hotel lobbies, jumping into limousines, hanging out at clubs until the musicians had closed the place. Not new either was accompanying them back to their hotel rooms for some quick, or more elaborate, sex. More often than anyone cared to admit, the musician, drunk or stoned, passed out. All of this has gone on in show business and sports—and politics—for years. But what was probably novel at that time, and with Zeppelin in particular, was the level of decadence (high or low, depending on your point of view), especially in the U.S.—which this band viewed as a candy store. It was impossible for anyone at home in England to get in touch with these guys on tour. To even make an international telephone call at that time was a performance. Especially with the time changes: Los Angeles was three hours (and, in those days, three years) behind New York and nine hours behind England. The math alone was confusing. There were no websites for wives to check out photos of nightclub hijinks; no online gossip sites to track the comings and goings in and out of hotels or bars. When the band entertained teenage girls at Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco on Sunset Strip, they did so in relative privacy—until the black and white photos of such gatherings made their way into the English music papers. Once, Robert Plant returned home to his farm on the Welsh border, and his wife Maureen raced down the hill, brandishing a copy of the British music weekly Melody Maker with photos of Robert and John Bonham with six Sunset Strip groupies. Robert merely joked, “Maureen, you know we don’t take that paper.”
There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll Page 5