When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  The first day of rehearsal was scheduled for 24 September – just another day to Rex King, who drove Bonham down the M4 from his farm to the Old Mill House, Jimmy’s new mansion (by the river) in Windsor, purchased earlier that year for £900,000 from the actor Michael Caine. Rex later recalled Bonzo telling him to stop off at a pub, where he downed four quadruple vodka-and-oranges and quaffed a couple of ham rolls. ‘Breakfast,’ he called it. When John got to rehearsals that day he wasn’t feeling any brighter, moaning about how long they would be away in America. He continued drinking until he literally became too drunk to play; unheard of in his heyday. He then downed at least two more large vodkas before crashing out on the sofa at Jimmy’s place, where everyone was staying, at around midnight. He was then half-carried, half-dragged to bed by Jimmy’s assistant, Rick Hobbs, who had seen this movie many times before. Hobbs laid the comatose drummer out on his side supported by some pillows. Then turned out the light and left Bonzo to sleep it off.

  When, the following afternoon, Bonzo still hadn’t risen from his lair, John Paul Jones and Benje Le Fevre both went to rouse him. But there was a bad smell in the room, Bonzo’s inert body unresponsive to touch and they realised with mounting horror that he was dead. An ambulance was summoned but it was already too late. The police also showed up but reported no suspicious circumstances. Paramedics deduced he’d probably been dead for several hours. Robert Plant immediately drove to the Old Hyde Farm to console Pat, Jason and Zoë. John Paul Jones went home to his own family, ‘terribly shocked’. Jimmy Page stood inside his house – the second time someone had died under his roof in less than twelve months – watching at his window as a gathering group of Zeppelin fans arrived to hold a silent vigil outside his gates. The news was already on the radio and his phone was ringing non-stop but he didn’t answer it.

  In Los Angeles, eight hours behind England, Bonzo’s old mate from Brum, Black Sabbath drummer Bill Ward, woke that day with a terrible hangover from ‘a bender the night before’ and ‘junked out’ – withdrawing from heroin. Bill, who had walked out on Sabbath some weeks before and would spend ‘the next year staying in my bedroom getting high’ was given the news of his friend John Bonham’s death by his drug dealer. ‘The dope dealer came around every morning with the allotted amount of stuff for the day. And one morning she came round and she was absolutely in bits, crying her eyes out because she was a major Led Zeppelin fan. I thought, “Oh, man, what’s going on?” She said, “Bonham’s dead”. The very first thought I had was a selfish one, and it was: “I’ll be next.” Like, “I’m right behind you, Johnny. I’m right behind you…”’

  As you lay there, the room spinning, your mind wandered off again…back to where the Worcestershire countryside blossoms, to the big ranch-style name board at the bend in the road and the twin white fences either side of the long, straight driveway to the farmhouse, where your dad did all the wood-panelling and your brother Mick helped build the extensions, surrounded by a hundred acres of sheep and cattle and trees and fields, to your beloved Pat and Jason and Zoë, to the bloody cats always under your feet and your cars, your pride and joys, all lined up in the converted barn, to your drum kits and your pub jukebox and your ale and your fags…to home. No way had you ever intended ending up a bloody farmer but then you’d seen this place, seen the look on Pat’s face and bought it.

  Planty was just a few miles up the road, too, with his flaming goats that ate everything, old boots, you name it. Not that you saw much of him when you weren’t working. Your real mates were people like Bev and his wife Val, getting dressed up and going to each other’s houses for dinner and a few bottles of wine. You liked getting dolled up in a nice suit and tie. None of that hippy shit when you were out for the night with Pat. She’d be in her gladrags too, and you’d both jump in the car and drive over to Redditch to take your mum and dad out down the working men’s club in Evesham and buy everybody a drink. You did it once in the white Rolls you’d bought after you’d first made a bob or two, and when you came out some fucking skinheads had smashed the bastard up, kicked in the windows and gobbed all over it, little cunts. You didn’t make that mistake again but you did like to turn up looking nice in a smart motor. All your jewellery and everything, Pat on your arm in her diamond earrings and princess shoes, looking like a million bucks, your mum and dad so proud of you at last.

  They knew it was all shit, what they wrote about you in the press. They knew you weren’t anything like the cunt in the bowler hat that used to roar like a bear on stage, not really. That was all just for show. They knew you only used to drink like that cos you hated being away from them all, hated all the bullshit that went with it. They knew that wasn’t really you in those pictures in the magazines; that you never went near groupies or took drugs or any of that other shit they accused you of. They knew you’d never do anything to hurt them, that you loved your wife, loved your kids, loved who you were and what you’d become, what you’d achieved, how you’d done it all for them and no-one else, never…

  An inquest was held on 8 October 1980 at East Berkshire Coroner’s Court, which recorded a ‘death by misadventure’ verdict, concluding that John Bonham had died from choking on his own vomit while asleep, ‘due to consumption of alcohol’ – in the region, they calculated, of forty measures of vodka. As a result, he had suffered a pulmonary oedema – a swelling of the blood vessels – due to an excess of fluid and begun vomiting. It was death by ‘accidental suicide’, they said. John Bonham was thirty-two.

  Inevitably, stories of the ‘Zeppelin jinx’ began to rear their head again, the NME scooping the prize for most tasteless speculation when under the heading: ‘Bonzo’s Last Bash’, it openly suggested that Bonham’s demise was somehow connected to Page’s interest in the occult. The London Evening News also got in on the act, splashing with the headline: ZEPPELIN ‘BLACK MAGIC’ MYSTERY and quoting an unnamed source as saying: ‘Robert Plant and everyone around the band is convinced that Jimmy’s dabbling in black magic is responsible in some way for Bonzo’s death and all those tragedies.’ Others whispered it was surely more a case of ‘bad karma’ an accusation Jimmy was still bridling at when I broached the subject years later. ‘To blame something like that on bad karma makes me angry,’ he said. ‘It’s ridiculous and disrespectful to the families involved.’ Or as he told Nick Kent in 2003: ‘I do believe in karma, very much so. But in life’s journey whatever comes at you, you’ve got to deal with. It doesn’t mean to say that you’ve generated the karma yourself.’

  The funeral took place two days later at Rushock Parish Church in Worcestershire; his body buried in the same churchyard he is seen speeding past in his car in The Song Remains The Same. Over three hundred mourners attended, including Grant and the rest of the band. Tributes were also received from Paul McCartney, Cozy Powell, Carl Palmer and Phil Collins. The band shunned reporters but by then they were hardly speaking to each other. Robert seemed to take it the hardest. First his own tragedies, now this, his friend from home, from teenage years, from that time before Zeppelin; a place he knew he would never now be able to return to. Bev Bevan told me he heard about Bonzo’s death on the radio. ‘I tried to phone Robert and I tried to phone Pat but we just couldn’t get through to anybody. It was just very difficult to come to terms with. The thing I do remember very well is the funeral. That was horrible. Unfortunately, I’ve been to a lot of funerals now. But that, I think, was the most horrible funeral I’ve been to. The church was absolutely packed with people – all his friends and family. I went with Jeff Lynne and Roy Wood. We got into the church but we were right at the back and we just about squeezed in somewhere. But it was just one of the saddest occasions. Unusually for a lot of the funerals I’ve been to, there was a lot of absolute weeping and wailing going on. People really were just hysterical. Just out of control, sobbing and weeping – screaming almost. It was just not a nice place to be. It was very moving – extremely moving. And what it did prove, even though it was unpleasant at the time to witness it,
was just how much he was gonna be missed. It was just incredibly intense. You get upset yourself, obviously. I’m quite an emotional person so it doesn’t take much to get me crying but I just burst into tears. It was horrible.’

  Sitting in the basement kitchen of the Tower House in 2005, Jimmy Page absolutely refused to discuss that day. Instead, he ran his fingers through his hair, puffed out his cheeks, and pointed out merely that it was ‘a desperate time, for me and for his family. It was also a great loss in the musical world, this chap who was so inspirational in his drumming. He was a young man, yeah. But then again what a body of work he left behind.’ What about the night he died: was there anything at all that could or should have been done to save him? Jimmy eyed me uncomfortably. ‘The thing is it wasn’t new to us to see Bonzo drink and pass out. I knew a lot of people who used to do that. Maybe in this day and age it might ring alarm bells. But in those days it was the norm within the sort of people that you knew. So one day – and this is all I’m gonna say about it – he goes to sleep and he’s had a lot to drink that day, and he’s collapsed and he goes to bed – and then he doesn’t wake up. I mean, that’s something that, you know, you just couldn’t believe would ever happen.’

  A few weeks after the funeral, the band met up with Grant at the Savoy Hotel in London, where Plant, speaking for them all, said simply: ‘We can’t go on without Bonham.’ There had been some suggestion that they might continue, as The Who had done after Moon’s death. Carmine Appice, Cozy Powell and Bev Bevan – all old friends of Bonzo’s – were all said to be in the frame. But it was never really an option. As Robert put it to me in 2003, ‘There’s always been this deal about, “Oh well, everybody else does it.” I mean, Jesus Christ, how you ever gonna weave that magic that was there? If you look at the DVD now and you watch things like “Achilles Last Stand”, from Knebworth, it’s frightening! That is Bernard Purdy meets Buddy Rich meets a brave new world that nobody’s ever heard of! Even if certain chemicals got the better of us here and there at that later stage, I still don’t think I’ve ever heard a rhythm section in a rock group do that. Who you gonna bring in to make that happen again?’ Or as Bevan said, ‘God, if I had of been offered the job, I think I’d have been terrified because I couldn’t have replaced Bonzo. I can’t think of anyone who actually could.’

  As Jimmy later admitted to me: ‘It could have been any one of us that [was] lost, at that point. And I know if it had been any of the others we wouldn’t want to have continued. We couldn’t just replace somebody; it wasn’t that sort of band. You can’t teach somebody, especially in a live situation. You’ve either got it or you haven’t, and nobody else has got what John had.’

  Peter Grant had reached the same conclusion before the band had even said a word. He told Dave Lewis that at the Savoy meeting, ‘They all looked at me and asked me what I thought. I said it just couldn’t go on because it had always been the four of them, and they were all relieved.’ Getting a replacement ‘would have been totally out of character’. Zeppelin had always needed all four members to make the magic happen. ‘Now one of them was gone.’

  On 4 December 1980, Peter Grant’s office released an official statement confirming the break up of Led Zeppelin. It read: ‘We wish it to be known that the loss of our dear friend and the deep respect we have for his family together with the sense of undivided harmony felt by ourselves and our manager, have led us to decide we could not continue as we were.’

  That Bonham’s early death would add lustre to the Zeppelin legend could not have been foreseen, said John Paul Jones. ‘There is always that James Dean quality to it,’ he told me. ‘The real tragedy was that John was doing fine at the time he died. He’d been through a bit of a dark period, but he’d come through it and was full of enthusiasm again. Working together, we had new energy again and so when he died…I remember it with a lot of sadness but a lot of anger too. Kind of, what did he have to go and do that for? Not just because of the band but because it was just such a waste of life. In bereavement counselling they teach you that anger is often the emotion in close friends of someone who dies relatively young. But I was angry with the situation too. It was an accident that so easily could have been avoided.’

  ‘It was such a different time, Mick, that’s all,’ said Robert. ‘Because after John passed away, there was no more Led Zeppelin. No matter what anybody would think about replacing John. I mean, he and I played together from when we were fifteen. I couldn’t walk away, feel bad, and then turn around and look for somebody else. It was not the issue. There was no need. What did anybody need to do that for?’

  And yet…if Bonzo had died after the second album or even the fourth, there seems little doubt that Led Zeppelin would have kept going. If John Paul Jones hadn’t changed his mind about leaving in 1974 they surely wouldn’t have broken up. No, John Bonham’s death – tragic though it was – didn’t on its own also mean the death of Led Zeppelin. The band had been slowly dying long before that. Bonzo’s drastic, shoddy demise simply made the whole thing more terrifyingly – irredeemably – real. The song might have remained the same but nothing else ever did. No matter how much Jimmy Page, with his occult knowledge, all useless in the end, might have willed it.

  16

  To Be A Rock…

  You are Jimmy Page and in the summer of 2008 you are one of the wealthiest, most admired and famous guitarists in the world – and one of its most conflicted. Everyone says your band is the best in the world. The awards people at Mojo, the awards people at GQ, the awards people give you just so with their words, everywhere you go, saying you should get back together, that it would be great; that it would be the best; that it would be like the Second Coming. Everyone, everywhere, all the time. The only one who doesn’t say it is Robert Plant. It’s a drag. You and Robert should have been out there touring with Zeppelin this summer. That was the plan. Instead, you get up and guest onstage at a Foo Fighters concert in London, you go to dinner at Nobu and drink alcohol-free beer and wonder why everyone always expects you to pick up the bill. Your picture still appears in newspapers and on the cover of magazines and people still offer you millions to tell your story – the real story – which of course you turn down, never having been remotely interested in telling the real story, why would anyone want to do that? You turn up backstage at Aerosmith and White-snake shows, then leave when you start to get pestered by drunks with camera phones, all wanting the same thing, talking to you like they know you when they know nothing, you just smiling along, trying to be the good guy now the bad days are long gone. You ride on a red double-decker bus in Beijing, gurning your way through ‘Whole Lotta Love’ with X Factor winner Leona Lewis and wonder why not everyone thinks it’s a great idea. Well, what are you supposed to do? The truth is, you don’t know. Or do you? When someone who’s supposed to know suggests you simply find yourself another singer, for the first time in years you’re tempted. Why not? Queen did it, didn’t they? Freddie’s dead but John Deacon isn’t and he’s not part of it, either, yet no-one holds that against them, do they? No. And if Robert doesn’t like it, let him say so. Let him come back and say he’ll do it instead. It worked before, didn’t it, when you were with David Coverdale? And if it doesn’t again this time, that stuff you’ve always said about ‘chemistry’, how it wouldn’t work without all the components. Yeah, well, blame Robert. Unless he comes back, of course, then you’ll have all the chemistry you could ever want again…

  Although the story of Led Zeppelin ostensibly ended that bleak day in September 1980 when it became clear that John Bonham’s pale, inert form would not be roused again, in reality new chapters have been added to it on a regular basis ever since. The first – the posthumous release in 1982 of the odds-and-sods Coda album, onto which was bundled a ragbag of rejects, from the three unreleased In Through the Outdoor tracks plus the leftovers of their earliest albums – was originally meant to have closed the book. Instead, its comparatively modest sales (a million in the US, compared to seven million for I
n Through the Outdoor, and only 60,000 in the UK, where Outdoor had sold over 300,000) reflected how much interest in the Zeppelin legacy had waned by the early Eighties. ‘I wanted to do a live album, too,’ Jimmy told me as far back as 1988. ‘Picking tracks from different eras. But we could never get it together.’ And nobody really cared anyway. Not right then anyway.

  Instead, the immediate period following Bonham’s death was ‘the worst time in my life’. For the best part of two years, ‘I didn’t even touch the guitar. I was shattered. I lost a very, very close friend.’ The guitar ‘just related everything, you know, to what had happened…the tragedy that had happened.’ The days had passed slowly but the years had ‘flashed by’. He wanted to come back, to ‘do something again’. But to begin with, the omens had all been bad. ‘I called up my road manager one day and said, “Look, get the Les Paul out of storage.”. But when he went to get it the case was empty! I think somebody took it out and never put it back. They shouldn’t have and it eventually reappeared. But when he came back and said the guitar’s missing, I said, “That’s it, forget it, I’m finished.” But it turned up again some time later and thank God it did, otherwise…’ He paused, took a drag on his cigarette. ‘Otherwise you wouldn’t be here today?’ I finished the sentence for him. ‘That’s right,’ he said softly.

  One of the few people to visit Jimmy during those dark days after Bonzo’s death was Timothy d’Arch Smith. ‘I went down to sort out all his books and some days it was very, very gloomy,’ he says now. ‘You knew he was there. The books would arrive on the ground floor. And that sort of made me think, “I wonder why I’m not allowed upstairs?” And then other days he’d sit and talk but it was obviously…difficult. I said “Are you going to start again?” and he said, “I can’t, you know, the chemistry. It was telepathic between Bonham and me.” Scarlet would come back from school and play the piano and the French woman [Charlotte] she was always very nice.’