by Rees, Paul
“Bonzo put on his Teddy Boy suit and slicked his hair back to go,” says Kellie. “I’ll remember one moment till the day I die. It showed off all Robert’s confidence and how he was this preening peacock.
“We were coming out of the show. I thought it had been wonderful but Robert wasn’t impressed—he thought Elvis had died when he went into the army. As we were walking to the limo a couple of girls walked by in the afternoon sunshine. Robert shouted to them: ‘Don’t worry, girls—Elvis is alive and he’s got long, blond hair!’ ”
9
SODOM AND GOMORRAH
That’s the kind of world they inhabited and Robert detested it.
Zeppelin closed 1972 and began the next year touring the U.K. There was a visceral, almost manic intensity to these twenty-five shows, the band cranked up into top gear. London aside, the venues were modest, theater-sized, seeming not quite big enough to contain them. When they were like this, locked into each other and the moment, it was as though they were an untamed force of nature.
Each night would open with an explosion of drums, Bonham hunched behind his kit, arms flailing. And then, to a blaze of white light, Page stepped forward to fire up the headlong charge of “Rock and Roll.” Next, they would go into a song destined to appear on their fifth record, “Over the Hills and Far Away,” light on its feet and effortless, before bringing the hammer down again on “Black Dog.”
His chest bared and head flung back, Plant puffed himself up and paraded through this spectacle like a great lion. No one, him least of all, doubted for a second who everyone was looking at. And he was now more than just a singer. He would send his voice shrieking to the heavens—using it like an instrument, just as he had heard the great Arab singers do in the markets and mountains of North Africa.
The sets were long, nearly three hours, but full of peaks and valleys—“Whole Lotta Love” stretching out into a melody of old blues and rock ’n’ roll songs, each night rounded off by a shuddering “Heartbreaker.” Yet it was “Stairway to Heaven” that emerged as the centerpiece of the show, hushing audiences as it unfolded, sending the place wild when it swept to an end. These were the best of times for the band in their homeland. Just then, it would have been impossible to believe that this was to be the last time they would tour the country.
Two London shows rounded off the first leg of the tour, both at Alexandra Palace, an elegant Victorian building set on a hill to the north of the city and once the site of the BBC television studios. The last of these took place on December 23, snow falling on a freezing night, and after it Plant handed the band’s crew a Christmas present. It was a single bottle of Scotch whisky to be shared between them. By now they had grown used to Plant being cautious with his money and had given him a suitable nickname. Among each other and his band mates he was called Percy—the man who never got his purse out.
When the band was not working Plant saw very little of Page and Jones. He would retreat to Jennings Farm, spending his time off messing around in his music room or, on a Sunday morning, playing football for the local pub team. Bonham had also bought his own farm, a fifteen-acre spread a couple of miles down the road from Plant’s, and the two men often met up for a beer, although Plant steered clear of Bonham whenever he went off raging.
“When John was really having a drink, I think he scared Robert and he didn’t want to be around him,” says Stan Webb, guitarist with Chicken Shack and one of Bonham’s regular drinking buddies. “I can remember a lot of the big nights I spent with Bonzo, and Robert wasn’t present at any of them.”
“Page, and Bonham to a degree, were different to me,” Plant told the writer Cliff Jones. “I reasoned that I could sing about misty mountains and then chip a football into the back of the net on my days off. That felt like the good life to me back then. It wasn’t all-consuming for me in the way it was for the others.
“Don’t forget that we had no choice but to get caught up in all that hotel room and drug binge kind of thing, because it was part of the experience, almost expected. But I always knew there was a timeout when I’d get off the bus and come home.”
Plant bought a second property, a working sheep farm at Dolgoch on the southern edge of Snowdonia National Park in Wales. Dividing his time between there and Jennings Farm he settled back into life with his wife, daughter and newborn son at the end of the U.K. tour. He had converted the old stables at Jennings Farm and went riding in the surrounding fields or hiked up into the hills.
By now he had also wrapped around him a close-knit gang of mates, most of whom he had known from his first bands or the local club circuit. Although people came and went, the central core of this group has remained to this day. To a man they’re fiercely loyal to Plant, so much so that in the Zeppelin camp they were referred to as his “Midlands mafia.” Among these friends, and with his family, he seemed less imposing, more relaxed, although no less sure of himself.
Bev Pegg, a local folk musician, first met Plant that year. “He was converting his barn into a recording studio and he’d got these old Revox tape machines lying around that he didn’t know how to use,” he recalls. “I gave him some tips on how to multitrack with them. He’d got a beautiful old jukebox in there, too.
“He took me around the house. The living rooms and the bedrooms all had a very Indian-style décor. There were several cars parked out the front, a late-’50s Buick and a maroon Aston Martin, which he said he’d bought from Donovan. He seemed very down to earth, though. He could be a bit abrupt sometimes, but I found it difficult to understand all these reports about hotel rooms being smashed up. It didn’t sound like the same bloke I knew. He always gave me the impression of being someone who’d be in control.”
“Robert had kept in touch with me and he’d come by when Zeppelin weren’t doing anything,” remembers Bill Bonham, keyboard player in Obs-Tweedle, Plant’s immediate pre-Zeppelin group. “The last time I saw him was at Jennings Farm in ’73. He wanted to know if I still had a pair of trousers that he’d left at my parents’ pub five years ago.
“We went out to his village pub and he was telling me about all the money he was making. Back then he was still saving the money-off coupons from his cigarette packets. Then he said he’d left his wallet at home and I had to pay for the drinks.”
Soon enough Zeppelin stirred again. For the next tour Plant wanted to have a sound engineer to enhance his on-stage vocals. He was recommended Benji LeFevre, a twenty-three-year-old Londoner who had been working with the prog-rock band Soft Machine and at a jazz club, Ronnie Scott’s.
“He rang me and suggested we meet near his home—at this pub in Kidderminster called the Market Tavern,” recounts LeFevre. “He told me they had a great stripper on. So I took the train up from London, met him, watched the stripper and had a few pints. Then he asked me back to his place.
“We got in his E-Type Jag and he scared the living daylights out of me with his driving. Anyway, I didn’t appear fazed so I guess I passed the audition. I thought he was arrogant, full of himself and very confident. He was also articulate and I thought perhaps I could have a laugh with him.”
The band went back out on the road at the start of March, touring Europe. This was a prelude to the serious business. Released at the end of that month, the new album paved the way for their biggest and most ambitious assault yet on North America.
It had taken months of wrangling, but the band had pruned the excess of material they had cut at Stargroves the previous spring down to eight songs. The rest they put to one side. One of these leftover tracks gave the album its title, Houses of the Holy, the first time they had bothered with such a thing.
If Zeppelin had felt pressured at having to follow the staggering success of their fourth record it did not show. Most of all, Houses of the Holy sounded like the work of a band that felt they could do whatever they liked. At best, this sense of abandon resulted in some of their most enduring songs, such as “The Song Remains the Same” and “The Ocean,” full-bore rockers both, Plant’
s urging vocals cutting a swathe through Page’s driving, densely layered guitar parts. Or the gently meandering “The Rain Song,” Page’s response to ex-Beatle George Harrison, who had told Bonham his band could not do ballads. Or “No Quarter,” an imposing and doom-laden epic that Jones had brought to the table.
This sense of ease also allowed for slighter, airier fare, like “Dancing Days” and “D’yer Mak’er,” the latter’s title coming from an unfunny joke about Jamaica, the song itself more palatable than Led Zeppelin doing cod-reggae should have been. Far less appealing was “The Crunge,” a horrible homage to Otis Redding that failed gracelessly to locate a loose-limbed funk groove.
The record was given a lavish cover, designer Aubrey Powell being dispatched to the north coast of Northern Ireland to photograph cherubic infants scaling the Giant’s Causeway, a vast natural rock formation. According to the writer Mick Wall, when Powell informed Grant such a shoot would be expensive, Zeppelin’s manager fired back: “Money? We don’t care about money. Just fucking do it.”
Houses of the Holy, as expected, raced to Number One in the U.S. and the U.K. Yet good as it was, it was not the all-conquering monster their fourth record had been and it fell off the charts before the end of the summer. In this regard Zeppelin’s thunder was stolen that year by another British rock band, Pink Floyd, their grandiose concept album The Dark Side of the Moon appearing the same month.
The reviews were also poisonous. Writing in Rolling Stone, Gordon Fletcher described Houses of the Holy as “one of the dullest and most confusing records that I’ve heard this year.” In response, Grant appointed the band a U.S. PR, twenty-two-year-old Danny Goldberg, a teetotal vegetarian. Goldberg worked for an upmarket New York agency, Solters, Roskin & Sabinson, which also handled the affairs of Frank Sinatra and Playboy magazine, and was briefed to improve the band’s standing among American commentators.
His first route to doing so was to emphasise the scale of their achievements. He sent out a press release describing the band’s forthcoming tour as “the biggest and most profitable in the history of the United States.” He found an instant ally in Plant, even now wanting to impress his success upon his father, still then convinced his son ought to get a “proper job.”
When it began that May the sheer size of the tour was self-evident. The opening night at Atlanta Stadium drew a crowd of 40,000, earning $246,000 in ticket sales. At the next show at Tampa Stadium Zeppelin set a new attendance record of 56,800. The production itself was grander—the band utilising louder PA systems, mirror balls and a battery of lasers. And Grant had forked out $30,000 to charter them a private plane, a Boeing 720, stocked with a bar, a bedroom and an organ for Jones to entertain them on. It was christened “the Starship.”
“Oh God, that tour was the biggest I’ve done,” says Cole. “It was intoxicating. I mean the band was enormous. The plane? Well, it was very luxurious but it was still about going to work. The band would get on it and have a few drinks. Coming back, they’d discuss the gig. Then they’d get off and get in the waiting cars and decide where they were going for the evening.”
Or, as Page told the writer Brad Tolinski, “Richard Cole ran into one of the air hostesses recently and she said to him, ‘You know, I made a lot of money off you guys.’ When people on the plane used to sniff cocaine, they’d roll up $100 bills to use as straws. Then, after they were high or passed out, they’d forget about the money. That might’ve been true, but I’ll tell you one thing: they never got any of my money.”
Presiding over the whole enterprise was Grant. He had made it his job both to seal the band off in their own bubble and to get them every penny they were owed. The bigger they got, the more forceful he became in enforcing each aspect.
“Everybody was shit-scared of ‘G,’ ” says Benji LeFevre. “But it must have been a very difficult period. Peter’s whole philosophy was to change the music industry from the promoters making all the money to the artists doing so—and then paying the promoters a fair share. All these guys were Mafiosi. There was only Bill Graham striking out on his own and going, ‘This is for the people, man!’ Peter must have encountered incredible resistance and probably violence.
“Plus when you work for someone who used to be a wrestler you’ve got to understand that physical intimidation is one of the responses in your arsenal. Especially in a country where people are allowed to carry guns. It’s a different order of watching your back, even though the band had security guards who were all off-duty FBI guys.
“Richard Cole was there to be Peter’s assistant and to make sure that nobody touched anybody. And a lot of dodgy things happened. But Richard had no capacity to make any decisions—that was Peter. And probably Peter and Jimmy, and then the rest of them, in that order.”
The shows themselves were electric. As a band they were riding high on the crest of a wave, on-stage revelling in their own glory. Audience reactions were wild, hysterical. I once asked Plant and Page how it felt, right then, to be in command of all that power.
“It was a question of communication between band and audience,” Page replied. “You sent it out and they sent so much back, and it just kept building. That’s how you made it into an event.”
“We needed a physical thing—a catalyst between the band and the audience,” Plant added. “A sense of power? We didn’t have it. It was just up there somewhere,” he said, waving his arms above his head.
The band invited their friend Roy Harper along to open the shows. Harper found himself attempting to quieten baying hordes with his lone voice and an acoustic guitar.
“It was like walking into the lion’s den,” he says. “I was in front of 50,000 people by myself. I remember being on stage at the Kezar Stadium in San Francisco. At the back, it was almost Falstaffian, debauched. At the front, there was a man who was completely stark bollock naked, except for the fact he was painted green and his pubes were scarlet. There’s no way of communicating with that many people, who were that out of it, in one place.”
For all the triumph of their shows, something rotten had begun to fester at the band’s core. The buccaneering spirit with which they had first caroused around America had turned meaner and more avaricious. Most often this change was embodied in Bonham, to whose roistering and acts of destruction there was now, often as not, a savage intensity.
The journalist Nick Kent recalled being in a club one night and seeing Bonham and Cole beat a guy to a pulp. There was no apparent reason for this and as they left the two of them tossed handfuls of dollars onto their prone victim.
“It makes me feel sick when I hear Robert Plant talking about what a great geezer Bonzo was,” Kent wrote. “Because the guy was a schizophrenic animal, he was like something out of Straw Dogs.”
Page, too, had started to withdraw into his own twilit world. Long before tragedy stained the band for him, it was this turn of events that sowed the seeds of discontent in Plant.
In Hammer of the Gods, his notorious biography of the band, the American music writer Stephen Davis purported to have lifted the lid on the crazed world Zeppelin inhabited on the road. Published in 1985, the book portrayed each of the band members as indulging in a non-stop orgy of excess and violence, with no fear of reprisal or thought for the consequences. Plant, Page and Jones were each at pains to distance themselves from Davis’s book as soon as it emerged, claiming it was wildly inaccurate and that the writer had known nothing about the band. Plant in particular was dismissive of it, suggesting Cole had been the source of most of the more outlandish stories in the book and that he had greatly exaggerated them.
“He [Cole] had a problem which could easily have been solved if he had been given something intelligent to do rather than checking into hotels, and I think it embittered him greatly,” Plant told Mat Snow of the NME in 1985. “A lot of the time he wasn’t completely well, and his view of things was permanently distorted one way or another.”
Plant maintained that many of Zeppelin’s extracurricular activities amount
ed to nothing more than youthful high jinks. This might have been true of their earlier tours, but there is no doubting the destructive turn things took the more omnipotent-seeming they became. Bonham was usually the central figure in this, with Cole and assorted hangers-on joining in or egging him on to carnage. Yet whereas Jones vanished himself at such times, Plant was frequently present, although more so as a voyeur than a participant, disapproving of the most extreme goings-on but remaining on the scene.
Revelling in his role as Zeppelin’s frontman he was hardly a shrinking violet, and he certainly did not abstain from the sex and drugs part of the rock ’n’ roll equation. But Plant also held to a set of values that were those of a peace-and-love-abiding hippy, and he grew increasingly weary of the darker forces that rose up in and around the band. These had very much taken root by the time of the American tour of 1973.
“That tour was crazy, absolutely crazy,” says Roy Harper. “Episodes going on backstage that weren’t always that kosher. The under-the-surface tensions, shall we say. I’m not going to tell any kind of story but it was actually deathly. It probably happens with a lot of bands, though not on that scale.
“Bonzo, though he was a friend of Robert’s, his high jinks were extreme. Although he wasn’t actually that violent a person, he was capable of being a rough boy. There were times when there was gay abandon in circumstances that others would have thought were close to the edge. More than once, Richard Cole gave me his watch and said, ‘Hold that for a minute.’ That’s the kind of world they inhabited and Robert detested it, I know he did. I think that’s one of the reasons why, after the fact, he never wanted to be involved with Zeppelin.
“Yet Robert would be in the middle of it, hating it, whereas John Paul Jones wouldn’t be seen at all. John Paul slept on a different floor to the rest of them at the hotels and so did Peter Grant. The others were all culpable because they were party to what was going on. In those days Robert was a peacemaker. He would make the way he was feeling obvious. You’d only have to look at his face to know it wasn’t what he wanted for himself, the band or the humanity surrounding them. There is an innate good person in him.”
