There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll

by Robinson, Lisa

  Even for those times, the excesses were astounding. During one tour, when Robert got the flu and a show was cancelled, Jimmy considered sending their empty private jet to fetch his then sixteen-year-old tour girlfriend Lori Mattix, to bring her from Los Angeles to be with him in the Midwest. And the cocaine and heroin that was an unspoken fact of life around the band, management and crew became extreme. A doctor accompanied the band to minister to their medical needs. Jimmy reportedly sat in his darkened hotel suite for hours at a time while people—meaning girls or dealers—were brought to him. Years later, his L.A. girlfriend Lori Mattix would paint a slightly different picture: she told me he sent her flowers, wouldn’t let her smoke cigarettes, met her mother, and was a perfect gentleman. As far as I could tell, Robert’s tour amours were girls who believed that he was, at any given moment, about to leave his wife, Maureen, the mother of his two young children.

  On August 4, 1975, I was on tour with the Rolling Stones in Williamsburg, Virginia, when I heard that Robert Plant, his wife Maureen, seven-year-old daughter Carmen and three-year-old son Karac were in a serious car crash while vacationing in Greece. I remember thinking at the time how I hated the first nine days of August. My friend, the Australian journalist and author Lillian Roxon had died on August 9, 1973. The Manson murders were on August 9, 1969. Lenny Bruce died on August 3, 1966. Marilyn Monroe died on August 5, 1962. And Stevie Wonder had been in a near fatal car crash on August 6, 1973. The Plant family was airlifted back to London. Maureen was in intensive care with a fractured pelvis, Carmen had a broken wrist, Karac a fractured leg, and Robert, who suffered multiple fractures of the elbow, ankles and other bones, was in a cast from his hips to his toes. He was told he wouldn’t be able to walk for six months. All of Led Zeppelin’s 1976 concerts were cancelled.

  *

  The next time I saw Robert was January 13, 1976. He came to New York without a winter coat and, as was the custom of the Royal Family, or, as was rumored, Paul and Linda McCartney, he carried no money. He walked with a cane and joked, “One small step for man, one giant step for six nights at Madison Square Garden.” We spent the afternoon at the Park Lane Hotel on Central Park South, then walked up the street to Nirvana where he was his usual, flirty, sparkly self. He let me take the check. He encouraged me to leave a bigger tip because “we come here all the time.” He told me that he’d had a lot of time to think about the rock and roll life: “The insanity, the hours, the flying around, rampaging the way we do. I think I need to get back to my farm on the Welsh border and be with my family—which doesn’t mean that I’ve lost the grease off my shoes. I’m still part of this thing that Led Zeppelin is. But you need to go back to your corner every once in a while to get the energy that you need to perform in front of all these people. When Zeppelin first came to the U.S. in 1969 it was like a little light, flashing inside of me. As the lights hit my face I started wiggling my hips and I realized this was all a fantastic trip and I had something to do. I wasn’t even sure what it was, I just knew I had to do it.” We talked about Hermann Hesse, Buddy Guy, the British rockabilly band Dr. Feelgood and Joni Mitchell—who he’d always had a crush on. He talked about his hometown Wolverhampton football (soccer) team and his local pub, where he went to throw darts. He said the reason the band didn’t play in England was because they didn’t have the proper venues, just “silly old cinemas.” The truth was, of course, that they were tax exiles at the time, but also, they could make much, much more money playing in the U.S. because there were more stadiums, which meant more people. He said while he knew it was a “punk” thing to say, “I’m just glad to be alive. I remember talking to Mick Jagger one night at the Plaza about the separation, or the lack of communication between one rock band and another. In the early days, there was a sort of jousting for position, a definite ego thing until you got up to a certain point. Basically, you think that the rock and roll scene is lacking a camaraderie, a kinship. But when this accident happened, there was a giant rally around from a lot of people I don’t think about that often. Wishes and regards sent, to Maureen, to both of us, from all levels of the music business, and it was a great gesture and an enlightening thing. Before, I was just sort of swept along by the impetuousness of everything we did, everything we are, and what was created around it. The accident gave me a fresh appreciation of things.” When I asked him how much longer he wanted to tour, Robert said, “No one knows how long this can go on. Look at Sinatra. He came to terms with his age and the time, and we can do that too. Who do they say is getting old and can’t do it anymore—Jagger? Oh, he’ll go on forever and ever.”

  • • •

  In 1977, for the heavy rock fan, there was no bigger band than Led Zeppelin who, with Robert recovered, were back in the U.S. on tour. But the British press now liberally referred to them—along with the Stones and the Who and the Faces—as bloated dinosaurs. Self-doubt started to creep into the band’s conversations. Things started to go terribly wrong. The drugs were getting so out of hand that there were times onstage when Jimmy would appear to be playing a completely different song than the rest of the band. The audience rarely noticed. Bill Graham, the larger-than-life San Francisco concert promoter, always thought Zeppelin brought an unpleasant element of male aggression to their shows. When the band performed the first of two shows for Graham outside San Francisco at the Oakland Stadium in July 1977, Peter Grant’s nine-year-old son Warren tried to remove a “Led Zeppelin” sign from a dressing room trailer. According to Bonzo, who claimed he saw it from the stage, a guard hit the kid. A hideous, violent scene followed. Peter Grant, Bonzo, and security man John Bindon, a thug who’d been hired for extra muscle, beat up Graham’s guy inside a trailer while Richard Cole stood guard outside. Graham’s staffer was rushed, bleeding, to the hospital. The band refused to do the next day’s show unless Graham signed a paper absolving the band of any guilt in the incident. Graham, fearing a riot if Zeppelin didn’t play, signed the paper after being assured that it was legally worthless. After the show, Peter Grant, Richard Cole, John Bonham and John Bindon were arrested at their hotel. Thankfully, when this happened, I was not with them. The lawsuit between Bill Graham and Zeppelin dragged on and was settled out of court for a sum lower than it should have been. Bill Graham devoted an entire chapter to it in his posthumously published autobiography. Reportedly, when a sober, thinner Peter Grant read it, he cried.

  *

  The rumors continued. Limousine drivers, always eager to blab, said the band’s hopped-up road managers and bodyguards stormed into drugstores and, threatening physical force, demanded that prescriptions be filled. A restaurant was trashed and waiters humiliated in Pennsylvania. With the exception of Bonzo in San Francisco, the band members were never involved in these incidents; Richard Cole told me years later that Jimmy and Robert were “never aware of any of this shit.” Whenever I was with the band, most of the drugs, all of the violence, the extreme decadent behavior—whether perpetrated by the band or the crew—was kept away from me. Of course I heard the stories, and I didn’t just dismiss them as benign. But I was with them to get a story, not to judge. However, as I’ve said, when you’re not a participant in these activities, you can be, and often are, on a completely different tour.

  A few days after Oakland, when the band checked into the Maison Dupuy Hotel in New Orleans, Robert got a phone call at the front desk and went upstairs to take it in his room. He was told that after being rushed to the hospital with a mysterious respiratory infection, his five-year-old son Karac had died. Accompanied by Richard, Bonzo and tour assistant Dennis Sheehan (today, U2’s longtime tour manager), Robert immediately flew back to England. The U.S. tour—a tour marked by increasing turmoil, tension, drug use, band estrangement and violence—was over. Robert, devastated by his son’s death (and reportedly upset too, that Jimmy and Peter had not attended the funeral), went into seclusion. The press wrote about Jimmy’s “bad karma,” and implied all sorts of absurd theories about a Zeppelin “curse.” T
here were ridiculous rumors that, like the blues singer Robert Johnson, Jimmy had made a deal with the devil. By the end of 1977, I’d already been on the six-week summer tour with the Stones, spent a lot of time with Michael Jackson, and was immersed in the CBGB’s scene. My idea of exciting new music was the Clash. I remember thinking at the time that Zeppelin would never be able to survive Robert’s accident, the drugs, and now the death of his child. I would be only partially wrong.

  *

  In August of 1979, Peter Grant invited me to come see the band at Knebworth, in Hertfordshire. Zeppelin was going to perform their first shows in over two years on the thirty-six-acre site of one of the stately homes of England. The plan was for a new album, to be followed by another lucrative U.S. tour. The band sent me a round-trip ticket on the Concorde, then put me up in some tacky motel near the site. Typical Zeppelin: high/low. I checked myself into Claridge’s in London, then went out to Knebworth on the afternoon of August 4th for the sound check. I stood with Bonzo way in the back as we watched his then thirteen-year-old son Jason sit in onstage on drums. “It’s the first time I’ve actually ever seen Led Zeppelin,” Bonzo told me. “Jason can play ‘Trampled Under Foot’ perfectly.” Only a few people were allowed in the closed-off backstage enclave that housed the dressing room trailers. The band appeared paranoid, nervous. “Now don’t you go and say this is nostalgia,” Robert warned me. In truth, with clubs in London starting to be populated by drag queens in science fiction outfits and everyone in New York having cut their hair three years earlier, this massive long-haired, denim-clad audience, ten years after Woodstock, did look like a throwback to another age. Robert was with Maureen and their daughter Carmen. Their new baby boy, six-month-old Logan, was at home with his grandparents. A half hour before the show, Jimmy Page flew in by helicopter with his longtime girlfriend, Charlotte Martin, the mother of his daughter Scarlet. He no longer wore one of those white satin pop star outfits or wildly embroidered black velvet suits; he was dressed in a more subdued blue silk shirt and baggy cream-colored trousers. He seemed smacked out. The band played for three and a half hours. The audience sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone” for fifteen minutes after the third encore. It was all very emotional backstage, and Robert appeared to cry. I hung out for hours after the show with a slightly out-of-it Jimmy Page and a companion who was not his longtime girlfriend. On that night, which was to be a new beginning, Led Zeppelin was not the same band I had seen in Jacksonville six years earlier. They were more than just rusty; the wit and the magic—to paraphrase Robert—was gone. It would be the last time I would ever see them together.

  *

  On September 25, 1980, after a night of overeating and drinking, thirty-two-year-old John Bonham choked to death while reportedly asleep in Jimmy’s house. I was in New York City at the Dakota apartment building interviewing John Lennon and Yoko Ono when I heard the news. It sounds cold, but I was becoming slightly immune to the deaths of rock stars—with the exception of the shocking murder of John Lennon two and a half months later—because so many of them had been on such druggy, downward trajectories. But I was really fond of Bonzo, and I was sad. And I knew that now, there would be no chance of a 1980 Led Zeppelin tour. Two weeks later, the three surviving members of Led Zeppelin met with Peter Grant at London’s Savoy Hotel and issued the statement that said, in part: “We can no longer continue the way we were.” Because of the ambiguity of that statement, speculation ran rampant for months that the band would reunite with another drummer. And even though no one involved would admit it, the three of them did get together and rehearse with other drummers to see if it would work. It didn’t. None of the other three band members had the heart for Zeppelin without Bonham. Robert, who during the 1980s told me he “refused to be one of the dying embers of poodle rock,” always insisted that there could be no Zeppelin reunion, because, he said, “no one could ever replace Bonzo,” and “we weren’t going to give anyone the opportunity.” John Paul Jones also said, “When John [Bonham] died, there was a big hole in Zeppelin. The Who and the Stones are song-based bands, but Zeppelin wasn’t like that. We did things differently every night, and we were all tied to each other onstage. I couldn’t even think how to do this without John.” Two early and brief “reunion” concerts with the three surviving Zeppelin members—1985’s Live Aid concert and Atlantic Records’ 40th anniversary in 1988—were abysmal. The band was out of practice, out of time, and out of tune. There was no groove. But most of the audience, who had never seen the group in its heyday, didn’t know the difference.

  In 1994, Plant and Page did an Unledded show together for MTV, then toured with Egyptian musicians and released two albums (all without a very unamused John Paul Jones). The show was good, but without Bonzo, it just didn’t have that swing. On January 12, 1995, Jimmy, Robert and John Paul Jones stood together onstage at the Waldorf Astoria’s Grand Ballroom (where Jones pointedly thanked “my friends for finally remembering my phone number”) for Zep’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Peter Grant died in November of that year. At one point during his solo career, when Robert Plant was unhappy that his band was the opening act for the Who on arena tours, his manager Bill Curbishley (who had managed the Who for years) told me he told Robert, “Here’s a phone number of a guitarist. Here’s a phone number of a bass player. Call them up and you can headline any stadium anywhere in the world.” Rumors of Zeppelin reunions surface as regularly as Elvis Presley sightings. When all three came to New York in 2003 for the premiere of the first reissue of archival live sets (featuring material Page bought from bootleggers, then spent over a year synching up, mixing and remastering), reunion buzz started all over again. Those of us who knew Page and Plant wondered if their egos could co-exist for a week’s worth of promotional activities, much less a prolonged, reunion concert tour. At the Plaza Hotel for a round of interviews to plug the boxed set, a clear-eyed Jimmy Page still wanted to talk only about the music. “I can understand why we got bad reviews,” he said. “We went right over people’s heads. One album would follow another and would have nothing to do with what we’d done before. People didn’t know what was going on.” He referred to the band’s reputation as “offstage antics,” and said: “We were doing three and a half hour concerts. We unleashed floodgates of music. By the end of that, you come offstage and you’re not going back to the hotel to have a cup of cocoa. Of course it was crazy, of course it was a mad life.” Later, in another room, Robert said, “How can we be reviled in so many different generations and then find out that we were people’s favorite band? We were considered underground, and I’ve got band members now whose parents wouldn’t let them listen to us; they thought it was the devil’s music. We questioned the whole order of things, and not just for one or two albums, but for ten years. We took a whole core of people who knew we were nothing like Bobby Goldsboro, or Rod Stewart. Led Zeppelin wasn’t an aerobics session. It was dealing with the devil; taking all that beautiful blues music and screwing around with it.”

  *

  In February 2006, I was having dinner at the Tower Bar in L.A. when Jimmy and Robert appeared and came over and sat down at my table. They stayed for hours. We affectionately reminisced. They refused to tell me why they were together or what they were up to. They teased me mercilessly. They had some drinks. They didn’t pick up the check. Some things never change. In 2007, Led Zeppelin “reunited” with Jason Bonham on drums for one concert only at London’s O2 Arena in honor of the late Ahmet Ertegun. The tickets were scalped for thousands of dollars. This time, the band rehearsed. They reportedly slowed down some numbers and lowered the key on certain songs so Robert wouldn’t have trouble hitting the high notes. Those who were there said it was great. I didn’t go. I prefer to remember them the way they were. It’s been a long time. The song couldn’t possibly be the same.

  Three

  I first met David Bowie in the fall of 1971 at the New York City offices of RCA Records. He had long blonde hair and was wearing a fl
oppy hat, baggy, pleated trousers, and, as I recall, yellow patent leather maryjane shoes. RCA’s big acts at the time were Elvis Presley and John Denver. My husband Richard was working for the label as a “house hippie”; every record company had someone who was in touch with what was then called the “counterculture,” to tell them what was what and who to sign. Bowie’s manager, Tony Defries, had sent RCA a vinyl demo of Bowie singing the songs that would eventually become Hunky Dory. And, as Richard recalls, the B side of that demo featured a woman—possibly Dana Gillespie, who Defries also managed—singing the same songs. The message was clear: pick one. Richard told the label executives that Bowie was an artist who could get on the cover of Rolling Stone. RCA picked Bowie. Richard also encouraged RCA to sign the Kinks and Lou Reed—who had left the Velvet Underground and was temporarily working in Long Island for his father in some accounting capacity. In the late 1960s, Danny Fields was Elektra Records’ “house hippie” who had signed the Doors, the MC5 and the Stooges. In 1971, Danny brought Lou to our apartment a lot. The arrangement was that Richard would try to get him signed to RCA as a solo act and produce his first album.

  When Richard worked at Buddah Records, he had an expense account, and now he had one at RCA too, so we were able to throw parties. We had a large, rent-controlled apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. I had been unduly impressed by the movie Performance, so I had the walls of our apartment painted maroon, brown, and red. We had a sofa where people could sleep. This was unique in the world of struggling rock writers. Most of our friends had, at best, one-room, walk-up apartments. Our building had an elevator. Everyone in this set relied on press parties for free meals. Among those who stayed on our sofa at one time or another were the rock critics Dave Marsh—in from Detroit—Richard Meltzer, and, for quite some time, Lenny Kaye, who became a close friend. This was several years before Lenny started working with Patti Smith. Once, in August, when Lenny had already been with us for months—and by now had moved to the floor, where he slept with his girlfriend—he asked if “we” were going to have a Christmas tree. Clearly, it was time for him to move on. Lester Bangs was an ever-present fixture at our parties; he was occasionally loveable and often drunk, but never both. We had no indication at that time that Lester—as opposed to the more talented Richard Meltzer—would wind up as a legend in the world of rock criticism. Death can do that for a career. We fed and occasionally housed others we thought were our friends until some of them wrote really nasty things about us years later. But we by no means ran a “salon,” as it was referred to in various recollections by some people who weren’t there. Nor did I wield any sort of “power” over the rock press—which, at that time, consisted of maybe ten people. Before I ever took over Richard’s column in Disc and Music Echo, I wrote an anonymous newsletter called “Popwire” that was mimeographed on brightly colored paper, and I mailed it to people. It was essentially a gossip sheet—similar to a blog today—about people in the music industry. It created a bit of what today would be called a buzz. Then I began the Disc column, which quickly led to a column in the New Musical Express. I typed those columns on an electric typewriter (or, when I had been on the road with the Stones, a small portable one), put them in manila envelopes, and went to the main post office on 34th Street after midnight to mail the columns to England to meet my deadlines. I wrote for the rock magazine Creem, and later, edited Hit Parader. But in the re-telling of this time in some books that will go unnamed here, our house, our parties, and even our feeble attempt at creating a group we called “Collective Conscience” (to serve as “youth” consultants to corporations) has taken on a life of its own—as if it had been a rock writer’s version of Gertrude Stein’s house on the Rue de Fleurus. Basically, we gave parties. We ordered in Chinese food. I made brownies. The record company paid for it. Richard recalls that if he turned in his expense reports by eleven in the morning, they would give him an envelope with cash in time to deposit it in the bank by noon.