When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  ‘It was the alcohol,’ said Bev Bevan. ‘The longer the tours went on, the more he drank.’ With wife Pat now expecting their second child – a daughter, Zoë – Bonham missed being home more than ever and was swift to take out his frustrations on any unsuspecting passer-by. ‘There’s no doubt about it,’ Mac Poole later told me, ‘the success fuelled the disease – because he had nothing to stop him, nothing to make him pull back from booze or anything else. And he had no self-discipline. Unfortunately, John let booze and frivolity temper his life.’

  It wasn’t just the booze now. On stage he had begun holding a plastic bag containing an ounce of cocaine between his legs, reaching in and rubbing handfuls of the drug into his mouth and nostrils as he played. After each show the crew would carefully dismantle the kit and shake the drum mat over a plastic bag of their own into which large deposits of all the coke Bonzo had spilt would accumulate, which they would then share amongst themselves. Bryan Ferry, whose band Roxy Music were also in town, was with Bonham one night when he burst into tears, freaked out, he blubbed, by his own behaviour. Both Page and Grant even made sure their suites were on different floors of the hotel to those of Bonham’s now, while the same scenes that had caused Jones to temporarily quit the band two years before now meant he did everything in his power to stay away from, as Cole puts it, ‘the chaos and excesses that he may have seen bringing Led Zeppelin down’. Often on tour, Jones would sidle up to Ricardo and tell him: ‘Here’s the phone number where I’ll be for the next forty-eight hours. Unless there’s an absolute emergency, don’t tell anyone – and I do mean anyone – how to reach me.’ Grant would grow steadily more furious with these regular disappearances. But, as Cole says in his own published account, ‘Perhaps Jonesy was smarter than any of us, keeping his distance while the rest of us were gradually sinking into the quicksand…’

  Partly because of Bonzo’s over the top antics, partly through Jimmy’s reputation for being the devil in disguise, and partly through Plant’s self-proclaimed status as ‘a golden god!’ as he boasted to Cameron Crowe on the Starship late one night, Zeppelin’s reputation now preceded them wherever they went, a situation not helped by the growing thuggishness of the entourage now surrounding them.

  ‘There were many times that Robert’s dogs – whoever was looking after Zeppelin at the time – were ready to punch anybody’s lights out the minute you went near the band,’ recalled Mac Poole with a shudder. ‘It got to be a very leery situation. You could see trouble coming.’ What’s more, the ‘dogs’ were now armed. According to Swan Song’s Alan Callan, speaking in 1975, this was because of panicky insurance companies who, in the wake of the dubious theft of 1973 insisted on ‘guards outside every hotel and dressing-room door…police escorts on the cars to and from gigs’. It wasn’t just the hired heavies that were now packing heat, though. Both Cole and Grant were also said to carry not-so-concealed weapons on occasion, while Bonzo reputedly stuck a gun in Deep Purple bassist Glenn Hughes’ back after drunkenly accusing him of sleeping with his wife Pat.

  Aynsley Dunbar recalls Cole pulling a gun on him during the LA leg of the tour. Having achieved a certain measure of fame since his Jeff Beck days drumming with Frank Zappa, David Bowie and Lou Reed, Dunbar was now a founding member of soon-to-be American stars Journey, whose debut album was about to be released, and was staying at the same hotel as the band. ‘It was very interesting,’ he tells me over the phone from his current home in California. ‘They were staying at the Hilton on Santa Monica and Wilshire and I had a suite there too and we used to hang around together and go to the parties afterwards. That was when [Cole] pulled a gun on me. He wanted me to leave but leave behind the two girls I was with. So I punched him in the balls. He turned round and goes, “That was fucking stupid!” I said, “No, the stupid part would be what you did. If you’d shot me in the head you’d have a lot of fucking explaining to do.”. He was just jealous of the fact I had two chicks with me – we used to have threesomes in my suite. But Led Zeppelin at that point thought they were the kings, they had guns with them and everything else, you know…the whole thing was so bloody weird. Talk about gangland…’

  But then these were witchy times. When, a few days before the band left LA, a skinny red-haired girl began bombarding Danny Goldberg’s suite with phone calls, demanding to see Jimmy, who she said she had ‘a warning for’, claiming his life was in jeopardy, Goldberg placated her by asking her to write her ‘visions’ down on a note which he promised to pass on to the guitarist, then threw the note away as soon as she finally agreed to leave. Six months later, however, Page was rattled to be told the same girl could now be seen on TV, having been arrested for aiming a loaded gun at President Ford on the streets of Sacramento – she was identified as Lynne ‘Squeaky’ Fromme, a member of the Charles Manson cult.

  It hardly mattered – by now the rot had set in anyway. I once asked Jimmy if it was true he had avoided Bonzo on tour by then. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m a very private person, and still am, so maybe people played that up into something else.’ In other words, yes. What about the image – the bad man with the guitar in one hand and the bag of tricks in the other? True, too? ‘Well,’ he said again, ‘there’s no smoke without fire. I guess I’m a pretty complex person.’

  Despite being at the very height of their commercial powers (as well as Physical Graffiti, all five previous Zeppelin albums had re-entered the US charts that spring), behind the scenes, even greater dramas were already beginning to unfold. According to Cole, the 1975 US tour was the first where heroin began to ‘circulate freely’. Although not a subject the band has ever been willing to discuss openly, Page, Bonham, Cole and others in their organisation would succumb to various levels of smack addiction over the next five years. ‘It was hedonistic times, you know?’ said Page. ‘We wanted to be on that edge, it fed into the music.’ As he said in another 2003 interview: ‘I can’t speak for the [other members of the band], but for me drugs were an integral part of the whole thing, right from the beginning, right to the end.’

  Maybe, but Cole complained that Page became even more mysterious and withdrawn on smack, while Bonzo, ‘already unpredictable, became more volatile’. Of course, it’s hard now to think of even one major Seventies rock band that didn’t see drugs as an essential part of the kit. Indeed, the history of heroin in music goes much further back, with the jazz giants of the Fifties famously falling for its occult allure. In the case of Zeppelin, however, cocaine and heroin came to represent their hubris; a symbol of their spectacular spiral to the ground over the next five years.

  Even Grant, who disdained junkies, had developed a not-so-secret coke habit, holing up at Horselunges, his mansion in Sussex, for days at a time when off the road, and spending increasing amounts of time locked away in his hotel suite when on it. The band may not have noticed anything radically different about their manager but those employees working closest with him now began to notice serious cracks in the previously thought impregnable demeanour. Chatting years later with Richard Cole – who, ironically, was now babysitting the ailing figure of Don Arden, Grant’s former mentor – he told me his main memory of Grant at this time was of his mentor and employer sitting at home at Horselunges, like the Al Pacino character in Scarface, a mountain of coke on the coffee table in front of him, spooning it into his nose and bemoaning the fact that, as Cole put it: ‘There was nowhere left to go. They’d reached the top of the mountain. The only way now was down…’

  Michael Francis, who later worked with Bon Jovi, later recalled the bizarre circumstances of his first meeting with Grant after being hired as a Swan Song band bodyguard. He told writer Phil Sutcliffe how, after being driven down in Grant’s Daimler from London to Sussex, he was forced to sit waiting for hours. ‘Then Norman [the chauffeur] explained that Peter would not be able to see me today and that I was to stay the night at the house.’ He did as instructed, assuming Grant had merely been ‘called away on business’. Until later that evening when ‘the chef said h
e was taking Peter’s supper up to him and I realised he had been in the house all this time. When Peter met me for breakfast, he offered no explanation. I later discovered that he would often stay secluded in his upstairs quarters for days at a time, taking cocaine.’

  According to Alan Callan, however, it wasn’t just drugs that were G’s undoing. His ten-year marriage was also now crumbling. To make matters worse, when wife Gloria finally left him, she did so hand-in-hand with the farm manager at Horselunges. ‘If I had asked Peter about mistakes he had made,’ Callan later told Phil Sutcliffe, ‘he would have said, “Lots, we all makes mistakes. We all win sometimes too.”. But if I asked him about failures, I believe he would have said only one: his marriage. He was a person who believed you married for life. I think the break up and its aftermath had a huge impact on him.’

  After the Animals came the Nashville Teens, another Don Arden group, knew it didn’t hurt not to be broke, but that was the same for any bird, wasn’t it? That doesn’t mean they have to say yes when you ask them to marry you, but Gloria did. Then gave you a gorgeous son, Warren, three years later, and then, not so long after that, a beautiful baby girl, Helen. Best of all, she didn’t want to know about the shows and the whatnot, the telly and the fucking lah-de-dah. She just wanted to be a mum and a wife. Woe betide any cunt saying so, but you’d never been happier. A proper family man at last, you’d found someone not just to go home to at night but someone to look forward with as well.

  That was when you knew you had to make it. Like Don, like Mickie, like all the other smart-mouth cunts in their suits and ties and double G& Ts. There was wonga to be made – big wonga – and you were going to get your share, make fucking sure of it. For Gloria and the kids. So while Mickie was striding ahead, producing Herman’s Hermits, Donovan, Lulu and the rest, you took a punt on The Flintstones – a right load of old crash-bang-wallop that went nowhere – and a girl group called She Trinity – from Canada. You got them signed to Columbia but despite their looks you could never get the bloody thing off the ground. Three singles and not a fucking tickle. ‘Forget ’em,’ said Mickie. ‘Move on.’

  So you did, signing the New Vaudeville Band – well, Geoff Stephens, the songwriter and producer. Geoff would knock out some tunes in the studio, you would get ’em played on the radio, and if it bit you’d help him put a band together to tour. Geoff wrote the schmaltzy sort of thing your old mum liked, but catchy and done with a twist, to make you laugh. You could see it on the telly, like Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen or Freddie and the Dreamers. Mickie laughed and took the piss but fuck me if it didn’t take off! ‘Winchester Cathedral’ was a hit all over the fucking place – who Mickie had produced their biggest hit for, ‘Tobacco Road’. Everyone was still getting a taste except you. But life was better in other ways now.

  You’d met Gloria, this tiny, pretty little thing who had been a ballet dancer. It was like Beauty and the Beast; you never knew what she saw in you. You number four in Britain and – ready? – number fucking ONE in AMERICA!! Next thing you knew you were back in the States, doing Ed Sullivan and whatnot, they couldn’t get enough of it. ‘This is it!’ you told Gloria. ‘This will buy us our house!’

  It bloody well did too. It also put you in touch with someone else who’d stick by you through the years. A young lad who reminded you of you – or what you might have been like if you’d been ten years younger. Richard Cole, a former scaffolder from north London. A wild card but the best often are. Not afraid to get stuck in, either, if there was trouble brewing, and there nearly always was. Coley had fought as a boxer and knew karate. A great fucking kid to have around, the sort you only had to tell once. Gobby, too, which also reminded you of you. Like when you told him, ‘If you ever fucking repeat anything you hear in this office, I’ll cut your fucking ears off,’ and quick as a flash the little cunt said back, ‘If you’re going to point your fucking finger at me much longer I’m going to fucking bite it off!’ Funny little fucker, you sent him to work as road manager with Geoff and the Vaudevilles and that was it, he never left your side again. Well, not till the very, very end, but that was another story…

  After the US tour ended in March – Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace introducing them on stage for the final show of their three-night run at LA’s Forum – the band flew home via New York, where Grant broke the news they had been warned to expect but had secretly dreaded: on the advice of their stern accountants, all four band members plus Grant were advised to become tax exiles, an increasingly well-trodden path at this point in the mid-Seventies for a generation of British rock artists. The good news: they would hold onto more than half their huge multi-million earnings from their combined album sales and tour receipts for 1975 – at that point estimated to reach in the region of $40 million. The bad news: they would have to leave the UK almost immediately, unable to return until April 1976 at the earliest. Most of the ensuing period would be taken up touring the world, it was decided, affording the band unusual opportunities to travel to territories they had never been able to before – South America was seriously discussed, as was India, Africa, and other previously thought out-of-the-way stops on the rock’n’roll map. Grant would direct operations from a newly established base, renting promoter Claude Knobs’ house in Montreaux.

  Jones received the news in his usual stoic fashion: the children could be left to board at school if necessary. Page and Plant were generally upbeat: both men viewing the forthcoming year as an adventure. ‘I think it’s time to travel,’ Page had told Cameron Crowe, ‘start gathering some real right-in-there experiences with street musicians around the world. Moroccan musicians, Indian musicians…’ He even talked fancifully of ‘getting a travelling medicine wagon with a dropdown side and travelling around England. Just drop down the side and play through big battery amps and mixers and it can all be as temporary or as permanent as I want it to be.’ Bonzo, though, was distraught, knowing what a long time away from home would in reality mean for him, even refusing at first to comply with G’s proposals, until it was made abundantly clear to him just how much money he would be kissing goodbye: up to ninety-five per cent of his earnings.

  Afterwards, Page and G stayed on in New York, making plans for Zeppelin’s return to the US later that summer for some giant outdoor stadium shows. Meanwhile, back home in early May, a limited seven-inch single of ‘Trampled Underfoot’ b/w ‘Black Country Woman’ was issued as a precursor to what would be, they decided, the crowning achievement of the band’s career in the UK so far: five sold-out shows at London’s 17,000-seater Earl’s Court arena. Grant had initially booked three nights – 23, 24 and 25 May– but they sold out so quickly that two more dates were added on 17 and 18 May.

  The run would be an unparalleled triumph in the band’s career. Then the largest indoor arena in Britain, the band had installed two 24 x 30-feet Ephidor video screens either side of the Earl’s Court stage – an innovation. ‘It was the first time anyone had used [the video screens] at a major rock show,’ said Jimmy. ‘I remember we had some lasers too. What would now be regarded as fairly cheap-looking beams of light – but it was the first time it had been done. I think we broke the rules using them, actually, because we really wanted it to be a show.’ One in which the band consciously looked back on their entire career to date. ‘Six-and-a-half years is a hell of a long time,’ declared Plant from the stage the first night. ‘We want to take you through the stages of six-and-a-half years of our relationship.’ At which point the band bludgeoned into ‘Rock and Roll’ and the place erupted. As Peter Makowski – then the teenaged UK equivalent of Rolling Stone’s Cameron Crowe – who reviewed the show for Sounds, later recalled: ‘One minute we were in the kingdom of Valhalla – all swirling dry ice and blinding lasers during “The Song Remains The Same” and “Trampled Underfoot” the next revisiting “our travels in Morocco…and the story of our wasted, wasted times” for “Kashmir” then transported to a small cottage in Wales while Plant regaled the throng with tales of stoned nights putting to
gether Led Zeppelin III.’ Nor could Plant resist throwing in some sarcastic comments about the band’s imminent tax-enforced departure from Britain, a subject made public just weeks before. ‘Somebody voted for someone and now everybody’s on the run,’ he announced one point. ‘You know, Denis [Healey, then Chancellor of the Exchequer] there’ll be no artists in the country anymore…he must be “Dazed and Confused”…’ While his final words before leaving the stage at the end of the last night were: ‘This is our last concert in England for some considerable time. Still, there’s always the Eighties.’ Then added: ‘If you see Denis Healey, tell him we’ve gone…’