by Nick Kent
That unfortunate incident still looms large in my memory, as do the events throughout the week leading up to it. Rod Stewart and the Faces had arrived in town to play a series of sold-out shows at a nearby enormodome and the stars came out in force to welcome them. Backstage on the first night I was standing around jawing with Stewart when a deeply tanned, well-heeled middle-aged couple stepped in to greet the singer. It was the actress Joan Collins, accompanied by her obscenely wealthy husband of the hour. Rod was his usual charming self and Collins wasted no time in then introducing him to a friend of hers whom she’d also brought to the concert. The face, form and flowing blonde hair looked distinctly familiar. ‘’Ere Nick - say hello to Britt Ekland,’ he shouted at me. ‘Rod ’n’ Britt’ soon went on to get designated as the ersatz Burton and Taylor celebrity couple of the rocktastic seventies but this was the moment they first actually met. I don’t recall the Rodster being much impressed by Miss Ekland’s charms at first glance. ‘She’s all right,’ he told me after she and Collins had exited the dressing room. ‘But I’m really waiting for Wednesday. Julie Christie’s supposed to be coming down to the show that night.’
After the first-night performance, Cher threw an impromptu party for the group at her well-appointed Hollywood eyrie. It was meant to be a celebrities-only bash but Ronnie Wood very kindly invited me along to mingle in the glamour, and it was just too good an opportunity to refuse. Fortunately no one bothered to inform the hostess of my profession or else I’d have probably been turfed out without further ado. The sultry songstress was getting a rough old time from the international press at this precise juncture because of her peculiar love life. On the one hand, she was bona fide well-respected Hollywood royalty with a hit TV show still high in the ratings. But ever since she’d broken up with husband/Svengali Sonny Bono, she’d been making distinctly catastrophic choices when it came to finding new suitors and the tabloids were hauling her over the coals for her oddball trysting. She’d recently been linked romantically with feared entertainment-industry power broker David Geffen. Unfortunately he turned out to be gay. Now she’d turned her amorous gaze on Gregg Allman. Allman was the vocalist and gaunt blond-haired figurehead of the Allman Brothers Band, arguably the most popular and successful home-grown US rock act of the early seventies. The Southern rockers were loved nationwide for their often turgid blues-rock improvisations but they were feared too, particularly by industry insiders who’d already seen their barbaric side at close quarters. Their roadies were supposed to have been homicidal thugs. One of them had even done jail time for stabbing a Mafia-affiliated promoter to death in his own club. But the definitive legend surrounding the group involved their guitarist, one Dickey Betts. Apparently he’d been out riding his Harley one day when he became peckish. Seeing a bull grazing in a field, he’d stopped his bike, ambled over to the animal, beat it to death with his bare hands and then cooked it and ate it before casually returning to his vehicle and speeding off again. Clearly, these were fellows it didn’t pay to trifle with.
It was providential indeed then that Gregg Allman was the only ‘bro.’ present at Cher’s little soirée and that he was so utterly cabbaged that night he’d have been hard-pressed to punch his way through a sheet of Kleenex. They say that love is blindness and in Cher’s case this was all too evidently true. It had taken her ages to divine the homoerotic sexual leanings of her previous boyfriend and now she - an ardent anti-druggie - had somehow managed to become smitten with the most notorious celebrity junkie in mid-seventies America. At one point, Allman staggered over to a white piano and attempted to perform a slow blues for his girlfriend’s guests. Whatever drugs he was embalming himself in, they certainly weren’t doing his musical chops any favours. Only Ronnie Wood was impressed by the impromptu recital. Seated next to me, he looked awestruck and mumbled words to the effect that we were both privileged to be in the presence of such a gifted entity. That’s when I came to the realisation that Ronnie Wood wasn’t exactly the brightest light bulb in the great fuse box of life.
But then again, no one ever required the cerebral acumen of a rocket scientist in order to become a successful rock guitarist. He might not have made an ideal contestant for Bamber Gascoigne to browbeat on University Challenge but the happy-go-lucky fellow with the jackdaw face and pineapple hair was still nimble-fingered and personable enough to be sought after by the musical crème de la crème du jour. On the second night of the Faces’ LA festivities, Mick Jagger turned up backstage seemingly out of the blue. There was a tense moment early on when he found himself face to face with the actor Ryan O’Neal, who’d recently been accused in the tabloids of having had a fling with his wife Bianca; Jagger came perilously close to bitch-slapping the grovelling thesp. But his mood lifted once he found the tune-up room, where Wood was strumming away surrounded by several cocaine dealers who were all offering up their merchandise for free.
After the show, we all returned to Wood’s hotel suite. Jagger started talking about a one-day festival show he wanted to set up somewhere in the States that would involve a bill featuring just three acts - the Faces, Led Zeppelin and the Stones. ‘Who’d be the headliner though?’ asked Wood. ‘We can work that out later,’ sniffed Jagger. ‘The thing is - I’m still not sure where we could actually stage it.’ ‘How about Death Valley?’ I offered. No one thought that was very funny. Jagger stayed glued to Wood that night. Back in England Keith Richards had been jamming with an American guitarist called Wayne Perkins and was grooming him as Mick Taylor’s replacement in the Stones. But Jagger was unconvinced and still hankered for ‘Woody’ to fill the role. That’s what this visitation was all about for him, a way to fathom out how the land actually lay for the Faces and whether their guitarist could be easily uprooted from it. In fact, I’ll wager that it was on this very night that Ron Wood first tentatively committed to life as a Rolling Stone. Mick Jagger just wouldn’t let him off the hook.
An even more momentous rock icon left his lush Malibu hidey-hole just to mingle with Woody and his scampish band-mates on their last night in the city of fallen angels: Bob Dylan. The wiry little troubadour with the sagebrush facial hair and the deeply sardonic eyes was still in his Garboesque reclusive phase despite being the comeback king of the season with Blood on the Tracks nestling at the top of the US album charts, but to everyone else’s astonishment made a point of coming out to party down with the Faces. I later wrote in the NME that I’d actually gotten to shake his hand that night but I don’t think I was telling the truth. I hope so anyway because I was ‘in a very bad place’ that evening. Just prior to attending the event, I’d driven over to Danny Sugerman’s house with Iggy and Sable. Johnny the black gay dude I’ve already introduced you to was there with some Mexican heroin he wanted to offload. Mexican heroin was very different from the Chinese rocks I was accustomed to back in London. The latter was ideal for crushing down and snorting but this Mexican stuff was like black chocolate, practically impossible to reduce to powder form. Injecting it directly into a vein was the only way to feel its power. So I persuaded someone present to do just that - to shoot me up for the first time. Oh boy! I just remember the needle piercing my arm, the tiny spool of blood it left when it was removed and then-a rushing sound in my head like migrating birds furiously flying out of my skull. After that - nothing. The next image I recall was Iggy standing over me, shouting and slapping my face. Danny Sugerman was behind him, screaming obscenities and demanding that the singer remove my prone cadaver from his bathroom floor, get the fuck out and never darken his towels again. So Iggy and Sable propped me on their shoulders and dragged me out into the driveway. I couldn’t understand what the fuss was all about: I wanted to fall back into the coma I’d just been rescued from. But Iggy kept getting in my face, shaking me and making sure I was still semi-conscious. We drove around for what felt like hours with the windows down and the breeze from the highway rushing into my face. At one point on this journey I started to fade out again and Iggy stopped the car and dragged me out ont
o a deserted Hollywood hilltop. It was a beautiful night. LA was stretched out before us in a swampy haze of glowing neon and the sky above us was ablaze with real stars. The only sound to be heard was Iggy’s voice. ‘Just don’t die on me, OK,’ it kept repeating. Thank God he was there to play the good Samaritan. Virtually anyone else in that environment and under those circumstances would have left me to float off into the ether. Hey, it was the seventies, baby. Kindness and basic human decency were mighty thin on the ground.
We finally arrived at the party around midnight. When Rod Stewart saw me weaving uncertainly through the door, he immediately dragged me into the toilet and started throwing tap-water from one of the sinks over my face to help further revive me. It was a gallant gesture but I think now in retrospect he did it more to impress Britt Ekland, who was there by his side. The only other memory I have of that night is this: I was leaning against a toilet-cubicle door with Iggy to my immediate left and a human behemoth hovering over both of us. ‘Old Kenty and Iggy fucking Pop - as I live and breathe,’ the latter exclaimed in an inebriated East London cackle. ‘Look at the state of you two cunts.’ Iggy - who didn’t recognise the guy - was looking at him with a truly disdainful expression and I knew he was about to say something deeply inappropriate like ‘Who is this fat prick anyway?’ So summoning what presence of mind I could muster, I reached out, placed my hand firmly over his mouth before he could utter a single syllable and said loudly and very firmly, ‘It’s Peter Grant, Jim.’ (I called him Jim because he tended to behave more reasonably when addressed by his given name. If you called him ‘Iggy’, he’d inevitably behave like Iggy, and that could prove problematic.) His face completely changed when he heard those words. Iggy knew all about Peter Grant - how feared and all-powerful he was throughout the music industry. He also knew Grant could break him like a twiglet if he felt the urge. All the contempt drained from his eyes in a split second, to be replaced by a look somewhere between stark terror and awe. ‘Hey, Peter, man - great to see ya,’ he spluttered enthusiastically. Grant just stood there grinning madly - he was seriously drunk - and laughing at the state we were both in. It was like two callow young punks suddenly coming face to face with Tony Soprano on a bender in a public rest room. Or two minnows confronting a whale. I told Iggy afterwards - ‘Hey, listen, you saved my life tonight but I may well have saved yours too. If you had said what it looked like you were about to say to Peter Grant before I butted in, he would have crushed you like he did when he recently sat on Elvis Presley’s dad.’
It was one of the juiciest pieces of gossip to have come out of the scandal-mongering seventies: Led Zeppelin get invited to a personal post-gig powwow with Elvis Presley in Las Vegas in early ’75 and their manager only makes the mistake of placing his enormous girth on a chair that - he fails to notice - already contains a frail, sleeping Vernon Presley. In Chris Welch’s posthumous biography of the man, Grant actually verified this improbable tale and even added embellishments. However, my wife recently interviewed one of Elvis’s boys who was present when his boss met the Zeppelin entourage on the night in question - one Jerry Schilling - and he swore that the incident never occurred. Logic indicates that Schilling’s version is the easier to believe; after all, Grant could have broken every bone in the poor man’s body if he’d descended on him from behind. But that doesn’t stop me from wanting it to be true.
I know a thing or two about how gossip is formed and then spread about. I’ve dished it out in my time and felt its boomerang effect as a victim of scurrilous and unfounded rumours myself. It’s usually 30 per cent truth mixed in with 70 per cent wilful misinformation. Most of the time, it’s mean-spirited and unreliable. But in this case, it’s so ludicrously funny it deserves to be written into the history books. Elvis would have killed your ass if you’d have stepped on his blue suede shoes but he didn’t seem to mind when Peter Grant sat on his dad. Maybe he was just too stoned to notice. (Strange rumours were starting to circulate about Presley all around LA. They were saying that the King was a hopeless pillhead junkie. At first it seemed absurd, too implausible to even contemplate. Elvis on drugs? No one could believe it.)
Or maybe the King felt chastened and genuinely taken aback by the sheer power Led Zeppelin wielded throughout the country of his birth at the time of their meeting. By the mid-seventies America had become their own personal fiefdom. No other act was remotely as popular. And in LA particularly the mania surrounding them was so vast and volatile it seemed capable of setting off earthquake-like tremors throughout the community whenever they played there. Zeppelin and their music had a strange, unearthly effect on the region that had to be felt and seen to be believed. The natives went stark staring mad just knowing they were in the vicinity.
Zeppelin and their touring retinue arrived in Hollywood - just as the Faces were finishing up there - in order to play a series of concerts booked all over the West Coast that March. They even had their own private aeroplane waiting at the local airport to wing them to the venues. In the past, the town had played host to the group’s highest times whilst out on the road. But the high spirits of yore were much harder to locate this time around. Cocaine was largely responsible for this hardening of Led Zeppelin’s spiritual arteries. There was far too much of it freely available: dealers would literally line up to share their wares and curry favour with the group’s principals. And the groupie situation surrounding the band had lately gone into a state of red alert. Valley girls were prepared to tear each other limb from limb in order to beat the competition and bed a Zep member. Jimmy Page told me about an incident where one deranged female had placed razor blades in a hamburger bun one of her rivals was about to eat as a way of eliminating her from the competition. The story had helped inspire the lyrics to one of their most recent songs - soon to be available on Physical Graffiti - ‘Sick Again’, Robert Plant’s disapproving ode to these self-styled she-creatures of the Hollywood Hills.
In fact, both Plant and Jones made a point in ’75 of steering well clear of all the groupie hysteria by renting accommodation in quiet mansions near the beach, far away from the Sunset Strip. The rest of the touring party though were happy to install themselves in Hollywood’s Continental Hyatt House hotel in the Strip’s centre, an establishment renowned for turning a blind eye to any outbursts of rock ’n’ roll excess.
Yet even Jimmy Page had grown tired of being fought over by scantily attired LA jailbait. In ’75 he initiated a new sexual pursuit: celebrity wife-swapping. He’d lately been seen enjoying the company of Bebe Buell, Todd Rundgren’s leggy consort, but had chosen Chrissie Wood as his ‘special friend’ throughout this West Coast stopover, a situation that didn’t best please her husband, Ronnie. Page spent practically all his down time sequestered in his suite on the hotel’s top floor. I visited him on several occasions there and found him holding court with a number of other acquaintances, all of us seriously wired on the voluminous quantities of cocaine that were readily available. Heroin was just starting to creep into the picture too. One night, he treated us all to an impromptu screening of Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising, the film he intended to create a soundtrack for later in the year. It lasted for about half an hour and consisted of amateurish home-movie footage shot by Anger of an extremely stoned Marianne Faithfull in black robes silently stumbling down a staircase embedded in the mountains of Egypt, holding a lighted candle.
Page may have been ever-increasingly drawn towards the dark side of life but he didn’t let these preoccupations interfere unduly with his professional responsibilities. He could still detach himself from the madness when he chose to. John Bonham, however, wasn’t so lucky in this respect. Los Angeles brought out all his most disturbing character traits and magnified them to a degree that made him a very frightening individual to be in close physical proximity to. He drank all the time partly as a way to counterbalance all the cocaine he was inhaling continuously. He’d even taken to placing an ounce bag of the stuff between his legs during their live shows and could sometimes be
seen placing his hands inside the bag and throwing handfuls of the drug into his nostrils whilst still behind the drum kit. Mick Hinton, his personal roadie, told me once that the entire road crew would very carefully dismantle the kit after each concert’s conclusion and then tip his drum mat over a large sack in order to capture and share the large deposits of cocaine the drummer had spilled onto it during each show.
However, his escalating excesses were turning him into an increasingly tortured figure. One night that week, he ended up spending an evening in the company of Bryan Ferry, the suave Geordie crooner whose Roxy Music were also touring the LA area at that point in time. Ferry later recalled Bonham repeatedly bursting into tears and pleading to return to the relative calm of his home and family back in the Midlands, so terrified was the drummer becoming of his own insatiable appetites whilst on the road.
I made my own escape from LA in early April, just in the nick of time. I returned to London with an unsightly sunburnt face - I’d fallen asleep at an outdoors Beach Boys concert I’d attended two days prior to taking the plane homeward - and no appreciable healthy glow to my features. I’d made few friends during the two months I’d been resident there and was now pretty much persona non grata in the region. Someone had even alerted the local police to have me placed under arrest if I ever returned there (it must have been rescinded; I flew back five years later without incident). The folks over there just didn’t understand kamikaze journalism. The place gave me the fucking willies anyway and I’d rubbed up against enough of its weird scenes and fame-worshipping grotesqueries to last me a lifetime. The way I saw it, California was doing me a favour banning me from its borders. I’d almost died out there but had still managed to tunnel my way out. Plus I had a couple of hot stories to peddle to the NME and its readers. All was not lost - at least not yet.