Jimmy Page had sold the Pangbourne boathouse after flooding had threatened the safety of his equipment, swapping it for a moated Sussex estate called Plumpton Place. In a new home studio he had built at Plumpton, he demo’d riffs for the next Zeppelin album. By late April, the band was working on Houses of the Holy.
7
SATANIC MAJESTY
LED ZEPPELIN’S fourth album was not an overnight phenomenon. Though it sold in huge numbers and quickly outstripped the sales of its predecessor, it was only in 1973, when the band undertook their biggest American tour yet—a 3-month slog grossing more than $4 million—that began to assume its Thrilleresque proportions. Much of that had to do with the ever-increasing popularity of “Stairway to Heaven,” the cult of which had turned the track into a mystical epic beloved of suburban metalheads from sea to shining sea.
By then Led Zeppelin had recorded and released their fifth album, the somewhat underwhelming Houses of the Holy, this time coughing up the cash required for the creature comforts of Mick Jagger’s country pile. The fact that Houses—classics such as “No Quarter,” “The Ocean,” and “Over the Hills and Far Away” notwithstanding—was Zeppelin’s Goat’s Head Soup (complete with the cod-funk of “The Crunge” and cod-reggae of “D’yer Maker”) only made sound better.
Whatever Zeppelin themselves felt about Houses of the Holy, the morale within the band was as strong as ever. Far from jaded, the quartet was enjoying every minute of its success. “In this band, we’re very lucky that everybody is more enthusiastic as time goes on,” Robert Plant told NME’s Charles Shaar Murray in Los Angeles in June. “There is no fatigue or boredom musically at all.”
The singer was even more emphatic in a Circus interview 4 months later with Cameron Crowe. “The magnetism that the group holds can’t wane for any reason that I can see,” Plant said. “We’ve tried to stay away from all the passing hypes and fads in the musical business. There’s no reason why we should follow them at all. We can just set our own standards. I think that people appreciate that. Obviously, I can’t see what I’ll be doing in 8 years from now … but I’ll tell you one thing. As long as I’m feeling ‘Black Dog,’ I’ll be singing it.”
Crucial to Led Zeppelin’s ongoing musical health was the balance within the band—and specifically the chemistry between Plant and Page. (“Pagey and I are closer than ever on this tour,” Plant said in 1975. “We’ve almost jelled into one person in a lot of ways.”) Plant’s respect for Page’s genius was hugely important for the group’s internal politics.
“By the time we got to Houses of the Holy, and in fact Physical Graffiti, all the way down, there was a conscientious air about Jimmy’s work,” Plant told Steven Rosen in 1983. “And Jimmy’s catalytic efforts to get everybody moving one way or the other. It’s remarkable that we kept it going for as many records as we did. Really, there wasn’t one record that had anything to do with the one before it. And that’s a great credit when there are so many artists who will unconsciously rest on their laurels and say, ‘This is it, this is the way it must be.’ ”
Having watched so many bands unravel acrimoniously over the years, Page himself was proud of Led Zeppelin’s staying power. “The group has been going for a long time now,” he told Mick Houghton in 1976. “There are too many groups that have broken up or changed personnel for whatever reason, and it’s so unfortunate. Whenever we sit down and talk about the future, there’s always this bond that we’re gonna go on forever. There’s no splinter thing like solo albums. If there ever were solo albums, it wouldn’t be because somebody was so frustrated that he couldn’t get what he wanted out within the group unit. The creative process may change, you never know, but we’re confident it will stay as it is.”
“They were fantastic,” Peter Grant reflected in 1993. “Part of the success was that we never hung out at the Speakeasy or wherever. We got together when we needed to and then did our own thing. That’s why I always tried to make sure we didn’t overdo the touring during the school holidays, so the guys could see their children. We didn’t live in each other’s pockets.”
“We’re not too close, not so that every little thing bothers us,” John Bonham said. “If one of us is ill, the rest of us don’t all come out in rashes too. We’re close in another way.”
The solidarity within Led Zeppelin was perhaps all the more surprising when one considers the tales of decadence and debauchery that followed the group around the world. After made them the biggest band on earth, their status as Learjet libertines almost came to overshadow their music. To this day, Led Zeppelin remains a byword for rock excess, macho affluence on a swollen scale. As Erik Davis wrote, “the enjoyment that Led Zeppelin has given so many of us is partly a function of our fantasies about their own engorged enjoyment of the world.”
“The rule book hadn’t been written yet,” Robert Plant later remarked. “We were the standard-bearers, from which that patent has been used so many times now.”
“The Beatles kind of opened the door to it,” said Henry Smith, “but the Beatles never did it the way rock and roll did it. When the Who came over and Zeppelin was there, they were the bad boys of rock and roll. Now, whether or not Peter used that as a tool—and in some ways I think he probably did— there’s nothing like a bad reputation to take you a long way. The Stones went places because the Beatles were the good boys and the Stones were the bad boys. And Zeppelin was the bad boys too. I think some of that mystique helped them in that time period.”
Hooligan aesthetes running riot in the corridors of America’s best hotels, Zeppelin flew the flag for British hedonism, “basking”—in the words of Lenny Kaye and David Dalton—“in the glory of stardom.” (“Next time you need two motorcycles and a live octopus at 3:00 in the morning,” a Zeppelin roadie grouched good-humoredly at Plant on the 1973 US tour, “go ask someone else!”) And nowhere was this more apparent than in Los Angeles.
“LA had a mystique,” Henry Smith continues. “It’s warm, and when you get in the warmth, you kind of let your hair down. Whenever we went there, it was a hub, it was the place to be. Drugs were easy to get, so when we arrived it was like, ‘Okay, we’ve finished the gloomy part of the US, which is anything between Cleveland and Denver, and where there’s nothing to do.’ ”
Life at LA’s Continental Hyatt House (or “Riot House”) involved cricket matches and motorcycle races in the hallway, along with the inevitable chairs and TV sets being flung from windows. In the UK tabloid The Sun, reporter Bob Hart wrote of “an English girl who was the coke lady … so nobody else ever carried or touched coke….” He also noted “the terrible treatment of girls” by the Zeppelin camp.
“Now I would look back on it with kind of a giggle,” said Henry Smith. “But in those days, I suppose I would have looked at it, going, ‘How dare they come over here and treat our women that way?’ Did we cross the line sometimes? Oh yeah. We were lucky we didn’t get arrested—for all sorts of things.”
“The downfall of the ’60s dream was very disappointing, because we’d really thought we could change things,” said Pamela Des Barres, who saw the band’s antics in Hollywood Babylon up close. “As much as I loved Zeppelin, they kind of fucked things up in LA. Something about their energy really altered the joie de vivre of the scene. They thought they could get away with anything, and they could, because everybody wanted to get near them. They were very debauched, and the girls got younger and more willing to do anything. It got to be incredibly sick.”
The former Miss Pamela had personal reasons for chiding the band, having been jilted as Jimmy Page’s LA squeeze in favor of pubescent über-groupie Lori Lightning (nee Lori Maddox). “There was such back-stabbing in the groupie scene,” she said. “In the ’60s, we were all for each other—there was a feeling that was more important than any one guy.”
“The original groupies were a lot quieter and lower-key,” said Richard Cole. “With the second-generation girls in LA, there was more hysteria there, because they were trying to live
up to what they’d read or heard about without really knowing how to do it. Girls like Pamela weren’t really groupies in comparison to what came later. They were a great bunch of girls, and we had a hell of a lot of fun with them, but they weren’t throwing the sex on the table. Sometimes there was sex involved, sometimes there wasn’t.”
“The really famous groupies were extremely tough and unpleasant,” concured Nick Kent, the NME journalist who wrote regularly about Zeppelin in the ’70s. “Jimmy told me that one of his Hollywood girlfriends bit into a sandwich that had razor blades in it. Seeing these conniving, loveless little girls really affected my concept of femininity for a while.”
Kent claims that in all his years as a rock writer, he never saw anybody behave worse than John Bonham or Richard Cole. “I once saw them beat a guy senseless for no reason and then drop money on his face,” Kent said. “It makes me feel sick when I hear Plant talking about what a great geezer Bonzo was, because the guy was a schizophrenic animal. He was like something out of Straw Dogs.”
“Well, Nick Kent was a groupie,” Plant countered. “He was with Keith [Richards] or he was with Jimmy. And the psyche of that condition and that platform from where he made his assertions was based on the chemicals and the humor. Nick went where he felt the greatest affinity, comfort, and stimulation, so to look at Bonzo coming in growling, with a suit and a fedora on and carrying a black stick with a silver top … see, the social intrigue of a group of people on the road was such that people who were with me wanted to know what on earth was going on in another area.”
Cole wasn’t much better, amiable bloke though he’s become. “It’s weird to see Richard today,” said Pamela Des Barres, “because I have images of him kicking people’s teeth out.”
“We didn’t give a fuck,” Cole said. “The doors had to open now. 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.”
“They were like a bunch of footballers, crude and rude,” recalled Peter Clifton, a director brought in to help salvage Zeppelin’s glorified “home movie” The Song Remains the Same. “In fact, they took a real pleasure in being rude to people.” Melody Maker’s Chris Charlesworth, an ally of the band, admitted that “it was very intimidating to be around Led Zeppelin in those days.”
To this day, however, the surviving members of the band feel their hell-raising reputation has been over-played. Much of that is due to Stephen Davis’s sensationalist Hammer of the Gods, a book based heavily on Cole’s reminiscences.
“I want to believe Hammer of the Gods because it’s done us huge favors in terms of aura,” Robert Plant told Mojo’s Mat Snow in 1994. “I once saw Kenny Hibbitt [a soccer hero of Plant’s in the ’70s] pissed on a Friday night. I was furious. I went home and I couldn’t sleep. Terrible.”
“The debauchery was more people like Richard and me than it was the band,” admitted Henry Smith. “The band just got the credit for it.”
In Davis’s book, Cole himself confessed that “all the so-called Led Zeppelin depravity took place the first 2 years in an alcoholic fog.” “I don’t think it was an attitude, really,” he says today, “except that we were perhaps a little more extravagant. It’s like someone going on holiday. I mean, you’re not going to do at home what you do on holiday—misbehaving and getting blind drunk and getting up to all sorts of tricks.”
By 1972, Cole claimed, “we got older and grew out of it,” adding that Led Zeppelin “became a realistic business.” In 1975, Robert Plant said the band was “more into staying in our rooms and reading Nietzsche,” though possibly he wasn’t speaking for John Bonham.
“Flying with them, it was surprising how quiet and well-behaved it all was,” recalled Chris Welch, who often accompanied Zeppelin on tour as a Melody Maker reporter. “They weren’t rioting all the time on a continental hotel-wrecking spree. Robert would be reading Country Life, choosing his next country mansion, and Jimmy would spend his free time in each city buying antiques.”
“I like to think people know that we’re pretty raunchy and that we really do a lot of the things people say we do,” Plant told Lisa Robinson in May 1973. “But what we’re getting across [onstage] is goodness. It ain’t ‘Stand up and put your fist in the air—we want revolution.’ ”
Plant was no innocent, though. Years later, Robinson wrote that his “tour amours” were “girls he managed to convince that he was, at any given moment, about to leave his wife, Maureen….” She recounted the story that Maureen once came running out of the farmhouse with a copy of Melody Maker featuring a picture of Zeppelin surrounded by the jailbait at Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco club. “Maureen!” Plant is said to have responded, “you know we don’t take the Maker!”
It didn’t help that 1973 also saw the publication of Trips, by another female rock journalist, Ellen Sander. In the book, Sander alleged that she’d almost been gang-raped by two members of Led Zeppelin in 1969. “If you walk inside the cages of the zoo,” she wrote, “you get to see the animals close up, stroke the captive pelts and mingle with the energy behind the mystique. You also get to smell the shit first hand.”
“I’m probably more ashamed of the reputation than of anything we actually did,” said John Paul Jones, the Bill Wyman of Led Zeppelin, and a man who claimed that “nothing exciting” ever happened to him. “Plus it seems to me they’ve forgotten every other band that was there, and it seemed to me that everybody was behaving in a similar way. People have put this really evil slant on it, but it was really more just high spirits. I read these things and think, ‘Are they really talking about us?’ I mean, we used to follow the Who places and they were still redecorating after them. We took the heat for everybody. With LA, the problem was it was so boring most of the time that as soon as any life arrived, suddenly you ruled the town!”
It was particularly irksome to Zeppelin that the Rolling Stones was as fawned over by the media as Zeppelin were vilified by them. (Unlike the Stones— and despite the patronage of Ahmet Ertegun— Zeppelin was never part of the chic New York circle surrounding Andy Warhol. They were never accompanied on tour by Truman Capote and Princess Lee Radziwill.) “We knew full well that we were doing more business than them,” Plant told Crowe. “We were getting better gates in comparison to a lot of people who were constantly glorified in the press.”
After Zeppelin’s 1972 tour of America, Peter Grant decided to take action, hiring publicist B. P. Fallon to bring the band kudos and credibility. “Without getting too egocentric,” Plant told Cameron Crowe, “we thought it was time that people heard something about us other than that we were eating women and throwing the bones out the window.”
The band members themselves were increasingly torn between their two lives: the madness of the road, the restorative calm of home. As Stephen Davis wrote in Hammer of the Gods, “Led Zeppelin lived in two worlds, one a secure green England of family and tradition, the other a lurid Hollywood movie of fantasy and excess.”
No one exemplified this better than John Bonham, whose behavior on tour was at least partly a response to the homesickness and anxiety he felt at being separated from his wife and children. “[Bonzo] was a loving, responsible parent,” Robert Plant told Mick Wall. “And underneath all the brash bravado … he was very reliant on [his wife]. They fought like cats and dogs, but they loved each other tremendously.” This is the family man we see in The Song Remains the Same: Bonzo on his tractor, Bonzo with his cows, Bonzo with Pat Bonham and young Jason on a drum kit.
“Bonzo drank because he hated being away from home, he really did,” said John Paul Jones. “Between gigs, he found it hard to cope. And he hated flying. Sometimes he’d drink before getting on a plane and ask the driver to turn round and take him home.”
“Bonzo was much more meat-and-potatoes than, say, Robert,” said Richard Cole. “It was always, ‘I don’t like all this foreign food.’ And when you went to his house in the south of France when they were
tax exiles, the pantry was like the corner shop—Bird’s custard [a cornflour-based custard], you name it, it was in there.” Killing time during a technical problem at the LA Forum on June 21, 1977, Plant described Bonham as— among other things—“the man who said he could go back to a building site anytime … and we all agreed.”
A surlier, more lumpen version of Keith Moon, Bonham was becoming a liability for Led Zeppelin. Had they not had endless cash to throw at the problem, the drummer’s career might have come to an unsavory end a lot earlier than it did. “He was a big overgrown baby,” recalled Linda Alderetti, a cashier at LA’s Rainbow Bar & Grill who became a regular companion of the drummer’s. “He did not grow up with much sophistication, and he was not very bright.”
Certainly not as bright as Robert Plant, himself torn in two by Zeppelin’s double life. “There’s constant conflict, really, within me,” the singer told Cameron Crowe in a big interview that was partly an opportunity for Rolling Stone to atone for their treatment of the band. “As much as I really enjoy what I do at home … I play on my own little soccer team and I’ve been taking part in the community and living the life of any ordinary guy. I always find myself wistful and enveloped in a feeling I can’t really get out of my system. I miss this band when we aren’t playing.”
Plant, still a hippie at heart, would have agreed with Pamela Des Barres’s assessment that the LA scene had become tarnished beyond recognition. “LA was LA,” he told Crowe. “It’s not LA now. LA infested with jaded 12-year-olds is not the LA that I really dug. I haven’t lost my innocence particularly. I’m always ready to pretend I haven’t. Yeah, it is a shame in a way. And it’s a shame to see these young chicks bungle their lives away in a flurry and rush to compete with what was in the old days, the good-time relationships we had with the GTOs and people like that. When it came to looning, they could give us as much of a looning as we could give them.”
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