Peter Grant: The Man Who Led Zeppelin

by Chris Welch

  Swan Song soon achieved impressive results and signed some formidable acts. Yet it never quite fulfilled its potential. It went through a number of label managers and seemed to lose momentum after being launched in the UK later in the year – on Halloween night – in a blaze of publicity with a party at Chislehurst Caves in Kent. The candle-lit party became a byword for Zeppelin’s legendary excess with fire-eaters and magicians entertaining the guests, as well as strippers dressed as nuns alongside women in various states of undress rolling around in vats of jelly. Copious supplies of booze left partygoers speechless for days afterwards. Peter attended wearing a naval captain’s hat and nodded in satisfaction as the nuns behaved like whores.

  It was a fun evening, designed both to enhance Zeppelin’s reputation as libidinous hedonists and stress their invulnerable position at the top of rock’s premier league. But behind the scenes all was not well. Peter knew there were rumblings of discontent within the ranks, which if mishandled could seriously damage the operations. During the long drawn out making of the Zeppelin film cracks also appeared in Peter Grant’s personal life, which began to affect his judgement, mood and attitude. The strain of running the entire operation was enormous and the band members also came under increasing pressure. Few outsiders appreciated what it was like to be constantly on the road and in the public eye.

  Then, in late 1974, John Paul Jones, seemingly the most stable member of the band, told Grant that he wanted to leave Led Zeppelin. Recalled Peter: “He turned up at my house one afternoon and told me he’d had enough and said he was going to be the choirmaster at Winchester Cathedral. We had this heart to heart, during which we recalled a time in Australia when I got very insecure and thought the band wanted to blow me out. Anyway, it turned out John said he thought it was the other way round, that I was going to blow them out. I said, ‘If you want to leave, well you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.’ But I told him to think about it. Meanwhile we invented a press story saying that he was ‘overtaxed’. It was all kept low key. I told Jimmy of course, who couldn’t believe it. But it was the pressure. He was a family man was Jonesy.

  “By that time the security thing in America was getting ridiculous. We started getting death threats. In fact straight after the 1973 tour, following the Drake Hotel robbery, there was a very serious one. Some crackpot letter from Jamaica stated what was in store for us when we toured again. It got very worrying.

  “That’s how we lost a little of the camaraderie after that, when we were in America, because there were armed guards outside the hotel rooms all the time. I think we even talked about wearing bullet-proof vests at one time. Bonzo told me to order extra large ones for him and me! We did laugh. But it was a serious problem. Then Jonesy came back refreshed and ready to go again. That’s when we finished the film and set up our next project, Swan Song.”

  Once Jones had been placated, the priority was to establish a headquarters for the new venture and a roster of acts. Peter Grant was breaking off his partnership with Mickie Most, which meant moving out of the old Oxford Street office. Grant’s friend Mark London, who co-managed Stone The Crows, found the label premises in New Kings Road, London. Says Mickie Most: “RAK moved to Charles Street and Peter decided not to come with us and wanted to do his own thing. He set up Swan Song in Chelsea. I never actually went there.”

  As well as Swan Song operations, Zep business was also conducted from the new address, but Peter increasingly did most of his work from home at Horselunges in Sussex, largely in order to avoid the long drive into town through traffic-laden streets.

  Horselunges Manor represented the peak of Grant’s ambition. A symbol of his success, it provided a place of refuge from the constant demands of the music business. When he bought Horselunges in 1973 he took his mother down to see his latest acquisition and she just looked at him and said: “Peter, what have you done!” Recalled a friend: “One of the first things Peter did when he settled into the house was to buy his son Warren a frogman’s outfit, so he could swim around the moat! Horselunges was a place he seemed to have known a long while. He got it through the property agent Perry Press, who found houses for stars. It was Perry who told Peter that Horselunges was up for sale.”

  Melody Maker journalist Michael Watts visited Horselunges to interview Grant and recalls the impression made by the magnificent house and its unlikely owner. “When I interviewed him in 1974 he lived in the most exquisite house I’d ever seen. It was a very old Elizabethan house set in these green acres and surrounded by a moat with its own drawbridge. Horselunges was full of lovely old tapestries and Grant collected art nouveau and art deco pieces.

  “He was very big on antiques. I once saw him in an antiques shop in Kensington High Street and I went and said hello. He said, ‘I spend a lot of time in here,’ and he had a genuine appreciation of antiques. It was an enormous contrast between this rather oafish looking person and the very beautiful objects that he had in his house. There was also the contrast between his physical bulk and his tiny, petite wife who was a ballet teacher. She was like a little mouse next to his elephant.”

  In contrast to these splendours the working environment at Swan Song was decidedly drab. The Chelsea office came to represent the curiously low-key approach Grant liked to adopt in London. While in the States he was all for grand gestures, the motorcycle escorts, limos and private jets, somehow he knew this wouldn’t cut much ice back home in the UK. He kept his offices deliberately dowdy and ramshackle. There were no potted palms, chrome furniture or leather seats in a prestigious tower block suite. Instead the offices, above the headquarters of the British Legion on a busy main road, were dark, gloomy and filled with second-hand furniture. Visitors found very few staff and often little signs of activity amidst the dust and cobwebs.

  Yet when the label was launched there were high hopes and great enthusiasm from the band. Said Robert Plant: “The label isn’t going to be like, ‘Yeah, we’ll have a label, far out heavy trip man’ and just put ourselves on it. The label won’t just be Led Zeppelin, that’s for sure. It’s too much effort to do as an ego trip. We’re going to work with people we’ve known and liked … it’s an outlet for people we admire and want to help. People like Roy Harper whose records are so good and haven’t even been out in America. We want to take some artists who we think are fine and never let them down at any point … that’s our intention.”

  Jimmy Page said that Zeppelin had been mulling over the idea for their own label for some time and thought it would reduce the kind of problems they had suffered with their own product. “We knew if we formed a label there wouldn’t be the kind of fuss and bother we’d been going through over album covers. Having gone through what appeared to be interference on the artistic side by record companies, we wanted to form a label where the artists would be able to fulfil themselves without all that hassle. We didn’t want to get bogged down in having to develop artists. We wanted people who were together enough to handle that type of thing themselves.”

  Jimmy could see one problem with having his own manager involved in the project. “There is one awkward situation with the label, which is that a lot of folk come along and seem to think that Peter Grant is going to be able to do everything for them. It’s just one of those unfortunate things that he’s there and they respect him, but he just doesn’t want to know. He’s got too much on his plate.”

  Page told reporters that the name Swan Song was at one time the tentative title of a long acoustic guitar piece he had written and was even going to be the name for an album, until it ended up on the label. “I think Swan Song is a good name for a record label, because if you don’t have success on Swan Song … well you shouldn’t have signed up with them.”

  Peter Grant was more specific about the problems that led to the creation of the label: “We first got the idea for Swan Song after Atlantic messed up the pressings for Led Zeppelin II. They ran off 100,000 copies, which jumped all over the place because they didn’t follow Jimmy’s instructions on the
master tape. So we decided it was time for us to take control of our own situation and ensure Led Zeppelin were presented in the best possible manner.” Grant stated that he would go to the pressing plant himself to check out the process. He discovered that vinyl records were dipped into vats of acid. For rock and pop records the vats were only cleaned every six months. However, for classical recordings the vats were cleaned out every ten days. So he persuaded the pressing plant manager to have Zeppelin’s albums dipped into the classical vat, which markedly improved their sound quality. “We were determined to ensure that nothing went out with our name on it until it was absolutely right. We delayed the release of Houses Of The Holy for five months because the cover artwork wasn’t right. Atlantic was going mad. But everything on our label got the right sort of attention.”

  Danny Goldberg, who would go on to a distinguished career in the US music industry, was appointed vice-president of Swan Song America. As an employee of the PR company Solters, Roskin and Sabinson, he’d already worked as the band’s publicist in the States but Peter persuaded him to leave SRR to run the New York office from a high rise building on Madison Avenue. In May 1974 two extravagant launch parties were thrown in America, the first, costing $10,000, at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York. As they couldn’t find any white swans to glide among the guests they hired a flock of geese – much to Peter Grant’s derision. “Ya’ think we don’t know the fucking difference between fucking swans and fucking geese?” he raged at one Atlantic employee. “We all live on fucking farms, ya’ cunt.” Unfortunately two of the geese were chased out of the restaurant by Richard Cole and John Bonham and were run over in the traffic.

  At the second party at the Bel-Air Hotel in Los Angeles, where the guests included Groucho Marx, Micky Dolenz and Bill Wyman, the lakes in the hotel grounds were already stocked with real swans. It was announced that artists signed to the label would include Bad Company, a band newly formed by former Free singer Paul Rodgers alongside his old drummer Simon Kirke, Mott The Hoople guitarist Mick Ralphs and King Crimson bassist Boz Burrell. As a legacy of Free’s contractual obligations, they were already signed with Island in the UK. Others included Dave Edmunds, The Pretty Things, a female singer called Mirabai, whom they discovered in a New York club, and Scots singer Maggie Bell, formerly with Stone The Crows. The latter band, which Grant and Mark London had discovered in Glasgow and signed for management, had broken up in 1973, following the death by electrocution of their guitarist Leslie Harvey in an on-stage accident, a tragedy that deeply affected Peter Grant.

  Peter claimed that he looked on Maggie Bell as his daughter and was very fond of her, but he wasn’t able to devote as much time to her career as she would have liked. She always said that his first priority was Led Zeppelin. But she remembers that it was Peter who came up with the name for her best-known band. “When he first heard me sing, he said ‘Cor, Stone The Crows!’ He had flown up to Glasgow with Mark London and Richard Cole to see me and Les. They arrived at the gig in a big limousine with dark windows. They freaked everybody out. We all thought, ‘Are they gangsters or what?’ Ricardo was dressed like a pirate. He had a black and white striped T-shirt, black tight leather pants, a leather cap, a big earring and a red scarf around his neck. The club was packed out and we went down really well. We spoke to Peter and Richard after the gig but the guy who ran the club said, ‘Don’t think you are going with that big man in the flash car. I’ve got you under contract.’ We told him to piss off. ‘What contract?’ Peter went off in his car and a couple of months later we went down to London and we were signed to him and Mark London for management and production.”

  The first time Maggie Bell saw Peter she told him he reminded her of Orson Welles in Citizen Kane. “He said, ‘Yeah, do you want to be my little Rosebud?’ He was absolutely enormous but always a very kind man. I was like a daughter to him, but looking back he didn’t really know what to do with me. He managed loads of guys and my career suffered through that. But Peter did get a deal for me with Atlantic Records after Stone The Crows split up.”

  Maggie went to New York and stayed for a year, making two solo albums that were never even released, one produced by Felix Pappalardi from Mountain and the other by Felix Cavalari from The Young Rascals. “I paid for them but to this day I don’t know what happened to them,” she says. “I was told they weren’t good enough, but believe me they were!” Maggie would later record her Queen Of The Night album with producer Jerry Wexler which was more successful.

  “But I was a bit upset at having two albums rejected, which I thought were wonderful,” she continues. “I didn’t want to become a cabaret singer at 27 and I thought Peter failed me a bit. He was so busy with Led Zeppelin I could never sit him down to talk to him for an hour. No disrespect to Peter, but it was a sore point that I could never get to see him. I used to go to the Swan Song office, which Mark London had found for a ridiculously cheap rent. I remember when some elderly ladies came for the rent Peter would always get them some nice cakes to eat while they’d be downstairs in the basement counting the money. He had a thing about old ladies! ‘Make sure somebody keeps an eye on them, because somebody could go in there and nick the rent money,’ he said. I liked him for that.”

  Maggie got to know Peter’s family and says: “His wife Gloria was fabulous. A lovely person. Helen, their daughter, looks like her mother. Gloria wore beautiful clothes and they were great together. She was there with him right from the beginning when they didn’t have two pennies to rub together. I remember she came to the Swan Song launch party at Chislehurst Caves when it was pouring with rain outside and there was nowhere to go to the toilets inside. Peter and Phil Carson held up these two huge umbrellas while Gloria and I had to pee behind the limo! What a place to go to the toilet, eh? When she split up with Peter, she made her own life and nobody ever saw her again. But I had a lot of time for her because she was a good lady. She spent a lot of time with the kids and made sure Helen went to dance school. Gloria was very good at setting up house and I was very sad when she left Peter. It was a huge shock for him because he devoted a lot of time to his kids.”

  Maggie saw the kind of pressures her managers had to cope with on the flight from New York to Los Angeles between Swan Song launch parties. She joined a large entourage that included American rock press writers Lisa Robinson and Lorraine Alterman, together with Danny Goldberg, Steve Weiss, Richard Cole and Peter Grant. “We were going to the Swan Song launch in LA. We had the whole of the first-class compartment to ourselves but I remember Peter hated flying. He was absolutely paranoid. I sat between him and Mark London and the two of them both took a Valium 5 before they got on the plane and another Valium each just before take-off, so they could sleep during the journey. They kept saying, ‘Now we’re gonna be alright.’ And as soon as the Jumbo jet took off Mark and Peter looked at me and said, ‘It didn’t fuckin’ work!’ But after a couple of glasses of champagne everyone was okay. We had dinner and we were just relaxing, when all of a sudden this guy comes up the stairs into the first-class section. He was some drunken American businessman. It was during a time when you could still smoke cigarettes on a plane and Richard Cole and me were just chatting and smoking to pass the time.

  “This guy comes up and says, ‘Put that cigarette out. It’s bad for your health.’ I said, ‘If it’s bothering you I will.’ ‘Oh, you’re English are you? Are you with that bunch of degenerate guys downstairs? So you’re in First Class. How do you people make your money?’ He was really pissed off that we just ignored him. Peter and Mark were asleep by now. Two hours later the same guy comes back and he starts again. ‘What do you guys do for a living?’ Peter wakes up and says, ‘Wot, who’s that? Wassa matter?’ And this guy is going, ‘You’ve only got all these chicks because you’ve got money. It ain’t because you’re good looking!’ Peter is awake now and says to the guy, ‘Mind your mouth in front of these ladies.’ He pushes the bell above his head and an air hostess and one of the stewards comes up and say, ‘Is ev
erything all right sir, can we get you anything?’ ‘Yes, you might tell this man to go and sit in his seat. He’s being obnoxious and swearing in front of these ladies.’ The crew could see we were taking up the whole front compartment of the plane and everyone went very quiet. Peter says, ‘We’re going to LA on business. This is not a pleasure trip.’ And the guy starts calling us streetwalkers and English degenerates and he suddenly pulls a gun! So we all go ‘Shit!’ There’s this loony guy pissed as a fart with a gun on a Boeing 747 half way to LA. He says, ‘Do you know what this is?’ Somebody else up front pushes another button and says to another air hostess, ‘There’s a guy up there with a gun.’ So two guys and the pilot grab the guy and take the gun away from him. When we arrive in LA airport the FBI and the CIA are all there. Peter was wearing jeans and a silk shirt and a pair of trainers. We were all wearing casual clothes because we were going to California where it’s hot! An official comes up and looks puzzled. He says, ‘How many people are there in your party? What actually happened.’ Peter explained he was taking a party of 12 on a business trip. ‘This guy was being rude to the girls. This is Maggie Bell, a famous singer and the other girls are top New York journalists. We’re going to Los Angeles to open up our new record company. This guy had too much to drink and he produced a gun.’