Peter Grant: The Man Who Led Zeppelin

by Chris Welch

  Said John Paul Jones: “When Bonzo died, we had been rehearsing for the American tour with a lot of optimism. The band was in good form but then it just had to stop. The music needed those four particular people to make it work. We could have had another band with another drummer, but it wouldn’t have been Zeppelin. That died with John.”

  Jimmy Page was so distraught he contemplated never playing the guitar again, especially when he found that his Gibson Les Paul had gone missing immediately after Bonham’s death. “It seemed like an omen,” he said. The guitar turned up later but he said, “If I even looked at a guitar, it would remind me of a dear friend I had just lost.”

  Robert Plant felt strangely vulnerable as Zeppelin came to an end. “It was like staggering away from a great explosion, with your eardrums ringing. I found myself standing on a street corner, clutching 12 years of my life with a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye and not knowing which way to go. The dream was over and everything had gone.”

  Peter Grant felt much the same way. He was devastated by the death of the wild and wilful drummer whom he had looked upon as another son. “It was such a tragedy,” he said. “People forget what a family man Bonzo was. And the manner in which some people tried to distort Bonzo’s death was disgraceful. They said dreadful things about him. One journalist wrote that John had died after taking a concoction of cocaine and heroin known as a speedball. Rubbish! What really caused the problem was that John got very nervous in rehearsal situations and he died just as we were rehearsing for the 30-date US tour. That would have been followed by another US tour in 1981. We had also just extended our contract with Atlantic Records. John tried to overcome his nerves by drinking vodka and taking a Valium. That’s what caused his death. The news about John was on the radio in Philadelphia within three hours. We didn’t know how. Helen told me Mitchell Fox who worked for us had been on the radio talking about John, which angered me. It was a terrible time. We were getting calls from drummers and Atlantic Records were baying for a ‘live’ album. People had to realise that for Led Zeppelin to make music, it needed all four of them. And now one was gone. We had to make a statement to end all the speculation. And then came the beginning of the period of blackness.”

  Peter Grant slumped into depression and apathy as Led Zeppelin vanished into the history books. Meanwhile, his former assistant was languishing in jail and wondering what was happening back in England. Richard Cole had to rely on friends to bring him news of the outside world.

  “A lawyer came to see me and brought me a newspaper cutting which was in Italian. He explained to me: ‘One of your guys has died.’ I thought it was Jimmy, but it happened to be Bonham, which was devastating, because he was the last one I would have thought. He was so strong and robust. It’s still a mystery how he died. He was supposed to have died from drinking vodka. But forty shots of vodka was nothing for him. It was a tragedy, but who knows what happened that day. I couldn’t go to the funeral. I was still in the high security wing, with the guy who shot the Pope.”

  With John Bonham dead, the band broken up and gone into mourning, Peter – divorced and smitten by a string of disasters – needed someone, anyone, to turn to. Even his old friend Richard Cole was now out of the picture. Explains Cole: “Peter and I were still very close and he treated me well. I had everything I wanted and on the road we lived like kings. But the whole thing with Peter and me kind of fell apart in 1979. I was living with a girl called Cindy Russell. She then moved in with Peter. Not that I cared but I never spoke to him again for years.”

  Peter Grant was about to enter what he would later refer to as his ‘dark period’. It would take many years for him to recover sufficiently and emerge from his seclusion to face a changing world. By then Peter Grant was also a changed man.

  12

  WE’LL MEET AGAIN

  “People climbed onto their tables and shouted and cheered. Elliot Rashman who managed Simply Red was shouting out, ‘Congratulations Peter, none of us could have done it without you!’”

  – Alan Callan

  After the death of John Bonham and the demise of Led Zeppelin, Peter Grant went into hiding, disappearing from the world into a hermit like existence. Aside from his cherished son and daughter, he had lost everything that was important to him. The great enterprise that had been his life’s work and struggle was lost forever in a sea of drugs and violence. He locked himself away in Horselunges Manor, his home since 1971, pulled up the drawbridge and became a recluse.

  There was still some work to do and certain matters that required his attention. He was the executor of John Bonham’s estate, and as well as sorting out Bonham’s financial affairs he helped the family get over their loss. There was outstanding business with Swan Song and there was also the problem of what to do with Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones. In the event, it seemed that after the Savoy Hotel meeting they all simply drifted apart. Robert Plant in particular made it clear that if he were to launch a solo career, he would seek new management. Jimmy Page, traumatised by recent events and wracked by ill health, didn’t even want to play guitar again, let alone think about forming a new band. John Paul retreated to the countryside and concentrated on writing film music, although this wasn’t necessarily by choice.

  Said Jones: “When the band split I didn’t see Peter very often. He was pretty much incommunicado. No one saw him, so I had to write to him and say, ‘It’s been great – perhaps we can work together again in the future.’ In the meantime I had to have some sort of career, which I didn’t. So I took the opportunity to rest for a bit. After all, I had been working solidly since I was 16. I was due a rest. But then it was very hard to find anything to do after Led Zeppelin. I could have joined another band, but I didn’t want to do that. People were saying, ‘Let’s form a new Asia, another supergroup.’ I just didn’t want to do that and so I wrote film music for a while and started producing.”

  In the midst of this rock’n’roll mid-life crisis, Mickie Most could see that Grant and his former Zep men were doomed to drift apart. “It was almost like a marriage in a strange kind of way. I think they fell out when Peter did his disappearing act and no one could get hold of him.

  “He was once so available for the boys and then all of a sudden he wasn’t taking any of their phone calls. Peter, being the manager, had four guys who wanted his attention 24 hours a day. If they had a problem at five o’clock in the morning, they’d phone Peter. They wouldn’t say, ‘No, don’t wake him up. I’ll talk to him tomorrow.’ They would phone because they think, ‘You are getting your percentage. You’ve gotta be there for me.’ They can be very selfish. He was like a father figure to them.”

  Most and Grant retained their mutual respect and Mickie tried to keep in touch with his old pal, but it was an increasingly difficult task, made worse by Grant’s increasing dependence on drugs. “Right back to the early days when he first started Led Zeppelin, I think even then he was being introduced to some bad habits,” says Most. “People with bad habits sometimes turn into people that they’re not. They never turn into nicer people. So it brought out a person who was – let’s say – not the real Peter. It’s like alcohol. People drink too much and they become nasty. I think Peter got increasingly involved in illegal substances and that’s not a secret. You’d phone him and he’d be in the toilet. ‘But he’s been in the toilet for three days!’ It just meant he didn’t want to speak to anybody. He became quite secretive and very elusive, more like a hermit. He had minders looking after him in his big moated place near Eastbourne.”

  Most was impressed by Horselunges and, before Peter sealed himself off completely, he attended parties there. “He’d throw big parties with jousting on the lawn and people would dress up in Knights Of The Round Table outfits, with jesters, drinking mead and all that. He had some fun there.”

  One of Peter’s great delights during happier times at Horselunges was to devise exciting family day treats. As well as medieval jousting tournaments on the lawn, there would
be serving wenches and roast pigs on spits. However, one such special occasion became a spectacular event, for all the wrong reasons.

  Phil Carson and Ahmet Ertegun were invited down to Peter’s house on the occasion of Warren’s 16th birthday. Carson had brought a birthday present with him and Ahmet brought a crossbow for Warren at a sports shop on the way down. They drove to Peter’s and found him reclining on his sofa bed. He was feeling unwell, but got up to see Phil and Ahmet and was grateful they had brought presents for Warren.

  “Very nice, but you won’t spoil his big surprise, will you?” said Peter. “I’ve got a motorbike for him … it’s a Harley Davidson. A helicopter is going to fly over the garden and lower the Harley on a length of rope, right? It’s going to be a wonderful surprise.” Warren came home and his dad took him out into the garden. “What a lovely day, let’s go for a stroll in the garden. Oh look, a helicopter, I wonder what that’s doing here?”

  The helicopter hovered over the garden and the motorbike was lowered on a wire hawser. It got to about 200 feet when the hawser snapped and the bike came down and smashed to pieces. Says one eyewitness: “It was at this point that the helicopter pilot made his big mistake. He landed. He was met by an enraged water buffalo, in the shape of Peter Grant.

  “He came stampeding towards this terrified helicopter pilot yelling, ‘I’m going to fucking kill you!’ The pilot tried to take off, but not before Peter got one leg on the landing skid and tipped the helicopter to one side. The rotor blades then sliced through and demolished about ten yards of garden fence. It was a pretty good birthday surprise!”

  Such incidents were few and far between as Peter slid into his ‘black period’. Mickie Most: “When he was in his low period and had separated from his wife Gloria, everything went pear shaped and he went into a deep depression. I used to drive down there on my motorbike quite regularly and try to cheer him up. I’d sit there for hours with him, but the divorce really upset him and he couldn’t come to terms with it.”

  Mickie tried to provide the fun and companionship they had enjoyed when they were both fighting to make their way in the music business. “We had a funny kind of understanding. We both knew where we came from and we knew that we’d got where we were, more by luck than judgement. We didn’t take ourselves too seriously. It was like, ‘Remember when we used to do the wrestling and you lent me a fiver when I was skint?’ It was all that kind of stuff. We had that kind of relationship … when I was the hottest record producer in the world and he managed the biggest band in the world. You have to keep your feet on the ground and Peter always did, until unfortunately it all got too much.

  “Once he started to get into drugs, life became not such a pleasant trip for him. We were very close, but I never got involved in any illegal substances. I never took any drugs and it never interested me. But a lot of the people I was very close to did and all of a sudden, I wasn’t close to them anymore. They think on different levels. Unless you are doing what they are doing, you’re not happening and you get frozen out. I had so many close friends I used to hang out with and when they get into that kind of stuff you feel like a spare prick at a wedding. They don’t want you around because you are too straight.”

  Most believes that Led Zeppelin were struggling to hold things together even before John Bonham died. “They had done everything there was to be done. You can’t do any more than fill the biggest stadiums in the world and sell millions of records. Somebody said to me recently, ‘Why don’t you go into the studio and produce another number one record?’ I don’t want to sound unappreciative, but another gold record wouldn’t make any difference to my life. The first one makes a helluva difference. After 238 gold records, who’s counting? Who cares? And of course it takes far too long to make records these days. We used to make them in a morning. By ten to one, a hit would be made and you could make an album in a day. Now they take months … and when they are banging away on their computers, it gets really boring.”

  After a period of respectful silence, rumours began to circulate that some former Zeppelin men might form a band called Cinema with ex-members of Yes, another Seventies supergroup in the midst of an upheaval. Nothing came of these plans and it became clear that Robert and Jimmy would pursue separate solo careers, without the involvement of their former guru.

  The big man was suddenly redundant. Grant frequently said he was ‘disappointed and hurt’ that Robert Plant didn’t want him for a manager and regretted that Jimmy wouldn’t get in touch or even speak to him after the break-up.

  Malcolm McLaren, manager of The Sex Pistols, who at one time had plans to make a film of Grant’s life, wrote later about what he saw as Peter’s modus operandi: “Grant needed the camaraderie of hard, dangerous men who gave him a sense of power. The harder they were, the tougher he felt, and only then was his desire for control satisfied. It all fell apart when Grant aped the lifestyle of Jimmy Page, who then ostracised his biggest fan.”

  Once he’d gone into hibernation, it was difficult to get Peter to pick up the phone. Alan Callan insists that Page did stay in touch and often phoned his old mentor. When Jimmy started work again, providing the music for Michael Winner’s Death Wish II movie and producing Coda, the last ever Led Zeppelin album, G was still making his presence felt.

  Coda, an album of outtakes from throughout Led Zeppelin’s career and one superb live track recorded at a soundcheck at the Royal Albert Hall, was to be the last Zeppelin release on Swan Song. Robert Plant’s 1982 solo début, Pictures At Eleven, was also released on the label the same year, although his next album The Principle Of Moments would be on Atlantic.

  The tenth and final Zeppelin album was a poignant farewell released with a minimum of publicity. Although it scraped into the top ten, copies of the LP were spotted in the bargain bins at high street record stores a few weeks later. Said Peter: “The album was the result of an agreement we struck with Ahmet. It was both to fulfil the long-term album contract and it was also done as a separate deal. When I made that deal with Ahmet we owed him an album or two, but the Coda deal was a separate thing. We had a meeting with the three of them and Pat Bonham (John’s widow), to sort it all out.

  “Jimmy said he’d hoped we had enough material to release as an album and Ahmet was great and paid an advance, knowing that if it was substandard and we couldn’t find enough material for a decent set, then the advance would be refunded. It was called the ‘Omega contract’. We met in Frankfurt, Germany and verbally agreed to renew our contract within the next year. We shook hands on that one. We did many a deal with Ahmet on trust and the paperwork would follow many months later. Ahmet was the only one who has ever said to me that I mourned too long over John. Maybe he was right.”

  Swan Song was finally wound up in 1983. Peter now had time on his hands to speculate on what might have been. “If Led Zeppelin had carried on into the Eighties, I’m sure we’d have gone into the mega stadium circuit, playing five nights at Wembley Stadium. The pace would probably have slowed down and I’m sure there would have been solo albums.”*

  Even if Robert Plant and Jimmy had wanted Grant to manage them, his physical state now meant he wasn’t up to the task. The gruelling years on the road had taken their toll and he admitted as much. “By 1982 I just wasn’t up to it. Mentally and everything. I’d just had enough. I did negotiate Robert’s five album solo deal. Shook hands with him on that.”

  Says Richard Cole: “Peter got Robert a record deal and Phil Carson got Jimmy a deal with Geffen Records. When a friend of mine went to see Page & Plant in Philadelphia, the pair of them were arguing. Page was saying, ‘I’m not playing with him anymore.’ It was all very strange.”

  When Jimmy wrote and recorded soundtrack material for the latest Death Wish movie in 1981, Peter described the process as ‘another nightmare’. This complaint seemed to hinge on the pressure the director put on both parties for the material to be delivered on time. Movie deadlines were rather more immovable than schedules in the laid-back world of Swan
Song. Michael Winner rang Grant and asked if Jimmy could do the job, but the guitarist was on holiday on a narrow boat sailing up the Thames. It took Peter an age to contact him. Eventually word got through and it seemed an appealing idea for Page to write and record music for a thriller.

  Peter: “Now the first Death Wish movie ended with Charles Bronson in Chicago at the airport. So when Jimmy rang me he said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it,’ thinking it would be set in Chicago. ‘I could do a blues album. That would be really great.’ We had draft contracts and all that and eventually we saw the rushes of the new film and it was a bloody street gang scenario set in New York! We stalled a bit, but eventually came up with the goods. But Michael Winner still wasn’t happy. He sent someone down to my house to get the contract signed. He was wasting his fucking time doing that. I just left him outside all night. The music got done in the end – in fact Jimmy always worked better with a deadline. I saw Winner later at the National Film Festival. He told me he kept a ‘Unique Letters’ file and still had one I had sent him. It was the one that informed him I’d filed his last letter in my ‘Silly Letters’ file!”