When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  ‘For all their offstage fun and frolics, Led Zeppelin were never anything less than 100 per cent on the ball when it came to their concerts. Oh, maybe once in San Francisco they left out a song or two so they could more quickly jet back to LA for more, um, relaxation but…well, that saved half an hour! Cut Led Zeppelin’s set in half and you’ve still got twice as much as what anybody else was delivering, not just in length but in terms of undeniable fuck-me power. The music was beyond amazing and the music’s still here to hear, will be forever, thank God, this Led fucking Zeppelin. You have to dig it. And them. Thank you, gentlemen.’ He pauses, at last, for breath.

  It wasn’t just in LA that the band enjoyed themselves. Out on the road, groupies and drug dealers were now everywhere. Three members may have been married but the concept of the ‘on the road lady’ was still a valid one in the Seventies. In New Orleans, they stayed at the famous Royal Orleans hotel and hung out in the French Quarter where Jonesy got embroiled in ‘a spot of bother’ with the local drag queens. They all now regarded cocaine as ‘rocket fuel’, though wary of attracting too much attention had begun to employ a full-time ‘coke lady’, a mysterious Englishwoman whose sole purpose was to administer cocaine with her index finger to members of the band then dab their noses with a pinch of cherry snuff and a drop of 1966 Dom Perignon. None of which was considered addictive, but rather sophisticated, even elegant.

  Was that part of the buzz, I once asked Jimmy. That different rules applied? ‘Sure, yeah, it was part of the reality of it. That’s the point, it’s part of the reality of it and that was exhilarating, yeah. But it was very apparent that we were right on the cutting edge of everything that was happening.’ Did it make it hard, though, for life away from the stage to match that kind of excitement and intensity? ‘No, I was still celebrating!’ He grinned. ‘No, because things were in a balance. There was the intensity and energy and creativity that was going on, that was the slot for that. The rest of the time was preparation or recovery. You know, most of it was so cocooned. We used to leave the stage, jump into the cars and get whisked off to the aeroplane, which would fly us to the next gig. Our feet never really touched the ground.’ He paused. ‘There was always a lot of theatre. There always is on rock’n’roll tours, though I think we might have pioneered a lot of it. In fact, I know we did…’

  More seriously, although they didn’t make it known until the tour was over, Page had also received death threats, some from out-and-out crazies, some of a more worrying origin. All were taken seriously by Grant, who doubled then trebled on-tour security, posting heavies at the elevator doors of the floors on which the band stayed at hotels and ordering Cole to help him keep an eye on the crowd each night. ‘It was a lot more serious than I thought,’ said Page, claiming someone had eventually been arrested. ‘It was a real Manson situation and he was sending out waves of this absurd paranoia which a friend of mine got mixed up with…eventually this guy was tracked down and got carted away to hospital. He would have definitely had a try though.’

  It wasn’t just Led Zeppelin under threat from the new, drug-heavy, post-Manson atmosphere at rock shows. The Stones had been the first to suffer at the hands of their own image-making, with the debacle of Altamont. Now it was bands like Uriah Heep, whose singer David Byron complained that albums like Demons and Wizards and The Magician’s Birthday had attracted ‘people on another planet’ to the band. ‘It was a joke for a while, and then it just started to do us in.’ Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi recalls arriving at the Hollywood Bowl in 1972 to discover a large cross painted in fresh blood across their dressing room door. When Iommi, whose gear was playing up, became so irate on stage that night he kicked over a large speaker cabinet, it revealed a knife-wielding figure dressed in long black robes. ‘He was about to stab me,’ Iommi shook his head. ‘But luckily the roadies tackled him to the floor. I mean, I did feel uncomfortable about it, but I think in them days we were doing so many drugs that it all just flowed into one.’

  Of course, it could be argued that these rock stars invited such attention, not least Jimmy Page, whose occult interests were plainly – even to his least credulous fans – far more serious than his contemporaries. Might it be that, head swimming with the power he now contained quite literally in his fingertips, he saw Zeppelin concerts as themselves a form of magick ritual? Dave Dickson certainly thinks it possible, comparing the stage to an altar. ‘There is more energy at a rock concert than the most intense evangelical church and it’s all geared towards one group of people. That’s why people always want to hear the greatest hits and why you feel a bit deflated when they play the new stuff, because you’re not part of that ritual. The whole basis of ritual is that it’s the same thing over and over again. When you get someone like Jimmy Page though, because he knows about magick, about the rituals, about the energy that can be garnered from that exercise, it’s entirely possible that he would have gone off somewhere at a later date and harnessed that energy.’ Speaking in 1976, Page certainly acknowledged there was ‘a hell of a lot that’s involved with the feedback between the group and the audience – an incredible energy that builds up, and you know it’s euphoric for the audience’. He added: ‘It’s just something that’s evocative and it’s been invoked.’ That word again – ‘invoked’. Like Iommi though, he seemed remarkably unperturbed. ‘There’s a lunatic fringe,’ he shrugged, ‘whether they’re Christian or Satanists or whatever…it’s not a karmic backlash or anything like that…there have been lots of little magick happenings but nothing that has really perturbed me.’

  More down to earth but no less worrying was the increasingly erratic behaviour of Bonham. At one point on the tour, Grant asked: ‘What’s wrong with you, John? Why are you trying to ruin things for everyone?’ It was a question almost everybody who ever knew Bonham would ask at one time or another. The only answer everyone agreed on was that there seemed to be two sides to the drummer: Bonham the loving, generous family man who hated being away from home; and Bonzo, the drunken, drugged-up thug who took his frustrations out on whoever happened to be standing in his way at the time. A Jekyll and Hyde character whose personality was split most easily when he’d been drinking.

  But then, as Page told me, ‘Everybody around that point in time was drinking. I mean, that’s how it was. It was hedonistic times, you know? Bonzo was definitely the guy who’d go down the pub and drink one more than everybody else – and not be sick. That’s how the drinking tradition was in those days. But he enjoyed having a drink. And the thing is that his playing was always there. So you just think, well, that’s it.’ A long pause. ‘There were a lot of people that liked to put it away at that point in time. So it didn’t actually seem that much out of the ordinary – not at that age.’

  ‘In general terms, he was a nice man, a very generous guy, too,’ said Bonzo’s old Brum pal, Mac Poole. ‘But he could be obnoxious when he’d had a drink, a rotten bastard. He had a way with him where he’d belittle people, you know. And I used to sharpen my mouth against him at times. I said to him, “You wanna lay off the booze, John, because it’s no good for ya.” I mean, he went over the top and far away. He’d set up a whole kind of situation, buy everybody [so many] drinks they’d have to fly the bloody manager in to pay the bill! That was John, having such a gregarious character, people would take advantage. And of course he’d made such a name for himself; it was a bit like Moony, he almost played up to it.’

  Back home in England, the money would be spent on gifts for his wife and son, family and friends. ‘He was very dapper as well,’ said Bevan. ‘He used to love wearing three-piece suits and ties and stuff. And he used to spend a lot of money on cars. He always kept six cars.’ One week it would be a Maserati, the next a Jensen Interceptor, an E-type Jag or maybe a Rolls Royce. At different times he also owned a Ferrari, a red AC Cobra and an Aston Martin. The Aston Martin had been a birthday present for Pat but she was so frightened when John took her for a spin in it – careering down country lanes at 100mph – s
he refused to ever step inside it again.

  ‘There was a particular garage there that he frequented,’ said Bevan. ‘God, what a salesman’s dream he was! If I saw him once a month, he’d still have the six cars but one of them would be different from what he’d had the last time I’d been there. The next month another one would be gone to be replaced by something else.’

  He also bought an old two-door 1923 Ford Model T from Jeff Beck, which he turned into a hot rod with a massive seven-litre Chevrolet engine. ‘It was a purple, sparkly thing that could do nought-to-sixty miles-per-hour in about three seconds,’ said Bevan. Riding with Bonzo in the car was ‘absolutely hair-raising. One time he parked it in the fast lane of a dual-carriageway and waited till he saw a car in the rearview come screaming down the road at us at 70mph – then just floored it! The wheels started screeching and the front of the car reared up in the air. I couldn’t speak, I was so terrified…’

  Planty was all right actually but like all singers there was always a ponce inside him waiting to get out and in the end you’d had enough of his poxy little group and fucked off. They weren’t exactly going anywhere you hadn’t been already. You didn’t need them to show you round the Ma fucking Reagan circuit. Now you wanted in at hipper Birmingham dives like Henry’s Blues House and Mothers. The sorts of gaffs the really big boys like Carl Wayne & the Vikings did. Which is how you ended up back in A Way of Life, living in the caravan with Pat and the boy and running round town at night with the chaps – Mac Poole, Bill Harvey, Bev Bevan, Jim Simpson and the rest. The sort of blokes who liked a pint almost as much as you did and didn’t give you earache for playing too loud. Not often anyway.

  You’d all go round Mick Evans’ drum shop in Brum, you and all the other drummers like Mac and Mike Kelly, Carl Palmer and Bev, Cozy Powell and of course Bill Ward. Mick Evans was a great guy, keeping the place open for you all, even on a Sunday afternoon sometimes after the pubs had shut. Hanging around, playing records and talking bollocks. It was amazing how many of you ended up in proper bands, bands that made it so you could pay the rent and own a nice motor and buy your mates a fucking pint.

  Then out of the blue one day Planty was back on the blower. Next thing he’s standing there outside the caravan talking to your mum and scratching his crutch, scruffy cunt. You stood behind your mum pointing and mouthing the words ‘Stop doing that!’ until the silly sod finally caught on. He was in the Band of Joy by then and you were doing nothing so you joined in too. All right it was as well, you were all going to be rock stars, poncing around in your kaftans and your fucking beads. It was good though cos it allowed you to do more with your drumming, more than just cha-cha-cha. They were all into this trippy shit and would nod and smile when you went off into one on the drums, doing your knitting, as you called it. The only trouble was there was never enough money in it and that was never going to fucking do, not when you’ve got a wife and kid.

  Out on tour Bonzo was now all but uncontrollable. He even had a new nickname – La Bete (the Beast) – given to him by French record company executive Benoit Gautier after watching him take such a dislike to the food and drink backstage at a show in Nantes in March 1973 he destroyed all three trailers being used as dressing rooms. Later the same night, he pulled apart Gautier’s Volvo on their way back from a restaurant, prising off the lid of the trunk, smashing open the sunroof and sticking the heel of his boot through the dashboard. As with so many others, Gautier later observed how John could be ‘the most generous guy and the worst guy. Bonzo would cry talking about his family.’ Then the band or roadies ‘would push him to do something and he’d go crazy’. Gautier also claimed Bonham once offered him cocaine – which turned out to be heroin. ‘He thought that was the funniest thing. He would take a chance on killing you!’

  Bonzo loved playing with the band, no question. His urgent need to ‘bend the arrangements’ each night spurred them into some stellar improvisations. Bonzo was also rightly credited for co-writing several of their best-known numbers. As Page said, ‘With John you could just use the drums as an effect in the studio.’ Plant recalled how Bonham exerted so much energy on stage he would ‘roar like a bear’ throughout the show. How when the show was over he was ready to ‘get loose and blow off some steam’. More often than not, this might involve the sort of booze-swilling, coke-horning, groupie-bingeing, room-wrecking activity that constituted ‘normal’ behaviour for any self-respecting rock star in the early Seventies. He also had a deep-rooted fear of flying that caused him to be drunk on planes, a problem only exacerbated travelling in the Starship, where drinks would be served before the plane had even taken off.

  He was also surprisingly insecure, so worried about letting the band down that Cole recalls him downing ‘ten or twelve drinks a night’ before a gig. ‘It calms my nerves,’ Bonzo told him. A big, tough guy on the outside, he would often be sick before he went on stage, stricken with nerves. ‘There’s no question that what you’ve got here is a super-sensitive guy,’ Black Sabbath drummer Bill Ward told me. ‘Although he hit the drums hard it was the subtlety in his playing too that made it, the sensitivity of it. I’m saying that because I saw that – without going into some of the private things that we talked about. He had enormous sensitivity, yeah, definitely.’

  It was a side of him hardly anyone else saw though. Backed up by roadies ready to ‘steam in’ on his command, tanked up beyond repair in his eternal efforts to ‘wind down’ after a show, on tour Bonham was a ferocious, unstoppable figure. ‘Bonzo used to like to put it away, it’s true,’ said Page. ‘The thing is his playing was always there. You could actually feel the energy coming off him. After three hours of that, there’s no way you come off stage and turn it off like a tap. It has to have its coming down period and so that’s probably why he didn’t sleep at night. It’s very obvious when you relate it to the music. He also had a really, really strong sense of commitment to family. When you hear about Bonzo playing up on the road or whatever, the reality of it was that he was desperately homesick, and that’s a real key to things. He didn’t used to like to go to bed until it was daylight. He was really just…lonely sometimes, I think. He really missed his family terribly.’

  Now, however, Bonzo began falling out with the band. Chris Welch recalls how ‘Robert would taunt John – offering him a banana at the end of his solo and calling him King Kong. At which point, John would explode, letting his fists do the talking.’ According to another insider, things got so bad between Plant and Bonzo that Grant eventually sat Robert down and told him: ‘It’s got to stop. It’s either you or Bonham and right now it looks like it’s not going to be you.’ Plant stopped the taunting, to Bonzo’s face anyway. ‘He didn’t do it in front of me either,’ Jimmy once told me. ‘Or I would have told him to fuck off.’

  Plant would admit they had their ups and downs. ‘We did flare up at each other,’ he told me in 2005. ‘[But] we had a margin, Bonzo and I, for the majority of the years ahead, which we could return to together. Even though we would then become individuals, we still only lived like six miles apart. As time went on, we did drift. Because Bonzo had his preoccupations with his cattle and farm and I was still in the middle of what I called hippy-build – taking ruined houses with a bunch of itinerants who’d just come back from Afghanistan and a truck load of dope, you know, some very nice rugs – and build a sort of rustic paradise. But we always managed to meet. We’d have football matches where my pub would play his pub. I’ve still got some video of it somewhere. My pub was the Queen’s Head and his pub was called the New Inn. The New Inn’s star left winger was a bloke with one arm who took the throw-ins. And if I played for the Wolves in some charity thing, Bonzo would come along and take the piss.’

  Back on the road in the summer of 1973, the idea of doing some sort of feature-length ‘concert film’ – an idea they had been toying with since the decision not to do TV – was back on the agenda. Grant, who was loath to enter a world where his experience was virtually nil, had always played down
the idea. Now with the tour reaching some sort of climax, he relented. On 14 July, less than a fortnight before the end of the tour, he phoned Joe Massot, who he had first met when Massot filmed the band at the 1970 Bath Festival, and instructed him to ‘get your arse out here’. Massot duly arrived with a hastily assembled crew in time for the final week of dates in Baltimore, Pittsburgh and Boston, where he shot some backstage scenes, before arriving in New York for the finale of the thirty-three-date tour with three nights – 27, 28 and 29 July – at Madison Square Garden. Massot and his crew filmed the first two shows. At Bath in 1970, the footage had been dark and unusable. This time Massot was determined to capture the band in all their newfound, polychromatic glory.