There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll

by Robinson, Lisa

  *

  It’s possible that when I first met Led Zeppelin, that day in Miami, I may have been the only journalist who ever told them anything favorable about their music. Since the words “male chauvinist” could have been coined with Led Zeppelin in mind, the fact that I was female probably made my opinions count less. Still, they—and Jimmy in particular—were pleased that I noticed all the various musical references in their songs. In Miami, we taped some hesitant, guarded interviews; they hadn’t done many and really didn’t trust anyone from the press. Robert, who was a constant flirt, teased me with innuendoes and double entendres. This would go on for years and wasn’t serious—he just couldn’t help himself. With my cassette tape on, he told me he wanted to do something as notable as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. He said this with a straight face. We talked about Sam the Sham, Snooks Eaglin, Otis Redding, Tommy James and the Shondells, and Yehudi Menuhin. He said “Stairway to Heaven” might be one of the things that would still be written down “after he was gone.” (To me, the lyrics of that song were utter nonsense; years later Robert would alternately refer to it as a masterpiece or “that wedding song.”) He said he could never be bored onstage, because he never forgot that he could just as easily have become a “chartered accountant.” He referred to Zeppelin’s tours as “the crusades.” He said he had been told that Zeppelin was responsible for twenty percent of Atlantic Records’ business. I asked him about their reputation. “When we do something, we just do it bigger and better than anybody else,” he said. “When there are no holds barred, there are no holds barred. I like to think that people know we’re pretty raunchy and that we really do a lot of the things that people say we do. But what we’re getting across [onstage] is goodness. It ain’t ‘stand up and put your fist in the air, we want revolution.’ I’d like them to go away feeling the way you do at the end of a good chick, satisfied and exhausted. Some nights I look out and want to fuck the whole front row.”

  • • •

  After traveling a few more times with Zeppelin in 1973, I understood that if you wanted to interview Jimmy, you might often have to wait three hours—or three days—for him to appear. Robert was easier: more accessible, no less smart, quick with a quip, and immensely quotable. But it was always all about Jimmy. Everybody was always wondering and worrying what kind of mood he’d be in. Whether he’d had enough sleep. Whether he was eating. If he’d seen a particular bad review. Of course, he’d set it up that way. Drugs had a lot to do with it. Later, when I traveled with the Rolling Stones, I came to consider this the Keith Richards school of keeping people at a distance. As a former guitarist for the Yardbirds, Jimmy was a highly paid 1960s London session guitarist who formed Zeppelin with another highly paid London session musician, John Paul Jones. Robert and John Bonham were in a band called the Band of Joy, and they came down to London from wherever it was that they lived on the Welsh border and joined up. With the guidance of Peter Grant, they changed the rules of the music business. When Peter worked with Jimmy and the Yardbirds, concert promoters split the take 50-50 with the band, but the band rarely made a dime. Peter signed Zeppelin to Atlantic Records for the then-unheard-of sum of $200,000, before anyone at the label even heard a note of the first album (which was recorded for $3,500 and which Jimmy paid for out of his own pocket). Early on, Ahmet Ertegun told me, “We knew Jimmy Page and we knew he was a genius and he’d be the driving force of the group. We were happy to sign them even before we’d heard any music. I knew it was going to be a success. I’d already had a big success with Eric Clapton and Cream, and I knew this would be another extension of a blues-inspired British rock and roll phenomenon. They were coming, and they were coming in droves. They weren’t ripoffs of the blues, they were extensions. Well, maybe a couple of songs sounded close. But they sounded like . . . Led Zeppelin.” Because Peter Grant refused to let the band release singles, fans were forced to fork over more money and buy the entire album. He wouldn’t let Zeppelin appear on television where people could see them for free; if fans wanted to see the band, they had to buy tickets to the concerts. And, in a move that forever changed the rock concert business, he forced promoters to give the band ninety percent of the gate—take it or leave it. They took it. Instead of employing the usual local promoters, Grant hired Jerry Weintraub’s Concerts West to oversee all of the band’s tours. (Weintraub, now the colorful movie producer of the Ocean’s Eleven franchise, was then the manager of John Denver and concert promoter for Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra.) Peter and Jimmy (for Peter clearly worked for Jimmy) encouraged a mystique. But, eventually, they were irritated that while Zeppelin broke stadium attendance records, the Rolling Stones got all the good press. And so, after I’d seen their concert in Jacksonville and talked to them a bit in Miami, I was invited to join them again, this time in New Orleans.

  *

  In 1973, New Orleans was a party town at a party time. The French Quarter was a tourist destination, full of drunken fraternity boys throwing up in the streets. I had never been there and I was excited to be right in the middle of the Quarter. For me, it was all Tennessee Williams and those lacework balconies and all that important music. I wanted to talk to Robert and Jimmy about the music: about Fats Domino and Ernie K. Doe and the Meters and Professor Longhair. After I arrived and checked into the Royal Orleans Hotel, I walked around by myself—down Bourbon Street to the corner of Iberville to the Gateway club, where Frankie Ford sang “Sea Cruise.” Clarence “Frogman” Henry and Ernie K. Doe were alive and well and performing in such spots as the Nite Cap Lounge and the King’s Castle. Broken bottles and malt liquor cans filled the gutters in the streets of the Quarter and there were a number of people wandering around mumbling to themselves. Bars served something called “Hurricanes”—a drink I had never heard of in Manhattan. The Deja Vu was an appropriately named club that drew local teenage talent and visiting rock stars. The whole city seemed like a perfect place to just get drunk and throw caution to the winds. (Years later, Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor would talk to me at length about living and recording in New Orleans’ Garden District and how he hadn’t had a sober day in the entire time he had lived there.) After Zeppelin’s show at the New Orleans Municipal Auditorium on May 14, 1973, the next morning—which meant the early afternoon—the entourage assembled around the “observation deck” at the rooftop pool at the Royal Orleans. I brought a tape recorder to talk to “the boys.” Everyone except Jimmy oiled up for the tanning rays. Piña coladas were served. Millions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of concertgoers and endless logistics were involved in this tour. But at that time, when there were really only ten big bands in the world and there was this sort of semi-tropical, festive atmosphere, it didn’t feel like work. Robert Plant was parading around in the same red nylon bikini he’d worn in Miami. Even offstage he was all twinkly and hair-flinging. The rest of the band addressed him by the nickname “Percy.” To be around any English band in the 1970s, but especially around Zeppelin or the Who, was to constantly hear nicknames: Robert was Percy, John Bonham was Bonzo, John Paul Jones was Jonesy, and many of them had campier, or far nastier nicknames for their bandmates. There was a wide range of English accents—from Cockney to upper class. (Mick Jagger, I would eventually discover, could switch from one to another in a flash and did, depending on who he was talking to.) The roadies, and Richard Cole and Peter Grant in particular, sounded like total ruffians. Some of the far-northern English accents sounded like a foreign language. But almost to a man, they engaged in that Cockney rhyming slang: from the naughty—“Bristol” or “braces and bits” for “tits” (Bristol City, titty, etc.)—to the more benign “apples and pears” for “stairs.” This would quickly lose its luster.

  *

  At the Royal Orleans rooftop pool, Robert told me that the English press had put Zeppelin down for trying to do reggae by recording “D’yer Mak’er,” while Emerson, Lake and Palmer—who Robert referred to as “a bunch of old queens”—were considered good musicians. About E
LP, he asked, “Where is the magic?” Despite the oppressive, humid heat, Jimmy Page, pasty-faced and thin, wore white trousers and a red and black silk print shirt. When I took out my tape recorder, he put on a wine-colored velvet jacket. He said he hadn’t eaten in three days. He told me he was becoming increasingly afraid of flying. He told me he got weird letters and death threats, probably because he was a known collector of memorabilia relating to the English satanist Aleister Crowley, and especially because he bought Crowley’s house in Scotland and the occult Equinox bookstore in London. He said he dreamed of traveling around the world in a sort of motorized caravan, just going somewhere like Morocco and recording with local musicians. He’d done a bit of it, “But the problem with that,” he said, “is that you stand out as the rich European. You could be dressed in rags, and you still stand out as a European, the way an American does in London. And bang—they’ll come over for the money and you can just forget your recording.” We talked about how some of the press had decided, once again, that rock was dead, and Jimmy said, “Every time it gets weak, someone comes back and just goes ‘fuck you’ and gives it a kick in the ass again.” He bitched about the band’s bad reviews. This was, I would learn, a constant refrain. When I offered more of my personal opinions about their music, Jimmy was pleased. “That’s it,” he said, “you get it. But the rest of the press doesn’t give us a chance. I wouldn’t mind constructive criticism. . . .” I told him I didn’t think any musician believed there was any such thing. “But they seem to be losing the essence of what’s important, which is music, purely,” Jimmy complained. “They wallow in rubbish. And while I may be a masochist in other regions, I’m not that much of a masochist that I’m going to pay money to tear myself to bits—reading.”

  *

  During the week that Zeppelin was in New Orleans, on a night off, Ahmet Ertegun gave them a party at Cosimo Matassa’s studio, where Allen Toussaint had recorded local musicians for Minit Records. We all went in limousines to a building that resembled a warehouse and took a wooden freight elevator hauled by big ropes down to a basement. A portable air conditioner with a long plastic tunnel was set up from the hallway into the large room. Inside that room, the Mardi Gras Indians danced alongside Dejan’s Olympia Brass Band. Ernie K. Doe was there, wearing white linen trousers, a pink sport coat and a white tie. Art Neville was at the organ, ready to perform with the Meters. Ribs, red beans, rice and hot apple cake were served. And then the great blind blues guitarist Snooks Eaglin played with the legendary pianist Professor Longhair—who wore brown slacks, a brown jacket, white shoes and had Band-Aids on his fingers. Jimmy and Robert and John Bonham and John Paul Jones all beamed. “Ah, it’s one of those dreams,” Robert said to me, “like when I used to have the radio under the covers too late at night. Chris Kenner, Jessie Hill, Benny Spellman, those records were a part of me.” It was two in the morning when we all filed out of Cosimo’s. In the car, on the way back to the hotel, John Bonham talked to me about his cattle and his home in Stratfordshire.

  *

  I once asked Mick Jagger what was the most important thing in a rock band. “The drummer,” he said. John Bonham, called either Bonzo or “the Beast” by the rest of the band, was a Gemini with a true dual personality. Drunk, he was a madman. At the first sign of his temper, everyone got out of his way. But sober, to me, he was a sweetheart—articulate, and a gentleman. He lit my cigarettes, opened car doors for me, and once showed up at my hotel room wearing a suit and tie for one of the few interviews he ever did. It’s hard to imagine now, when drummers sit high on the stage on setups that resemble spaceships, but in those early days, Bonzo didn’t even have a drum riser. His solo, the twenty-minute “Moby Dick,” was a crowd-pleaser and an opportunity for Jimmy to go back into the dressing room if he so chose, for some quick sex. (Once, Jimmy reportedly went back to the hotel during the drum solo.) Bonzo is the one who was credited with driving a motorcycle down the hallway of the Continental Hyatt House in L.A., but it was probably Richard Cole who did that; no one who was there remembers it the same way. During a full moon—of which there were many on Zeppelin tours—Bonzo went wild. As the years went on, he had really bad stomachaches, became increasingly drug-addled and extremely homesick. But with his love of R&B and especially Motown, he probably was the greatest rock and roll drummer of that generation or maybe ever, and was never given credit for it during his lifetime. (Charlie Watts was primarily a jazz drummer, Keith Moon was overrated, and as for Ringo, when John Lennon was asked if Ringo was the best drummer in the world, he reportedly replied, “In the world? He’s not even the best drummer in the Beatles.”) Bonzo would go nuts and bang on people’s hotel room doors in the middle of the night, so Peter Grant eventually instructed some of the staff to get two rooms—a secret one to really sleep in, and another kept empty to deflect Bonzo’s four a.m. rampages. Once, on a street in Dallas, Bonzo saw a Cadillac he wanted (although it’s been written about as a Corvette; again, no one remembers it the same way). He told Richard Cole to wait until the owner showed up and insist that “Mr. Bonham from Led Zeppelin wanted to buy him a drink.” He paid $30,000 for the car, which was worth $20,000, shipped it to L.A., and put it in the basement of the Hyatt House while the band’s lawyer went through a rigamarole to get the insurance transferred. Bonzo then dragged musicians from other bands over to admire the car, drove it for two days, and sold it.

  *

  In January 1975, before the band was due to go onstage at the Chicago Stadium, Bonzo—who had debuted his Clockwork Orange boilersuit and bowler hat on this tour—was roaring mad and flinging furniture in the band’s dressing room. “I’d like to have it publicized that I came in after Karen Carpenter in the Playboy drummer poll!” he bellowed. “She couldn’t last ten minutes with a Zeppelin number!” But later that night, he sat in a booth at the gay disco The Bistro, and while Robert and Jimmy stood around listening to whispered propositions from the local talent—including a few drag queens—Bonzo talked quietly to me. “You know my wife is expecting again in July,” he said. “She’s really terrific, the type of lady that when you walk into our house she comes right out with a cup of tea or a drink, or a sandwich. We met when we were sixteen, got married at seventeen. I was a carpenter for a few years; I’d get up at seven in the morning, then change my clothes in the van to go to gigs at night. How do you think I feel, not being taken seriously? Coming in after Karen Carpenter in the Playboy poll . . . Karen Carpenter . . . what a load of shit.” To this day, I cannot hear “The Crunge” or “Trampled Under Foot”—both underrated Zeppelin songs and still my favorites—without hearing his superior rhythmic talent. In 1975, during the Stones’ summer tour, Ian Stewart told me that while Bonzo could be a “right evil bastard at times,” he said: “Everything with Zeppelin rocks and rolls. That’s because Bonham, who is probably the best drummer in rock and roll, will always see to that.”

  *

  You take guys in their twenties, put them on their own private jet, with tons of money and more drugs than they can handle, at a time when life was pre-AIDS, and they turned nothing down. It would be hard to find anyone in that situation who didn’t react with a sense of entitlement and grandeur, but rock stars especially were treated like children and encouraged to behave badly. However, there can be no question that along with all the drugs and the sexism and the bad behavior, the perks—like the plane—couldn’t have been more delightful. If you were going to shlep to a concert in, say, Pittsburgh, it certainly made it easier and more fun to travel on a private plane. Or to have a police escort to the hall (I had no idea then that you could apply for that, like a permit). So even though it was my husband’s birthday on July 24, 1973, we weren’t sentimental about such things and so I accompanied Zeppelin on their plane for the first time—to their show in Pittsburgh.

  The limousines were lined up outside the Plaza Hotel in New York City, and our seven-car motorcade made its way out of Manhattan to Newark Airport where the band’s 707 jet would take us
to Pittsburgh. The plane (the same “Starship” used earlier by Elvis and later by the Stones and Elton John) was painted gold and bronze with the “Led Zeppelin” logo along the side. I cajoled the band into lining up by the wing (no easy feat) so that Bob Gruen could take the photograph that would eventually become a postcard. Robert’s shirt was, as usual, unbuttoned. So, sadly, was John Paul Jones’. The stewardesses were Susan, dressed in maroon and pink, and Wendy—who wore a blue feather boa and whose uncle was Bobby Sherman’s manager. The plane was garish. I thought this was what all private planes looked like. The interior walls were orange and red, there were circular maroon and patterned velvet banquettes, white leather swivel chairs, a mirror-covered bar, something that looked like a fireplace and a white, fake fur–covered bed in the back bedroom. Four off-duty policemen who made up Zeppelin’s security team sat together on a sofa. Food was served: steak, string beans, radishes, celery, salad. Nearly everyone smoked cigarettes, and everyone drank. I have many photos of me, sitting with the band or with Ahmet Ertegun or Jerry Weintraub or Peter Grant on that plane, and there is always a drink or a cigarette, or both, in my hand. Or my tape recorder stuck in someone’s face. That summer, I wore little halter tops and open-toed platform shoes and flared jeans. I wore huge sunglasses. I never wore a watch and I remember thinking that it was corny if a musician ever wore a watch onstage. Sometime around the 1990s, when life got busier and more deadlines loomed, I started to wear a watch. But I still think it’s corny if a musician wears one during a show. At that time, I was thin enough to go out wearing tube tops and bright red satin camisoles—underwear, basically—trimmed in black lace. I wore fur jackets in the winter. (I was not yet wearing only black clothes. That came later. First of all, as hard as it is to believe, no one really made good black clothes then. Towards the very end of the 1970s, when I was spending more time in clubs and Studio 54 and such, and people were constantly spilling drinks, black clothes seemed a good, defensive idea.) When I went on Zeppelin’s plane, I carried a bag with my tape recorder, note pads, pens, and makeup. There was no check-in situation; we went right onto the plane, which was right on the tarmac. After landing, we went straight from the plane in limousines to the backstage door at the venue. These days this is all routine, but then, it was brand-new and felt special. There were cases of wine (usually Blue Nun) in Zeppelin’s dressing room, along with bottles of vodka and Jack Daniel’s. There were potato chips and occasionally, those “deli-trays” made famous in Spinal Tap. (Spinal Tap was so on the money in so many ways that my favorite comment about it came from Tom Petty, who once said, “I’ve seen Spinal Tap. It’s not funny.”) There were terrycloth bathrobes for the band when they came offstage soaked with sweat and had to go straight into air-conditioned cars for the “runners” back to the plane, or to the hotel. Considering that I felt cossetted and privileged during these excursions, imagine what it was like for “the boys.”