When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  None of which impressed the leading lights of the punk movement one jot. ‘When Robert Plant went down [to the Roxy] he had about five heavies with him, half the band and others,’ sneered Johnny Rotten in ZigZag. ‘There were about twenty of them. They like took a corner, posing and hurling abuse at people that walked by as if they were something special. Now if I go somewhere I either go on my own or with a couple of mates. I don’t need all that heavy stuff.’ He concluded: ‘People shouldn’t worship stars like Robert Plant…These superstars are totally detached from reality. I’ve no doubt it’s very difficult to keep in touch with reality once you get to that stage, but you should at least try. They don’t seem to try at all. They let it overtake them.’

  To his credit, though, Plant was the first to agree. ‘Those accusations of remoteness, of playing blind, of having no idea about people or circumstances or reality, of having no idea about what we were talking about or what we were feeling, of being deep and meaningless and having vapid thoughts – there was a lot of substance in what was being said. People were quite right to say all that. It hurt at the time but I’d have to plead guilty.’ Jonesy, however, was having none of it. He didn’t agree with punk’s suggestion that the band was verging on obsolescence, nor did he feel kindly towards the music of punk. His response, to largely ignore it: ‘I must say I didn’t like punk at first. It just sounded loud and horrible…For us it was a case of just carrying on regardless.’

  The end of 1976 found the band, Page in particular, doing exactly that, yet labouring under heavy manners. Down about the poor reaction to the band movie, which he could no longer even bring himself to watch, he was even more down, though refused to admit it, about the fallout with Kenneth Anger over his cherished soundtrack to Lucifer Rising. He now had to contend with evicting squatters from the Tower House: a bizarre couple, once friends, now no longer, who had taken to masquerading as he and Charlotte.

  In January 1977, Jimmy finally got the news he’d been waiting for when Robert confirmed that he was ready to go back on the road – boasting of building up his leg strength by joining in on training sessions with his beloved Wolverhampton Wanderers football team. An equally delighted Grant began booking what would be their biggest US tour yet: 51 dates over a four-and-a-half month period, divided into three legs, which would see an estimated 1.3 million Zep fans snapping up tickets. A mix of multiple nights at arenas – including six nights at Madison Square Garden in New York and six nights at the Forum in LA, and huge outdoor stadiums in Chicago, Tampa, Oakland, Michigan – where they would set another attendance record at the Pontiac Silverdome (for over 76,000 fans, beating the previous best for a show there by The Who in December 1975) and single performance fee ($792,361) – climaxing at the JFK Stadium in Philadelphia where more than 95,000 people had bought tickets the day they went on sale. With the tour itinerary undergoing no less than six revisions before he was finally happy, this was to be the comeback to end all comebacks, Grant decided. It would be that, all right, though not for the reasons a relieved Jimmy and G envisaged as they laid plans and snorted coke together at Manticore, the west London rehearsal studio they had rented from Emerson, Lake and Palmer.

  This would be Led Zeppelin out to prove themselves again, they decided: to the punks who disowned them, to the press who never lost an opportunity to put them down, to the fans that had stuck by them through the travails of the past two years, but most of all to themselves, their reward for hanging on in there, against the odds, as they saw it, before coming out the other side, more together than ever before, they decided. There were some marked differences, however, between the band that had bowed out in such splendour at Earl’s Court in 1975 and the one about to reappear, as though nothing had happened, in 1977. First off, there was the music. While the set resembled the one of ’75, there were some notable absences, such as ‘Dazed and Confused’ – though not the violin bow showcase, Jimmy merely taking a solo spot, coaxing all manner of eerie and grating effects from his green-lit Les Paul. Robert had also wanted to drop ‘In My Time Of Dying’, seeing it as one temptation of fate too many in the lead up to his and Maureen’s accident, still as fresh in their minds as though it were yesterday. But he changed his mind halfway through the tour. And there were to be only two new songs from Presence: ‘Achilles Last Stand’ and ‘Nobody’s Fault but Mine’ almost an admission that the rest of the material on the album simply didn’t measure up to the band’s past. On the plus side, however, Jones unveiled his new triple-necked guitar, an exotic-looking instrument, built for him by guitar tech Andy Manson, which allowed him to play bass and rhythm guitar and help sustain the melody on numbers like ‘Ten Years Gone’ – performed live for the first time on this tour – emulating the multi-tracked guitars of the recording while enabling Page to take off in improvised flights of fancy on the lead. ‘Rock And Roll’ was also dropped as set opener, replaced by ‘The Song Remains The Same’, and the sit-down acoustic set was reintroduced to the American show for the first time since 1972. ‘A unanimous group decision that Jimmy and I made,’ joked Robert, who in reality needed the break to rest his still-damaged ankle and leg. There was also a new arrangement of ‘The Battle of Evermore’, with Jonesy singing the Sandy Denny parts. ‘I’ll never know how I agreed to that,’ Jones later admitted. ‘It was a case of: “Oh, Jonesy will do it”, which happened quite a lot.’ Page’s old Yardbirds showcase ‘White Summer’ was also reinstated as a prelude to ‘Kashmir’, turning the entire set-piece into a twenty-minute epic.

  The light show was much the same as before, though for the stadium shows there would now be the addition, as at Earl’s Court, of the Ephidor video screens erected either side of the stage. The band’s mode of transport also changed: the Starship had been grounded after one of its engines nearly came off mid-flight, so without telling the band why – lest it freak out its already jumpy passengers – Cole arranged for the hire of the private 707 owned by Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, normally used to jet in high-rollers to the city’s most lustrous hotel-casino. Named Caesar’s Chariot, it had all the comforts of the Starship, with only one exception: no more Thomas organ. Nobody minded. The days of anyone from the band tinkling the ivories for the edification of whatever guests had been ‘lucky’ enough to find themselves on board their plane were long over. There were still many recreational activities to be enjoyed aboard Zeppelin’s private plane, but no longer any half so innocent.

  Other changes to the set-up would have more far-reaching consequences, notably the hiring of several new ‘assistants’. Everyone would have one: Jimmy’s would be his chauffeur and butler Rick Hobbs; Robert’s the former Maggie Bell roadie, Dennis Sheehan; John Paul’s a qualified pharmacist and rugby player named Dave Northover; Bonzo’s the rough-tough Rex King. Even Richard Cole now had a full-time second-in-command: Mitchell Fix, originally a member of the New York Swan Song team. The most noted of the new ‘assistants’, however, was Peter Grant’s: a bit-part film actor – known for typecast hard-man roles in Get Carter and Performance – and real-life strong-arm merchant named John Bindon. Thirty-four-year-old ‘Johnny’ Bindon was a nasty piece of work who had been hovering on the fringes of the Zeppelin operation for some time; a shoot-first-don’t-even-bother-asking-questions-later London ‘face’ who counted among his friends the Kray twins and Princess Margaret, and who would serve several prison sentences before being accused in 1979 of murdering another underworld enforcer named John Darke in a club brawl. Both menacingly intimidating and, apparently, hilariously funny, depending on his mood, Bindon’s favourite party trick was to balance as many as six half-pint mugs on his erect penis. Bankrupt at the time of being hired by Grant, the only thing that assuaged his violent temper was the vast amounts of marijuana he smoked. With both Page and Plant now receiving death threats before the tour had even begun, G had decided he needed someone like Bindon along for if and when things got ‘rough’. The trouble was, with someone like Bindon, things were likely to get rough sooner rather than lat
er. As Alan Callan would observe, ‘He certainly wasn’t hired for his dinner conversation. He was Robert’s bullet-proof vest. I believe Bindon would have actually taken a bullet for him.’

  Speaking years later to Dave Lewis, Grant admitted that hiring people like Bindon was not, on reflection, a good idea. But as he said, ‘It was hard for me really because I had to leave the kids and my divorce was starting. John Bonham was also uptight that year and we took Rex out to be his whipping boy.’ Bindon was ‘a friend of Richard’s…an aide who ended up looking after Jimmy quite a lot.’ He added: ‘Jimmy’s health was suffering. There were definite drug problems with one or two people, including myself.’

  The immediate effect of so many ‘cooks’ on board the touring ship, Cole would later write, was ‘multiple divisions…cliques were formed and a very tight organisation became fragmented’. Sometimes it was ‘as though we were staying at different hotels from each other, not just down the hall’. Even when they did socialise ‘streaks of hostility or maliciousness’ poisoned each encounter. Even the once unstoppable Grant became more and more withdrawn, staying in his hotel room, snorting coke, issuing orders via Bindon or Cole. When the NME ran a gossip item claiming he had become a virtual recluse on tour, he flew off the handle yet again, insisting the paper print a hasty apology on pain of legal action – or worse.

  The soft kernel at the centre of this increasingly hard outer shell was Plant himself. Able to walk again without a cane, his right foot was still swollen, the leg a long way from full recovery; he still had to take painkillers every day just to cope with normal activities. He was so nervous that the start of the tour – originally scheduled to kick off with a date in Fort Worth on 27 February – had to be put back, the official reason given as ‘laryngitis’. How would he cope, he wondered, having to whirl and twirl and sashay about the stage as he had done in the past, the unremitting glare of the spotlight following his every move? Speaking just two days after the start of the tour in April, at the Memorial Center in Dallas, he confessed: ‘I was petrified. For the ten minutes before I walked up those stage steps, I was cold with fright. Supposing I couldn’t move around the stage properly because my right foot is permanently enlarged now? It was killing for the first two gigs. I had to be virtually carried back on one foot.’

  Other nights on the tour, Plant could be seen visibly wincing in pain as he forgot himself momentarily and attempted a sudden twist or turn. Then there were the moments when he simply seemed lost, unable to project the kind of warmth and joie-de-vivre that had always been his stock in trade as a frontman. Conscious of the struggle the singer was going through, Page did his best to compensate, adding a little more physical exuberance to his own performance – at least on those nights when he wasn’t so out of his head on cocaine and heroin that he began to seriously struggle himself. For this US tour would find Jimmy Page at his darkest. Forget Sid Vicious, for sheer cadaverous chic the Page of 1977 would take some beating: now sporting an all-white version of the famous dragon suit most nights, whip-thin, pinned pupils masked behind permanent-midnight sunglasses. He was now going three or four nights without sleep, and boasting of living on a liquid-only diet. ‘I prefer to eat liquid food,’ he explained with a stoned half-smile. ‘Something like a banana daiquiri, which I can put powdered vitamin in. I’m not really into solid foods very much [but] I know I’ll never turn down some alcohol, so a banana daiquiri, with all the food protein, is the answer.’ To aide such special requirements, once again they’d hired their own doctor. A graduate of Harvard, he was a rock veteran whose first tour had been the notoriously out-of-control 1972 US trek by the Rolling Stones, as immortalised in the cult film, Cocksucker Blues. Jimmy vehemently denied the doctor was just there to provide the band with legal access to drugs. ‘We had a doctor to look after all of us, period. It was a bloody long tour,’ he later told writer Chris Salewicz. He also denied rumours that he was wheeled around between gigs in a wheelchair. ‘I may have done that for a laugh – not seriously. No, no. That wasn’t happening at all.’

  The fact that such rumours did the rounds at all demonstrated how low Zeppelin’s reputation had now sunk. During their four-night run at the gigantic Chicago Stadium, Page came on decked out in a decidedly punk SS Stormtrooper’s cap, his long spider’s legs disappearing into a pair of shiny black leather jackboots; no longer interested in concealing the darkness which he said had found him, not the other way around. On the third night, the show had to be abandoned halfway through ‘Ten Years Gone’ when Jimmy came down with ‘stomach cramps’, as the official explanation had it. Or ‘technical difficulties’ as another official explanation put it. In reality, according to one who was there but asks not to be named here, the show had to be called off because Page ‘was so out of it he was trying to play twin-neck on the wrong guitar.’ (Indeed, there is an infamous bootleg of the show called China White that appears to back this claim up. His playing, shaky throughout, simply stops halfway through ‘Ten Years Gone’. ‘Jimmy has got a bout of gastroenteritis,’ Robert, doing his best to cover, tells the audience, ‘which isn’t helped by firecrackers, so we’re gonna take a five-minute break’. They never came back out.) Another occasion on stage, ‘he was so gone he couldn’t even pull his own trousers up’. During the acoustic section of the next show he became so absorbed he leapt out of his chair towards the end of one song – unplugging his guitar in the process.

  Speaking the next day to a writer from Circus magazine, Page blamed his inability to complete the show on ‘food poisoning’ a mystery ailment, indeed, considering he wasn’t actually eating any food at that point. He was dismissive about rumours that it was to be the band’s last tour. ‘Led Zeppelin is a stag party that never ends,’ he declared unconvincingly. ‘This is no last tour. It would be a criminal act to break up this band.’ Perhaps, but his actions were now taking him perilously close to doing just that. As Dave Dickson points out: ‘A rock star of the magnitude Page was by then, they live in a little bubble, there is no contact with reality. And there’s so much pressure on you, the head guy of the biggest band in the world, if you find a release by doing heroin, because that just takes you away to some alternative place where no one can touch you, then you’re gonna do it. The thing is, like Crowley discovered, it is eventually going to destroy you, because you become its slave. The heroin stops working for you and you start working for it.’

  Page, however, remains almost blissfully unrepentant. Asked by Nick Kent in 2003 whether he regretted ‘getting so involved in heroin and cocaine’, he shrugged. ‘I don’t regret it at all because when we needed to be really focused, I was really focused. That’s it…You’ve got to be on top of it.’ Clearly, though, there were exceptions to the rule and in 1977 they were becoming more frequent. A freak storm at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport delayed the take-off of Caesar’s Chariot. As a result, the next night’s performance at the Minneapolis Sports arena was delayed by more than an hour. After the show, Jimmy got into an argument with the doctor when a phial of Quaaludes went missing from his black bag. When the doc cornered him in a bathroom about the missing drugs, Page was outraged. ‘Accusing me!’ he cried. ‘Who the fuck does he think is paying his salary?’

  American writer Jaan Uhelszki, who profiled the first leg of the tour for Creem, did his best to put a positive, if somewhat sceptical spin on things, quoting one unnamed source as follows: ‘It was about 5:30 am, and I had finally managed to sneak away from all the carousing and carnage of the past 48 hours, and had successfully thwarted Bonzo from breaking down my door or dousing me with a wastebasket full of what I hoped was water. Bonzo was entertaining himself by going from room to room with a broken bedpost slung over one shoulder, demolishing as many rooms of Swingle’s Celebrity Hotel in as little time as possible.’ There was also a ‘chilly’ meeting with Page, who ‘sauntered unsteadily into the room on his obscenely thin legs…dressed in his regalia of the night before, which caused a passer-by in the hotel lobby to remark to her companion, “If tha
t’s not a rock star, he’s a flaming wonder!”’ Travelling aboard Caesar’s Chariot was more fun, though; the doctor ‘threading his way through the cabin, passing out pre-“game” vitamins to all occupants of said cabin, regardless of whether you’re one of the “players” or not.’

  Cornering Plant to enquire where the band went from here, the singer answered sardonically: ‘There are two paths you can take…’ When the writer corrected him: ‘There are two paths you can go by, but in the long run, there’s still time to change the road you’re on,’ Plant is taken aback enough to attempt a proper answer for once. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted, then added prophetically: ‘I think it’s an extension of what I’m doing but I don’t think I’ll be surrounded by so much hysteria. I think I will go to Kashmir one day, when some great change hits me and I have to really go away and think about my future as a man rather than a prancing boy.’ A ‘great change’, though he didn’t know it yet, sitting on Caesar’s Chariot awaiting the next touchdown, was fast approaching.

  In truth, there was a heavy atmosphere pervading all the shows now; a cold, black cloud that hung over the band even when they weren’t on stage. Even the audience was starting to act up. At the next show, in St Paul, twenty-four fans were arrested for disorderly conduct as hundreds of ticketless fans tried to crash through the gates. There was a repeat performance five nights later at the Cincinnati Riverfront Coliseum, when over a thousand apparently crazed fans simply tried to gate-crash security and make their way into the building. This time local police made more than a hundred arrests. Then, in a surprisingly little-reported incident at the time, a fan tragically died during the second show in Cincinnati after accidentally falling from the venue’s third level.