There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll

by Robinson, Lisa

  *

  July 29, 1973, was the final night of Led Zeppelin’s sold-out run at Madison Square Garden. The backstage security at the Garden wasn’t anywhere near as uptight as it is now. The Garden’s been renovated since then, but as I recall, the dressing rooms were still off the rotunda, to the right of the stage if you were in the audience looking at the stage. They were part of the same long concrete hallway that now houses the locker rooms for the Knicks and the Rangers. But at that time, Zeppelin’s dressing rooms were more communal. If you were one of the few allowed back there, you could just sort of hang out with the band—except that Zeppelin never really got there early enough to hang out before a show. I seem to recall police escorts from the Plaza racing to the Garden, with very little time between the band’s arrival and the start of the show. For these summer 1973 shows, the band was being filmed for what eventually would become the disappointing movie The Song Remains the Same. The film crew, hired by the band, got little direction from the band, and seemed confused about what they were doing. (Years later, Jimmy remixed and re-mastered—and for all we know, might have re-recorded—some of the music for the film’s re-release.) On July 29th, there were more security men than usual with bomb-sniffing dogs checking out the area underneath the stage. Richard or Peter put me on the side of the stage—as they always did—right by the band’s amplifiers. I spent many nights directly next to those speakers and I never wore earplugs; I thought they were for civilians. It’s a miracle I still have any hearing left whatsoever. The band did a blistering three and a half hour set and when it was over, the band and a few of us were mysteriously shoved into cars and raced to the Upper East Side apartment of the band’s lawyer’s secretary’s boyfriend. No one told us why we were there, but for some reason “the boys” needed to be kept away from their hotel, the Drake, on East 56th Street. The hotel was crawling with cops and FBI agents, and the roadies rushed to the rooms to get rid of all the drugs. Later that night, at a party hosted by Ahmet Ertegun at the Carlyle Hotel, we learned that $253,000 in cash had been stolen from the group’s safe-deposit box at the Drake. “Peter did have a funny expression on his face,” Robert said later, “but what were we going to do? Break down and cry? We had just done a great gig.” The next morning Peter Grant, Richard Cole and Danny Goldberg faced press accusations that the robbery was faked by the band. The band’s position was that someone who worked at the hotel took the money. The “case,” such as it was, was never solved. The 1973 tour was over.

  • • •

  By 1974, Atlantic Records gave Led Zeppelin anything they wanted and what they wanted was their own record label, just like the Rolling Stones had. Zeppelin’s Swan Song Records signed other acts—1960s band the Pretty Things, Scottish singer Maggie Bell—but the only one other than Zeppelin that had any real commercial success was Bad Company, led by ex–Free singer Paul Rodgers. On May 7, 1974, Zeppelin came to New York City for a Swan Song launch at the Four Seasons restaurant. They instructed Danny Goldberg to get some swans for the pool and when he couldn’t find any, he got geese instead. The band was furious. “We all live on farms!” Robert shouted. “Don’t you think we know the fucking difference?” Bonzo and Richard Cole picked up the geese, carried them outside and let them loose on Park Avenue. The band then traveled to L.A. for a Swan Song launch (with real swans) at the Bel-Air Hotel, attended by, among others, Bryan Ferry, Bill Wyman and Groucho Marx. They went back to England to record Physical Graffiti, the double album that included the Eastern-flavored “Kashmir,” which many still consider the band’s real masterpiece and which, more than twenty years later, was sampled by Sean “Puffy” Combs. I went to London as Zeppelin’s guest for a huge party they had at the Chislehurst Caves on Halloween to celebrate Swan Song in England. The plan was, after the Christmas holidays, Led Zeppelin would come back to the U.S. to start the next tour.

  *

  Led Zeppelin’s 1975 tour did not start off on a good note. Right before the tour, Jimmy injured his finger getting off a train in England. Robert had the flu. The first show, on January 20th in Chicago, was mediocre. The second one, the following night, was better. We were all staying in the Ambassador East, the hotel with the famed Pump Room—the restaurant where Chicago columnist Irv Kupcinet did his radio show. The walls of the Pump Room were lined with framed photos of every show business personality who had ever come to Chicago—among them, Frank Sinatra, Eydie Gorme and Steve Lawrence, Don Rickles, Myron Cohen. In his suite, Robert Plant posed for photos. He lit two cigarettes at once, like Paul Henreid in Now, Voyager. Everyone around him murmured, “Lovely.” Robert appeared pleased. I rifled through the LPs on his coffee table: Margie Joseph, Danny O’Keefe, Otis Redding, the Guess Who. “Don’t count that as my taste,” he said. “Although the Guess Who are great.” I told Robert that Bob Dylan had said his kids listened to Zeppelin. “Well,” he said, “that’s very nice. But doesn’t he listen as well?”

  At two in the afternoon on January 22nd, Jimmy came to my room for a breakfast interview. He was in a good mood because he’d had five hours of sleep, and he felt that the show the night before had been great. But he was slurring his words more than usual and he was scary skinny. The truth was, of course, that his heroin use had escalated, but this was never acknowledged around me. The party line was that Jimmy was a genius, and a delicate, sensitive soul. But that angelic, wasted appearance belied a shrewd, tough, manipulative hedonist. In an interview that lasted several hours, Jimmy and I gossipped a bit about someone setting fire to Angela Bowie’s hair in Rodney Bingenheimer’s L.A. disco. Jimmy told me he didn’t want to see “those girls” get so fucked up. We discussed Iggy Stooge—who Jimmy likened to a sadhu. He said he couldn’t believe how much Alice Cooper had stolen from Screaming Lord Sutch. Jimmy said that at the end of the last tour he had no idea where he was, and that he was becoming a recluse. He was increasingly afraid of heights and of airplanes. Jimmy, then thirty-one, said he never thought he’d live past thirty, and that his music was “a race against time.” He told me that before the show the previous night, he’d been depressed because of his broken finger: “I wanted to toss myself out of the window, but people kept stopping me.” He drew a diagram for me of where the finger was broken, and talked about how he had to develop a “three-finger technique.” He ordered scrambled eggs with ketchup, an English muffin and tea. It would be the only food he would have for days. “I’m going off eating,” he said. “I’m trying to photosynthesize, like a plant.” He was just going to have banana daiquiri shakes which, he claimed, “gave him all the vitamins he needed.” Jimmy, who weighed 130 pounds, said he wanted to get down to 125.

  *

  Later that afternoon, I visited Peter Grant in his suite—which was all blue brocade drapes and fake French furniture. It was the same one occupied by Zsa Zsa Gabor whenever she came to the city and where, Peter said, her dogs relieved themselves on the carpets. He was told that she never tipped the maids. There were large cases of champagne and Heineken stacked up in a corner, and several floral displays sent by Atlantic Records. Peter wore a satin tour jacket with the Zeppelin “ZOSO” logo and his fingers were covered, as usual, by rings. He reminisced about a Midwest hotel clerk during the band’s last tour who admitted that the worst trashing of hotel rooms had occurred during a Young Methodists’ Convention. “The guy was so frustrated about not being able to just go bonkers in a room himself,” Peter said, “that I told him to go and have one on us. He went upstairs, tossed a TV set against the wall, tore up the bed, and I paid the $490 bill.” He discussed his objections to doing a week in the same theater: “It’s like vaudeville,” he said. “The minute a rock musician wakes up night after night in the same place, it becomes a grind. Pure routine.” And then he grabbed my pad and wrote a note in it as follows: “Lisa Robinson is a lying, cheating, conceited . . . fucked . . . prissy, whoring sweetheart. I love her. Yours truly, Peter Grant.”

  *

  On January 31st, on the plane to the s
how in Detroit, Jimmy argued with a reporter from the London Daily Express. The reporter, who wore an ascot, smirked and said to Jimmy, “You’re not supposed to make intelligent remarks.” Jimmy, who was stoned and drinking Jack Daniel’s, was exasperated. “Listen,” he said, “I don’t just jump up and down onstage. I compose. I’ve done session work. . . .” Bonzo muttered, “Uh-oh, I know what he’s like when he gets like this. He’s gonna slug somebody.” After landing in Detroit, in the car on the way to the Olympia Stadium, Jimmy was incredulous. “Can you believe that man referred to my guitar playing as a trade?” During Bonzo’s drum solo, the other band members went into the dressing room. The reporter tried to follow but was stopped by Richard Cole, who said the band was having a “meeting.” The reporter was enraged: “I write for ten million people and I won’t have you humiliate me in front of a member of my staff!” The member of his “staff”: a buxom blonde woman swathed in rabbit fur. On the way back to the plane, the reporter demanded the radio be turned off in the car. “After two hours of that Led Zeppelin racket, I can’t stand any more!” Back on the plane, people whispered in groups of twos and threes. Jimmy, who’d been huddled under a red blanket, suddenly came to life and got right back into the argument. “You don’t want to know about my music,” Jimmy yelled, “all you care about are the [financial] grosses and the interior of the plane. You’re a communist!” Meanwhile, Robert was muttering under his breath, “I don’t think he’s such a bad bloke. Ten million people read the paper. Me mum and dad read the paper. The singer was good. . . .” Jimmy started yelling about the way he voted in the last election, someone threw a drink at the reporter, the reporter became more belligerent and then, suddenly, Richard Cole stood in the aisle, holding a gun. I had never seen a real gun before. We were 25,000 feet in the air. I cowered in my seat. Nervous glances all around. Two of the band’s security guys walked over and stood menacingly next to Richard, who threatened the reporter with his silent stare. “FOR CHRIST’S SAKE,” Bonzo yelled from the front of the plane, “WILL YOU ALL SHUT UP??? I’M TRYING TO GET SOME SLEEP!”

  • • •

  In February 1975, Led Zeppelin was in New York City in the Plaza Hotel, where every so often, in the middle of the night, tour photographer Neal Preston had to give them a slide show and present every photo he had taken, for their approval. Shouts of “Flab!” could be heard as they made fun of each other during this cumbersome process that often took hours. I lived in Manhattan, so I’d visit them at the Plaza if we were doing interviews, or accompany them to an out-of-town show, or go see them at the Garden. Today the Plaza is a condominium with a lobby built for tourists. It resembles an upscale Midwestern mall and is full of children. A piano player sits in a corner of the lobby near what was once the real Palm Court restaurant and plays “Happy Birthday” every few minutes because there is bound to be some kid there having a birthday tea, just like Eloise. But in 1975, it was quiet, it was elegant, and had huge corner suites that overlooked Central Park. It was the first time I ever saw a kitchen or a dining room in a hotel suite. Jimmy hated his suite, which he likened to “the fucking Versailles Palace.” His TV set didn’t work because the black candles he placed on top of it dripped down. The movie projector Jimmy rented buzzed, so his Lucifer Rising screenings (he was writing the score) had to be at such high volume to block out the buzz, that he was afraid he’d be thrown out of the hotel. Bonzo demanded that a pool table be brought into his suite, and no one was going to argue with him. On a night off, I suggested that we all go to a party for Leonard Cohen, to which Robert said, “Let’s run through it tossing quaaludes around to liven up the place.” Instead, we left the Plaza and strolled down the street to Nirvana—an Indian restaurant in the penthouse of 30 Central Park South. Nirvana was one of those restaurants that could have been considered impossibly corny: sitar music was piped in over the sound system (there might even have been live sitar players as well), the place was dimly lit, and covered in floor-to-ceiling Indian tapestries and mirrored pillows. It had an amazing view of Central Park. The band loved it. “Have you got any fresh dania?” Robert asked, showing off to the waiters. “I know about this food, I’m married to an Indian,” he added. Jimmy laughed, “So you tell them every time you come here.” I told them that John Lennon told me that he heard “Stairway to Heaven” and loved it. “He’s only just heard it now?” Robert said.

  *

  By 1975, my life revolved around a diverse assortment of bands: Queen, Roxy Music, the New York Dolls, Patti Smith, David Bowie, the Jackson Five, and many others. I did a lot of interviews for the New Musical Express, my syndicated column and rock magazines. I went out nightly to Studio 54 and Max’s Kansas City and CBGB’s. I went out to dinner, but restaurants were not a destination or a way of life. Dinner was something you had before, or after, you went to a concert or a club. Usually after—like midnight. My social life and my work life were inexorably intertwined. I spent days on the phone with friends, re-hashing the nights before. My musical tastes were to the right—Led Zeppelin—and to the left—Television. But when Led Zeppelin came to town, they were a priority.

  In general, Led Zeppelin did not draw a celebrity crowd. In 1972, Truman Capote had followed the Stones around on tour, so, in 1975, Jimmy wanted to enlist William Burroughs to interview him. It was decided that Burroughs would spend some time with Jimmy and write something for the underground rock magazine Crawdaddy. Burroughs came to a show at Madison Square Garden, spent two sessions interviewing Jimmy, then wrote mostly about himself and arcane black magic practices. Mick Jagger stopped by one of Zeppelin’s Madison Square Garden shows to check out the sound system. When Zeppelin was in Los Angeles, David Geffen visited Peter Grant backstage at the L.A. Forum. George Harrison showed up at one of the band’s after-parties and threw some cake at Bonzo—who then threw the former Beatle in the pool. But the band mostly surrounded themselves with pals like Freddie Sessler, or the Irish journalist B.P. Fallon, or the musician Roy Harper. And there was a retinue of girls—especially in Los Angeles—with names like Lori, Sable, Bebe or Connie the Butter Queen. Occasionally, someone would show up from the trendy London scene—like the mysterious, glamorous personality and Roxy Music album cover girl, Amanda Lear. (“I’m in love,” she once said to me on the phone after spending some time with Jimmy.) But there was no Andy Warhol or Lee Radziwill or the gang from Studio 54. Led Zeppelin was just not fashionable.

  Zeppelin was aware that when the Rolling Stones walked into a room, they created an ambience. So when they went to a club, say the Rainbow on Sunset Strip—down the block from the band’s Hollywood hotel, the Continental Hyatt House (which they called the Riot House)—Richard Cole would call ahead. He would alert them that the band was on its way and to make sure the bottles of Dom Pérignon (which Earl McGrath called “rockstar’s mouthwash”) were chilled and waiting at the table. Richard would personally go in advance to stake out the “talent.” When Zeppelin was in Los Angeles, the groupie grapevine went into overdrive. At the Rainbow, bodyguards manned the tables reserved for “the boys.” Teenage girls, dressed in what appeared to be no more than two handkerchiefs, with platform shoes and frizzed-out hair, lined up in front of the band’s table and just stood there. The girls’ style, such as it was, was a look made popular by the short-lived Star magazine, a publication that publicized and glorified L.A. groupies. At the Rainbow, the girls posed provocatively in front of “the boys,” while the musicians and some of the crew drank, chatted up the girls who were actually with them, and just generally behaved in whatever loud, drunken, loutish ways they pleased. Lots of Cockney rhyming slang and Monty Python acting-out and shrieking. The mantra was “No head, no backstage pass” among the roadies, who were in a position to get the former and give the latter. A few such evenings went a long way. I often left earlier than any member of the band, which could mean one in the morning. I went back to the hotel, made long-distance calls to Richard or whichever friends were still up at four a.m. in New York, wh
ich meant all of my friends. During my times with Led Zeppelin, I didn’t have a chance to get too lonely; I never was with them for weeks at a time. It was usually in and out, like a jaunt to Pittsburgh or Detroit for a night, or a week in New Orleans or Chicago, and then back to New York, where they were “stationed” in the same hotel for a week.