by George Case
Because of their huge record sales and cash intakes from concerts, the Led Zeppelin organization could afford ample supplies of premium substances, especially cocaine, but in the lucrative rock world of the 1970s such indulgence was a status symbol; any habits formed were unforeseen side effects of silver-spoon luxury. Similar problems took hold with high flyers the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, whose platinum albums guaranteed steady rewards of quality blow. But spending lots of money on drugs—promoter Bill Graham recalled facilitating a $25,000 cash advance that went straight to Zeppelin’s connection—does not necessarily imply physiological need. The members of Led Zeppelin took copious amounts of drugs and were in different ways debilitated by them, but they were not the only such offenders in their scene, nor even the worst.
You Need Coolin’: Led Zeppelin’s Arrest Records
Long-haired rowdies bringing rock music to the provincial towns of Europe and North America, crossing borders and surrounded by hordes of hopped-up kids, were in the 1960s and ’70s (and today, for that matter) prize targets for police. The security around Led Zeppelin, however, was such that they rarely fell afoul of law enforcement and, unlike other acts, were not constantly dodging charges and court appearances. Ironically, the most serious trouble any of them got into was because of rather than despite the personal protection they brought with them.
The Zeppelin touring party often met with police hassles in their early years, particularly with John Bonham’s and Richard Cole’s drunken revelry, but they usually managed to avoid formal charges or permanent convictions. Bonham slept off a 1969 Kansas City binge in a jail cell; the same year he had to be restrained from taking off his clothes onstage during a Long Island jam with the Jeff Beck Group, before the cops stepped in. In the American south the band encountered vigilante and police resistance to their hippie looks and foreign origins, though no actual busts went down. A 1970 post-gig limo ride from Ottawa to Montreal had Page and John Paul Jones racing into Quebec to keep their joints out of the jurisdiction of the Ontario Provincial Police. In Perth, Australia, in 1972 the band’s hotel was raided by the local law, but miraculously no drugs were found and the entourage made it out of the country. On the same antipodean tour Zeppelin were refused entry into Singapore due to their long hair. Jones has also told a story of being arrested for jaywalking in Los Angeles sometime in the 1970s and paying a $25 fine when he couldn’t produce a passport (the police had never heard of Led Zeppelin). In France in 1973 most of the act, including Bonham, Jimmy Page, and Robert Plant, along with most of the road crew, were tossed into jail overnight for hotel and vehicular destruction. No arrests were made following the theft of the band’s cash deposit from New York’s Drake hotel in 1973, but Peter Grant was charged with assault for smashing an inquisitive reporter’s camera after the robbery. In Monte Carlo in 1976, Bonham, Richard Cole, and roadie Mick Hinton were arrested after a nightclub fracas but were released the next day.
All of these would have been no more than misdemeanors or minor drug offenses had they been followed through, but in 1977 Zeppelin’s most damaging run-in with the law took place, the one that would affect the rest of their career. Since the Drake heist, their hired muscle had grown more aggressive and even paranoid. Backstage at Oakland Coliseum during a show on July 23, West Coast heavyweight Bill Graham’s staff member Jim Matzorkis was confronted by John Bonham, Peter Grant, Richard Cole, and Zeppelin bodyguard John Bindon after sharply refusing Grant’s son, Warren, a Led Zeppelin placard from a dressing room trailer door. Full of cocaine-induced anger and agitation, Bonham booted Matzorkis in the groin, then Cole kept Graham at bay as the equally wired Grant and Bindon laid into Matzorkis inside the trailer. The hapless employee was pummeled mercilessly by Grant and Bindon, and the Zeppelin drummer and his three henchmen were arrested, charged with assault, and released on bail the next day. Later, through lawyer Jeffrey Hoffman, the four pleaded nolo contendere (a legal sidestep requiring proof of neither guilt nor innocence), then paid out $50,000 and received suspended sentences.
This last condition hung over Bonham until his death: any further Led Zeppelin visits to the United States meant he would be subject to criminal prosecution should he have any more problems with the American police. His anxiety over such a prospect may have driven him to drink even more heavily than usual as the band began rehearsals for a subsequent US tour, which is what finally caused his expiry on September 25, 1980. In later decades charges of murder and other violent crimes would circulate around hip-hop artists and their posses, but in 1977 the Oakland bust was one of the first times a rock ’n’ roll group was at the center of something much heavier than a bust for drug possession, indecency, public drunkenness, or other petty crime. It was the bitter culmination of Bonham’s years of aggressive antics and the logical consequence of the coked-out arrogance that had infiltrated the Zeppelin operation. “I had to sing [‘Stairway to Heaven’] in the shadow of the fact that the artillery we carried around with us was prowling around backstage with a hell of an attitude,” Robert Plant remembered the Oakland debacle. As the Rolling Stones learned after hiring the Hells Angels as crowd control at the Altamont Speedway near San Francisco in 1969, private security teams can end up being more dangerous to their employers than the outsiders they are paid to fend off. After Led Zeppelin’s disbandment following Bonham’s fatal bender, Jimmy Page himself went through two British court cases after he was found with cocaine, but the guitarist was let off with a conditional discharge in 1982 and a fine in 1984; he was also caught smoking and “visibly intoxicated” aboard a commercial jet during the Page-Plant tour of 1995 and faced a $1,000 fine.
Other than these instances, though, the band and its associates were entirely upright, peaceable, law-abiding citizens.
16
Mama It Ain’t No Sin
Led Zeppelin and Groupies
Mrs. Cool Rides Around: The Girls of Zeppelin
Casual relations between male musicians and female fans were the third component in the great triumvirate of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll that dominated Led Zeppelin’s glory years. Throughout the Western world, the advent of the oral contraception pill, the women’s liberation movement, the relaxation of divorce and abortion laws, and a general sense of enhanced personal freedoms among young people led to a generational shift in long-standing standards of courtship, marriage, and morality. The upshot of all this was a widespread increase in premarital liaisons that became known as the sexual revolution. While there had always been a licentiousness to show business based on the aphrodisiac effects of fame, money, and mobility, in the culture of rock music in the 1960s and ’70s the opportunities grew exponentially. The members of Led Zeppelin took full advantage of them.
As were their drug-taking and hotel-wrecking reputations, though, the groupie-enjoying legends around the quartet have been stereotyped and embellished past their rather mundane actuality. Names of conquests more connected to other acts have been tied in with Zeppelin, and anomalies like the Shark Incident portrayed as regular occurrences. Almost every rock performer of the period was having casual sex with his fans; security teams and other gatekeepers were getting their fair share too. The difference with Led Zeppelin is that the band was enormously successful and their critical stature has risen since their disbandment, so their enthusiastic but not unusual partaking of carnal pleasures has become remade as a superlative to match their other professional accomplishments. “The record industry was fuelled by cocaine, sex, and music,” B. P. Fallon asserted to Brad Tolinski in 2007. “That was the norm. Except in the world of Led Zeppelin, the norm was magnified a million times.”
For rock ’n’ rollers on the road, sex at every stop was a given. It was no-strings, almost anonymous, sometimes even cruelly cavalier. “You won’t make much money,” Ronnie Hawkins famously told the Hawks (later the Band) when he hired them as his backup. “But you’ll get more pussy than Frank Sinatra.” Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman is said to have reached a tally of partners that ext
ended into four figures, while Jimi Hendrix looked on the plentiful women he and his friends encountered as just “Band-Aids.” Reporter Bob Greene once overheard a member of Alice Cooper’s tour party recounting his exploits from town to town: “Let’s see, Nashville yes, Greensboro no—wait, Nashville yes, Greensboro no, Madison yes, Ann Arbor yes, Toledo, let me think, I’m trying to remember what my room looked like, Toledo I got blown, Toronto yes…” “There are times when [women] come around after something and you’re after something, too, so you get it together and everybody’s happy,” recalled Country Joe McDonald of Country Joe and the Fish. “My personal record is five chicks at once,” recounted Van Halen’s David Lee Roth. Songs like Steppenwolf’s “Hey Lawdy Mama,” Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “On the Hunt,” Kiss’s “Room Service,” Styx’s “Midnight Ride,” Motörhead’s “Jailbait,” or the Stones’ “Starfucker” (live versions of which name-dropped Jimmy Page) were documents of the Dionysian lives led by peripatetic musicians during the most fervid years of the sexual revolution. Led Zeppelin’s own “Living Loving Maid (She’s Just a Woman),” “Sick Again,” “Royal Orleans,” and “Hot Dog” offer more firsthand accounts.
Overlooked in the annals of these rock ’n’ roll sexcapades is that the groupies of Zeppelin’s day were no longer the small-town, starstruck bobby-soxers who’d swooned for Sinatra or Elvis Presley. They had designs of their own. Some of them were determined young women who’d come of age just when free love and guiltless affairs were being touted as healthy and natural outlets for a society too long repressed by the old constraints of marriage, fidelity, and propriety; others were affluent and sophisticated girls who had already been initiated into sex, drugs, and rock music before ever meeting any rock musician in the flesh. Several of the groupies linked to Led Zeppelin aspired to celebrity themselves, and parlayed their relationships into a Warholian fifteen minutes of fame. The women based in Los Angeles, where stars from all media were familiar figures in a city whose main industry manufactured them by the hundreds, were especially calculating in their pursuits of both publicity and rock ’n’ roll performers. None of them, anywhere, were attracted to the men only for their great personalities, as if their eminence as professional entertainers was incidental. Jimmy Page himself was quoted as saying that groupies from the metropolises of New York and LA “make a religion out of how many pop stars they can fuck.” As crass or as opportunistic as the men could be, the women were not much more innocent.
Still, though there are several tell-all accounts by ex-paramours of Page and other rockers, it says something about the anonymity of most groupies that there are not more memoirs titled “My Night of Love with Led Zeppelin.” Outside of the big cities, the old dynamic still held: The band showed up for a concert, a few local hopefuls found their way backstage or to the hotel suite, and the next morning it was all over and mostly forgotten, certainly by the band. As Robert Plant recalled for Rolling Stone, “[S]ometimes I’ll meet somebody in New York or whatever, and they go, ‘Hey, do you remember Swingo’s, in Cleveland, on such-and-such a night?’ And I remember, uh, romps.” Page asked that Pamela Miller allow him to “do things” throughout the smaller burgs of America after he left their Los Angeles love nest, since it got “so bloody boring” otherwise. Even in their dressing rooms during Bonham’s “Moby Dick” drum solo, the other players might get a quick service from a lady with a backstage pass. “Those were the days of pure hedonism,” the guitarist said in 2003. “LA in particular was like Sodom and Gomorrah…. You just ate it up and drank it down. Why not?” To the Englishmen, the abundance of everything in America shaped and distorted all other considerations. As Zeppelin protégé Michael Des Barres explained to author Michael Walker in the cultural history Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll’s Legendary Neighborhood, “The young girls represented to me the absolute change of being in America, where after my whole life of living in this archaic, sort of regimented country where I could have been speaking Latin, I come to America and the sandwiches are this thick and the girls are this thin.”
In hindsight, the sex—like so much else with Led Zeppelin—may have been overstated. For one thing, the musicians sometimes found it easier to cohabit with one lover over a single time frame, or when in a single location, rather than go to bed with a complete stranger night after night. Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham were all married men with children when the group was formed, and Page was in a long-term relationship after 1970, which was sometimes enough for him to resist temptation. In other settings they contented themselves with sex shows (strippers or duo acts) rather than the real thing. Road manager Richard Cole and his team of roadies also screened many an applicant before they could get to the four players in the group, leading to tales of “Led Zeppelin sleaze” that involved no one from the actual Led Zeppelin, and friends like Roy Harper likewise benefited from what Plant called “some of the Led Zeppelin by-products, like the occasional blow job.” “While we had a reputation as rampaging sexual vandals,” Plant said in a 1985 interview, “the truth is that most of the time we were looking for nothing [more] at bedtime than a good paperback.” Well, maybe. To Rolling Stone in 1990 he went into considerably more detail: “Yeah, that era, the whole thing of the GTOs… Yeah, shoving the Plaster Casters’ cast of Jimi Hendrix’s penis in one of the girls’ assholes at some hotel in Detroit was… quite fun, actually. I don’t remember who did it, but I remember I was in the hotel at the time. It was… free love.” In 2005 he was more up-front, saying, “Well, it depended on whose room key you had. There was a certain amount of youthful splendor in the grass, but it was pretty overblown.” In the 2004 documentary The Mayor of the Sunset Strip it’s remarked that Plant felt the title subject, LA superfan Rodney Bingenheimer, was more popular with women than he was. “With the females, sexually it was a very liberal scenario—loose as a goose,” said B. P. Fallon. “You could say a bit of third-leg boogie went on.” Just a bit.
Today, a list of the most confirmed Led Zeppelin conquests can be assembled from interviews, autobiographies, and other reminiscences, some of these tales a bit too tall to be taken at face value. Prominent figures would include, but are by no means restricted to, the following.
Pamela Miller
Jimmy Page’s main squeeze in Los Angeles for a few months in 1969 and sporadically thereafter, “Miss P” later described her adventures with various, um, members of Led Zeppelin, the Doors, the Stones, the Flying Burrito Brothers, the Who, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience in the entertaining book I’m with the Band. (Her chronicle also discusses heavy flirting with Robert Plant and mentions a girlfriend named Mickey who was, in her words, “hanging on” to John Paul Jones.) Miller, who now goes by the name Pamela Des Barres after her marriage to the aforementioned Michael, was one of Frank Zappa’s Girls Together Outrageously, a clique of Angeleno girls the acerbic Zappa cultivated as a kind of performance art complement to the all-male musical acts that were springing up throughout southern California in the late 1960s. Previously interviewed for Stephen Davis’s Hammer of the Gods, she mentioned in passing that Page used whips on her GTO friend Miss Cinderella (Cynthia Sue Wells): “She loved it!” Said to be the partial inspiration for the character Penny Lane in Cameron Crowe’s 2000 film Almost Famous, Miss Pamela was a member of one of the first idealistic groupie groups (she disdained the term herself) who genuinely believed themselves to be muses of the musicians they slept with: In their own minds, the GTOs were devoted fans first, artistic inspirations second, and sexual playthings third. Perhaps the most famous groupie to survive the era of serial partners and widespread drug use, Pamela Des Barres has gone on to author several honest and funny volumes compiling her very intimate history of rock ’n’ roll.
Lori Mattix
A Page girlfriend whose existence was unknown until the publication of Hammer of the Gods in 1985, the celebrated “Lori Lightning” was involved with the guitarist from 1972 to about 1974. Not one of the GTOs but a later arrival on the Sunset Strip, s
he was notorious for her age when swept up into the Zeppelin scene—only fourteen years old—and for emerging after the hippie conceits of the 1960s groupie pioneers had faded. Page’s romantic interest in a juvenile was questionable, to say the least, but unlike other infamous cradle-robbers like actor Rob Lowe, singer R. Kelly, or filmmaker Roman Polanski, he never saw his dalliance blow up in his face: he met Lori’s mother, took the girl to the Disneyland amusement park, and sternly made her smoke an entire pack of cigarettes when he caught her lighting up.
Today the adult mother Lori Mattix has spoken fondly of her days and nights with Page, and Cameron Crowe has remembered a wistful latter-day meeting with an unidentified rock star who asked him, “Have you seen Lori?” It was Lori Mattix who Page was playing to when performing the 1972 Led Zeppelin concerts in Los Angeles and Long Beach, captured in the powerhouse How the West Was Won CDs of 2003. For all her status as Zeppelin’s underage angel, however, Lori had already been modeling and haunting the rock ’n’ roll hangouts of Hollywood when she met Page, and was not shy about being photographed with famous musicians in glamorous poses. She has also claimed (in Pamela Des Barres’s Let’s Spend the Night Together) that it was none other than David Bowie who deflowered her, though the chronology is problematic, since her Page affair likely began in June of 1972 and Bowie’s first tour of the US was not until later that year. In that book she also discusses subsequent hookups with Ron Wood and Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Though perhaps more mercenary than the older groupies whose place in the hearts and bedrooms of English guitar heroes she usurped, Lori Mattix and her teenage peers were still products of the same blissfully permissive time and place of southern California in the early 1970s.