When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  No-one ever forgot you, though, which was even more important than the records, in the long run. People didn’t say, ‘Let’s go and see RAK Management,’ they said, ‘Let’s go and see Peter and Mickie…’ and it all came good eventually. Once you had four LPs in the Top 20! Take that, you bastards! Then came the Yardbirds. A bit of what you really fancied. Mickie was all over them like a cheap suit but you knew they’d need you too – a band like that didn’t want to be in the studio all day, they wanted to be out there, earning, putting on the clobber and pulling the birds.

  It was also through the Yardbirds that you got to know Pagey and Jones again. Pagey everyone knew, of course, from his sessions. And Baldwin, as he still was to you, was another face from that same scene that Mickie pulled in to do some work on the Little Games LP. By now it was all about LPs, the hippies had taken over. It was all dope and acid now and hey man you can fuck my girlfriend. But there was loot in it, and plenty of it if you only knew how, and you weren’t gonna let it get away from you even if it meant growing what was left of your hair. Mainly, it was all about America. You’d had the Animals of course but it wasn’t you that saw the money from them, it was Mickie and that cunt Jeffrey. God bless the New Vaudeville Band, they’d made a few bob for you over there but they weren’t exactly fashionable. They were old men compared to this Yardbirds mob. You talked it over with Mickie but mainly he had his eye on the guitarist, Jeff Beck – well, good luck with that…But you reckoned if you played your cards right these Yardbirds could be like a cross between the Animals and the New Vaudvilles, successful and cool. You sat there at the broken desk, having a fag and thinking about it. First though, you’d have to get them back over to America, see the lie of the land for your own eyes…

  You rang up Richard Cole and told him he could come too, be your assistant. You had a feeling you’d need all the help you could get. Sure enough, there were times when you wondered what the fuck you’d got yourself into. Like that rotten State Fair in Canada that winter, driving through the pissing rain and snow, lorries jack-knifed all over the highway. Then when you got there you were so late you’d missed the first show. Next thing you know these two Mafioso wankers are standing there saying they’re gonna kill ya cos we’d cost them money and blah blah blah. You were sitting in the back of the bus when they pulled out their guns. You were so tired and fucked off you didn’t give a shit, just stood up and waded into them. They pushed their guns into your guts but you just kept on coming. ‘You’re gonna do WHAT?’ you screamed into their faces. Little cunts started laughing like a pair of schoolgirls. That’s when you realised they were even more scared than you were. One look at you and everyone was always more scared than you were. That was the idea anyway…

  It all came to a sticky end though when the band didn’t want to know anymore. You know you’re onto a serious loser when you can’t even dangle money in front of the cunts. A club date in the States – flat fee, $5,000. A lot of fucking spondulicks. Jimmy, no fool, said yes, and so did Chris, but the others didn’t wanna know. Big row. In the end you drafted out a letter giving Jimmy the rights to the name, which they all signed, so at least he could do the gig, pick up the bread. He was a good kid, Pagey. Quiet until you got to know him, but solid as a fucking rock when it came down to it. Better than Beck, who could play and had the looks but never knew whether it was Tuesday or fucking Selfridges. With Pagey you were solid gold all the way. He was like you, wanted the copper and the kettle. When he said he wanted to form his own mob you were ready to put the house on it. In the end you would put that and a whole lot more. ‘Just remember,’ you would tell people, ‘if the ship starts to sink Jimmy is the first one in the fucking lifeboat, get it?’ Gloria heard you say it so often she used to say you loved Jimmy more than you loved her…

  Speaking to Nick Kent in 2003, Jimmy said his main memories of Oakland are that ‘It was particularly ugly’ all round, not just backstage but, again, amongst the crowd itself. During the second of the two shows, ‘All I could see were people getting pulled over the barriers and beaten up, and it was horrible to play in front of that. There was a very nasty, heavy energy about the whole day. I don’t know what arguments had gone on between Peter and Bill Graham but I know it was getting very ugly behind the stage. Our people beat up one of Graham’s security guards. It was a scandal, just abhorrent, but it was going on out front all the time so it was “like attracting like” in a sense.’

  He felt that Grant had been ‘very, very affected by his divorce’ and, by implication, that his judgement was seriously impaired. ‘A lot of the violence that went on was kept away from the group, so we rarely knew anything. It was only near the end that I saw it truly manifesting itself. It had got very heavy by then and it was so far removed from what the true spirit of the band was about. The bad elements in the organisation grew out of all control and it became a terrible misuse of the power of the band. It was people around us abusing our power.’

  Six months later Grant, Bonham, Cole and Bindon would file joint pleas of nolo contender (I will not plead guilty) to the assault charges. All four were found guilty and given fines and suspended jail sentences. Matzorkis would also file a $2 million civil suit against the band, but as none of the four had been required to appear personally in court, the civil suit was never heard. Graham was outraged at such lenient sentences but there was little the promoter could do other than condemn them publicly. ‘I could never in good conscience book them again,’ he said. Years later, Grant admitted he deeply regretted the Matzorkis incident. So upset was he by Graham’s account in his autobiography, he openly wept in front of his friend, Dire Straits’ manager Ed Bicknell. ‘I don’t want to be thought of as a bad person,’ he told him. But it was too late; much too late.

  Typically, Jonesy was the first out the door after the Oakland shows. As he later told Dave Lewis, ‘I actually had all the family over and was due to travel to Oregon the next day. I’d rented a motor home and I had it parked outside the hotel. We heard the police were on the way and they were swarming around the lobby. So me and my family went down this service elevator out the back, through the kitchen and into this motor home – which I’d never driven – pulled out of the hotel, onto the freeway and away from the trouble.’ Adept at staying out of trouble, his philosophy: ‘If it was fun you joined in, if it wasn’t you didn’t. I was often in another part of the hotel I guess. But that sort of stuff got a bit tedious after a while. Things were getting a little crazy with Richard Cole and the likes of John Bindon.’ He added, pointedly: ‘Every band was doing the drugs thing at the time – we didn’t really worry much about it – but by then it was getting a bit out of control.’

  And it was about to get worse. The band had only just arrived at the Maison Dupuy Hotel in Louisiana – where the governor planned to make them ‘honorary colonels’ – when Robert received a desperate phone call from Maureen in England saying that their five-year-old son, Karac, was seriously ill with a viral infection. Two hours later, Maureen called back with even more shattering news: Karac was dead. Details were hard to come by – Karac had been diagnosed with a respiratory infection; within twenty-four hours his condition had worsened so alarmingly Maureen had dialled 999 and an ambulance was sent, but it was too late and Karac had died in the ambulance on his way to the hospital. As Plant put the phone down, his world collapsed. So did what was left of Led Zeppelin’s. All remaining shows on the tour were cancelled.

  Cole, Bonham and Dennis Sheehan accompanied Robert on his journey home. A private jet met them at Heathrow to fly them up to the Midlands, where a limo was waiting to speed the singer home. They all stayed with him for the funeral in Birmingham, the only members of Zeppelin’s inner circle to attend. Page, Jones and Grant were all still in the US, G busy dealing with the repercussions of having to cancel the remaining seven dates. Why neither Page nor Jones made the trip back for the funeral, neither man has ever explained fully, not even to Plant. Hurt the others hadn’t showed up, he told Cole, in Stair
way To Heaven: ‘Maybe they don’t have as much respect for me as I do for them. Maybe they’re not the friends I thought they were.’

  ‘I just couldn’t believe it,’ said Jones. ‘I was up in Oregon. Somewhere in Oregon I called in to New Orleans – I was going to stay with Tommy Hullat from Concerts West. It was quite a time for him, what with the Zeppelin tour being cancelled, and then Elvis died a couple of weeks later and he had to sort that out too. Anyway, Robert had gone home with Bonzo and I drove on to Seattle. It was a very strange time. We just knew we had to give him time.’

  For Robert Plant, 1977 was ‘the year it all stopped for me. Nothing could make it all right again and nothing ever will.’ Through it all, he told me nearly thirty years later, Bonzo never left his side. ‘During the absolute darkest times of my life when I lost my boy and my family was in total disarray, it was Bonzo who came to me. Him and Pat, they were the people who I’d been dealing with all over those years who were there. The other guys were in the South and probably because they didn’t have the same social etiquettes as we have up here, Bonzo could actually bridge that very uncomfortable chasm between…’ He paused, swallowed hard, ‘…with all the sensitivities that would be required…to commiserate and console.’

  The press, however, were in no mood for consolation and instead began writing about a Led Zeppelin ‘jinx’. A London tabloid quoted a ‘psychic’ predicting more troubled times ahead for the band, while a radio DJ in Chicago announced that ‘if Jimmy Page would just lay off all that mystical, hocus-pocus occult stuff, and stop unleashing all these evil forces, Led Zeppelin could just concentrate on making music.’

  It may have been crudely put, but it summed up the secret thoughts of many who had more than a passing acquaintance with Page and Zeppelin. Did such thoughts ever infect Plant, though? It’s hard to believe that, in his grief, he didn’t at some point allow himself to wonder if Page’s occult connections hadn’t in some way impacted upon the band’s collective karma. Plant certainly believed in karma – as did Page – in good vibes and bad, in reaping what you sow. More likely, however, as with so many parents in similar situations, he merely blamed himself. The drugs, the groupies, the excuses to friends and loved ones and, ultimately, to oneself…how could it not all eventually end in tears?

  There was more fuel to add to the karmic law bonfire though when, in September, a drunken Bonzo crashed his car while driving home from the pub one night. Going far too fast as usual, he spun off a bend and hurt himself badly, the car ending up in a ditch. Not willing to call the police or even a doctor, he had the wreck privately towed back to his farm and when he did finally agree to see a doctor – after suffering such pain he was having difficulty breathing – he was diagnosed as having broken two ribs. News eventually got out and the word ‘jinx’ was all over the papers again.

  Jimmy was understandably touchy on the subject of bad karma. Speaking upon his return from America that year, he scowled: ‘It’s just the wrong term to ever use, and how somebody can level that at us shocks me. The whole concept of the band is entertainment; I don’t see any link between [Karac’s death] and karma, it’s nonsense.’

  Ultimately, what Robert Plant, as grieving father, needed was to be left in peace; for time to work its miracle and at least scab-over wounds that would never fully heal. The future of Led Zeppelin would simply have to be put on hold – again. There would be no daily phone calls from Page checking on his progress this time, either. He and Grant had already decided at a private meeting in London that they would give Robert ‘three months or three years, whatever he needed,’ as Grant put it. ‘I felt quite remote from the whole thing,’ said Robert, looking back many years later. ‘I wasn’t comfortable with the group at all. We’d gone right through the hoop and, because my hoop was on fire, I didn’t know if it was worth it anymore.’

  Drugs were also now an issue. After Karac’s death, Plant would view cocaine and, particularly, heroin, in a very different light – along with those that used them, like Page. ‘Addiction to powders was the worst way to see yourself, a waste of your time and everybody’s time,’ he said. ‘You make excuses to yourself why things aren’t right or about what’s happening to your potential. You lie to yourself first and rub your nose later. It was time,’ he concluded, not unreasonably, ‘to get out…’

  15

  The Outhouse

  After Karac’s funeral, Robert Plant left Led Zeppelin far behind and simply, as he later put it, ‘went away for a year…when you’ve gone through something like that and come out the other end, all the godhead shit and the affectations of a rock star pale away. You tend not to take yourself too seriously.’

  Speaking in 2005, it’s a wonder, I said, he actually came back at all. ‘Yeah, well…as you get older, your shoulders get broader and you have to be prepared to go into territories that you’ve never been before for the sake of the people you love.’

  Yes, I say, but you weren’t really ‘older’ then, you were just twenty-nine.

  ‘That’s right, yeah. But it was me that seduced Bonzo to join the Yardbirds, and it was he that brought me back to go down to Clearwell Castle to piece together something that became In Through the Outdoor. And it was he that played so beautifully on [it]. So he worked on me, saying it was…’ He faltered as the memories came flooding back. ‘You know, all I was doing was just parading around with a shotgun and a bottle of Johnnie Walker, trying to shoot at the press.’

  It was Bonzo talking to you that got you past that? I asked.

  ‘Well, yeah. I didn’t want to leave my family, you know? I didn’t want to leave Carmen and Maureen. And also I didn’t know whether it was worth it, to be honest. John came over and nuanced all the reasons why it was a good idea. And then fell asleep on an Afghan cushion and was woken up twelve hours later!’ He paused. ‘I think it was just…at no detriment to anybody who was around me then, it’s just that he had the history with me outside of the success.’

  It wasn’t just Plant who found the aftermath of Karac’s death difficult to get through, of course. With his beloved Zeppelin once again put on hold, this time possibly for good, Jimmy Page was left with nothing but time on his hands – a disastrous circumstance for someone with a raging heroin habit and all the money he needed to regularly keep it fed. Aware of the mire he was slowly sinking into, Jimmy booked a two-week holiday in Guadeloupe, in the West Indies, for himself, Charlotte and Scarlet, inviting Richard Cole along too, who he suggested join him in trying to get off smack by staying drunk on white rum for the duration of their stay. Miraculously, as a makeshift cure it worked – temporarily, at least. Back in England in September, relatively ‘straight’ though still drinking heavily and snorting coke, Jimmy tried to keep his mind off the heavy gear by staying active, performing for a kids’ charity called Goaldiggers and working in his home studio, sifting through endless hours of Zeppelin live tapes going all the way back to the Albert Hall in 1970 for a prospective ‘chronological live album’ he’d convinced G would be just the thing to plug the gap while they waited for Robert to put his life back together.

  But it all came to nought as the weeks and months dragged by, and by Christmas 1977 the project was no longer a talking point as he slipped back into a serious funk, taking heroin again and doing…not very much at all. When, not long after that, Grant had to be taken to hospital late one night after he’d suffered a minor coronary or ‘heart scare’ as he put it to the band and anyone else that needed to know (‘all down to pressure,’ he explained dismissively, conveniently overlooking the ruinously large amounts of cocaine he was still ingesting on a daily basis), it seemed there was no point fighting it. Despite the ‘Zeppelin To Split’ stories that were again now doing the rounds, Page had no choice but to sit back and bide his time, filling the void that opened up before him each day with drugs and drink. Even his occult ‘studies’ no longer interested him in the same way. He still had Boleskine and all his treasured Crowley artefacts; he still read the books, drowsing over them
into the small hours most nights. He just no longer had the outlet to somehow make it all make sense.

  By spring 1978, however, Maureen was pregnant again and the healing process of the Plant family was finally underway. It was also around this time that Roy Harper gave an interview to a farming magazine, mostly about the sheep he kept on a small holding, but in which he also mentioned he’d been working with Jimmy Page, helping write lyrics for the next Zeppelin album. When Robert, who in his guise as gentleman farmer happened to subscribe to the magazine, read the article he was furious, phoning Jimmy for the first time in months and demanding an explanation. Taken aback, but not entirely displeased as it showed how deeply his singer still apparently cared about his role in the band, Jimmy denied the story but suggested that maybe it was time the band did finally get back together, just to see each other again, see how it felt. Robert, who had also had John Bonham working on him, dutifully obliged, agreeing to a meeting at Clearwell Castle, an eighteenth-century neo-Gothic mansion in the Forest of Dean, near his home on the Welsh borders.

  Reputedly haunted by a mischievous female ghost who would mess up locked rooms and sing lullabies to her ghost child on the landing at night while playing a tinkling musical box, the vibes surrounding Zeppelin’s brief visit were not promising. Taking over the basement, the band tentatively jammed for a few days, playing anything Robert felt comfortable singing along to, but despite Jimmy’s constant urging and Grant’s forcedly avuncular encouragement, sparks steadfastly refused to fly and the band went their separate ways again.