When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  Things got better when you moved into the council flat in Dudley – Eve’s Hill. You even got a part-time job at Osbourne’s the men’s clothing shop in the high street and for a while things settled down a bit. You might have been a tearaway but you always scrubbed up well, never went out without a clean suit and tie on. And you never gave up on the drumming, drifting from group to group, whoever paid the most, which is when you bumped into Planty again…

  The music was evolving at a faster rate on stage, too, with many of the spontaneous jams of the first US tour now taking on a life of their own, turning into fully fledged songs, which was just as well because behind-the-scenes Atlantic was already pressing for a follow-up album, ideally for release in the US that summer. G did his best to shield the band from this extra pressure. Nevertheless, he could see the wisdom of Ahmet’s ways and encouraged Jimmy to take the band back into the studio as early as April, reconvening at Olympic in London for a few days with engineer George Chkiantz. One of the first numbers to emerge was a more elaborate, much heavier arrangement of Chicago bluesman Willie Dixon’s ‘You Need Love’, retitled ‘Whole Lotta Love’, which had first surfaced on tour as part of an extended improvisation during ‘As Long As I Have You’. There was also ‘What Is And What Should Never Be’, guitars making the most of the recent arrival of stereo with its flanged vocal effects and switching from left to right channel; and a shorter, bouncy rocker called ‘Ramble On’.

  ‘They were the first numbers written with the band in mind,’ Page remembered. ‘It was music more tailor-made for the units – the elements – that you’ve got. Like knowing that Bonzo’s gonna come in hard at some point and building that in.’ The songs were also the first on which Plant would be asked to contribute some of the lyrics. It had, he said, ‘taken a long time, a lot of insecurity and nerves and the “I’m a failure” stuff’ to produce the lyrics for the latter two. ‘Whole Lotta Love’ came from the tight riff Jimmy had come up with, ‘Bonzo taking hold of the whole thing and making it work from the drums point of view.’ Less concerned with specific lyrics, Plant’s main preoccupation had been ‘to try and weave the vocal in amongst it all, and it was very hard. Each song was experimentation…’

  Their routine on the second tour was now well established. With the venues getting bigger, responsibility for road management was now split between Richard Cole and Clive Coulson. While Coulson oversaw the technical aspect of every show, taking charge of transporting and setting up the equipment, Cole took care of the band, driving them to and from airports in a rented station wagon, sorting out hotel reservations, airline tickets, gas for the car, and keeping them ‘entertained’ – a euphemism for getting them drunk and introducing them to willing groupies. What Ricardo wasn’t so good at doing was keeping them fed or making sure they got enough sleep. Still travelling on commercial airlines, waiting in line like everybody else, this could lead to some tricky situations, most often for Plant who was still in the habit of going barefoot wherever possible, his hair now stretching down his back. Routinely spat at, yelled at and generally abused by anyone who objected to the sight of an obviously stoned hippy in their midst, instead of stepping in to save him, Cole, who was nursing a growing dislike for the cocky young singer, tended to look the other way. Plant’s personal hygiene wasn’t up to much either and he was often told to take a shower, wash his greasy hair and use some deodorant.

  Other problems brought on by their growing popularity now included bootleggers and ticket scalpers. In Chicago, at a sold out Kinetic Circus, Grant discovered the hall manager selling tickets out of the back door and pocketing the cash. He and Cole grabbed the hapless swindler and forced him to turn out his pockets, confiscating all the spare cash. Still suspicious, they then dragged him into his office and pulled it apart until they discovered a waste bin filled with bogus ticket stubs of the wrong colour. Again, Grant and Cole forced the manager to turn over whatever illicit sums he had pocketed. Grant had seen it all before, you couldn’t fool him. If God was in the detail, Grant was his winged messenger. The result was that Zeppelin would become the first major rock band that actually got to keep most of the money they made.

  It wasn’t just their music that was getting them noticed either. Ann Wilson, later of Heart, went with her sister Nancy to see the band at the Greenlake Aquatheater in Seattle, where they appeared on a bill with Sonny & Cher and Three Dog Night. ‘The level of sexual arousal of the older girls in the audience was an eye-opener,’ she told Classic Rock. ‘This was no Three Dog Night show we were attending!’ For Jimmy Page, twenty-five, single, and already highly attuned to the possibilities offered up by the permissive sexual nature of American groupies (certainly compared to their more staid British counterparts) from his years on tour with the Yardbirds, none of this was new, and he instructed Cole to offer backstage access to only the prettiest girls in the audience. But while tales abounded of Page’s exploits – having Bonzo dress up as a waiter and ‘serving’ Jimmy on a room-service cart to a roomful of delighted young women – for the others this was a whole new world. One in which, despite their marital status, they would all take advantage of sooner or later. As Plant and Bonham’s contemporary, Ozzy Osbourne, once told me, ‘In them days in England, you’d still have to wine ’em and dine ’em before they’d let you near ’em. The first time bands like Sabbath and Zeppelin got to America, none of us could believe it. The chicks would just come straight up to you and go: “I wanna ball you!” None of us could resist that.’

  In particular, Plant, who’d never been short of female admirers anyway, now felt overwhelmed by the attention he was getting. ‘All that dour Englishness swiftly disappeared into the powder-blue, post-Summer of Love Californian sunshine, I was teleported…’ he told me. ‘I was [twenty] and I was going, “Fucking hell, I want some of that and then I want some of that, and then can you get me some Charley Patton? And who’s that girl over there and what’s in that packet?” There was no perception of taste, no decorum.’ However, when it came to groupies, the guilt he felt afterwards during the long car rides and plane journeys could be equally overwhelming. Feelings he would try to exorcise in the first song he would complete the lyrics for: a touchingly heartfelt, if somewhat disingenuous, ditty to his wife entitled ‘Thank You’. ‘It took a lot of ribbing and teasing to actually get him into writing,’ said Jimmy, ‘which was funny. And then, on the second LP, he wrote the words of “Thank You”. He said: “I’d like to have a crack at this and write it for my wife.”’

  Even Bonham and Jones, both of whom had made a big show of turning down opportunities to frolic on the first US tour, would have their moments. As Jones later admitted, ‘The touring makes you a different person. I realise that when I get home. It takes me weeks to recover after living like an animal for so long.’ But while he tended to be discreet in any clandestine get-togethers with the groupie population, stories of Bonham’s escapades – the drummer being egged on by Cole, with whom he had become regular ‘boozing buddies’ – would soon become almost as legendary as that of Page’s. The most notorious being when Cole encouraged him to have sex with a notorious LA groupie known as the Dog Act, after her habit of always bringing her Great Dane with her to the hotel. Having tried and failed to get the Great Dane to perform cunnilingus on the girl by dangling pieces of fried bacon from her vagina, Cole dragged a drunken Bonham in to take the dog’s place. As Cole would later tell writer Stephen Davis, ‘So Bonzo’s in there fucking her, and I swear he says to me, “How am I doing?” I said, “You’re doing fine.”. Then Grant walks in with this giant industrial-sized can of baked beans and dumped it all over Bonzo and the girl. Then he opened a bottle of champagne and sprayed them.’

  As these youthful high-jinks are typical of the sort of thing that rock musicians, bored on the road and far from home, indulge in, the fact that at the same time as a naked Bonzo was having cold beans poured over him, Jimmy Page was in his room having himself photographed covered in offal, which another famous groupie, the GTO
Miss Cinderella, pretended to eat off him, should shock no-one. Years later, however, when such incidents were related in awed tones in such laughingly prudish tomes as Hammer of the Gods, the shock they caused was enough to add several layers to the Zeppelin myth. In reality, of course, Elvis and the Beatles had been up to much worse long before Zeppelin crash-landed in America. Even in the mid-Fifties, before the so-called sexual revolution, Presley’s former Memphis Mafia crony, Lamar Fike, told Mojo, ‘Elvis got more ass than a toilet seat. Six girls in the room at one time…when we left places it took the National Guard to clean things up.’ Or as John Lennon later told Jann Wenner about the Beatles’ on the road adventures: ‘If you could get on our tours, you were in. Just think of [Fellini’s film] Satyricon. Wherever we were there was always a whole scene going on. [Hotel rooms] full of junk and whores and fuck knows what.’

  Even if the general public would remain ignorant of such antics a while longer, the fantasy of the rock star living the life of hedonistic abandon as some sort of entitlement had already been well established; an idea enhanced by such provocative images as that of a roomful of naked women used for the cover photo of Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland album, or the famous bacchanal portrait photo of the Stones taken by Michael Joseph for the inside of the Beggars Banquet album, both released at the tail end of 1968. The new album-buying rock audience itself was hardly innocent, with movies of the period such as Blow Out, Easy Rider and, later, Performance, Woodstock, Zabriske Point, even latter-day Beatles films such as the acid-influenced Yellow Submarine and the downered-out ambience of Let It Be clearly reflecting the new sex-and-drugs consciousness evident in all aspects of the Sixties rock experience, certainly post-summer of love.

  The GTOs were half-a-dozen groupie friends who became famous through the patronage of Frank Zappa, who had the idea of turning them into an actual group that would record for his own independent label, the aptly named Bizarre Records. GTO stood for many things: Girls Together Outrageously, Girls Together Only, Girls Together Occasionally, Girls Together Often, and any number of similar acronyms. There was Miss Cinderella, Miss Christine, Miss Pamela, Miss Mercy, and Miss Lucy (plus, at different intervals, Miss Sandra and/or Sparky). Having proved themselves by appearing on stage at several Mothers of Invention shows as dancers and/or backing vocalists, in November 1968 Zappa put them on a weekly retainer of $35 each. As Alice Cooper, another notable signing to Zappa’s label, later recalled in his autobiography, Me, Alice, the GTOs ‘were more of a mixed-media event than musicians. People just got off on them. They were a trip to be with…’

  As even an unashamed letch like the brutish Cole would acknowledge, groupies played an important role in the well-being of most working rock bands in America in the late Sixties. ‘I don’t think you will ever find an English musician who would ever put down those girls who were called groupies, cos those girls were not sluts or slags or whatever. They fucking saved my arse as far as patience goes, cos you’re talking about twenty-year-old guys away from home. The girls took care of them and were like a second home. You could trust them. They wouldn’t steal from you.’ It wasn’t just in Los Angeles or New York that the tribes gathered, either. ‘There were quite a few of them,’ Plant recalled with a smile, ‘Miss Murphy, The Butter Queen, Little Rock Connie from Arkansas. Some of them are still around, too – but now they’re teachers and lawyers.’

  In Los Angeles, in 1969, there was no groupie more highly thought of or lusted after than the prettiest and best known of the GTOs, Pamela Ann Miller, aka Miss Pamela, aka Pamela Des Barres (as she became better-known in the mid-Seventies after marrying rock singer Michael Des Barres). Miss P, as she was also known, would sometimes babysit for the Zappas, make handmade shirts for her boyfriends, and was, she said, ‘too romantic for one-night stands’. If she was with you, it was ‘for the whole tour – at least, locally!’

  Remembered by Alice Cooper as ‘a smiling open-faced girl who looked like Ginger Rogers’ with her strawberry blonde hair, freckles and goofy, flower-child smile, Miss Pamela was the epitome of the California Girl the Beach Boys had earlier eulogised. Although still only twenty years old, she already had a long history of ‘hanging out’ with rock stars before she met Jimmy Page, including Iron Butterfly singer Darryl De Loach, Jim Morrison, Noel Redding of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Chris Hillman of the Byrds and actor-turned-country rock singer Brandon de Wilde. She had also met and spent time with the Jeff Beck Group.

  When Zeppelin returned to LA to perform again at the Whisky A Go Go on 29 April, Miss Pamela was there. She later recalled how her friend and fellow groupie, Cynthia Plastercaster (of the Plastercasters of Chicago, famous for casting rock stars’ penises in plaster), had warned her that ‘the music was supposed to be fantastic, but they were supposed to be really dangerous guys, and you’d better stay away from them’. But she went anyway with fellow GTO Miss Mercy. Page looked frail and helpless, she thought, ‘like Sarah Bernhardt.’ Instantly smitten by what she perceived to be the guitarist’s ‘demure, almost feminine’ persona, in her subsequent memoir, I’m With The Band, she breathlessly recalls Page wearing a pink velvet suit on stage, ‘his long black curls stuck damply to his pink velvet cheeks. At the end of the set he collapsed to the floor, and was carried up the stairs by two roadies, one of them stopping to retrieve Jimmy’s cherry-red patent-leather slipper.’

  After the show, there was a party held for the band at LA’s then most fashionable hang-out, a club called Thee Charming Experience, where Miss Pamela watched Zeppelin ‘carousing at the darkest table at the back’. She was ‘very proud not to know them’ as she watched Richard Cole ‘carrying a young girl around upside down, her high heels flailing in the air, panties spinning around one ankle. He had his face buried in her crotch and she was hanging on to his knees for dear life, her red mouth open wide in a scream that no-one could hear. It was hard to tell if she was enjoying herself or living a nightmare. Someone else was getting it right on the table.’ Nevertheless, she found it hard to keep her eyes from straying towards Jimmy, who ‘sat apart from it all, observing the scene as if he had imagined it: overseer, creator, impossibly gorgeous pop star’. Appalled, she fled the scene, despite having ‘sticky thighs’. But she had been noticed and when the band next returned to LA, Page would send out his bloodhound, Cole, to find her…

  While the band could not be held responsible for every strange or disturbing thing that happened to them out on the road (for example, when they arrived early one morning in Detroit, having flown overnight, they were greeted by the gruesome sight of a murdered corpse being carried out on a stretcher, a thick pool of blackened blood on the lobby floor where the victim had been gunned down), they clearly revelled in the chaos their mere presence seemed to cause everywhere they went. It was also in Detroit that Life magazine journalist Ellen Sander joined the tour. Sander had originally wanted to cover The Who, also touring the US that summer, but that had fallen through and so a story on the Zeppelin tour was hurriedly installed to replace it. It was her first assignment for Life and she was thoroughly looking forward to it, if a little disappointed not to be covering the much better-known Who. Noting her enthusiasm, Cole immediately organised a betting pool amongst the road crew on which member of the band would fuck her first.

  For her part, Sander would characterise them accurately enough. Page was ‘ethereal, effeminate, pale and frail’. Plant was ‘handsome in an obscenely rugged way’. Bonzo ‘played ferocious drums, often shirtless and sweating, like some gorilla on a rampage’. Jones was the one who ‘held the whole thing together and stayed in the shadows’. She concluded that the band ‘had that fire and musicianship going for them and a big burst of incentive; this time around, on their second tour, from the very beginning, they were almost stars’. Sander spent most of her time on tour with Page, not sleeping with him, as the boorish Cole had predicted, but quizzing him about the abuse she observed him dishing out to groupies. She quotes him: ‘Girls come around and pose like starlets, teasing
and acting haughty. If you humiliate them a bit, they tend to come on all right after that. Everyone knows what they come for.’

  At the end of the tour, when Sander went to the dressing room to say goodbye, she claimed that: ‘Two members of the group attacked me. Shrieking and grabbing at my clothes, totally over the edge.’ Bonzo came at her first, she said, followed by ‘a couple more…all these hands on me, all these big guys’. Unable to identify them from the mêlée, it’s not clear if these were actual members of the band or roadies. Terrified she was going to be raped, Sander says she ‘fought them off until Peter Grant rescued me, but not before they managed to tear my dress down the back’. Furious at the offence, in retaliation Sander refused to write the planned Life article, thus denying the band what might have been important, perception-altering publicity on the grand scale later enjoyed by the Stones. She did, however, make her feelings felt in a subsequent book, Trips, in which she concluded: ‘If you walk inside the cages at the zoo, you get to see the animals close up, stroke the captive pelts and mingle with the energy behind the mystique. You also get to smell the shit first-hand.’

  When asked some years later about Sander’s damning account of her experiences on tour with him, Page admitted, ‘That’s not a false picture,’ adding only: ‘But that side of touring isn’t the be all and end all. The worst part is the period of waiting before going on. I always get very edgy, not knowing what to do with myself. It’s the build-up where you reach a point almost like self-hypnosis. There’s a climax at the end of the show and the audience goes away, but you’re still buzzing and you don’t really come down. That’s when you get a sort of restlessness and insomnia, but it doesn’t bother you too much if there’s a creative stream coming through. Maybe it’s necessary to that creative stream. What’s bad is that it’s not always a release. You build yourself to that pitch and the release doesn’t come. There are different ways of releasing that surplus adrenalin. You can smash up hotel rooms – it can get to that state. I think we’ve learnt to come to terms with it. I’ve learnt to enjoy it and achieve something creative from it too.’