Peter Grant: The Man Who Led Zeppelin

by Chris Welch

  “In previous generations people who accumulated wealth bought land. What came with the land was a community. When you are a rock star or a businessman you buy isolation, you don’t buy community. There used to be a whole feudal system that brought stability. When you are a rock star and you own a huge house and you go off on the road for three months, your wife is stuck in the middle of nowhere with very few friends and nobody treats you as normal. This kind of wealth brings you isolation. You own a great manor but nobody is allowed to knock on the front door. That puts great stress and strain on marriages. It did on mine and on Richard Cole’s.”

  Managing Zeppelin put great strain on Peter Grant’s marriage to Gloria and now he was about to endure the shock and pain of divorce, which undermined his confidence and sapped his good spirits. Alan Callan: “The years 1974 through to 1975 were very difficult for him. Gloria was living at Horselunges when it happened and then he moved and went into isolation for a while. The situation was exacerbated by the fact that the rock’n’roll business is not a nine-to-five job. He said it was ‘five years of fun and 25 years of hanging about.’”

  Peter Grant separated from his wife Gloria in 1976 following a breakdown in their relationship exacerbated by the constant touring and absence from home. The split became permanent when Peter discovered his wife had found somebody else to share her life. His loyal lieutenant Richard Cole observed the drastic effects of the catastrophic marital collapse on Grant’s mood and temperament. “It was during the time when we were editing the Zeppelin movie and I used to have to fly over to Los Angeles every couple of weeks because he wouldn’t leave LA. They kind of left me in charge. Gloria was very down-to-earth and quite a small woman. Moving into those big houses was a bit overwhelming for her. It was like, ‘Oh my God, what’s all this?’ I think all the Zeppelin wives were a bit amazed to find out that the men they had married turned out to be multi-millionaires. They were all married before they became successful, apart from Jimmy. John was with Pat, Robert was with Maureen and John Paul Jones was with Mo and Peter was with Gloria. So they were all happily married. And it wasn’t too hard to live with success. They all got nice cars! Bonham was the most generous. John Paul Jones didn’t drive a car in those days. He had a Rolls Royce and a chauffeur.”

  What went wrong?

  “Well basically everyone was doing coke. Peter was pretty straight. He’d have a drink and that was it. But what happened was one day he had a toothache. He was moaning about it so much I said, ‘Well put a bit of this on it, that’ll cure it.’ So I gave him some cocaine to stick on his gum and of course that did cure the pain. And from then on he started to get into coke. And of course in the music business, if you’re waving a bag of coke around, the women come running. It was very strange. To get to the band the girls would even climb up the outside of buildings. I’d have to keep them off but I was a scaffolder, so I wasn’t worried about heights!”

  Many wondered how such a strong-willed man like Peter could have got into drugs.

  “Well a lot of strong-willed people get into drugs! The drugs take over and that’s all there is to it. The pattern of his life changed. Whereas Peter would call his wife every day, once he got into coke, the phone calls didn’t come at the usual time every night. Gloria sussed something was going on. Once that happened, he was finished in one sense. He kind of fell apart after that and never really recovered, I don’t think. He became a different person. A nastier side came out. There he was, one of the richest men in the country and certainly the most powerful man in the music business and suddenly your wife runs off with a hired hand, who was in charge of the cows! It was a terrible blow to his ego and he never got over it. My own relationship with him didn’t change that much, simply because I was getting divorced from my wife for the same reasons.”

  When Peter first discovered what was happening back home, he seemed to take it with a degree of phlegmatic good humour; but then he had his own peccadilloes to conceal as Mickie Most recalls:

  “Of course away from the band the rest of his world was his wife Gloria and the two kids, Warren and Helen. I know what happened. He finished a tour and instead of coming back he said, ‘I’m just going to sleep for three days and then I’ll be back refreshed.’ In fact he was with some other woman for three days and Gloria found out and that kind of put the cat amongst the pigeons. Gloria ran a little dance school for the local kids and she had her life well organised while Peter was on the road, battling away.

  “She wasn’t sitting at home saying, ‘Oh, where are you Peter?’ She got on with her life in the nicest possible way. And when she found out about this other stuff it kind of jaded the relationship. Then when Peter went away on tour again they took on a new guy to work on the farm they owned. Peter said to me: ‘When I came back from the tour I was having breakfast and sitting at the breakfast table was this farm manager. And he didn’t get the burnt sausage. Then I realised something was up.’ What he meant was the favourite doesn’t get the burnt sausage. You know what I mean? If you are staying in digs with a glamorous landlady, you know who is giving her one because – he never gets the burnt sausage! It was one of Peter’s many original expressions. He tried to repair the problem with Gloria, but she had fallen in love with the guy, so it wasn’t a question of a fling between friends.

  “She said, ‘I’m in love.’ And that kind of killed Peter off and took a lot out of him. It all came at the wrong time. He was having problems with Led Zeppelin because of their drugs and booze. I went to Paradise Island in the Bahamas and Jimmy Page was there and he never came out of his hotel room in two weeks. I also went to his birthday party when he had a big house out in Windsor, which he bought from Michael Caine. They had roast pigs on spits and all sorts and he never turned up. He never even turned up for his own birthday party. So it was all a funny time.

  “You led an unusual life being in Led Zeppelin. They were touring continuously and they lost their sense of reality. Add to that taking substances and it’s a bad mix. You’re living in a world where nobody says ‘no’ to you. The record companies, the tour promoters say ‘yes’ to everything. ‘I want five girls with 80-inch breasts.’ They’ll be there. ‘I want a red, white and blue Cadillac.’ Anything you want, it will be there. My point is that nobody says ‘no’ and of course that is very unhealthy. You can almost commit murder. Rape. Pillage. Driving cars into swimming pools at parties. It’s a terrible thing really. There was an element of fun about it, but in retrospect, looking back, you see how silly it all was.

  “I remember being on the road with Zeppelin and saw the way they treated people. This reporter came to see them and they started pouring beer all over him and insulting his girlfriend. There were times when it got out of hand. And I’m sure if they look back on it, the guys who were responsible would probably say they wouldn’t behave that badly if they could live their lives again.

  “I know it came with the territory, to be outrageous and do things you knew you could get away with, but there was something unpleasant about it all. It might have seemed fun at the time but in retrospect, it wasn’t very nice. Most of the people in rock bands were just normal guys who didn’t want to be sheet metal workers or go down the coal mines. Nobody would turn up in a Rolls Royce and say, ‘I want you to sign me. I’ve got a band but we don’t need any money.’ That never happens. They always come from the wrong side of the tracks. It was an option in the Sixties. You liked music; you bought a guitar and learned to play it. All of a sudden you’ve got your friends around you and they can play a bit. That’s how it developed. Even The Beatles started off as a skiffle group and ended up being the best musicians, singers and writers we’d ever seen. You need to be a very strong character for success not to go to your head or you have to have very strong management.

  “It’s hard to control a group because there are four people there who are all different and basically they are not mugs. Every one of Led Zeppelin could play and they were all wonderful musicians and Robert Plant sang like
an angel. They all had this wonderful ability and there was nobody along for the ride. They were hard to control but Peter had a unique relationship with them. The problem with that is it always turns nasty in the end. It always turns sour. Nobody knows why. It’s not one particular thing that happens.”

  Most does not buy the view that Grant and Zeppelin had an indestructible bond. “There’s far too much sugar in it. When Led Zeppelin started Peter was like the fifth member of the band. He would kill for those guys and he made sure they never got ripped off for one programme, one ticket or T-shirt. He was really meticulous. For him it was like a matter of life or death or even more important than that. So I figured that their relationship was so unique and they were so tight that eventually it became very claustrophobic. I think by the end of their fourth album everybody wanted some air and freedom. The relationship had started off being very healthy and then it became unhealthy and that happens a lot.

  “My relationship with Peter Grant was very close and then drifted apart because he changed as a person through the tremendous hard work and success and all that goes with that. He had a personality change and of course the split-up with Gloria was like the nail in the coffin. Then he was kind of morally broken and he wasn’t the Peter Grant that we all knew and had a good time with. He never said anything to me that was abusive and not correct but he became very secretive, which he never was before. There were always secret phone calls going on and you felt a bit uncomfortable around him.”

  Grant fought to cope with the break-up of his marriage. Despite jokes about ‘burnt sausages’ he was consumed by anger and, as Richard Cole recalls, seemed bent on revenge, although quite what he proposed to do about Gloria’s new beau was never made clear, even to Richard. “He called me up and I went down to Horselunges one day with a shotgun,” he recalls, “and a few other guns locked in the trunk of the car, while he decided what he wanted me to do with this guy. Gloria was talking to him and he was trying to find out what was going on.”

  The pair approached the house but Grant, who was in an agitated state, appeared stymied by his own moat and drawbridge. “The house was on an island with a moat around it and I was on the outer perimeter,” says Cole. “Peter wanted to get back into the house. I had pretty good judgement and figured if I climbed up this tree, I could get onto a branch and then across the moat. Unfortunately the tree was rotten and the branch snapped and I fell into the middle of the moat.” The incident ended on a fairly peaceful note but Cole says that a fortress state subsequently pervaded Grant’s beautiful home.

  Observes Alan Callan: “I don’t think Peter ever got over his divorce from Gloria because he was the kind of person who believed that marriage and friendship was for life. I don’t think he ever recovered from the fact that something he’d held so dear was taken away. It was a great personal tragedy. He eventually won custody of the children, Gloria left and he ran the house properly. He did everything he possibly could, but as far as he was concerned, within his life, he had failed. And he was not a man used to failure.

  “When things went wrong, all his life he had been able to find a solution. If you worked with him and you had a problem in your life, then he’d solve it for you. Then suddenly there was this problem in his life and he didn’t solve it.”

  In the midst of all this there was the unspoken fear that the band he helped create wanted to get rid of him. Strung out, nerves on edge, it wasn’t surprising that he’d launch into blistering attacks on anyone who got in his way, offended his pride – or slammed a door on his foot. Peter Clifton, still busy working on The Song Remains The Same during this traumatic period, could see the way Grant was beginning to succumb to emotional turmoil and was resorting to drugs.

  “When I first met him, his marriage was happy but by the end of the film-making, everything had collapsed. He began to drug himself into a stupor and wouldn’t get out of bed. Peter was living like a king in this great bed at his house and he wouldn’t get up. Gloria loved him … she really loved Peter. But she told me that Peter loved Jimmy more than her. He was the only person he really loved. I remember when Jimmy hurt his hand in the train door and I was with Peter when he heard the news. We were working on something to do with the film and he just got up and left like a shot. He wanted to look after Jimmy. I always felt that if ever there was a problem, Peter would protect me and I guess that’s how Jimmy always felt.”

  Journalist Michael Watts thought it more likely that Grant’s peccadilloes caused the rift more than any excessive loyalty to Jimmy Page. “He behaved very badly and that’s why they got divorced. There was certainly a soft side to him but I think in life people’s actions and their personalities can, to an extent, be dictated to by their appearance.”

  The complex, multi-faceted nature of Grant’s personality left him confused about his real feelings and intentions, just as those outside of the inner Zeppelin circle were confused – or scared – of Peter Grant. Power and money simply exacerbated those characteristics and personal traits that might otherwise have been manageable.

  Watts: “Because he was a quite villainous looking character I think he decided at some point in his life to play up to it. If you’re in the wrestling ring, it’s very easy to portray yourself as ‘Count Massimo’. The other contrast about him was that you’d think by looking at him that he’d have this great bellowing voice, yet he had a soft south London twang to him. He actually wasn’t loud and he had a slight lisp. He was just scary to look at and to be around! The pop business has moved on a lot since his day. It is de rigueur to paint the manager as the bad guy and that’s how he would appear in a movie of his life. But rock bands aren’t like Led Zeppelin anymore. They’re not as big and in any case accountants run the music industry. There’s less room for mavericks like Peter Grant. Kids aren’t interested in rock, only dance music and rap and most rap figures are scarier than Peter Grant could ever hope to be. Some of those guys have committed murder and next to them Grant was a pussycat. You’re talking about people who take fierce drugs, carry guns and have taken part in serious crimes.”

  Richard Cole could see that the man who once terrified others was now becoming frightened himself, in the wake of his separation and divorce. “Because of the cocaine he was taking, Peter became very paranoid and his place was full of surveillance cameras. He was always calling the police out. He was convinced there were people waiting for him outside. I remember one day he wouldn’t let the police in the front door; he made them come in through the window. And he was sitting there with a sawn-off shotgun under his seat and I’d got an axe under mine. Who were we expecting? No one! It was pure paranoia. We were doing so much coke. There weren’t any blokes coming down to see us. Either Peter knew all the boys, or I did! We both knew guys like John Bindon, but I had a lot of different contacts from Peter, because I lived in America and I worked for a lot of people there – let’s say. My connections went back a lot longer, before my time with Led Zeppelin.”

  These connections – and Grant’s paranoia – would soon lead to the notoriously violent outburst that abruptly ended Led Zeppelin’s reign in America. They had started the decade with high hopes and aspirations. Now they were about to endure ‘the wrong goodbye’.

  * * *

  * US promoter who handled Presley’s concerts and worked with Led Zeppelin in 1975.

  10

  THE WRONG GOODBYE

  “He was always bad vibing people and he was just not a very nice person to be around. That’s why it was not really a comfortable situation to be involved in, because you never had faith in the consistency of his behaviour.”

  – Drum technician Jeff Ocheltree

  When Caesar crossed The Rubicon, a small river in ancient Italy, in 49 B.C. he passed beyond the limits of his province and became an invader, thus precipitating war with Pompeii. Peter Grant crossed his Rubicon when he declared war on the personal fiefdom of one of the most powerful men in American rock politics. The results would be devastating.

 
When powerful men lose self-control, they expose weakness. In the case of the manager of Led Zeppelin, his greatest skill had lain in his ability to coerce, intimidate and use personal charisma to achieve results. It was only when Grant resorted to real personal violence that he lost face and respect, those twin assets that are unspoken and indefinable, yet more valuable than any number of blows and punches.

  It all came to a head during what should have been just another concert on yet another money-spinning, successful tour. 1977 was a strange year, which did not augur well for popular music culture. It was a time when sections of disaffected British youth had suddenly begun to question the validity of super powerful rock groups, who flaunted their wealth and seemed to delight in trampling everyone underfoot. There was a growing movement to wrest back control of rock’n’roll and place it in the hands of the untutored, impoverished ‘kids on the street’, from whence it came. Punk rock was the new force already capturing headlines in the London music press. Led Zeppelin were prime targets for the new rebels with a cause, who loudly proclaimed they wanted to sweep away the ‘boring old farts’ and the ‘dinosaurs of rock’. It was into this atmosphere of aggression and disrespect that Zeppelin blundered like an untethered balloon, blown by the forces of an ill wind.