Led Zeppelin FAQ

by George Case

  Aside from being some obviously very weird shit, the Shark Incident is notable for its factual fuzziness. Apparently Mark Stein filmed it with a Super 8 movie camera, but even with today’s online depositories of embarrassing sex videos and amateur exposés, no footage has ever been shown in public. Pressed for explicit descriptions, Stein, Appice, and Cole have all either dodged the questions or embellished the tale (“That girl must have come twenty times,” Cole has boasted), while Plant has shrugged it off by referring to the Zappa song and Page has never acknowledged it. The common threads of the differing accounts are that a) some kind of small saltwater marine life was used as a sexual device on a female, b) this was in full view of several spectators, c) everyone was intoxicated, d) it happened quickly and was over as soon as it began, and e) it was a consensual act. Kinky? Indeed. Sleazy? Sure. Worth all the fuss over forty years later? Probably not.

  It may be that even stranger things happened in Led Zeppelin’s private quarters when no one but those directly involved were watching, but the relative openness of the Shark Incident has established its notoriety. It took place in broad daylight, in the middle of a party, with bemused onlookers standing around. There’s also a possibility that other acts from the same era got up to comparable backstage orgies yet never scored any number one albums or wrote several all-time rock anthems, and so never had their own “incidents” publicized. From today’s viewpoint, the relevant issues are that the groupie was not forced or coerced into something she obviously didn’t want to do, and that at the time it was repeated among the band’s circle as an amusing story but was otherwise no big deal. In hindsight it became more and more outrageous, but in July 1969 it was business (or pleasure) as usual for young entertainers and liberated women. Reported in several biographies and circulated as a classic anecdote of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, the Shark Incident has been magnified out of all proportion to its drunken, spontaneous, and very brief essentials.

  Wearing and Tearing: Led Zeppelin Versus Hotel Rooms

  The wanton vandalism of their tour accommodations by rock stars is one of the clichés of the genre. Songs like Lynryd Skynyrd’s “What’s Your Name,” Grand Funk Railroad’s “We’re an American Band,” the Rolling Stones’ “Memory Motel,” Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Travelin’ Band,” and others all allude to the stir-crazy sensation of endless road work that could only be alleviated by pointless yet somehow satisfying destruction of their lodgings. Members of the Led Zeppelin entourage were as guilty as anyone of this—but no more guilty than anyone, either.

  There are many stories of Zeppelin hotel and backstage havoc wrought all over the world. In 1969 John Bonham splattered two cans of baked beans over Richard Cole and a girl he was bedding in Los Angeles’s Chateau Marmont. Bonham laid waste to a Vancouver dressing room in 1970. Bonham once flooded John Paul Jones’s Hawaiian hotel room with a fire hose. Bonham and Cole took samurai swords to Jones’s suite in the Tokyo Hilton in 1971. Bonham smashed up three dressing room trailers in Nantes, France, in 1973. Jones’s New Orleans hotel room caught fire after he passed out with a lit joint and a transvestite friend. “When I woke up it was full of firemen,” the bassist admitted. The same year, Cole brought a Honda motorcycle to the band’s floor of LA’s Continental Hyatt House, where it was raced up and down the hallways at all hours; Bonham is said to have done the same with a Harley-Davidson. In 1977 journalist Steven Rosen noticed that the phone in Page’s Chicago suite had been forcibly pulled out of the wall. The ringing disturbed him, Page said. On the ’77 tour, the aftermath of a Zeppelin–Bad Company hotel party in Fort Worth, Texas, was compared to a nuclear holocaust. At numerous stops, drinks, clothes, water balloons, furniture, and appliances were tossed out of hotel windows.

  For all these confirmed instances—there are more apocryphal ones where the culprits and location are unnamed—the surviving members of Led Zeppelin have shrugged them off as wildly exaggerated or merely routine. Even while the quartet was still functioning, they dismissed the mayhem as something they outgrew after their first few circuits of North America. “Look, we were young then, but we’re not like that anymore,” Robert Plant explained to publicist Danny Goldberg no later than 1973. A few years on he looked back on those days as a lost era. “There was good fun to be had, you know, it’s just that in those days there were more people to have good fun with than there are now…. People were genuinely welcoming us to the country and we started out on a path of positive enjoyment. Throwing eggs from floor to floor and really silly water battles that a nineteen-year-old boy should have.”

  “Sitting in this hotel for a week is no picnic,” said Page to Cameron Crowe during the Zeppelin US tour of 1975. “That’s when the road fever starts and that’s when the breakages begin.” “On the surface it seems moronic,” pointed out publicist B. P. Fallon, “but it has to do with the pent-up energies after a gig. One minute you’re ruling the world, and the next, if the girls haven’t arrived yet, you’re in a hotel room alone.” “If it was fun you joined in, if it wasn’t you didn’t,” Jones recalled for Dave Lewis in 1997. “But that sort of stuff got a bit tedious after a while…. I just avoided it because I disliked all that violence stuff. I know Robert never liked it…. In fact, Robert and I used to go out walking a lot to try and get a daytime existence.” Plant himself has been particularly forthright about the matter. “Yeah, there were wild times, without having to go into the names of the recipients or the makes of televisions that went out the window,” he told Rolling Stone in 1988. “I don’t deny it. A lot I can’t remember, unless someone brings it up to me…. I can remember a stream of carpenters walking into a room as we were checking out. We’d be going out one way, and they’d be going in the other way, with a sign, ‘Closed for Remodeling,’ being put on the door. It’s kind of embarrassing.”

  Two qualifiers apply to these eventual admissions. One is that anywhere young men gather to let off steam after work, plenty of alcohol gets consumed and the parties usually turn boisterous; sometimes somebody gets hurt or something gets broken. All the personalities involved have spoken of the heavy boozing of Led Zeppelin’s first frantic, economy-class treks around Britain, Europe, or North America, and the “I can’t remember” line is not an excuse but an honest testimony of being blotto every night. The second factor to remember is that Zeppelin traveled with a road crew who were also males in their twenties, also doing heavy physical labor far from home. The four musicians in the act could cause trouble on their own, but add to them a complement of low-paid, anonymous chauffeurs, riggers, and bodyguards with less to lose (and fewer willing women to distract them) and the potential for destruction was multiplied many times.

  Again, the hotel-wrecking reputation was hardly unique to Led Zeppelin, any more than the sense of psychological dislocation that inspired it. Guitar hero Randy Rhoads, who accompanied the solo Ozzy Osbourne on his first albums in the early 1980s, confided to a friend what life in a popular touring rock ’n’ roll show was really like: “It was really grueling and… there’s a lot of weird people out there,” he said. AC/DC’s Angus Young, meanwhile, explained that the song “Highway to Hell” wasn’t a homage to Satan but a record of existence on the arena circuit. “All we’d done is describe what it’s like to be on the road for four years. When you’re sleeping with the lead singer’s socks two inches from your nose, believe me, that’s pretty close to hell.” “Imagine being revered on stage for that golden hour and then rushed back to your hotel cell,” remembered veteran keyboardist and producer Al Kooper. “You felt like some talented animal in a zoo on temporary leave.” The trails of devastation left by Led Zeppelin were blazed by many other performers.

  “It’s strange how success and room-wrecking seem to go together,” said Bev Bevan of the Electric Light Orchestra. “For years we never destroyed so much as a toothbrush holder and it was only when we were playing every night to sellout crowds of anything from 20,000 to 72,000 did we get in trouble.” The ELO drummer articulated one of
the hidden reasons for all the defenestrated TV sets: They could get away with it. For bands who toured as extensively as Led Zeppelin, the damage incurred by hotels was no more than overhead, paid for out of the nightly concert revenues. Like any professionals who travel for a living, the musicians and their crews became acclimatized to the itinerant lifestyle, becoming as well versed as any salesmen or executives in the amenities and regulations of various hotel chains (Keith Richards once commented that his toddler son Marlon’s first words were “room service”). The hotels, for their part, were insured and prepared for occasional disruption from guests, and depraved rock ’n’ rollers were actually getting more of their money’s worth than the quiet family of vacationers on the next floor. Knowing that any liabilities were soon covered and that they would be five hundred miles away the next day anyway, the musicians and their friends had few qualms about messy pranks, lost furnishings, or flooded hallways. One familiar story has Zeppelin manager Peter Grant handing a five-hundred-dollar bill to a hotel clerk who’d expressed a longing to toss a television out a window himself. “Here, have one on us,” he laughed.

  “I think there was an enormous amount of adrenaline that we were building up onstage,” Jimmy Page reflected in 2003, “and we were just taking it offstage into the land of mondo bizarro. You know, you’d have someone riding a motorcycle through a hotel hall, but that would only be exciting for fifteen minutes, then it would be next and next and next.” He also told biographer Mick Wall, “There’s a climax at the end of each show and the audience goes away, but you’re still buzzing and you don’t really come down…. There are different ways of releasing that surplus adrenaline. You can smash up hotel rooms—it can get to that state.” “It was like a traveling football team, really,” said Robert Plant. “But without being too facetious, that’s what people wanted. Once the seed had been sown, it would be terrible if it was just once a week. It had to be all the time.” Together the singer and guitarist point to the main drivers of Led Zeppelin’s barbarism—releasing tensions and living up to expectations—that, many years after all the damages have been repaired, seem understandable if not quite forgivable. Yes, Led Zeppelin smashed up hotel rooms. They were young rock stars going from town to town and country to country: Why wouldn’t they?

  Dazed and Confused: Led Zeppelin and Drugs

  Heavy substance abuse is another stereotype of rock ’n’ roll, and one that well applied to Led Zeppelin. Several of their songs make lyrical nods to cannabis (“Going to California,” “Misty Mountain Hop,” “Over the Hills and Far Away”), cocaine (“For Your Life”), or unspecified dependency (“Nobody’s Fault but Mine”). There are plainly druggy motifs to the abstract effects of “Dazed and Confused” and “Whole Lotta Love,” while Robert Plant ad-libs a suspiciously energized “I can’t stop talkin’…. I can’t stop talkin’…. I can’t stop talkin’” over the coda of “Trampled Underfoot.” In concert Plant made occasional spoken acknowledgments of pot smoking, and even explicated the “pocket full of gold” as “Acapulco Gold!” in “Over the Hills and Far Away”; he introduced “Misty Mountain Hop” with “This is a song about… walking in the park and you’ve got a packet of cigarette papers in your pocket and you’ve got some good stuff to put in it….” At other shows the singer prefaced “Dazed and Confused” with a story of the band’s genesis (“… as soon as we lit up our first joint, this was it”) and later spoke of how the group would deliver fans “… a little taste of that, a little toot of this, a little blow of that…”

  Most reports identify Jimmy Page as a heroin user from about 1975 to 1983, while John Bonham and Richard Cole are also implicated, and Peter Grant developed a severe cocaine habit that lasted from his Zeppelin years into the mid-1980s. Plant and John Paul Jones were, by the making of In Through the Out Door in 1978, “relatively clean” (Jones’s words), although both had taken marijuana and cocaine throughout the band’s career. Jones himself looks pretty glazed in photos taken at 1970’s Bath Festival, and Plant is seen puffing a joint as he walks offstage in The Song Remains the Same. The nineteen-year-old Plant was photographed leading a small pro-pot rally in his native Birmingham in 1967, and Page blamed a stoned camera crew for inadequate footage of their 1973 Madison Square Garden gigs: “Everyone was stoned at the time, but at least we did our job.” Richard Cole told Peter Grant’s biographer Chris Welch of a main reason for the band’s declining morale after 1975: “Well, basically everyone was doing coke,” he said. In Cole’s own Stairway to Heaven he wrote that Page admitted to him that he was “hooked” on heroin, and Eric Clapton, who performed with Page

  Neal Preston’s classic 1975 backstage shot has come to symbolize Led Zeppelin’s rock ’n’ roll indulgence.

  Courtesy of Duane Roy

  during the Action Research into Multiple Sclerosis (arms) shows of 1983, hinted that Page was “very frail” for the gigs. Other accounts state that members of Zeppelin were taking cocaine on their tour planes, just before hitting the stage (which would partly explain their athletic running and jumping around during “Rock and Roll”), and, in the case of John Bonham in 1977, right at his drums while performing.

  Drug use and drug addiction have been an occupational hazard of pop musicians for decades. Louis Armstrong, Gene Krupa, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Chet Baker, Charles Mingus, Stan Getz, Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, and Hank Williams are just some of the artists known to have taken, been arrested for possession of, or died from illicit drugs, before rock music ever existed. The rock revolution of the 1960s and ’70s came along with—and was abetted by—the rising drug culture of the same period, during which virtually all the performers were occasional or regular takers of one kind of drug or another: marijuana, amphetamines, barbiturates, LSD, mescaline, cocaine, or heroin. The musicians in Led Zeppelin were as swept up in the drug tide as anyone, and paid the price for it.

  “I can’t speak for the others,” Jimmy Page said in 2003, “but for me drugs were an integral part of the whole thing, right from the beginning, right to the end.” Though others have reported that Page was fairly abstentious in the first years of Zeppelin, by the end of the 1970s he was visibly and audibly affected by his intakes. “It was totally reckless behavior. I mean, it’s great that I’m still here to have a laugh about it, but it was totally irresponsible. I could’ve died and left a lot of people I love. I’ve seen so many casualties.” To journalist Lisa Robinson he defended, “We were doing three-and-a-half-hour concerts…. 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.” To rock writer Nick Kent he again made no apologies for his drugging: “I don’t regret it at all because when we needed to be really focused, I was really focused.” In 1988 Robert Plant told an interviewer, “The real lame thing is, and it has to be said, the singer went to bed. Not necessarily alone. But there was a lot to be said for trying to keep the voice in shape…. At a certain point, I had to say, ‘Oh, the sun’s coming up, I’m off.’” (In spite of such conscientiousness, many fans say Plant’s voice did wear down over his Zeppelin career.) “I guess we all got messed up,” the vocalist clarified in 2005. “The drugs did kick in and out…. And I had enough of what I’d had enough of quite early in the adventure.” In 1997 John Paul Jones said to Dave Lewis that by 1977, “Every band was doing the drugs thing at the time—we didn’t really worry much about it—but by then it was getting a bit out of control.” Later the bassist admitted regret over John Bonham’s death by alcoholic misadventure: “You always think, ‘If I’d have done this or that it might not have happened,’ but, in those days, people knew less about helping other people with those kinds of problems. And besides, none of us were in much of a position to tell other people how to live their lives. We all partied all the time.” In another interview Jones confessed, “I did more drugs than I care to remember—I just did it quietly.” “We never had anybody checking us up saying, ‘Oh, man, the blood test shows you’re reall
y low in minerals,” said Plant, and Peter Grant conceded in a 1993 conversation, again with Dave Lewis, that by 1976, “Jimmy’s health was suffering. There were definite drug problems with one or two people, including myself.”

  Clinically, Page, Bonham, Cole, and Grant may not have been as addicted as any street junkie. There are no accounts of them using needles for their fixes, and as rich musicians and well-connected managers they never had to steal or prostitute themselves to score. Bonham’s death was not caused by an overdose, while both Page and Cole have survived into ostensibly healthy middle age, and Grant managed to trim his massive weight and clean his own system of all but tobacco before dying of a heart attack at age sixty. Led Zeppelin’s contemporaries in rock ’n’ roll, like the members of the Grateful Dead, Aerosmith, Black Sabbath, and Eric Clapton, David Bowie, and Keith Richards, were just as far if not further gone into their own drug excesses, let alone the confirmed drug casualties of Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Gram Parsons, Sid Vicious, and so many others. Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, and even the Beatles were far more identified by the public with drug use by members and fans than were Led Zeppelin, and individual performers Bob Marley, Lou Reed, Keith Moon, Neil Young, and Iggy Pop were far more open consumers of marijuana, speed, or heroin (Reed even mimed shooting up onstage). And what of the obvious drug connotations of Doobie Brothers, Cheech and Chong, and the New Riders of the Purple Sage’s “Panama Red”?