The Mammoth Book of Hard Bastards (Mammoth Books)

by Robin Barratt

  “I’m the manager of the band,” Grant boomed imperiously. “Who’s in charge here?”

  The gobsmacked police officers silently pointed out their captain, whose eyes met Peter’s and were fixed in his glare.

  “You and me need to talk – alone.” Peter said quietly. “Get your men out of here.”

  With a wave of his arm the captain dismissed his troops and Richard and I followed suit – we didn’t need telling. Closing the door carefully behind us, we left Bonzo, Peter and the captain in the room and waited. And waited. And waited.

  Finally, after about ten minutes that seemed a lot longer, the captain emerged, all that anger drained from his fat face, and beckoned his men to follow. Bemused, we gingerly stepped back into the locker room, where Peter greeted us with a smile.

  “Well done!” he beamed. “Now, let’s get Bonzo on the bus.”

  I didn’t need to be told twice. I grabbed the still-prone Bonzo and hauled him bus-wards and within minutes Peter and Led Zep, complete with their semi-conscious drummer, were speeding out of town. No charges. No arrest. In fact, it was as if the incident had never happened. I was in awe of Peter’s unique brand of diplomacy that had somehow convinced the outraged cop captain to let the matter drop. It was amazing the authority that guy commanded. Maybe it was his sheer size and physical presence … well, that and the sheer size and physical presence of his wallet – as I found out when I asked Peter later on the bus.

  “That was a cheap get-out, Don!” he laughed heartily. “It only cost me $300!”

  So now I knew how Led Zeppelin did business – and how the big man made problems just disappear. It was a lesson I’d take to heart – and which would take me to the very centre of the stellar supernova that Zeppelin were about to become.

  The irony was that the quiet, understated style of getting things done that I’d developed for myself was sometimes at odds with Peter’s methods. The further their balloon went up, the more money there was sloshing around – and Peter’s preferred way of dealing with problems was to throw money at them. And that may have taken the edge off tricky situations, but it also brought a whole new range of complications. Despite – or maybe because of – his unquestioned authority within the rock ’n’ roll sphere, Peter was drawn to people who had power of other kinds. He seemed to be influenced by anyone who was “connected”, whether in government circles or in the underworld. One gentleman, although I’m not sure the term is accurate in this case, seemed to hold particular sway over Peter. Herb Elliott, that was his name. Ex CIA or FBI, he appeared on the scene after a huge US tour that Zep had just completed and he soon became instrumental in smoothing the band’s way through the States. The powers that be move in mysterious ways and this Herb guy was clearly connected. As if by magic the band had police escorts on demand and incidents such as that Singer Bowl debacle were ironed out and wiped away without the need for negotiation.

  One time outside the Montcalm at Marble Arch, Peter’s favourite London hotel, I spotted three dodgy looking men in a car, who were definitely staking out the hotel. Naturally, I mentioned it to Peter and Herb.

  “What make of car? Registration?” Herb asked in a flash.

  I told him, having made a mental note of the licence plate just in case. Herb left the room purposefully and was back in ten minutes.

  “It’s OK. They’re police – but they’re looking for someone else,” he said with an air of confidence that could only come from a man with some serious contacts at the highest level.

  * * *

  Maybe here’s the right place for me to go back to the beginning, where, you may remember, I opened with the tragic end of John Bonham in September 1980.

  “Get down to Jimmy’s and take care of things,” Ray had said in that awful phone call to tell me Bonzo was dead.

  “OK, leave it to me,” I’d replied. And I knew from long experience that Ray and Peter Grant wouldn’t have called if the shit wasn’t about to hit the fan. I had to get down to Jimmy Page’s place sharpish. It was down to me to contain the situation, limit the damage – and that probably meant keeping the police and the press at bay.

  I put the phone down, grabbed my keys and in minutes I was out of my office in the NOMIS complex in Sinclair Road, London W14, and gunning my BMW on to the A4. I sped west for Windsor, where the family of Jimmy, the prince of rock, had a palatial mansion, the Old Mill House in Mill Lane (incidentally, formerly owned by Michael Caine). It was a stone’s throw from another royal household: Windsor Castle.

  My mind raced faster than the car’s screaming engine. John’s dead. How? Was it accidental? Did he suffer? What about Pat and Jason, his wife and son? That frantic half-hour’s drive was on autopilot as a cascade of John’s larger-than-life exploits flashed through my mind – fleeting recollections that made me smile despite the Bonzo-sized hole deep in the pit of my stomach. This tragedy was the latest in a run of bitterly bad luck for the band. Whether by sad coincidence or something more sinister, the Grim Reaper had been knocking at Zeppelin’ s door much too often for comfort of late – as I was reminded when I stumbled breathless into the guest room at Jimmy’s mansion to find Bonzo’s body, lifeless, on its side. Benjy le Fevre, his personal roadie, had put him to bed after his drinking session, having taken care to prop his back with a bolster to ensure that he couldn’t roll over and choke on his own vomit. The central heating had been left on but later someone had opened the windows – and it was the fresh air, I was told, that had caused the strange discolouration of his face. It was as if John’s life and soul went out of the window as the fresh air blew in.

  Arriving at around noon, I’d beaten the police and press to the scene. Professionals to the end, the roadies – Benjy and Rex King – and Jimmy’s manservant Rick Hobbs had already “cleaned up”, by which they meant that they’d got rid of anything potentially incriminating or embarrassing to the band or John’s family. The one thing even they couldn’t conceal or control, though, was his blood – and whatever that contained would be revealed in the post mortem. To the uninitiated that might sound impressively levelheaded and professional, but to a seasoned roadie it’s pretty much standard procedure – as routine as tuning a guitar and placing the monitors correctly – especially if your man indulged heavily in all the usual extracurricular rock ’n’ roll habits! And there’s no denying that John Bonham indulged – in fact, he was the epitome of the wild man of rock, modelling himself on his boyhood hero, the late, great Keith Moon of the Who. It transpired that the boys had been rehearsing that day and Bonzo, characteristically, had been hitting the vodka hard – at least four quadruples, by all accounts, as well as who knows how many speedballs, the last of which was to be John’s final hit. But, ironically, it wasn’t that heady mix of coke and smack that killed him. Tragically, despite Benjy’s diligent precautions, it was later found that John had vomited and inhaled at the same time in his deep, drunken sleep, setting up a fatal siphon effect whereby the contents of his stomach were pumped into his lungs.

  Shaking off my initial shock, I took charge of my emotions – and then I took charge of the situation.

  You have to be pragmatic at times like that. It was too late to do anything for John, and I could take care of his family later. Right now, damage limitation was the name of the game – and the first threat was the police. I briefed everyone in the house: keep your mouths shut and make sure the cops confine their investigation to the guest room. They must not be allowed to nose around the rest of the house! I didn’t know what they might find but whatever they turned up, I was sure it wouldn’t do the band any good. And once the press got wind of it they’d have a field day, especially since Bonzo was the second visitor to have died in one of Jimmy Page’s guest rooms in just over a year. In fact that earlier incident served as a sort of rehearsal for this latest tragedy …

  On 24 October 1979 Paul McCartney’s company, MPL Communications, hired us to provide men to check the guest list and handle the overall security at a very prestigio
us award ceremony that The Guinness Book of Records was holding at Les Ambassadeurs nightclub just off London’s Park Lane. Everybody who was anybody was there, including the press, paparazzi, liggers and jibbers (jibbers are people who blag their way into gigs, receptions or backstage without a pass or invitation), largely because Paul was being presented with a medallion cast in rhodium (which is a very hard, silvery platinum-like metal element) by a government minister. I was just checking out the members of Pink Floyd when one of my men said that there was a call for me upstairs (obviously this was a long time before the advent of mobile phones!). At the reception desk I found the call was from Ray Washbourne – and it wasn’t the best of news! They’d just found one of Jimmy’s guests dead at his home at Plumpton Place, Sussex. Predictably, he wanted me to get down there and take care of things.

  “I think someone may have phoned for an ambulance,” he said, “but that’s all I know.”

  “Leave it to me,” I said before telling Gerry Slater, my business partner, what had happened and taking off like a scalded cat.

  I arrived at the same time as the police. Obviously that was because they’d been called out by the ambulance crew – which is standard procedure. Their presence meant that I couldn’t clear up the way I’d have liked to. All I could do was confine their investigations to the guest room where the guy, whose name I later found out was Richard Churchill-Hale, had popped his clogs. And that annoyed the cops intensely! If I’d arrived ten minutes later they’d have been all over the house like a rash – so I was very lucky, timing-wise.

  I didn’t get a chance to clear up completely so they did find “substances” by his bedside. It transpired that the poor bloke had overdosed – but because he was a guest, staying in a guest room, I was able to limit the police’s snooping to the room he slept in.

  Anyway, going back to Bonzo, I knew that the press would hound his family pitilessly, and that simply wasn’t an option. I had to keep a lid on it for as long as I possibly could, at least until Peter Grant turned up and started throwing his weight around – and, as demonstrated, that time at the Singer Bowl, that was a lot of weight to throw!

  The police weren’t happy about being stymied at every turn. But what could they do? It was apparently an accidental death: nothing suspicious about it. A drunken man had seemingly inhaled his own vomit – period. There was no good reason for them to snoop around, no matter how much they’d have liked to. Anyway, it was the law; they knew it and so did I. Funny how rock ’n’ roll makes lawyers out of everyone involved – just like crime!

  Sure enough, by the time Peter and Ray arrived and John Bonham had “left the building” for the last time in the ambulance, the road had filled with reporters and the mob was growing by the minute as the circling vultures homed in on the smell of death. The three of us discussed all the angles, analysed the kinds of problems that might ensue, made contingency plans and decided how we would box for the next few days. That resolved, Peter and Ray went off to console the boys in the band. It was only after his unusually subdued departure that it dawned on me that Peter hadn’t been in his normal control-freak manager mode. Far from it – he was obviously deeply shocked by the event and, after our preliminary talk, left the whole affair to me to deal with.

  At least I didn’t have to worry about the rest of the band. They’d made a hasty departure minutes after John’s body had been discovered and I’d arranged for more of my men to go and look after them until they were safely ensconced in secure retreats where there would be no intrusions. That may sound callous. It wasn’t. It was, again, standard procedure. When there was a “death in the family” unwritten rule number one was to make sure that the band members were as far away from the action as possible. It meant fewer questions for them to answer. But, more importantly, it allowed them to grieve in private, protected from the press.

  The platoons of press and police set up camp at the Old Mill House for days. So I did, too. I hardly left Jimmy’s place for the following few days. Keeping the hounds at bay was a full-time job and a hard one, with the more dogged photographers climbing over the walls – and driving me and my men up the wall in the process. There were a few little incidents, but nothing I couldn’t handle, and I managed to contain the situation as effectively as anyone could. Maybe I shouldn’t have bothered. They’d caught the whiff of a story that was a tabloid hack’s wet dream: rock star, booze, drugs and death – and if there wasn’t any sex they’d find a way to work some in. So, if they couldn’t get the story from the horse’s mouth they’d let their imaginations – and Led Zep cuttings archives – run riot. Predictably, they added Ol’ Black Magic to the lurid mix, concocting ludicrous fantasies involving Jimmy Page and his admittedly strong interest in the occult in general and Aleister Crowley in particular. For example, he owned a house that had formerly belonged to Crowley and in which there had allegedly been a terrifying catalogue of murders and suicides. The place was also apparently haunted by the spirit of a man who’d been decapitated there some 300 years earlier – all lurid grist to the newspaper mill!

  Having been so close to so many famous people whose lives had been blighted and hacked to pieces by the lies and sensationalism of the gutter-press hacks, I knew exactly what they’d do to John’s memory, given the chance. They didn’t care whose feelings they hurt as long as they could drag up enough dirt to muddy the issue – because they know mud sticks. Any little association, any name, any snippet of gossip or unsubstantiated innuendo would do if they could cook it up into a tasty dish for their hungry public. I wouldn’t mind so much if what they printed was true – but in my experience they get it wrong most of the time and hurt people more than they’ll ever know. But they never, ever apologize. Worse still, they never, ever, seem to care. Luckily enough, because John was so well-liked by his friends, there were very few new revelations about him. In fact, it’s a tribute to his friends’ loyalty and integrity that all the press could do was dig up and rehash old stories.

  Despite the press, I at least partially succeeded in controlling the way the whole tragic affair was perceived by the public by keeping a lid on everyone involved and ensuring that they didn’t disclose anything. And now I faced another, far more unsettling, task: to make sure John looked his best for his swansong show for all the family and friends who wanted to pay him their last respects. To do him justice, the mortician needed to know what this vacant frame had been like in life – larger than life was what Bonzo had been. I found a photo that captured that free spirit we’d lost and made an appointment at Kenyon Morticians in Kensington – at which I duly arrived, full of trepidation.

  After polite introductions in the office, I was ushered into the area where the bodies were stored, silently awaiting their burial or cremation. It was cool like … well, like a morgue really. I, on the other hand, wasn’t just cool. I was chilled to the bone when the mortician reverently drew John out of what looked like an oversized filing cabinet – the one where they file your life when it’s no longer current. Desecrated by the autopsy and horribly discoloured, this wasn’t the Bonzo I’d known and loved. John’s wasn’t the first dead body I’d seen and wouldn’t be the last, but that didn’t make that “death mask” any less horrifying. I was calmed, though, by the mortician – a kind, congenial and fascinating man. It’s a tribute to his professionalism and integrity that when he looked at John’s body, having talked about John with me and examined the photo I’d brought along, he saw him through my eyes. He explained the way he would use make-up and style his hair and assured me that by the time he began his quiet sojourn in the Chapel of Rest, John would look peaceful and serene – and no one would see any sign of the autopsy or the discolouration that had so disturbed me. Bonzo, peaceful and serene. That’s a first, I thought.

  A consummate professional in the art of sending people gracefully to their final rest, he was just as skilled in bringing peace to the living – and, having put my mind at ease, he shared some of the intimate and touching aspects of his craf
t. In another “file” was another body – that of a sixty-one-year-old Greek or Cypriot woman. She was fully clothed and looked as if she’d just fallen asleep. But it had been a very long snooze because, amazingly, she’d been dead for nearly two years. Evidently her husband had requested that they kept her there, perfectly peaceful and preserved, until he died – which he apparently would be soon – so that they could make their final journey together; go home to be buried in their own country. And this wasn’t a one-off. He told me he’d once kept the body of an exiled African head of state for more than six years because his family was waiting until their country’s political climate changed before they could take him home and bury him in his native soil. I found myself moved by the reverence with which this gentle man accommodated people’s last wishes in God’s departure lounge. There couldn’t have been anyone better to administer this art to John: a great and talented artist performing his art for another great and talented artist.

  A few days later I returned to see his handiwork and my faith was fully justified – John had been transformed. He looked lifelike – perhaps better than he’d looked for several years. All his confusion and conflict was resolved; the stress and strain relieved. He just looked bloody handsome and, finally, the wild man of rock was completely at peace.