Peter Grant: The Man Who Led Zeppelin

by Chris Welch

  The first Knebworth concert was held on August 4 with a bill that included Fairport Convention, Commander Cody, Chas ‘n’ Dave, South-side Johnny & The Asbury Jukes and Todd Rundgren’s Utopia. Grant wanted to ensure the great comeback event was given full technical support and the American company Showco installed a 100,000-watt sound system and 600,000-watt light show. A huge video screen was also erected so that the audience could see the group in close-up. Nobody could miss the action. Zeppelin played a three-hour set and even included ‘Stairway To Heaven’ as one of their four encore numbers.

  The second show took place a week later with much the same supporting cast, but with the addition of Keith Richard’s New Barbarians, who came on late and played rather badly. Although Zeppelin played professionally and at full bore, the vast audience took some coaxing to respond after a day of listening to music. Sometimes it was possible to hear a pin drop between numbers and there was an eerie feeling of 100,000 strangers standing in a darkened field in the countryside watching an unfamiliar band dutifully going through its repertoire. Many in the audience were seeing Zeppelin for the first time and didn’t quite know what to expect or how to react. What was missing was the old interaction, the communal sense of excitement and joy. There was none of the screaming pandemonium that had greeted Led Zeppelin at the Bath Festival nine years earlier. However the band’s spine tingling performances of ‘Stairway To Heaven’, ‘No Quarter’ and ‘Trampled Underfoot’ were eventually greeted with roaring applause.

  Despite some less than complimentary reviews the band had achieved its aim and lived up to expectations. It looked like Zeppelin were back in business. Peter Grant was also back in business, making sure he got the full amount due from the promoter. He pulled out all his old tricks to ensure the cash flowed in his direction. He might have had his regrets about the immediate past but there was no sign that he was going to be any less aggressive in his pursuit of the band’s income. As usual, he was suspicious and took ‘precautions’.

  Said Peter: “We thought that doing Knebworth rather than a full tour was the right decision. Absolutely. We didn’t want to start all over again, so I said, ‘Fuck doing a tour. We’re the biggest band in the world, so we’d better get out there and show them we still are.’ I said Knebworth was the right gig and I reckoned we could do two dates. I said to Bannister, ‘This is the biggest band in the world and we can do two dates.’ I was absolutely confident. We did have a bit of a row with Bannister over the attendance figures. But I had the arena photographed from a helicopter the first week and sent the pictures to NASA to be analysed. There were 210,000 people in there give or take two per cent, they told us. Well, we got paid in full. There was also some battle over VAT I recall. I think we had 180,000 the second week. We had the photograph of the aerial shot hanging in the office.

  “We also had a few nice photos from the festival. We took some beforehand for publicity. Jimmy moaned about his hair because Richard Cole had driven him there in his Austin Healey with the top down. His hair was all in knots when he arrived for the photo shoot. Another bollocking for Richard. Bonzo also complained that the pictures captured his love handles and so they had to be airbrushed out. The sky was too dull and we had to overlay a sky scene from a shot from Texas to give it some colour! We went through a lot of traumas just to get one picture of the band.”

  When the last show was over Robert Plant said guardedly to the audience, “It’s been quite good.” Peter Grant wasn’t entirely happy with the shows either. “It was a bit rusty although we’d been to Copenhagen to get the sound sorted out. That was always one of my strategies to warm up in Europe, usually Scandinavia. Jimmy was up for hours rehearsing with the lighting guys to give them the exact order so he would project the bow outwards to make sure the laser effects were spot on. That really was a fantastic moment to watch from the side of the stage. And backstage during the day it was great seeing all the families come in. We had a special ‘ligger’s enclosure’ marked out. We banned the magazine Sounds though, which was a typical move when the press got up our nose.”

  Knebworth House has been in the Lytton Cobbold family for several generations, and David and Chrissie Lytton Cobbold, the present owners, encountered Peter Grant over the two weekends. “He came up to the house after the second concert,” wrote Chrissie in a book about the Knebworth concerts that was published in 1986. “An enormous man with long black hair, neither of us cared much for him.”

  Ms Lytton Cobbold also shed some light on the difficulties encountered by promoter Freddie Bannister. “After the August 4 concert the County Council and newspapers stated that the attendance had been anything up to 200,00 people,” she wrote. “The licence was for only 100,000. Freddie said 93,000 had paid for tickets to come in. Peter Grant, whose band was paid on a commission basis, thought Freddie was cheating him. For the second concert he brought his own staff to count tickets and money.

  “Freddie was worried but there wasn’t much he could do about it. Peter Grant’s ‘heavies’ took over our office, turfing our staff out. David was furious and ordered them out. They eventually left, taking the money with them. Peter Grant would not believe that Freddie hadn’t pocketed the proceeds from the first concert.”

  The sands of time were running out for Led Zeppelin. Says Richard Cole: “They did the two weekends in Knebworth and they were the last concerts I ever did for them. That’s where Peter asked for aerial shots of the audience. It wouldn’t have made any difference how many people were there. They had paid us a million pounds in cash before the show. We split it up and put packets of £200,000 in the trunks of each car.”

  That, of course, was doing things Peter’s way.

  Within four days of its release Atlantic received an additional 900,000 orders for In Through The Out Door, the new Led Zeppelin album, and by the end of September it had shipped three million copies. All nine previous albums now returned to the Billboard charts during October. In Through The Out Door stayed at number one in the US charts for seven weeks and was in the top twenty for six months. It wasn’t even a classic Zeppelin album, although songs like ‘In The Evening’, ‘South Bound Saurez’, ‘Fool In The Rain’ and ‘Carouselambra’ showed the musicians were opting for new ideas and not relying on the kind of music that had brought them so much success in the past. It was certainly unlike the early blues-rock albums that had made their name. An interesting feature was the use of different sleeve designs, each showing a different version of the same scene, a man sitting in a typical American bar. There were six different sleeves, each packaged inside a brown bag, It was all part of the oblique strategies employed by Grant and Page.

  Said Grant: “Jimmy came up with that great idea of using a watercolour on the inner sleeve from one of his daughter Scarlet’s books. Then Atlantic went and spoiled it by telling everyone. We wanted it to be a surprise. Still, whichever sleeve it had, it still sold a bucketful which pleased us greatly of course and seemed to bolster the US record business at the time.”

  Before attempting a return to America, where chart returns showed the vast mass of the record buying population desperately wanted them back, Grant decided to arrange a full-scale European tour. In April 1980 the band began rehearsing at the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park, north London. It was then announced Zep would play 14 dates in Germany, Holland, Belgium and Switzerland.

  As John Bonham celebrated his 31st birthday, rehearsals moved from the Rainbow to Shepperton studios, now owned by The Who. It was around this time that Jimmy Page bought the actor Michael Caine’s former home in Windsor for around £900,000.

  The ‘Over Europe ‘80’ tour began in Dortmund, Germany on June I7, and was followed by shows in Cologne, Brussels, Rotterdam, Bremen, Vienna and Nuremberg, where the show was halted after three numbers when John Bonham collapsed, reportedly from physical exhaustion. He recovered in time for the rest of the dates, which ended in Berlin on July 7. When they played in Munich there was a surprise guest appearance by Bad Company’s drumme
r Simon Kirke who joined Bonzo on a version of ‘Whole Lotta Love’. In Frankfurt, Atlantic Records executive Phil Carson played bass on the band’s version of R&B standard ‘Money’.

  Said Grant: “The idea to tour Europe in 1980 with a stripped down stage set came from a discussion with Jimmy. We said, ‘Let’s forget the big lighting rigs and go back to basics.’ Meanwhile, Robert kept insisting at the time that he wouldn’t go back to America. At Knebworth he even sang the wrong words to ‘Stairway’. Unforgivable really. He was in a difficult frame of mind. And then there was all that speech he made on stage. ‘We’re never going to Texas anymore … but we will go to Manchester’ and all that. And as he’s saying that, he’s eyeing me out at the side of the stage.

  “So we did the European tour, and we had this big meeting down at my house that went on all night. All the others said it was down to me to get Robert to agree to go back to the States. I mean we just had to carry on really. [America] was where a sizeable amount of the market was, simple as that. So purposely I played it down with Robert, and Bonzo would tell me he’d say to him, ‘How come G hasn’t said anything to me about America yet?’ I never said a thing. But I have an outstanding memory of coming off the Europe tour, landing in the Falcon jet in England, walking across the tarmac and Robert coming up to me and saying, ‘OK, I’ll do it but only for four weeks.’ So I said I’d give him a call in the next few days and we were able to set up the autumn tour. We were fully operational again.”

  One familiar face was missing from the European tour. Richard Cole had been replaced by Phil Carlo as tour manager. It was the first time Ricardo had missed a Zeppelin tour in twelve years, since the band first played in Denver, Colorado in I968. It seems he had been sent away to sort out his drug problems. Explained Grant: “I’d paid for the doctor’s visits and all that and he just wasn’t getting better. He had a massive problem so I thought the only way to shake him up was to blow him out. I told him I wouldn’t want him in Europe and he said, ‘You can’t do it without me,’ but I said, ‘Well, we’ve got to.’ He was shattered and he spoke to Jimmy, but I had made the decision. The next we heard he was in Italy with some dreadful girl. But I can’t take away what he did for us in the peak years, he was always there and always reliable. He was always employed by me. We needed him for America, so I thought this would shake him up. But it didn’t seem to do much good.”

  Grant was fairly pleased with the way the band coped with the European tour. “By and large it went very well. We had trouble with Bonzo in Nuremberg, but a funny thing occurred there as well. When he collapsed they wrapped him up in a red blanket in the ambulance. They strapped him in with this hand bell and he says, ‘How do I look?’ and I said, ‘Like fucking Father Christmas!’ He said, ‘Don’t make me laugh, it bloody hurts.’ But he’d eaten 27 bananas that night so it was not surprising he was ill!”

  Richard Cole now admits he wasn’t in a fit state to have coped with the European dates. “I was so fucked up on heroin I was sent off to Italy to clean up and I ended up getting arrested over there.” Unbeknown to him, Cole had arrived in Italy on the day of the notorious Bologna railway station bombing. The police were rounding up all the suspects they could find. Richard was arrested at the Excelsior Hotel in Rome and taken in for questioning. He has some fascinating theories as to quite why a rock’n’roll tour manager should be arrested on suspicion of terrorism.

  Cole: “It was some bullshit thing set up by some ex-CIA guy who worked for Peter Grant. He was so paranoid he had the strangest people around him. It was a fit-up. But what they didn’t gamble on was the fact that I knew people in Italy. I was fortunate enough to be in a cell with a couple of the Godfathers, or at least sons of Godfathers from The Mafia and I did them a couple of favours. I earned their respect and had some open-ended contracts, whenever I needed them, y’know what I mean?”

  The circumstances of Richard Cole’s trip to Italy are still somewhat mysterious but he is convinced that his old boss wanted him out of the way. It wasn’t entirely to do with a health cure. “How was I set up? Well, it was a mixture of things. I had to go to Rome to meet someone, who turned out to be fictitious. I smelled a rat. I checked the hotel register where I was supposed to meet him the day before and his name wasn’t on it and he didn’t have a reservation. But I was so fucked up my wits weren’t about me. The next thing was I got arrested on a terrorism charge.” Richard was held in a local jail then transferred to Regina Coeli Prison. He later went to Rebibia, another prison near Rome where he was held for two months without charge. His incarceration meant he had to undergo enforced withdrawal from heroin addiction.

  Back in London Peter Grant was arranging for Richard to be sent $500 a month while busily arranging the band’s first North American tour since 1977. It could only go ahead once he’d got Robert’s grudging consent. The plan was to play 19 dates, starting in Montreal on October 17. Queues began to form at box offices as soon as tickets went on sale. Even if John Bonham had qualms about returning to the States and Robert Plant was uneasy about singing ‘Stairway To Heaven’, all these feelings had to be set aside to placate the hungry Zeppelin machine. The tour was arranged under the banner ‘Led Zeppelin – The 1980s Part One’.

  Said Grant: “I knew we couldn’t cover everywhere in four weeks because Robert’s schedule was going to be ‘two days on, then one day off.’ But I reckoned that once Robert got over there and got into the swing, he’d be okay. So it was a ‘Part One’ of what I hoped would be further visits. We had a meeting at Blake’s Hotel in London to get it organised and set the first dates up. It was looking good.”

  It seems strange that Grant was quite so determined to get the band back to America, given all they had been through and the musicians’ state of health. Was it just for the money? They already had an avalanche of income from record sales and publishing royalties. How many more cars, houses, farms and antiques could they buy? While there was talk of vast amounts of cash to be had from ‘live’ concerts, it seemed that in reality it didn’t always flow so readily to the musicians.

  According to John Bonham, when they played at the Earls Court concerts in 1975, he had received hundreds rather than thousands of pounds. It seemed almost a blind, compulsive act that led Peter Grant to risk pushing his charges, no longer young men but fast approaching middle age, into yet another maelstrom of rock’n’roll schedules, where they would be surrounded by all the old temptations. Cue yet another round of flights, concerts and media scrutiny. There was also the added fear of what might lay in store from any enemies they might have made on previous trips. The adrenalin would flow and they would walk the walk. But was it worth the candle?

  In September the band began more rehearsals, this time at Jimmy Page’s new home in Windsor. John Bonham felt depressed and uneasy about going on tour again and expressed the view privately that his drumming was no longer up to scratch. He’d rather stay at home and let someone else play than launch into yet another gruelling marathon around the States. On the day he was due to travel from the Midlands to Windsor, September 24, he began drinking vodkas in a local pub at lunchtime and then carried on drinking at Jimmy’s house until midnight. In all he consumed something like 40 measures of vodka during a 12-hour session, both before and during the rehearsals. Eventually he flaked out and was put to bed by Jimmy’s personal assistant, Rick Hobbs. He never woke again.

  John Bonham died in his sleep and was found by John Paul Jones and tour manager Benje LeFevre the following morning. They had waited a few hours before going into the bedroom to see how he was. Like Jimi Hendrix before him, the drummer had choked on his own vomit while he slept. LeFevre immediately phoned Peter Grant at home in Sussex to tell him the news.

  Says John Paul: “I think he had been drinking because there were some problems in his personal life. But he died because of an accident. He was lying down the wrong way, which could have happened to anybody who drank a lot. Benje LeFevre and I found him. We tried to wake him up … it was terrible. The
n I had to break the news to Jimmy and Robert. We had all been in such a good mood beforehand. It made me feel very angry – at the waste of him.”

  The police were called but there were no suspicious circumstances and a post mortem was arranged. Tributes poured in from all over the world, many from drummers who idolised Bonham. Grant’s cherished plan for an American tour was immediately abandoned and all the dates cancelled. An inquest was held on October 8 and a verdict of accidental death was returned.

  The funeral took place at Rushock parish church near Bonham’s farm in Worcestershire on October 10, attended by family, friends and fellow musicians. For a few days the music world held its breath, wondering whether the band would decide to carry on with another drummer, as The Who had done when they lost Keith Moon. Many top players put their names forward, some even telephoning Peter Grant to offer their services. All were politely refused. On November 7 the three remaining band members went to Jersey in the Channel Islands to discuss their future. On their return they held a meeting with Grant. Said Peter: “After John died the other three went off to Jersey to think things over. When they returned I hired a suite at the Savoy Hotel in London, making sure no one found out about the meeting. They told me that without Bonzo there was no desire on their part to carry on. It could never be the same again. I was relieved. That was exactly the way I felt.”

  After the meeting an anonymous statement was released on behalf of the band on December 4, 1980. It read: ‘The loss of our dear friend and the deep sense of harmony felt by ourselves and our manager, have led us to decide that we could not continue as we were.” In other words, the party was over. It was the end of the most powerful rock band of all time. This was Led Zeppelin’s ultimate swan song.