Peter Grant: The Man Who Led Zeppelin

by Chris Welch

  Violent events involving Peter Grant and his band on one side and US promoter Bill Graham and his men on the other in July that year were a defining moment. It was the day when the pioneering spirit of rock music died, amidst the thumps and grunts of a sordid beating inside a backstage trailer.

  The previous year had been a time of consolidation for Zeppelin, during which they celebrated their past achievements with the release of The Song Remains The Same and pointed to a more diverse musical future with their latest album Presence. As far as most of their public were concerned the band still seemed untouchable; giants of rock who earned millions and whose word was law. In reality, of course, they were just as vulnerable and uncertain about what life held as any other participants in a great artistic enterprise. Despite all the hype and all the uproar that seemed to surround Zeppelin, the bottom line was they were sincere about their work and were always seeking ways to improve and change.

  Unlike the gaudy glam rock bands that followed in their footsteps, creativity was always more important than the Rabelaisian lifestyle they were supposed to pursue. Jimmy Page and Robert Plant were gifted men, who took pride in their craft and were well versed in the roots and origins of the folk and blues that provided Zeppelin’s seed corn. John Paul Jones and John Bonham were consummate professionals and equally creative. All four were admired and respected by their peers, and together they had created a band whose influence was felt for years after its demise. Whatever happened during the latter part of the band’s career, nothing could detract from their achievements. Yet ironically, the man who helped them bring it off almost brought them down, by misuse of the very methods that had previously worked so well in their favour.

  Led Zeppelin had been out of action since May 1975 and there was an eagerness to get back into playing live. January 1977 was taken up with rehearsals, although Page and Plant also took time out to visit London’s thriving new punk rock clubs to see The Damned. The following month, just a few days before the band were due to start their latest American tour, Robert suffered a bout of tonsillitis.

  Once Plant had recovered, the eleventh US bash began on April 1 at the Dallas Memorial Hall. They had some 51 dates scheduled in 30 cities and they expected to play to some 1,300,000 fans. Grant and Cole based the band in hotels in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles and once again the entourage commuted between cities on the Zeppelin Starship. Peter recalled his mood during the build-up to the tour. “It was a really hard time for me because I had to leave the kids and my divorce proceedings were starting. John Bonham was also uptight that year and we took Rex King out to be his whipping boy.”

  Apart from Page suffering from food poisoning and the occasional riots by fans desperate for tickets, the tour seemed to progress smoothly. Despite Grant’s continuing anti-pirate crusade, bootleggers managed to record many of the concerts.* The recorded evidence of these sold-out gigs showed performance levels strangely below standard. Fans who eagerly taped their shows spoke later of guitars out of tune, lyrics forgotten and drum breaks muffed.

  At the Pontiac Silverdome on April 30 they played to 76,229 people, the largest audience ever assembled for one rock band. During these blockbuster shows Jimmy Page experimented with his Theramin, a unique electronic device played without touching the instrument, which made a splendid addition to the violin bowed guitar he used during ‘Dazed And Confused’. Recordings made at the Pontiac Silverdome captured the audience egging on their heroes. According to one review the sound was like ‘An immense battlefield with its constant firecracker outbursts.’ Robert Plant could be heard introducing John Bonham as ‘the greatest drummer in the band’.

  During May Zeppelin took a two-week holiday and Peter Grant went to Grosvenor House in London to receive an Ivor Novello Award for the band’s ‘colourful and energetic contribution to British music’. It was a time for honours and plaudits. The music business clearly held Grant in the highest esteem and was grateful for his efforts in helping to create such a lucrative industry.

  On May 18 they resumed the US tour in Birmingham, Alabama, and journeyed through the Southern states. They arrived in Florida on June 3, but the show at Tampa Stadium had to be cancelled after 20 minutes due to heavy rain, which began to leak into the electrical equipment on stage. Some 70,000 fans began to cause a disturbance that resulted in a ban on the group returning to Tampa Stadium. It was the first major ‘blip’ of the tour, but there was worse to come. Grant admitted later that the booking had been “a big mistake. Possibly one of our biggest, and all because we never realised there should be a rain date. It had been dreadfully wet for days in the area with rain like we’d never seen.”

  Peter should have realised that if an outdoor show was rained off, a supplementary ‘rain date’ had to be booked, which the band was then supposed to honour the following day. But Grant wasn’t concentrating. His mind was on other things and his health was poor. “Somehow we missed the detail on this one,” he admitted. “It wasn’t until we were on the plane flying from Miami to the gig that Richard Cole showed me the ticket which said on it ‘An Evening With Led Zeppelin June 3: Come Rain or Shine’, i.e. no rain date. I stormed off to blast Terry Bassett from Concerts West. Steve Weiss our lawyer should have caught it in the contract.”

  As was his wont, Grant was always ready to ‘blast’ others about a job he should have taken care of himself. Yet when asked about the litany of disastrous events that year, Peter was unusually forthcoming about the Tampa debacle. It was almost as if he preferred to talk about a storm and a riot than more painful events closer to home. “I should have sent Richard out to check the place,” he admitted. “But he’d been sorting out some trip for Robert and Jonesy to visit Disneyland with the kids. All sorts of trouble. If Richard had gone he’d have seen that they’d set up a canvas roof instead of a metal one, which we always demanded. So when we got to the site there was something like 1,000 gallons of water resting over the drums. I had to make a decision about them going on. There was a lot of pressure. When they were about to go on, the rain stopped. There were 70,000 fans gathered and we had to get it on somehow. So I decided to let them start. There was a great big rain cloud looming overhead. I thought at this rate it would be us who would be leaving under a big black cloud and sure enough, after three numbers it started pouring. I signalled to Robert to wind it up and off we ran. One funny aside to this was Robert told me later that as he was coming off stage, my son Warren shouted to Robert to pick up a Frisbee he’d thrown. As you can imagine Robert told him in no uncertain terms to leave it there!”

  The show had run for just twenty minutes before it ground to a halt. Police with riot gear moved in and began hitting and kicking protesting fans. Over a hundred fans and 17 police were injured in the ensuing fracas. The Mayor announced later that Led Zeppelin would be banned from ever appearing in Tampa again ‘for the health and protection of police and citizens.’

  Reporter Jack Lyons described the scene in Rock Scene magazine. “It all started innocently enough; fans drove from as far away as New York and Georgia, waving to each other with one thought in their mind – Led Zeppelin. The much publicised concert began as the rock group hit the stage at 8.20 p.m. ‘This is our first trip to Tampa in four years,’ said bare-chested Robert Plant, his huge penis bulging in his pants. ‘It’s good to be back.’ The band had barely played ‘The Song Remains The Same’ before lightning ripped through the sky and rain poured in a drenching torrent. ‘We have to stop or our equipment will blow up,’ yelled Robert.”

  While pressmen were trapped amidst the unfolding chaos, the band fled to their cars waiting backstage, with Grant and Cole shepherding their charges to safety. “Getting out was a nightmare,” recalled Grant. “We had to wait at the airport for John Paul’s wife Mo, who had travelled out in a separate limo which had spun off the road. It was another typical 1977 mishap all round. Now we would get the blame for all this and there was a town council meeting coming up at the weekend. So I put our view forward, which was the
truth. I took a double page ad in the Tampa Times or whatever it was, stating that in no way were we to blame and that Concerts West were taking responsibility. The way we rushed it through is that I knew Colonel Tom Parker’s son-in-law ran an ad agency, so we got him out of bed early on Sunday to get the ad in for the first thing the next morning. So, no matter what the council said, we were in the clear for all to see.”

  Another problem loomed. It seemed $10,000 had gone missing from the band’s funds. Grant was worried. After the Drake Hotel robbery, it seemed Zeppelin money was leaching away. There were no prizes for guessing where the money went or what it was used for, but said Grant: “There was a query over some of the expenses Richard had handled, but it all turned out to be an accountant’s error, thank the Lord. I mean, if it had been just a thousand dollars I could have lived with it. It might have been down to someone putting something on his expenses, but $10,000 was a bit different. The thing is, it wasn’t my money, or Richard’s. It was the band’s money and I was paid to be responsible for it.”

  In the midst of the riots and the mystery of the missing cash, the Zeppelin magic worked for all those who loved their music. Said Peter: “One positive memory of ‘77 was that I came to realise just how much it all meant to people. It was during our stay at the Plaza in New York, which we used as a base to fly out to the surrounding gigs. Our stint at Madison Square was still some weeks off. Every night outside the hotel there were scores of fans surrounding the limos and it was just amazing. Then we announced the New York dates on Scott Muni’s radio show. Woosh! All tickets gone. The tariff for that Madison Square Garden stint showed that our advertising costs were nil. The tickets sold out purely from demand on the streets.”

  Even Grant was impressed by the way the band’s success just kept escalating. “The loyalty of the fans astounded me. There was no hype, no MTV promotion or anything like that. It was all down to pure demand. At that point I really did wonder how much bigger all this could get. From those humble beginnings in 1969 to this level in the space of seven years was just astounding. And the music was still wonderful. I remember the first time Jerry Weintraub (promoter) saw Jimmy Page on stage. He said to me: ‘Is that guy gonna live?’ Jimmy was faking it a bit, which he often did for a laugh with the others. Being on stage was where it all happened for Jimmy.”

  Even if Jimmy was ‘faking it’ there was no doubt he looked ill and seemed painfully thin, unable to eat solid food and with flecks of grey beginning to appear in his black, tousled hair. He attempted to boost his health by eating bananas and taking more protein. The rest of the band stayed with their diet of horseplay in hotel suites. One eyewitness at the Ambassador East Hotel in Chicago spoke of seeing “a room with wall-to-wall hamburgers, Cola drenched bed sheets, French fried plastered walls, mustard smeared mirrors, a 16-piece telephone and gutted cushions where the furniture used to be.”

  Peter Grant turned a blind eye and pulled out his chequebook. Still agonising over his divorce, Grant kept his distance from the usual Zeppelin frolics. As long as he delivered the band and they delivered on stage, he remained proud and happy. Amidst all the media frenzy that now attended their every move, the group were determined to give value for money.

  The best shows lasted over three hours with an extra long acoustic set and each member of the band had their chance to shine, including their bass and keyboard player. Recalled Grant: “Jonesy was doing incredible versions of ‘No Quarter’ at this time. I wasn’t surprised there were a lot of bootleg albums from that tour because one night Benji LeFevre lost some of our sound desk tapes. I never did bollock him for it; I just put it down as one of those things. In fact in the early Eighties I was disappointed and hurt by his plan to become Robert Plant’s manager, which all went wrong in the end. I used to phone him up and I’d never get a return call or any communication. Silly really.”

  As Zeppelin grew in stature and esteem, so the world beat a path to their door. Peter Grant was most impressed when even the Soviet Union began to take an interest in their activities. “1977 was also the year I had a meeting with the Russians. I was invited to dinner at the Russian Embassy and the entire guest party came to the gig. It was utterly amazing.” The Russians came to one of four gigs at the Capitol Center, Landover, Maryland, at the end of May. “They really knew their stuff. I was in the limo with one of the wives and she said, ‘What’s the sound like for your group?’ and I said, ‘Very good,’ and she added that when they saw The Rolling Stones the previous year there was ‘no bottom to their sound’ because all the amps were hung above the stage. Amazing! They met the band beforehand and during the gig, instead of watching from the box, they all went to sit at the side of the stage. Jonesy then played variations from Rachmaninov during ‘No Quarter’ and the Russian guests were just blown away. We planned to go to Russia but after Robert’s tragedy, we had to scrap it. It was a shame because we could have been one of the first rock acts to go to Russia. Elton John went instead.”

  Peter was all smiles and full of old world courtesy when dealing with his VIP guests. Those who worked for him, however, noticed that at other times he was irascible, suspicious and hostile. He seemed to particularly dislike some of the young Americans who worked for the band during their US tours and formed the impression they were only there for the ride. One such new recruit was drum technician Jeff Ocheltree. He had been working for Billy Cobham, the drummer with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, when John Bonham had spotted him at a concert at the Crystal Palace Bowl, in south London.

  Intrigued by the idea of a ‘drum tech’ whose sole job was to tune drums and ensure the boss had a good sound on stage, Bonham offered Ocheltree a job as his personal assistant, even though he already employed long standing pal Mick Hinton to do this task. A couple of weeks after a formal meeting at Bonham’s LA hotel, Jeff Ocheltree got a phone call from Peter Grant and was asked, somewhat grudging as it turned out, to come on tour with Zeppelin and work as John Bonham’s official drum technician. It was the dawn of the era of greater expertise among road crews, but this did not impress the management.

  “We did a bunch of dates,” recalls Ocheltree, “and there were moments when I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ I had Peter Grant coming up to me and saying, ‘What are you doing anyway?’ So I said, ‘Well I don’t think you’d understand if I told you.’ Of course that would tick him off. I said, ‘I’m tuning the drum.’ He said, ‘Aw you don’t know how to tune a drum. That’s what John Bonham does.’ Peter left me alone for a while, but then he started coming up to me and saying, ‘I understand you are being paid in dollars. Well, you are going to be paid in pounds from now on.’ So I said, ‘That’s great.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘Oh, you are a sarcastic fellow are you?’ I said, ‘What is sarcastic about being paid in pounds? That’s your sterling – that’s your money.’ And he said, ‘Precisely.’ Then he said, ‘I don’t really see why we need you and Mick Hinton.’ So I said, ‘Well, I don’t want Mick to get fired.’ ‘What do you mean by that?’ ‘Well, you don’t need both of us but I know you need me.’ Then I thought, oh, that’s the wrong thing to say. So I apologised to him. Peter then said, ‘Well I just took that as another of your sarcastic remarks.’

  “Peter once heard one of the road crew guys complaining about the lack of security on stage. Let’s face it; Peter Grant was the band’s security. But if some fan wandered on stage or somebody became threatening, they had to take care of the situation. When he overheard the crew complaining he got really mad and left the stage. Then he came back with this great big heavy bag and he threw it down on the stage. He said to us, ‘Get over here.’ We ran over and he said, ‘Open up the bag.’ Inside was a bunch of brand new frame hammers. He said, ‘Use these for your security. I don’t want to hear another word.’ So later that night I looked down and saw Jimmy’s roadie hitting a fan on the fingers with a hammer.

  “I thought, ‘Oh my God, they took this literally.’ The road crew felt very threatened by Peter and very intimida
ted. To this day some of the guys will not talk about Zeppelin. It’s very strange, isn’t it?

  “Peter remained suspicious of me. He thought I was scamming the band. He said, ‘You’re just trying to make some money off them.’ I said, ‘Really? You think that this pays that well? You think you’re overpaying me? You just don’t understand what I’m doing.’ I remember a couple of times him threatening me and having John step in to say, ‘Hey, wait a minute.’ He explained that I was just trying to get Bonzo a great sound every night. But I didn’t think it was cool that he had to stand up for me, like that.

  “Peter Grant had a real temper problem. I knew a guy called Beauford Jones, a sound engineer who worked for Showco, who was asked to cover the Bad Company tours. On the first day he goes into the dressing room to get a Coke. While he’s pouring it Peter Grant comes in and says, ‘Who the hell are you?’ and grabs him by the neck and squashes him against the wall. Beauford told me later: ‘I thought I was going to die. I was gasping for air. I told him I’m just the house mix guy. I’m mixing the sound.’ Grant said, ‘Don’t you ever go into the band’s dressing room and take anything out of there.’ He was always bad vibing people and he was just not a very nice person to be around. That’s why it was not really a comfortable situation to be involved in, because you never had faith in the consistency of his behaviour. He had too much power and he viewed himself as a tough guy who was taking care of business. To give him credit he was a genius in certain marketing ideas. He went to Madison Square Garden and said, ‘Hey, I’m renting this place for three or four days. You get your people out of here, I’ve got my own staff.’ And he brought Led Zeppelin posters over from England to sell in New York. He didn’t want anyone in America getting their hands on stuff he thought he could take care of himself. He knew what he was doing and so did Bill Graham. Until he disrespected Bill Graham so badly, the two of them could have gone on to do even greater things. Bill Graham was a tough guy too and he was not afraid of Peter Grant one bit. Peter Grant intimidated a lot of people because they knew he was actually physically tough. But Bill Graham wasn’t scared of him.”