When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  The first leg of the tour ended on Saturday 30 April, after their record-breaking show before 76,229 at the Silverdome in Pontiac, Michigan. The next day, Page flew to Cairo for a short break while the others flew home to England, Plant planning to spend his break horse-riding in Wales. Ten days later the whole band plus Grant attended the Ivor Novello awards at the Grosvenor Hotel in London to accept the 1977 award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music. Then, on 17 May, they flew to the US to begin the second leg of the tour with a swing through the South, beginning at the Coliseum in Birmingham, Alabama, where Jimmy would include a snatch of ‘Dixie’ in his guitar solo spot.

  Despite the near three-week break, when the tour reconvened, instead of lightening the atmosphere, if anything things became even more bleak. When the band found themselves sharing a hotel in Fort Worth, Texas, with Swan Song label-mates Bad Company, they invited guitarist Mick Ralphs up for a jam at their show that night at the Convention Center – bashing out a raggedy version of Jerry Lee Lewis’s ‘It’ll Be Me’ during the encores. Later on, back at the hotel, there was the inevitable ‘party’, during which damage to various rooms was so extensive and apparently systematic the local promoter likened it the next morning to ‘a nuclear holocaust’.

  The fun just never stopped. During their next stopover – a four-night run at the Largo Capitol Center in Landover, Maryland – G attended a specially convened dinner at the Russian Embassy – the first step, he hoped, in negotiations for Zeppelin to play behind the Iron Curtain. Afterwards, he invited a group of delegates to the show where he introduced them to the band, who for once were all on their best behaviour. Then, during the show itself, he arranged for John Paul to incorporate some Rachmaninov variations into his ‘No Quarter’ set-piece. ‘It blew them away!’ G cried afterwards, treating Jonesy to one of his bear hugs.

  After the show at the Summit Arena in Houston on 21 May, overexcited fans again went on the rampage, causing an estimated $500,000 of damage. Police were called in and forty people were arrested on charges of disorderly conduct and drug possession. Two weeks later, when the outdoor show in Tampa – scene of utmost triumph four years before – had to be abandoned after just two numbers because of torrential rain, thousands of angry fans pelted the stage with bottles and fights broke out in the 70,000-strong crowd, aggrieved because tickets for the show mistakenly carried a ‘rain or shine’ pledge – something Grant had steadfastly refused to agree to since the death five years before of Stone The Crows guitarist Les Harvey, electrocuted on stage at the Swansea Top Rank after touching an unearthed microphone with wet hands.

  As the band sped away from the stadium in police-escorted limos, forty more armed policemen in riot gear waded into the crowd to try and stop the commotion but only succeeded in escalating the violence as their billy clubs were met with fists and more bottles, until a full-scale riot was in progress. A stream of ambulances and police squad cars followed. More than sixty fans and a dozen cops were eventually hospitalised. Nineteen were arrested. The next day Grant ordered Concerts West, the promoters, to print a full-page apology in the local Tampa newspaper absolving Zeppelin of any responsibility for the debacle. They meekly complied.

  ‘I see a lot of craziness around us,’ said Plant. ‘Somehow, we generate it and we revile it. This is an aspect since I’ve been away from it which has made me contemplate whether we are doing more harm than we are good. That’s very important to me. I’m not doing a Peter Green or anything. What I mean is, what we are trying to put across is positive and wholesome; the essence of a survival band, and almost a symbol of the phoenix if you will; and people react in such an excitable manner that they miss the meaning of it, and that makes me lose my calm, and I get angry.’

  Not everyone took to the various changes that had been made to the set, either. While ‘Stairway To Heaven’ was still the ovation-demanding finale of every show, the set-list was even more gruellingly long than usual, Jonesy’s ‘No Quarter’ now stretching to quasi-classical lengths of up to thirty minutes, while Bonzo’s re-titled ‘Moby Dick’/‘Over The Top’ drum solo clocked in some nights at almost forty minutes. Coming straight after equally self-conscious lengthy epics like ‘Achilles Last Stand’, for the first time ever at a Led Zeppelin show there would be intense fidgeting, some fans regarding these overindulgences as unofficial toilet breaks, wandering outside to the concession stands, waiting for the ‘real’ show to resume.

  Three days after the Tampa fiasco, the band arrived in New York for their week of shows at Madison Square Garden, the first major highlight of the tour: six sold-out shows that would gross them over $2 million in ticket sales alone. Anxious to put on their best performances, all six Garden shows found the band operating at a new musical peak, the solos still as lengthy but reinvigorated, and with a couple more upbeat numbers added in, ‘Over The Hills And Far Away’ and ‘Heartbreaker’, neither of which had featured since 1973. The first night Robert jokingly dedicated ‘In My Time of Dying’ to the Queen: ‘Tonight is the beginning of Queen Elizabeth the Second’s Silver Jubilee,’ he announced, straight-faced, ‘and that’s a heavy one.’ A pause and smile, and then: ‘So we’ll do this for Liz…’

  Relatively incident-free, backstage was a friendlier place to be, too, with visitors including Mick, Keith and Ronnie from the Stones and actress Faye Dunaway, who also took pictures of the show from the photo-pit out front. The only blight was when Jimmy got hit on the hand by a firecracker and had to leave the stage. He was back a few minutes later, though, his mood, for once, undiminished. Between shows, the band could be seen out on the town, Jimmy hanging out with Keith and Ronnie at newly fashionable Trax disco, while Robert bought himself a new Lincoln Mark VI with plush red interiors, which he had shipped back to England. Plant even agreed to a few select interviews, something he had largely avoided until now. Talking to Melody Maker editor Ray Coleman, he said: ‘It’s been said these shows now are events more than concerts and I suppose that’s true. But what’s the option? I guess we must carry a bit of the legend with us.’ Bonzo, meanwhile, made his presence felt in his own inimitable style, finally getting the band thrown out of the Plaza Hotel for good after he made so much noise throwing TVs and furniture off his balcony guests thought the hotel was under attack from Puerto Rican terrorists.

  From New York they flew via Caesar’s Chariot direct to the West Coast, for their six-night run at the Forum. It was in LA that Jimmy gave a series of fascinating interviews to Dave Schulps of Trouser Press. Describing Page as ‘remarkably thin and pale, his sideburns showing a slight touch of grey, his skin exhibiting a pallor’, Schulps said he ‘found it hard to believe this was the same person I had seen bouncing around at Madison Square Garden a week earlier’. He also remarked on how ‘Page spoke in a half mumble and whisper, which matched his physical appearance’. Nevertheless, and despite frequent interruptions stretching across several days, it was one of the most remarkably candid interviews Jimmy ever gave during Zeppelin days, tracing his career from wide-eyed start to pinpricked present.

  The LA shows themselves were of a similar order to the New York ones, the band making a special effort to ensure that these performances at least would be remembered for all the right reasons. Highlights included an impromptu appearance on the third night from Keith Moon, who simply wandered on during ‘Moby Dick’ and preceded to join in, grabbing Bonzo’s extra sticks and settling down for a genuinely exhilarating drum solo. An impression he then spoiled somewhat by coming back out and making a botch of introducing the encores. Then, after playing the kettle drums on ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and ‘Rock And Roll’ (during which the smoke bombs nearly blew him offstage) he wandered down to the front and tried joining Robert in singing Eddie Cochran’s ‘C’mon Everybody’. Page, Plant and Jones looked on and laughed. Well, what else could they do?

  Offstage, however, what should have been a triumphal ‘homecoming’ and the culmination of the second leg of the tour, was again marred by the general ‘bad energy’ su
rrounding the tour. The night after his self-invited appearance on stage with the band, Moon, who had also booked himself into the band’s hotel, joined Bonzo and the boys on a night-off visit to the Comedy Store, but the Who drummer was in melancholy mood and eventually got them thrown out for repeated – and unfunny – heckling. Bonzo didn’t care. He was now so permanently out of it, day was colliding with night. Bev Bevan, in town with ELO, by then a huge US concert draw themselves, recalls inviting Bonzo over for a drink at his hotel. When he turned up, Bev was shocked by what he saw. ‘I think he felt he had a reputation to live up to, like Keith Moon. For every one drink I had he’d order himself six Brandy Alexanders, just showing off, really, knocking them back one after another. Then he got up to play a tune with the house band – Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” – and he was awful! I was so embarrassed because I’d just been telling these guys, wait till you see him play, he’s the best, but he could barely hold the beat. I don’t think I actually saw him again after that.’ The Bonzo who Bev had known in the old days had changed ‘and it wasn’t for the better. It’s a shame but that’s the truth. He was drinking so much it was terrifying, really.’ Grant, meanwhile, was now so locked into his cocaine paranoia he arbitrarily ordered a full audit of the band’s tour accounts, specifically the ‘expenses’ handled personally by Cole, where it was discovered that a total of $10,460 had apparently gone ‘missing’. No less befuddled than Grant, Cole later admitted: ‘I thought, what with all the drugs I may have made a blunder.’ However, the ‘discrepancy’ was eventually traced back to $10,000 Cole was originally to have picked up from a Houston promoter, only to have arrangements altered at the last minute.

  On the sixth and last night of the Forum run, Plant bid the audience farewell with the words: ‘Thanks to the badge holders of California’ – an in-joke reference to all the groupies backstage, now carefully delineated by their own ‘special’ backstage passes, distributed by all the various assistants – before Zeppelin roared through a medley of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and ‘Rock And Roll’. Immediately afterwards, Cole did as he always had and ushered the band – and their guests – into a fleet of limos, waiting not to whisk them back to their hotel this time, however, but direct to LAX airport and home. Exactly eight and a half years since they’d made the same journey but in the opposite direction – and in far less luxurious surroundings – Led Zeppelin’s long, hot, passionate, sometimes violent, always eventful love affair with the City of Angels had come to an end. Though none of them, not even Jimmy or G, knew it yet, they would never play there – in any sense – again.

  The third and final leg of the US tour had begun in Seattle with a sold-out show before 65,000 at the Kingdome, home of the Seattle Sounders soccer team, on 17 July. It was a lacklustre resumption with poor sound and another unruly crowd making for an unappetising spectacle. ‘It did begin to feel like a soundcheck in the dark,’ said Jonesy afterwards. ‘The audience was so far away you could hardly see or hear them.’

  Six days later they arrived in San Francisco for the first of two festival shows at the 90,000-capacity Oakland Coliseum. Intended as a festive occasion, the band and all the main members of the crew, including Grant, had flown their wives and children in. Also on the bill were Rick Derringer and Judas Priest, both of whom would do their utmost to try and pull the rug from under the headliners. Neither caused Zeppelin as much embarrassment, however, as the new backdrop they had specially constructed for the large outdoor shows – a mock-up of Stonehenge (an idea that would return to haunt them in the post-Spinal Tap age). Worse – much worse – was to follow at the end of the first show though, and an event that would become the source of a much deeper, more shameful stain on their reputation.

  In his autobiography, promoter Bill Graham recalls the whole build up to Oakland being pockmarked with unsavoury incidents – portents of the gloom which would swiftly descend on all of them – beginning with a phone call from Richard Cole the day before the first show, demanding a $25,000 cash advance – ‘drug money,’ claims Graham. He also noted the heavy atmosphere now surrounding the band. ‘I [had] heard about the ugliness of their security,’ he wrote, ‘how they were just waiting to kill. They had these bodyguards who had police records in England. They were thugs.’ As if to prove it, when, in the build up to the first early-evening show, Jim Downey, one of Graham’s regular stage crew made what Grant took as a disparaging remark about his weight – offering to help the stoned, tottering giant down some backstage steps – John Bindon stepped forward and punched him, causing Downey to bang his head on the concrete, knocking him out cold.

  But that was small fry compared to what happened later during the show when another of Graham’s staff, security man Jim Matzorkis, stepped in to prevent a young boy from removing a wooden plaque with the band’s name on it from a backstage trailer door, explaining sternly they would need it for the following day’s show. Unfortunately for Matzorkis, the boy was Warren Grant – G’s son – and when Bonzo, who’d witnessed the incident, gleefully reported it to Grant – adding that Matzorkis had slapped the boy – the furious, spittle-flying manager grabbed Bindon and Cole and the four of them went looking for Matzorkis. ‘You don’t talk to a kid like that,’ Grant told Matzorkis when he found him, and ordered him to apologise to Warren. As if to emphasise the point, Bonzo kicked him in the groin. Matzorkis ran for his life, hiding in one of the backstage production trailers. According to an interview Graham later gave Rolling Stone, in the tumult that ensued, his production manager Bob Barsotti was also hit on the head with a lead pipe. Grant then promised Graham there would be no further violence; that he just wanted to finish speaking with Matzorkis. So Graham reluctantly led him to the trailer where Matzorkis was hiding. ‘I said: “Jim, it’s okay, it’s me”, then I stepped in. I said, “Jim, this is Mr Peter Grant, the boy’s father.” Before I could finish the sentence Peter blasted Jim in the face.’ Grant then had Bindon throw Graham out, closed the door, leaving the pipe-wielding Cole to stand guard outside as he and Johnny went to work on the terrified Matzorkis. The beating was so savage the trailer began to rock from side to side. Matzorkis only escaped, he later said, after Bindon had tried gouging out his eye. A horrified Graham had his still bleeding staffer rushed straight to East Bay hospital.

  At the second show the following night, Zeppelin took the stage over ninety minutes late, waiting while a lawyer, hastily drafted in by Grant, arrived backstage and informed Graham he would have to sign a letter of indemnification, absolving the band and/or its employees of any responsibility for the previous evening’s atrocities – or the band would not perform the second show. Not wanting a riot on his hands, Graham signed. However, he did so safe in the knowledge that the letter would have no influence on Matzorkis’ own options. Robert, who had always admired Bill, did his best to try and affect some form of reconciliation – even thanking him publicly as the band left the stage that night – but Graham wouldn’t even look at him, let alone speak. The show itself was a surprisingly good one, including an impromptu acoustic version of ‘Mystery Train’. But Page was distraught throughout and did almost all of the show that night sitting disconsolately, with his guitar, on the lip of the stage.

  The matter did not rest there, however. Determined to regain control of the situation, Graham planned to fly twenty-five of his own armed men into the next show at the New Orleans Superdome. Before he could give the go-ahead, however, Matzorkis had beaten him to it by going to the police. The morning after the second Oakland show, the band’s hotel was surrounded by an Oakland SWAT team as officers went in, weapons drawn, and formally arrested Grant, Bindon, Bonham and Cole on charges of assault. They were taken and held in an open jail for several hours before being released on bail.

  The 155 Oxford Street office – above Millets – with Mickie became legendary, the joint stuffed with music biz knocking shops, pen-pushers churning out ‘certain’ hits for any dodgy publisher or record company dick willing to give them the price of a pint or t
wo. Chrysalis on the first floor; Island Music and Mike Berry on the second. The only downside for you was that your office was on the sixth floor. There was a lift but if some fucker left the gate open the bloody thing wouldn’t work. Mickie would just run up the stairs. Not you. You taking the piss? Naw, when that happened you’d simply turn on your heel and fuck off down the pub, or just go home. It was even worse in winter, waiting for the cunts in the shop downstairs to put the heating on, freezing your bollocks off trying to make a phone call. In the end you’d go in there and grab the manager and tell him straight: ‘If you don’t put that fucking heating on, I’ll put you in the fucking boiler!’ After that the cunts never turned the radiators off again, not even in summer.

  You had a temper, course you did. You had to stick up for yourself in this business or they’d walk right over you. When you got really annoyed you’d kick the front panel out of your desk. You knew it’d been a stinker that day if the desk ended up in pieces on the floor. Usually you’d get it off your chest just by shouting and swearing, though. Give some deserving cunt an earful on the dog. But sometimes it took more than that. Sometimes you just wanted to break something…somebody…

  It was at the Oxford Street gaff you met Bill Harry. One of the chaps, Bill was. A scally with the gift of the gab to prove it; you had him doing the PR for the New Vaudeville Band and later on Led Zeppelin. Lucky to have him too, they were. Bill had been to school with John Lennon, started Mersey Beat magazine and knew them all: the Beatles, the Hollies, the Kinks, Pink Floyd, Ten Years After, Jethro Tull…loads of ’em. It was Bill who switched you onto the pirate radio stations, chatting to him over a fag one day, setting the world to rights together. Next thing you knew there was you and Mickie in a fucking boat full of records, you driving, setting off from Clacton trying to get to Radio Caroline, Radio London and the rest. Not knowing what the fuck you were doing, Mickie trying to throw the records on board these big bastard ships, the records sailing off into the sea. You didn’t know whether to laugh or piss yourself. Turn left at the Thames Estuary, Mickie said, and don’t look back! The DJs all shouting, ‘Never mind the records, throw the Scotch!’ You sitting there, fucking miserable and starving. ‘Don’t worry,’ Mickie would say, ‘when we get to Southend, we’ll have fish and chips.’ Piss-taking cunt…