When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  ‘By the time we got to the Garden,’ said Robert, ‘the whole thing had taken on an entirely different aspect. It was such a big deal by then the feeling of freedom it gave out was tremendous. We were buccaneer musicians, ready to try anything and, for me, Madison Square Garden was a seminal moment. Until then, I don’t think I could ever have imagined something like that, where there was so much energy coming and going between us and the audience. It was like having a dream come true that you never knew you had. Afterwards, I thought: now we know what happened to Judy Garland!’

  Then, in the midst of triumph – disaster. After the final New York show it was discovered that somewhere in the region of $200,000 in cash had gone missing from the band’s safety deposit box at the Drake Hotel, where they were staying. The money had been deposited in $100 bills by Richard Cole and band lawyer Steve Weiss the night before the first Garden show – an on-tour slush fund larger than usual in order to pay off the Starship and film crew after the final show. With only Cole and the hotel’s own security team having a key to the safe deposit box, the finger of suspicion was pointed at the band’s maverick road manager, who was promptly arrested and held for questioning. He was freed the following day after some fancy footwork by the band’s lawyers and the voluntarily undergoing of a lie detector test – which he shocked the cops by passing with flying colours. Most of the band were told about the theft after the show, Jimmy being informed at the side of the stage during Bonzo’s lengthy drum solo. Before he called the police, Cole had combed the band’s rooms for drugs. But when the FBI became involved the press were alerted, sparking headlines around the world the following day. Grant lost his cool and slugged a reporter from the New York Post outside the Drake and found himself arrested and dragged off to the local cop station. Eventually Goldberg called a press conference to try and take the heat out of the situation. But G became riled again when another reporter from the Post asked him if the theft was a publicity stunt.

  When the dust had settled, Grant pleaded guilty to harassment, and the case was adjourned contemplating dismissal; Cole, still under suspicion from the police and the press, later successfully sued the Drake, while the band flew home to England utterly exhausted. Charlotte was so freaked out when she saw the state Jimmy was in that she tried to get him checked into a sanatorium. But he baulked at the idea, though admitted he felt he belonged in a monastery. ‘It was like the adrenaline tap wouldn’t turn off.’

  Amidst the hullabaloo, what was never fully addressed was the more pressing question: if neither Cole nor the hotel’s own security had stolen the money, who had? It’s well known now that the Mafia had begun to infiltrate the music business in the early Seventies. Grant’s former mentor Don Arden told me the story of how just a few months after the Drake theft, Joe Pagano – head of one of the five Mafia families – had sent one of his henchmen, ‘Big Waasel’, to inform Don he was taking over the management of his own band, ELO, physically threatening him backstage at a show at New York’s Palace Theater. It was only because Don stood up to them, he said, issuing his own counter-threats, that he was then invited to lunch with family head, Joe Pagano, who he then became firm friends with, thus averting the proposed ELO takeover. Could it be that the theft of Zeppelin’s money from the Drake just a few months before was also in some way Mafia-connected? That perhaps a similar attempt to ‘take over’ Zeppelin from Grant had ended with a show of power from the mob? As Grant, nor anyone else from the Zeppelin organisation ever alluded to it, it now seems unlikely.

  Which points the finger of blame back at either the hotel staff or the band itself: the former exceedingly unlikely as a hotel like the Drake relied so much on its reputation as a safe haven for high-rollers. Which only leaves the band. The question is: why, hypothetically, would they ‘steal’ their own money? One possible answer: in order to keep it. With Britain’s Labour government then enforcing a draconian ninety-five per cent tax rate on the country’s wealthiest citizens, Led Zeppelin were not the only internationally successful rock artists then looking for ways around the problem, regarded as particularly unjust as the average lifespan of a successful rock star back then rarely exceeded two or three years. The simplest option, to become a tax exile, would be taken up by several of Zeppelin’s contemporaries during this period, including the Rolling Stones, Elton John, Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, David Bowie, Status Quo and many others. With the ’73 US tour now at an end, could it be that Grant had hatched a plan to squirrel away at least some of the wads of cash the band would be bringing back with them, by making it ‘disappear’? Classic Rock editor, Geoff Barton, recalls Grant boasting over lunch with him in the mid-Eighties of bringing ‘false-bottomed suitcases’ stuffed with wads of cash back into Britain from various Zeppelin tours. They could have been the idle boasts of someone enjoying a particularly long lunch. Grant was well aware of his reputation by then and liked to play on it. Or he might simply have been telling the truth.

  At the time, the cloud of suspicion never fully lifted from Cole. The only one of the Zeppelin inner circle from its earliest days not to be transformed into a millionaire by the band’s travails these past five years, he would admit he suffered feelings of jealousy, even entitlement, as the years passed and everyone got richer – except for him. Might he have reached some sort of tipping point at the end of what was then the most lucrative tour in music history? What was a couple of hundred thousand dollars now to Led Zeppelin? Didn’t he, Ricardo, faithful servant, master-at-arms, confidante, quality-drugs-and-groupies procurer par excellence, deserve a more substantial reward than his monthly pay cheque? As we now know, lie-detector tests are not infallible. And wouldn’t he, a man used to being ice-cold under pressure, stand a better chance than most of beating the system? Or might he simply have left the key lying around while he slept off another long night’s carousing? He says he had not been near the safety deposit box since the first night at the Drake. Was it possible he had simply looked the other way while someone else crept down there on his behalf and did his dirty work for him?

  All of this is pure speculation, and Cole and the band may be entirely innocent – something Cole has repeatedly stressed. All we know for sure is that the case was never solved, though the repercussions for the band in America, where insurance companies would from now on view them with utmost suspicion, would be long term. Not that anyone from the band seemed overly concerned. Despite the theft, they would come home a reportedly $4 million richer. ‘It had reached that point where we really couldn’t care too much,’ Page told the NME a couple of months later. ‘I mean, if the tour had been a bummer, then that would have been the last straw, but it wasn’t. I’ve had to deal with far worse situations than that on the road.’ He mentioned cutting his finger in LA (‘I had all manner of treatment and injections’) and the fact that he had been labouring under death threats. ‘It’s things like that that tend to lessen the effect of having £80,000 [roughly the sterling equivalent of $200,000 in 1973] ripped off at the end of a successful tour.’

  As was his wont, John Paul Jones also appeared to affect an eye-of-the-hurricane calm about these latest developments. But behind the Cheshire cat smile there was a growing concern over the way the band and its organisation conducted itself. Not on stage, where ‘the feeling of satisfaction was enormous’. But offstage, as the groupies got wilder, the drugs got more expensive and the dreams grew ever more fanciful. By the end of the ’73 US tour, in fact, he was ready to quit, joking to friends he was considering ‘retiring’ to become the choirmaster at Winchester Cathedral.

  ‘I’d just had enough of touring,’ he later told Dave Lewis. ‘I did go to Peter and tell him I wanted out unless things were changed. There was a lot of pressure on my family what with being away so long. Funnily enough things changed pretty quickly after I’d seen him. We didn’t tour in the school holidays as much and there was more notice given for when we were touring. Things had to change and they did, so it quickly blew over. I trusted Peter to put it right…’r />
  Grant’s way of ‘putting it right’ was to try and keep a lid on it, even from Plant and Bonham. ‘I told Jimmy of course, who couldn’t believe it,’ he confided in Lewis. Jones was ‘a family man’ who had become rattled by the way the ’73 US tour had gotten out of control, culminating in the robbery from the Drake Hotel. He was also worried about the death threats, which Grant admitted ‘got very worrying’. In short, Jones had had enough. But Grant, shrewd as ever, felt a period away from the action was all that Jonesy would need to bring him round. In reality, however, it would take a great deal more than mere promises to persuade the ever-dependable Jonesy not to abandon ship, insiders now suggesting that to all intents and purposes he did, briefly, tender his formal resignation and that the start of 1974 found Page and Grant in a quandary over how best to proceed without him, keeping Plant and Bonham in the dark about how serious the situation was until they could figure out what to do.

  The first time you really felt like a session pro was when you were booked for the Dave Berry session that produced ‘The Crying Game’. You’d played bass on that and on the B-side, ‘Don’t Gimme No Lip Child’. You knew that was a proper session because Jimmy Page, a well-known session guy, was there too and the record was actually on the radio and telly and everything. Juke Box Jury. ‘Our panel votes it…a hit!’ said David Jacobs. And it bloody well was too. Now you knew how someone like Jimmy Page felt, sort of. He’d played on loads of hits. Not that you’d know it when you spoke to him. Always very cool. Friendly, but very cool. Which is how you acted too. Bumping into each other all the time over the next couple of years, nodding and saying ‘hi’. Smiling and saying nothing. Just plugging in and getting on with it. Thrumming away behind Lulu, Donovan, Herman’s Hermits…always very cool, never giving anything away.

  Sometimes it didn’t seem to matter who played what. Sometimes, like on Herman’s million-selling ‘Silhouettes’, you knew it was your throbbing bass and Jimmy’s colourful guitar that made it what it was as much as Peter Noone’s gormless smile. The girls all screamed when he walked on stage but you knew that Mickie Most the producer knew who was really responsible for the record’s success. Not that you ever said anything. The real guys like Mickie and Jimmy never did. They just got on with it, and so did you. The money was good too. Thirty quid a day some days, other days even more. If you wanted it, and John Paul Jones did. John Baldwin might have wondered what it was all about, what it was all eventually supposed to be leading up to, but he was boring. John Paul Jones was one of the boys, knew the score, what it was, making more money in a day sometimes than his dad would make in a week, a month. More money than seemed right somehow.

  It wasn’t all bad either, not by a long chalk. Playing bass on singles for young cats like Marc Bolan and Rod Stewart. Cats with talent who the world hadn’t heard of yet. Young cats with no bread; just helping them out, cos you were a good egg. Even becoming known as an arranger; sorting out the strings on tracks for the groovy ones who could afford to pay like the Yardbirds, the Stones, Donovan…Coming in, sorting everything out for them, going away again, everyone grateful.

  And you didn’t always have to go straight home either. Hanging out, making the scene at places like The Crazy Elephant, the Roaring Twenties, the Scene, the Flamingo, or the less fashionable Marquee. Meeting and turning on young cats like Davy Jones. ‘We went over to his flat. He had a huge room, with nothing in it except this huge vast Hammond organ,’ David Bowie, as he would become better known, would later recall: ‘I watched in wonder while Jonesy rolled these three fat joints. And we got stoned on all of them. I became incredibly high and it turned into an in-fucking-credible hunger. I ate two loaves of bread. Then the telephone rang. Jonesy said, ‘Go and answer that for me, will you?’ So I went downstairs to answer the phone and kept on walking right out into the street. I never went back. I just got intensely fascinated with the cracks in the pavement.’

  Your real party pal was Pete Meadon, who was working as the PR for the Pretty Things when you first met him and was later manager, briefly, of The Who and Jimmy James and the Vagabonds. Pete was nuts – far out – and you loved it. It was with Pete that you once gate-crashed a coming-of-age party in Downing Street for Caroline Maudling, daughter of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Reginald Maudling. You couldn’t bloody well believe your eyes but Pete just talked you both through the door and right into the middle of the room, grabbing two glasses of champagne as he did.

  It was also through Pete that you got into Preludin, an appetite suppressant that contained amphetamine sulphate. A really great pill. Pete was older, ultra-Mod, and always carried all sorts of pills in his jacket pocket, blue ones, purple ones, Preludin to get you up; barbiturates to help you down. ‘Pop music was all pills in those days,’ you would recall years later. French Blues, Black Bombers, Mandies, Purple Hearts…over, upwards, sideways, down…It was funny later on, after you’d made it in Zeppelin, how people always used to think of you as the Quiet One…Ha bloody ha said the clown…

  12

  The Golden Gods

  Even without the threat of John Paul Jones leaving, the calamitous end of the 1973 tour had forced Page and Grant to sit back and take stock. The plan had been for October and November to be spent recording the next album. Instead, Zeppelin was put on hiatus as Jimmy and G considered their next move. In the works was the proposed tour movie – and accompanying live soundtrack album. Also looming on the horizon was the renewal of the Atlantic deal, the band’s initial five-year contract now having run its course. With all five Zeppelin albums having sold well in excess of a million copies in the US alone, Ahmet Ertegun was happy to propose a five-year extension with attendant multi-million dollar signature advance. But Grant now demanded more. Having seen both the Beatles and Stones graduate to their own boutique labels, he and Page wanted the same for Led Zeppelin. Despite the disastrous outcome of Apple (where the lack of quality control led to more signings than anybody could properly account for) and the strange inertness of Rolling Stones Records (which, despite occasional one-off signings like Cuban rockers Kracker, and former Wailer Peter Tosh, it soon became clear that it was an outlet purely for the Stones themselves), the allure of owning your own label was strong: not just because it would mean an end to the protracted disputes over record sleeves, mastering, singles, release dates and etc that had persistently dogged them over the years with Atlantic, but because it was a sign that you really had made it; that you weren’t just big, you were supernova; something that appealed greatly to both Jimmy’s and G’s vanity. Grant was also not slow to grasp that it would help offset some of the gargantuan amounts of tax the band would otherwise have been forced to pay. And so negotiations began for Zeppelin to have the autonomy of their own label, although under the distribution umbrella of Atlantic, thus guaranteeing no immediate shortfall in sales opportunities, distribution being the single most important thing giant corporate labels like Atlantic actually had to offer in the Seventies.

  Both Page and Jones, meanwhile, embarked on what were essentially solo projects, with Plant also now thinking of making a Rod Stewart-like plunge into a parallel solo career. Despite denying it as soon the press had gotten wind of the idea, ‘To go away and do a solo album and then come back is an admission that what you really want to do is not play with your band,’ he said, feigning shock at the very idea, Plant was only talked out of proceeding with a solo album when Grant insisted it would be better to wait until the band’s own label was in full swing before embarking on such a venture. In reality, G had no plans whatsoever to allow a Plant solo album, he merely wished to present as united a front as possible to Ahmet during the negotiations over Zeppelin’s own label. Ertegun was well aware that the bass player might need replacing but it was a situation that could be managed; losing the band’s singer, however remote the possibility, could not be.

  Relieved to be out of the maelstrom of touring, Jones had begun producing and playing on an album for his old friend, Blue Mink singer Madeline
Bell. Titled Comin’ Atcha, he also performed live with Bell in December on the BBC 2 TV show Colour My Soul. Desperately keen to prove to himself that he still had a viable career outside Zeppelin if he so wished, he also appeared at the invitation of producer Eddie Kramer on the Creatures of the Street album by derided American glam rocker Jobriath. Fortunately for Zeppelin, neither album was a major commercial success; with Grant making suitably consoling noises, Jones indicated he’d be happy to return to the fold.

  With no need for a solo album – Zeppelin albums were his solo albums – Page, nevertheless, had embarked on an intriguing side project which, while it never threatened to replace Zeppelin in his thoughts, would come shockingly close to derailing the future of the band in ways they could not have considered possible back then: to write the soundtrack for a film by Kenneth Anger, entitled Lucifer Rising.

  Page had met Anger at a London auction of Crowley memorabilia in 1970. ‘Anger had some money at the time and he and Jimmy were both…not really outbidding each other but I think there was a time when they were competing,’ recalls Timothy d’Arch Smith, then acting as Page’s chief procurer of occult books, paintings and other memorabilia. ‘I think it was for the Bagh-I-Muattar, actually. I said to Jimmy, “I’m not bidding for it. I’m going to Paris.” Because [Gerald] Yorke had sent Anger in who always scared me to death. He never smiled.’

  Described these days by the American Film Institute as ‘the magus of cinema’, Dr Kenneth Anger, as he enjoys being addressed since receiving an honorary doctorate in humanities a few years ago, long ago reached the status of real-life Magus and is, according to Dave Dickson, now one of the highest ranked members of the O.T.O. His credentials for such a role go back to 1955 when he travelled to Cefalu, Sicily, with Alfred Kinsey, the self-proclaimed ‘sexologist’, where they unearthed a number of pansexual murals at Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema, later mimicked by Page at Boleskine with his Charles Pace-commissioned murals. ‘I never talk about it with people that aren’t magicians,’ Anger told one reporter in 2006. ‘Because they would think you were a fucking liar. But, you see, I’m not a Satanist. Some people think I am. I don’t care…’