Peter Grant: The Man Who Led Zeppelin

by Chris Welch

  “I remember some places where the kids and the police were just using a gig as an excuse to have a go at each other. At one place nobody was paying the slightest bit of attention to us. It was just a big stand-off. Robert said, ‘Look, if you don’t all sit down, we’re just gonna go.’ After that we wouldn’t allow uniformed police inside our gigs. Police outside, but not inside. They were just too provocative. I saw one police chief, whose feet literally left the ground, jumping up and down like a six year old screaming at Peter to stop the show. It was because the kids were standing on the concrete stadium seating. I think they took Peter downtown and he had to spend a few hours in jail because he wouldn’t stop the show. He used to stand up for us and he hated people trying to rip us off. That’s what led to that famous scene in The Song Remains The Same over the bootlegger.

  “The hall managers would get kickbacks and allow these people in to bootleg the show. They thought they could do what they liked, but Peter stood up to them. Consequently everyone put it around that he was this horrible, hard man. And he wasn’t at all. It was a tough job dealing with all those American guys. They all worked together and probably said: ‘Okay, here comes a bunch of Limeys.’ But in standing up to them, he wrote the rules. It used to be a 60/40 split of the proceeds from a show but it ended up 90/10 – in favour of the band. The whole concert business is based on those figures now. In the old days the band would do all the work and the promoter and the owner of the hall took all the cash, for doing virtually nothing. The band was the most important thing and he had to fight for that. Of course the promoters could see their whole way of life being threatened. And it was and they were right!

  “As we know, Peter got all his experience from going round with The Yardbirds who had played every toilet in the world. They tried to rip them off, but he was a big fellow and knew that he could stand his ground. He wasn’t armed and they could have just shot him. And they did have guns in some of those places. It was pretty dangerous. He brought professionalism to the business. He didn’t need a gun; he could out-talk them. I never really saw him use his fists. He took a pride in out-talking people. His weight kind of backed it up because they thought twice about tackling him. But he used his brain, not his weight. It wasn’t even as if he had to say, ‘I’ll send the boys round.’

  “It was just him standing there and saying, ‘If you don’t like it, we’ll go somewhere else.’ I’m sure the word spread that this guy knew what he wanted and wasn’t going to leave until he got it. A lot of Americans helped us, like Frank Barsalona. The bright ones could see what he was doing and could understand what he was getting at. Peter’s whole thing was that if the band makes money, then everybody makes money. They saw that there was enough for everybody and you didn’t have to screw everybody for the last cent. The band wouldn’t come back, for a start. When you look at the long-term strategy, it all made perfect sense. He was a very smart man which wrong-footed them. They just saw a big guy and thought if they could move quickly they could get round him. But he had all that covered. He wasn’t a ‘muscle man’ at all. The size made people think twice but it was his brain that did all the work.”

  John Paul explains that Grant fully understood the complexities of the music business, despite his frequent assertions that accountancy and law were ‘boring’. “He knew all about contracts and when they were right or wrong. He could see the small print and also the spirit of a contract and just knew when it was geared up against the artist. He wanted to change the contracts and he understood how the business could be better. Record companies, promoters, other managers, were ripping artists off all the time in every possible way.”

  Former Swan Song executive Alan Callan agrees with John Paul Jones’ view on Grant’s traditional methods before the advent of computers and credit cards. “Peter always tried to make sure the band never got ripped off. You were coming out of an era when you got paid £300 for the night and you wanted it in cash. Advance ticket sales weren’t done by credit card. People paid at the box office. The transition was quite late in time when you consider rock music started in the late Sixties. Peter had a very simple way of auditing. He would phone up the fire chief and say, ‘How many people am I allowed to have in here?’ And the chief would say, ‘38,000’. And Peter would get hold of the promoter and say that’s what I want paying for. Peter wouldn’t recognise the business today. It’s all done electronically and Ticket Master would simply give him a printout of the figures from all over North America.”

  Once it got underway Led Zeppelin’s tenth US tour would place huge demands on Grant’s energy and resources. During the first few shows at Chicago Stadium, Robert Plant, normally a tower of physical strength, suffered an attack of influenza and struggled through the next shows in Cleveland and Indianapolis. However, the show scheduled for the Missouri Arena, St Louis, on Sunday, January 26, 1975, had to be cancelled. Plant rested at their Chicago hotel, while the rest of the band and entourage decided to take the Starship to Los Angeles for a holiday.

  Chris Charlesworth, now Melody Maker’s US correspondent based in New York, saw a Chicago concert and was invited to stick around. “There was a band meeting to decide where to go,” he recalls. “They paid for the Starship on a daily basis whether they used it or not and nobody wanted to stay in Chicago because it was so cold. John Paul Jones wanted to go to the Bahamas and Bonzo fancied Jamaica. Jimmy wanted to see some girl in LA. Then the pilot stepped in and pointed out that the plane wasn’t licensed outside of continental America, so Jimmy got his way. All the way to LA we got roaring drunk and sang old English songs with John Paul on an electric organ. Peter Grant loved it … he was singing ‘Any Old Iron’ and ‘My Old Man Said Follow The Van’. He was in a very happy mood.”

  Meanwhile John Bonham, who had been drinking vodka since before the plane took off, had fallen asleep in the bedroom at the back of the plane. “In fact he had collapsed,” says Charlesworth. “I’d shared a limo with him on the way to the airport and Cole came and asked me whether I’d seen him take anything other than vodka. I hadn’t but he was drinking it straight from the bottle, like water. The roadies undressed him and put him in a robe and left him on the bed. Then after two or three hours he suddenly woke up and came lurching down the aisle. He spotted one of the stewardesses who was wearing a very short skirt and he grabbed her round the neck. This girl screamed and Cole and Grant dragged Bonzo off the poor girl. The pilot came out and said, ‘What’s going on! You people come on this plane and behave like animals.’ Grant was full of apologies and meanwhile Bonham was dragged back into the bedroom. Jimmy Page calmed the girl down and put his arm around her and said, ‘He didn’t really mean it, he didn’t know what he was doing.’ Very diplomatic he was, but the whole incident changed the fun atmosphere of the plane ride.”

  On the flight from Chicago to LA, Charlesworth sat in the cockpit at one point and watched the pilots at work. Then a pilot asked him if he wanted to have a go. “So I sat in his seat and held the stick for a few minutes. Then I went back into the plane and told G what I had done. ‘That’s nothing,’ he replied. ‘Bonzo flew us all the way from New York to fucking Chicago last week.’”

  There was a reason for this apparent madness, as John Paul Jones explains: “Bonzo loved playing drums, but he hated being on tour. I remember in the early days he wouldn’t go to bed until it was light. I used to sit up with him, just talking or listening to the radio. He really hated being away and he hated flying. So that was another thing that made him drink. We’d send cars to drive him to the airport and he’d been known to order the driver to turn round and take him back to Birmingham.

  “His fear of flying actually got better, once we had our own plane. They let him sit at the controls of our jet liner and because he loved fast driving, he suddenly realised flying was a bit like driving his car. They let him do a few moves and I’m sure I can remember somebody coming out of the loo at the back saying, ‘What the hell was that!’ as the plane lurched. He came out of the cockpi
t with a big smile on his face and said, ‘That’s the fastest thing I’ve ever driven!’

  “Like a lot of people with a fear of flying, once they feel they are in control then it’s not so alien. Peter wasn’t a great flyer either but John really hated it. He drank at the airport because he knew he had to get on a plane, and then when he was on the plane he’d create a bit because he was drunk. He was boisterous rather than abusive. He just got loud and we had to calm him down.” Safely in LA the group stayed in the Continental Hiatt House on Sunset Strip and partied for 24 hours before flying all the way back to North Carolina. Recalls Chris: “The gig was really awful and everyone was very tired.”

  The show on Wednesday, January 29, 1975, was at The Greensboro Coliseum. It was a lacklustre performance, probably because Jimmy, John Paul and Bonzo had been obliged to rise at an uncharacteristically early hour to fly coast to coast (against the time zones) from Los Angeles to reach Greensboro in time. Robert, who flew in from Chicago, benefited from another day in bed and didn’t have anything like so far to travel. Outside the venue a shortage of tickets for waiting fans caused more violence to erupt. This sparked off one of Peter Grant’s most spectacular exploits. By the time he’d finished it looked like a scene from a Bruce Willis Die Hard movie.

  Charlesworth: “It was a horrible gig and nobody wanted to do it. About five hundred fans attempted to storm the rear of the building, throwing broken bottles, stones and pieces of scaffolding. They even threw stones at the band’s limos and three of the five limousines were severely damaged. The drivers of the other two – which were parked inside the building – wanted to take their cars away. Peter Grant wasn’t having that … oh no … he was livid!” Only two limos had been able to drive into the arena while the other three had to park outside. Instead of having five limos to rescue the entourage from a riot situation they were reduced to two and their drivers also wanted to take their cars away, leaving the Led Zeppelin entourage stranded.

  “They wanted the huge gates at the back of the stadium opened so they could drive out,” continues Charlesworth. “Peter was called and he started shouting at the drivers, who said they had to go or else their limousines would get damaged. So Grant says, ‘Alright, how much do you want for your fucking limousines. How much are they fucking worth? Forty thousand dollars each? I’ll fucking buy them from you right now.’ He carried a lot of cash around with him and usually had a hundred grand in his briefcase. The drivers protested, ‘We can’t sell them, they’re not ours to sell.’ So Grant says, ‘In that case, I’ll fucking steal them. I’ve offered to buy them and if you can’t sell them, I’ll just fucking take them.’ The drivers said: ‘You can’t do that!’

  ” ‘Don’t be fucking stupid,’ replied Peter. ‘Of course I can do that. I can do what I fucking want, can’t I? I’ve got twenty men working for me. You can’t fucking stop me, ya’ cunts.’ So the upshot was all the people who had previously fitted into five limos now had to get into two. Grant said to the drivers, ‘We don’t need you. We’ll drive the fucking cars ourselves.’ Peter drove one and a guy called Magnet, a roadie for Deep Purple who was along for the ride, drove the other.”

  At the end of the set, Richard Cole came on stage with large red towelling robes for the band and they dashed off and jumped into the first car with Grant at the wheel. The stadium doors opened and a huge mob surged forward. Grant blasted a way through with his horn blaring and the crowd parted like the Red Sea. With a police escort, sirens blazing, the truncated convoy drove at speeds of up to 70 mph in a heavily built-up area. Grant led the way, driving through red lights and on the wrong side of the road. “After he’d driven the band and Richard Cole back to where the plane was waiting at the airport, he drove round and round the huge aircraft, tyres screeching, faster and faster,” says Charlesworth. “When he finally came to a stop someone asked him why he’d done that. He replied, ‘The band were placing bets on whether I dare crash it into the plane.’

  “It was incredible to be involved in scenes like that … Peter was just unstoppable. When he got out he kicked the car really hard. ‘Fucking useless pile of fucking junk!’ he shouted. ‘Way off tune … my old Bentley goes twice as fast!’ We all just stood there laughing … totally exhilarated by it all. Then we flew back to New York and the band checked in the Plaza. It was a very tiring day. Unforgettable, though. When you rode with Zeppelin you rode high and fast.”

  Peter clearly enjoyed taking over the limo drivers’ jobs. Perhaps it harked back to the days when he owned a minibus and chauffeured pop stars in the early Sixties. Certainly the episode at Greensboro wasn’t a one-off. Peter Clifton recalls a similar incident during the making of The Song Remains The Same. “I always thought that Peter Grant was part swaggering pirate and part father figure. He was impulsive, wild, vengeful and uncontrollable. I remember when we were filming Led Zeppelin in Boston. We were backstage and there was a teeming crowd outside who pushed through the barriers at the end of the concert. They came right into the backstage parking lot and it was very scary. I packed up my cameras, but the limo drivers had bailed out. We were totally cut off. Peter grabbed one driver and said, ‘You call your boss and tell him this car is now mine,’ and he handed him his Gold Amex card. He grabbed Jimmy Page by the scruff of the neck, shoved him into the car and the other band members followed. Peter jumped into the driver’s seat and floored the long black Cadillac. He drove like a maniac right through a fire hydrant, which exploded. He bumped over the gutter and onto the main road. I watched in amazement and awe as the limo sped out of sight.”

  During the next two months the band grossed a further five million dollars. It wasn’t surprising the young rock gods were eager to let their hair down. They were richer than they’d ever dared imagine, especially Bonzo who’d worked as a building labourer. Now they could have anything they wanted and do whatever they pleased, all in the name of rock’n’roll. There were certainly plenty of people standing in the wings ready to help them enjoy themselves. Their PR Bill Harry recalls what it was like, before he bowed out of the Zeppelin camp, exhausted and with his trousers ripped courtesy of John Bonham’s escapades. “We went to all these clubs in America and the places were flooded with groupies. It was always booze and mainly lager. Everybody had hangovers. But most of that was caused by sitting around in rooms for 15 hours of tension before a gig.”

  The promoter Bill Graham threw one particularly lavish party in their honour after a gig at the Winterland in San Francisco. The Winterland didn’t have much space for entertaining, so he hired a suite at a nearby hotel. After the show they went to the suite. Suddenly the doors opened and two trolleys came in bearing naked girls with food placed over their bodies. “Bill Graham gave everybody foam cream to spray over the girls,” says Harry. “The drinks were flowing and there were all kinds of orgies going on with people taking Polaroid pictures. Screaming Lord Sutch joined the party but he conked out on a bed. Somebody who had been bonking in the bath left the taps running and the water started going all over the carpets.

  “After a couple of hours it leaked through the ceiling onto the floor below. Somebody complained to the management and the house detective started banging on the door. They used a pass key to get into the flooded bedroom and found Lord Sutch lying on the bed covered in Polaroid pictures of all the action.”

  During February the rampaging hordes of Zep played six concerts to 120,000 people in the New York area alone at Madison Square Garden and Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. The tour ended in March with three dates at the LA Forum. It wasn’t until the end of the US tour that Swan Song finally released Physical Graffiti which should have been out months earlier. At least it was in time for the band’s milestone UK concerts.

  Led Zeppelin played five nights at the Earls Court Arena in London on May 17, 18, 23, 24 and 25 which went down as among their finest ever shows. British fans saw the full American show complete with lights and lasers. They played five songs from the new album. None of the ecstatic fans at Earls
Court could know they wouldn’t see their heroes again for another four years. It was their finest hour but it was already Led Zeppelin’s swansong.

  Peter saw these shows as ‘keeping faith with the fans’. He chose Earls Court because he thought it was then the biggest and best venue in London for a big concert. He also liked the promoter. “Mel Bush did a great job with those dates and Earls Court was fantastic. Nobody sat behind the stage. We had the video screen and the whole Showco stage set up. It took half a Jumbo jet to get it over. Mel Bush did a super job in presenting those gigs.

  “He presented us with souvenir mirrors afterwards depicting the ‘Physical Rocket’ idea used for the advertising. Mel told me that we had enough ticket applications to have done ten shows that month. There was a video of the shows, which Jimmy Page took when he came around to my house one day. They could be used for a video release one day. I just never really rated the idea of Zeppelin on the small screen.”

  Unusually for a new album Physical Graffiti had yielded much material that was instantly popular with audiences. Usually people clamoured for old favourites but they were stunned by two pieces in particular that marked a complete stylistic departure for the band. ‘Trampled Underfoot’ mainly featuring John Paul Jones on funky electric piano was a funky driving riff more in the spirit of Stevie Wonder than heavy metal. ‘Kashmir’ was even more unusual, a kind of Moroccan chant that reflected the interest Jimmy and Robert took in the music of the Middle East. Zeppelin was playing ‘world music’ long before the phrase was coined.