With all due respect to the movie Almost Famous, I never went on a Led Zeppelin tour where the band spontaneously burst into an Elton John song on a tour bus. Nor do I recall hootenannies with acoustic guitars in the Continental Hyatt House on the Sunset Strip. I remember the band’s needle-thin guitarist, Jimmy Page, sitting in the dark on a sofa in a corner suite at the Plaza hotel in New York City with a cadaverous David Bowie by his side, watching the same 15 minutes of Kenneth Anger’s film Lucifer Rising over and over again—with lines of cocaine on the table. I recall a flight to Detroit aboard the band’s private jet when Jimmy got into a fight with a Fleet Street reporter, and the tour manager, the menacing Richard Cole, pulled out a gun.
And, of course, I remember the rumors: Jimmy traveled with a suitcase full of whips. One time he was naked, covered with whipped cream, put on a room-service table, and wheeled into a room to be served up to a bunch of teenage girls. The band attacked a female reporter from Life magazine, ripping her clothes, until, in tears, she was rescued by the band’s manager. And, in 1969 at Seattle’s Edgewater Inn, in a notorious episode that has achieved mythic proportion, the band violated a teenage girl with a live shark. (“It wasn’t a shark,” Richard Cole told me years later. “It was a red snapper. And it wasn’t some big ritualistic thing; it was in and out and a laugh and the girl wasn’t sobbing—she was a willing participant. It was so fast, and over and done with, and no one from the band was there. I don’t think anyone who was there remembers the same thing.”)
With more than 200 million albums sold, Led Zeppelin is the biggest-selling rock group in history. Tour promoters have offered untold millions for a Zeppelin reunion. A whole new generation has discovered the band with a TV ad for Cadillac that features their song “Rock and Roll.” This past spring, Zeppelin entered both the CD and DVD charts at No. 1 with eight and a half hours of live material recorded more than 20 years ago.
At the time of Led Zeppelin’s ascent, at the end of the 1960s, their reviews were at best dismissive and at worst, devastating. A Rolling Stone critique of the band’s first album stated, “Robert Plant sings notes that only dogs can hear.” Zeppelin was labeled derivative, a hype, and every vile name anyone could possibly think of, and their U.S. tours were scandalous, rapacious, excessive, arrogant sprees. There was nothing new about girls waiting in hotel lobbies, jumping into limousines, hanging out at clubs until the musicians passed out, then accompanying them back to their beds. What was new was the level of decadence (high or low, depending on your point of view) that accompanied Led Zeppelin, especially in the U.S.
At the beginning of the 1970s people were liberated and angry, frustrated and bored. There were no cell phones, no Game Boys, no DVDs, no Walkmans, no Internet, no reality TV. Music was it. And, just when big music and big money came together, Led Zeppelin gave new meaning to “sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll.” Everything was offered to them. They turned nothing down. But if a legend was about debauchery only, people would still be extolling the virtues of the 1980s hair band Poison, or David Lee Roth. And they’re not. According to producer Rick Rubin, “Jimmy Page revolutionized everything. There was no real blues rock in that bombastic way before Zeppelin. Plus, with the insane drumming of John Bonham, it was radical, playing at a very, very high level—improvisational on a big-rock scale. It was brand new.”
In 1970 the Beatles, no longer on tour, seemed tame. The Rolling Stones, while fashionably louche, played songs. Led Zeppelin was neither a hippie jam band nor an improvisational jazz outfit, but they took the blues, added Eastern influences, switched into acoustic folk in the middle of a number (they even did a cover version of Joan Baez’s “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You”), and you never knew what they would do next. Twenty-six-year-old Jimmy Page, a sophisticated London studio musician, had toured the U.S. as a member of the Yardbirds—a superior blues-rock band that had also, at different times, featured Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck. Bassist-keyboardist John Paul Jones, 24, was also a seasoned London session musician. Combine that with two novices from the provinces—the randy 22-year-old singer Robert Plant, besotted with flower power, blues, and rockabilly, and drummer John “Bonzo” Bonham, 22, who knew all about Motown and James Brown—and you had a group that took rock music to a progressive new level: loud, fast, complex, heavy, virile.
And the band’s manager, Peter Grant, changed the rules of the music business. A baroque, bearded, 300-pound former bouncer, tour manager, and professional wrestler (who had gone by the name of Count Massimo), Peter was an intimidating presence. When he worked with Jimmy and the Yardbirds, concert promoters “split” the take 50-50 with bands, but the bands rarely made a dime. Peter signed Zeppelin to Atlantic Records for the then unheard-of sum of $200,000, before anyone at the label had even heard a note of the first album (recorded for $3,500, which Jimmy paid out of his own pocket). Peter refused to let the band release singles, so that fans had to buy the albums. After the band got big, he wouldn’t let them make television appearances, so if people wanted to see Led Zeppelin they had to pay to go to the concerts. And, in a move that forever changed the rock-concert business, he forced promoters to give the band 90 percent of the gate—take it or leave it. They took it. Instead of employing the usual local promoters, Peter hired Jerry Weintraub’s Concerts West to oversee the band’s tours. (Weintraub, now the movie producer, was then John Denver’s manager and the concert promoter for Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra.)
Led Zeppelin enjoyed immediate and massive financial success with their first album, which included such rock classics as “Dazed and Confused” and “Communication Breakdown.” They pretended not to care about the bad reviews. Defensively, they did no interviews. Peter and Jimmy (at the start this was clearly Jimmy’s band and Peter worked for Jimmy) encouraged a mystique. But eventually they wanted to be famous. Robert Plant, in particular, was irritated that Zeppelin was breaking attendance records but the Rolling Stones were getting all the press. So they hired a press agent.
1973: Danny Goldberg, hired to do publicity for the band, asked me to go see them on the southern leg of the U.S. tour. I was terrified. I had heard all the stories and wanted no part of this band. But my editors at the British music weekly Disc—and later at the New Musical Express, Hit Parader, Creem, and the New York Post—all insisted that I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk to what was quickly becoming the world’s biggest rock band. So, from 1973 to 1979, I traveled on and off with Zeppelin in the U.S. and taped more than 50 hours of interviews (published sections of which were “sampled” by others without permission in books written about the band). I endured the disdain of my so-called colleagues, all of whom considered Led Zeppelin déclassé: hyped-up barbarians who drew a working-class—or, worse, white-trash—and mostly male audience.
May 7, 1973, Jacksonville, Florida: Zeppelin had just broken the Beatles’ attendance record for the largest paying crowd ever at a single group’s concert—56,800 people at Tampa Stadium—but the first show I went to see was at an indoor arena. Backstage, I saw a phalanx of security guards. Peter Grant was screaming at some T-shirt bootleggers and at a policeman who had been rough with a female fan. Richard Cole, after politely shaking my hand, placed me on the side of the stage near the amplifiers. To my astonishment, I loved the three-and-a-half-hour show. The next day, at the Fontainebleau hotel in Miami, I was told that the band asked if I was “hiding” in my room. I took the challenge and went downstairs to the pool. John Bonham and John Paul Jones were nowhere in sight. Jimmy Page was aloof. Robert Plant, wearing a tiny red bikini, was charming. I asked about the band’s bad reputation. “It’s all true,” he said. “When we do something, we just do it bigger and better than anybody else. When there are no holds barred, there are no holds barred.”
May 13, 1973, the Royal Orleans Hotel, New Orleans: The band and their entourage were assembled at the rooftop pool. Jimmy Page was fully dressed, looked very pale, and talked about the bad press the band received in England. “I wouldn’t mind constructive criticism,” he said—whatever that is, I said—“but they seem to be losing the essence of what’s important, which is music, purely. They wallow in rubbish. And while I may be a masochist in other regions, I’m not that much of a masochist that I’m going to pay money to tear myself to bits—reading.” Robert Plant, dressed in the same red bikini he wore in Miami, talked about the band’s image. “There are so many people who come around just because of that. We’ve been to California and that Continental Hyatt House and there are guys who book in there with whips and goodness knows what just because they hear we’re coming. It’s crazy. I like to think that people know we’re pretty raunchy and that we really do a lot of the things that people say we do. But what we’re getting across [onstage] is goodness. It ain’t ‘stand up and put your fist in the air—we want revolution.’ I’d like them to go away feeling the way you do at the end of a good chick, satisfied and exhausted. Some nights I look out and want to fuck the whole front row.”
Peter Grant instructed Danny Goldberg to make up a press release that stated, “The 49,000 people at the Atlanta Led Zeppelin show was the biggest thing in Atlanta since Gone with the Wind,” and to attribute the quote to the mayor of Atlanta. In both Atlanta and Tampa, the band got front-page billing with the Watergate hearings. In New Orleans, Ahmet Ertegun rented Cosimos Studios, a big, funky, warehouse recording studio, for a party for Zeppelin after their show, and invited the Meters, Ernie K-Doe, and Professor Longhair to perform. A large portable air conditioner was set up to cool the room. Ernie K-Doe was wearing white linen trousers and a pink sport coat and white tie. Art Neville sat at the organ, ready to perform with the Meters. Blind blues great Snooks Eaglin had his guitar, and Professor Longhair was at the piano. The members of Led Zeppelin, who grew up in England hearing these guys on pirate radio, were thrilled.
Led Zeppelin were aware that when the Rolling Stones walked into a room they created an ambience. So when Zeppelin went to a club, Richard Cole called ahead to say the band was on its way and to make sure that bottles of Dom Pérignon were waiting at the table. When Zeppelin was in town, especially in New York City and more especially in Los Angeles, the groupie grapevine went into overdrive. In Hollywood, at the Rainbow on the Sunset Strip—just down the street from the Hyatt House where the band stayed—bodyguards manned the booths reserved for “the boys.” (They were always “the boys,” and, in fact, musicians now well into their 50s and 60s are still, on tour, referred to as “the boys.”) Teenage girls lined up in front of them. “No head, no backstage pass” was the mantra among the roadies who were in a position to get the former and give the latter to the 14- to 18-year-olds who wanted to get to the band.
One 15-year-old, who modeled in the rock publication Star Magazine and caught Jimmy’s eye at an L.A. club, was Lori Mattix. (“We were madly in love,” says Lori today, now a 45-year-old fashion buyer and mother of a 17-year-old boy. “My mother knew all about us. She adored Jimmy. He sent her flowers.”) Lori was Jimmy’s steady girl whenever he was in L.A. She says he called her every day even when he was in England, where he lived in a reportedly contentious relationship with longtime girlfriend Charlotte Martin, the mother of his daughter Scarlet. Lori says she never saw a whip in his room, Jimmy was always delightful to her, he would never let her touch a drug, and he was so furious when he once saw her smoke a cigarette that he made her smoke an entire pack of Salems so she’d never do it again. During the 1973 tour, when Robert got the flu and a show was canceled, there was talk of sending the band’s empty jet to fetch Lori to bring her to be with Jimmy in the Midwest. Instead, the band went to Los Angeles—their favorite playground—for a few days off.
Robert’s tour amours were girls he managed to convince that he was, at any given moment, about to leave his wife, Maureen, the mother of his two young children. Once, when he went back home to his farm on the Welsh border after a tour, Maureen came running out of the house furiously waving a copy of the English music weekly Melody Maker. A photo of Zeppelin at Rodney Bingenheimer’s Sunset Strip club with a bunch of young girls was on the front page. “Maureen,” Robert cried, “you know we don’t take that paper!”
July 24, 1973, New York City: The limousines were lined up outside the Plaza, and our seven-car procession made its way out of Manhattan to Newark airport, where the band’s private 720B jet would take us to Pittsburgh. The Starship (which would later be used by the Rolling Stones and Elton John) was some plane: gold and bronze, with LED ZEPPELIN painted along the side. I persuaded the band to line up alongside the wing (no easy feat) for Bob Gruen to take the photo that would eventually become a postcard. The stewardesses were Wendy—who wore a blue feather boa and whose uncle was Bobby Sherman’s manager—and Susan, dressed in maroon and pink. The walls of the plane were orange and red; there were circular velvet couches, white leather swivel chairs, a mirror-covered bar, a nonfunctioning fireplace, and a white fake-fur-covered bed in the back bedroom. Tour manager Richard Cole described the plane as “elegant.” John Paul Jones (nicknamed “Jonesy”) usually played a quiet game of backgammon. John Bonham (always called “Bonzo”) sat alone in the front. Bonzo was homesick. He’d been getting drunk and wild and would bang on Danny Goldberg’s door in the middle of the night, demanding to do interviews right there and then. Peter Grant told Danny to get two rooms: a secret one to actually sleep in, and an empty one to deflect Bonzo’s four A.M. rampages. Once, on a street in Dallas, Bonzo saw a Corvette Stingray he wanted, and instructed Richard Cole to wait until the owner showed up and insist that “Mr. Bonham from Led Zeppelin wanted to buy him a drink.” He paid $18,000 for the car, which was worth considerably less, shipped it to L.A., and put it in the basement of the Hyatt House while the band’s lawyer went through the necessary rigamarole to get the insurance transferred. Bonzo then dragged musicians from other bands over to admire the car, drove it for two days, and sold it.
July 29, 1973, New York City: Possibly because Jimmy was a known collector of memorabilia relating to the English satanist Aleister Crowley, and especially because he bought Crowley’s house in Scotland, he got bizarre mail and death threats. On the final night of a five-night run at Madison Square Garden, more security men than usual checked out the area underneath the stage. The band did a blistering three-and-a-half-hour set, and when it was over we were inexplicably shoved into cars and raced to the Upper East Side apartment of the band’s lawyer’s secretary. No one told us why we were there, but for some reason “the boys” needed to be kept away from the Drake Hotel. Later that night, at a party given for the band by Ahmet Ertegun at the Carlyle Hotel, we learned that $203,000 in cash had been stolen from the group’s safe-deposit box at the Drake. (“Peter did have a funny expression on his face,” Robert said, “but what were we going to do? Break down and cry? We had just done a great gig.”) The Drake was crawling with cops and F.B.I. agents; the band’s roadies had to get into the rooms and get rid of the drugs. The next morning Peter Grant, Richard Cole, and Danny Goldberg faced press accusations that the robbery was faked by the band. The band’s position was that someone who worked at the hotel had taken the money. The “case,” such as it was, was never solved. And the 1973 tour was over.
May 7, 1974, New York City: By now, Atlantic Records gave Led Zeppelin anything they wanted, and what they wanted was their own record label, like the Rolling Stones had. Zeppelin’s Swan Song Records signed other acts—the 60s band the Pretty Things, Scottish singer Maggie Bell, and rock band Bad Company, led by ex—Free singer Paul Rodgers. Zeppelin came to New York for a Swan Song launch at the Four Seasons restaurant, where they instructed Danny Goldberg to get some swans for the pool. He couldn’t find any, so he got geese instead. The band was furious. “We all live on farms!,” Robert shouted. “Don’t you think we know the fucking difference?” Bonzo and Richard Cole picked up the geese and let them loose on Park Avenue. The band then traveled to L.A. for a Swan Song launch at the Bel-Air Hotel (with real swans) attended by Bryan Ferry, Bill Wyman, and Groucho Marx. They went back to England to record Physical Graffiti, the double album that included the Eastern-flavored “Kashmir,” which many consider the band’s real masterpiece, as opposed to what was undoubtedly the biggest song of their career—the song that has been played on radio more than any other, the song that ended every one of their shows, the song that was Jimmy’s pride but privately referred to by Robert as “that wedding song”—the pompous “Stairway to Heaven.” (“Every band should end their show with ‘Stairway to Heaven,’” Robert said. “In fact, the Who do a very nice version of it.”)
January 20, 1975, Chicago: There were box-office riots in New York City, Long Island, and Boston when tickets went on sale for Zeppelin’s 1975 U.S. tour. Right before the tour, Jimmy injured his finger getting off a train in England. Robert had the flu. Bonzo’s stomach hurt constantly and he was more homesick than ever. This was not a good start. “I’d like to have it publicized that I came in after Karen Carpenter in the Playboy drummer poll!,” Bonzo roared in the band’s dressing room at the Chicago Stadium. “She couldn’t last 10 minutes with a Zeppelin number,” he sneered. Danny Goldberg told me that Bonzo had just shown up wearing his Clockwork Orange boilersuit and said, wasn’t it a good idea, and who was going to argue with him? When Bonzo was sober, he was a sweetheart—articulate and a gentleman. Drunk, and particularly during a full moon—a nightmare. His drum solo, the 20-minute-long “Moby Dick,” was a concert crowd-pleaser and an opportunity for Jimmy to go back into the dressing room for some sexual activity. Once, Jimmy went back to the hotel during the drum solo. After the show, everyone went to Busters to see Buddy Guy play guitar with a small amp perched on top of a pinball machine. The next morning, Jimmy came to my room in the Ambassador East Hotel around noon for breakfast. He often wouldn’t eat for days on tour (he weighed 130 pounds and wanted to get down to 125), but this time he’d been making vitamin-enriched banana daiquiris in his room—for sustenance. In Peter Grant’s ornate suite (the only one Zsa Zsa Gabor stays in when she’s in Chicago), Peter reminisced about a Midwest hotel clerk from the last tour who admitted that the worst trashing of hotel rooms had occurred during a Methodist youth convention. “The guy was so frustrated about not being able to just go bonkers in a room himself,” Peter said, “that I told him to go and have one on us. He went upstairs, tossed a TV set against the wall, tore up the bed, and I paid the $490 bill.” Late that night at the Bistro, Bonzo—the man known as “the Beast” when he got wild—was sitting quietly in a booth, alone. “You know my wife is expecting again in July,” he told me. “She’s really terrific, the type of lady that when you walk into our house she comes right out with a cup of tea, or a drink, or a sandwich. We met when we were 16, got married at 17. I was a carpenter for a few years; I’d get up at seven in the morning, then change my clothes in the van to go to gigs at night. How do you think I feel, not being taken seriously, coming in after Karen Carpenter in the Playboy poll. . . . Karen Carpenter . . . what a load of shit.”
January 31, 1975, New York City to Detroit: On the plane, Jimmy was having a heated discussion with a reporter from the London Daily Express. “You’re not supposed to make intelligent remarks,” said the reporter, smirking. Uh-oh. After we landed in Detroit, in the car on the way to Olympia Stadium, Jimmy was incredulous. “Can you believe that man referred to my guitar playing as a trade?” During Bonzo’s drum solo, the other band members went into the dressing room. The reporter tried to follow, but was stopped by Richard Cole, who said the band was having a “meeting.” The reporter was enraged: “I write for 10 million people and I won’t have you humiliate me in front of a member of my staff!” The member of his “staff”: a blonde woman swathed in rabbit fur. On the way back to the plane, the reporter demanded that the radio be turned off in the car. “After two hours of that Led Zeppelin racket, I can’t stand any more!” Back on the Starship, people whispered in groups of twos and threes. Jimmy, who had been huddled under a red blanket, suddenly came to life and got right back into the argument. “You don’t want to know about my music—all you care about is the grosses and the interior of the plane. You’re a Communist!,” Jimmy exclaimed. Meanwhile, Robert was muttering under his breath, “I don’t think he’s such a bad bloke. Ten million people read the paper. Me mum and dad read the paper. The singer was good . . . ” Jimmy started yelling about the way he had voted in the last election, someone threw a drink at the reporter, and a scuffle ensued. The reporter got more belligerent. All of a sudden, Richard Cole stood in the aisle holding a gun. I had never seen a gun before. We were 25,000 feet in the air. I cowered in my seat. Nervous glances all around. Silence. Two of the band’s security guards (off-duty policemen) walked over and stood next to Richard. “for christ’s sake,” Bonzo yelled from the front of the plane, “will you all shut up? I’m trying to get some sleep!”
February 3, 1975, New York City: The band was ensconced in the Plaza hotel, where every so often, in the middle of the night, tour photographer Neal Preston had to give them a slide show of every picture he shot, for their approval. Shouts of “Flab!” could be heard as they made fun of one another during the cumbersome process that often took hours. Jimmy hated his suite, which he said looked like “the fucking Versailles palace.” The TV set didn’t work because the black candles he had in his room dripped down into it. The volume of the Lucifer Rising screenings was so loud he was afraid he’d be thrown out of the hotel. John Paul Jones either had a secret life or just kept to himself; most of the time, the only time anyone saw him was at the shows. Bonzo’s suite had a pool table. We all left the Plaza and walked down the street to the Nirvana restaurant for some Indian food. “Have you got any fresh dania?” Robert asked, showing off to the wait-ers. “I know about this food; I’m married to an Indian,” he said. Jimmy laughed: “So you tell them every time you come here.” I told them that John Lennon heard “Stairway to Heaven” and loved it. “He’s only just heard it now?,” Robert said.
February 1975, backstage at Madison Square Garden: Perhaps as an answer to Truman Capote’s hanging around the Stones, William Burroughs was there, enlisted to interview Jimmy for the underground rock magazine Crawdaddy. (Burroughs came to a show, spent two sessions interviewing Jimmy, then wrote mostly about himself and arcane black-magic practices.) Mick Jagger stopped by to check out the sound system. In Los Angeles, David Geffen came to see Peter Grant, and George Harrison showed up at a party and threw some cake at Bonzo—who then threw the former Beatle in the pool. But Zeppelin did not draw a celebrity crowd; no Andy Warhol or Liza Minnelli or the Studio 54 gang. Led Zeppelin was just not fashionable.
August 4, 1975: While vacationing in Greece, Robert Plant and his family were in a serious car crash. They were airlifted back to London. His wife, Maureen, was in intensive care with a broken pelvis and fractured skull, his seven-year-old daughter, Carmen, had a broken wrist, and his four-year-old son, Karac, a fractured leg. Robert suffered multiple fractures of the elbow, ankle, and other bones. All of the rest of the band’s concerts for 1975 were canceled.
In 1977, for the heavy-rock fan, there still was no greater group than Led Zeppelin. But the big news in England was the Sex Pistols and the Clash. In New York, it was the punk scene at CBGB. The members of Zeppelin were portrayed by some in the press as bloated, self-regarding dinosaurs. Self-doubt started to creep into the band’s conversations. And the heroin that became an unspoken fact of life around the band, management, and crew didn’t help. Doctors accompanied the band on tours to minister to their medical needs and write prescriptions. According to someone close to the band, the drugs were getting so out of hand that there were times onstage when Jimmy would be playing a completely different song than the rest of the band.
April 7, 1977, Chicago: Late at night after the show, Jimmy talked about the band’s reputation (“We haven’t really stopped”) and the rumors (“I must have had a good time”). Either very tired or very stoned, he slurred his words. Later, in another room, Robert, as always, joked: “All this stuff about us being barbarians is perpetuated by the road crew. They check into hotels under our names. They run up disgusting room-service bills and then they take the women of the town by storm by applying masks of the four members of the group. It gets us a bad name. And sells a lot of records.” He added, “I’ve met members of the opposite sex who were only eight or nine when we first went into a studio . . . and they’re great fucks.”
Around June 1977 everything started to go terribly wrong. Bill Graham, who escaped Nazi Germany, was the larger-than-life promoter in San Francisco, the founder of the Fillmores West and East, and a highly regarded man in the music business. He always thought that the band brought an unpleasant element of male aggression to their shows. When the band performed the first of two shows for Graham in Oakland on June 23, 1977, Peter Grant’s 11-year-old son, Warren, tried to remove a LED ZEPPELIN sign from a dressing-room trailer. According to Graham, one of his security guards told the child nicely that he couldn’t have it. According to Bonzo, who said he saw it from the stage, the guard hit the kid. A hideous, violent scene followed. Peter Grant, Bonzo, and John Bindon, a thug who’d been hired for extra security, beat up Graham’s man while Richard Cole stood guard outside the trailer. Graham’s staffer was rushed, bleeding, to the hospital. The band refused to do the next day’s show unless Graham signed a paper absolving the band of guilt. Graham, fearing a riot if Zeppelin didn’t play, signed the paper after being assured it was legally worthless. After the show, Peter Grant, Richard Cole, John Bonham, and John Bindon were arrested at their hotel. A civil case dragged on for more than a year, was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum, and Bill Graham—no pussycat himself when it came to intimidation (verbal, not physical)—devoted an entire chapter to the episode in his posthumously published 1992 autobiography. (Reportedly, when a sobered-up Peter Grant read it, he cried.)
The rumors continued. Limo drivers, always ready to blab, gossiped that the band’s hopped-up road managers and bodyguards stormed into drugstores and, threatening physical force, demanded that prescriptions be filled. A restaurant had been trashed and waiters humiliated in Pennsylvania. It was understood that (with the exception of Bonzo in Oakland) the band members were never involved in these incidents; it is likely that they didn’t even know about them at the time. Still, the crew was hired in the band’s name and represented them and it all took its toll.
Then, two weeks after the Oakland incident, as the band checked into the Maison Dupuy Hotel in New Orleans, Robert got a phone call at the front desk, took it upstairs in his room, and was told that after being rushed to the hospital with a mysterious respiratory infection his five-year-old son, Karac, had died.
Robert, accompanied by Richard, Bonzo, and assistant Dennis Sheehan, immediately flew back to England. The U.S. tour—a tour marked by increasing turmoil, tension, drug use, violence, and estrangement among band members—was over. Robert, devastated by his son’s death (and reportedly upset too that Jimmy and Peter had not attended the funeral), went into seclusion.
The press wrote about Jimmy’s “bad karma” and his interest in Aleister Crowley. They dredged up all sorts of crackpot theories about a “Zeppelin curse” and suggested that Page and the band (but especially Page)—like blues great Robert Johnson, supposedly, years before—had made a “deal with the devil.”
August 4, 1979, Knebworth, Hertfordshire: Peter Grant invited me to come see the band at Knebworth, site of one of the stately homes of England, where Zeppelin would do their first shows in two years—two concerts for 300,000 people. The band sent me a round-trip Concorde ticket, then put me up in a Holiday Inn. Typical Zeppelin: high-low. Before the show, Bonzo told me that he watched his 11-year-old son, Jason, sit in on drums during the sound check: “He can play ‘Trampled Underfoot’ perfectly,” he said. “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Led Zeppelin.” Very few people were allowed in the closed-off backstage enclave that housed the dressing-room trailers. The band seemed nervous. “Now, don’t you go and say this is nostalgia,” Robert said to me. (In truth, with Blitz, the hottest club in London, drawing drag queens in science-fiction outfits, this massive denim-clad audience—10 years after Woodstock—did seem like a throwback to another age.) With Robert was his wife, Maureen, and daughter, Carmen. His six-month-old baby boy, Logan, was at home with his grandparents. Jimmy Page flew in by helicopter to the site a half-hour before the show with his girlfriend, Charlotte. No longer in his white satin pop-star outfit, he wore a blue silk shirt and baggy cream-colored trousers. The band played for three and a half hours, the audience sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone” for 15 minutes after the third encore, and Robert appeared to be crying backstage. I hung out for hours after the show with Jimmy Page and Ron Wood’s wife, Chrissie—both of whom seemed totally out of it. Zeppelin certainly was not the same band that had stepped onstage 10 years ago. For those of us who’d seen the band at their peak, they were more than just rusty; the wit and the wonder weren’t really there. But Knebworth was to be a new beginning, and everyone was excited about a 1980 tour.
A little over a year later, on September 25, 1980, after a night of overeating and drinking, John Bonham choked to death in his sleep at age 32 at Jimmy Page’s house. Two weeks later, the three surviving members of Led Zeppelin met with Peter Grant at the Savoy hotel in London and issued a statement that said, in part, “We can no longer continue the way we were.” Because of the ambiguity of that statement, speculation ran rampant for months that the band would reunite with another drummer. And even though no one involved would admit it, it was rumored that the three did get together and rehearse with other drummers to see if it would work. But nothing ever came of it. No one had the interest, or the heart, for Zeppelin without Bonham. “When John died, there was a big hole in Zeppelin,” John Paul Jones told me years later. “The Who and the Stones are song-based bands, but Zeppelin wasn’t like that. We did things differently every night, and we were all tied to each other onstage. I couldn’t even think how to do this without John.”
The few “spontaneous” reunions of the three surviving Zeppelin members—1985’s Live Aid concert and Atlantic Records’ 40th anniversary in 1988—were abysmal. The band was out of practice, out of time, and out of tune. But most of the audience, who had never seen the group in its heyday, didn’t know the difference. In 1994, Plant and Page did an Unledded show together for MTV, toured with Egyptian musicians, and released two albums (and did not include a very displeased Jones). All three stood together for Zep’s 1995 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (where Jones pointedly thanked “my friends for finally remembering my phone number”). Plant, who told me he “refused to be one of the dying embers of poodle rock,” always insisted that there could be no Zeppelin reunion, because “no one could ever replace Bonzo” and “we weren’t going to give anyone the opportunity.”
2003: Richard Cole is a recovering alcoholic who hasn’t had a drink since 1986. He’s worked closely with Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne and is in demand to tour-manage young bands. Peter Grant died of a heart attack in 1995 at age 60. John Bindon, the bodyguard involved in the Oakland incident, died of pneumonia in 1993. Bill Graham died in a helicopter crash in 1991. In the past 23 years, Jimmy Page has worked with musicians as diverse as singer David Coverdale (a Robert Plant imitator) and former Bad Company singer Paul Rodgers, and recently toured with the Black Crowes. John Paul Jones has done string arrangements for, among others, R.E.M. and has toured with avant-garde vocalist Diamanda Galas. Of all the members of Zeppelin, Robert Plant has had the most successful solo career.
However, last year, the word was that Robert was not happy opening up arena shows for the Who. His manager reportedly said to him, “Here’s a phone number of a guitarist. Here’s a phone number of a bass player. Call them up and you can headline any stadium anywhere in the world.” Rumors of Zeppelin reunions surface as regularly as Elvis Presley sightings. When all three came to New York last May for the premiere of the DVD and CD live archival sets (featuring material Page bought from bootleggers and then spent more than a year synching up, mixing, producing, and remastering), the reunion buzz started all over again. But those who knew Page and Plant wondered if their egos could coexist for a week’s worth of promotional activities, much less a prolonged reunion concert tour.
May 28, 2003, the Plaza Hotel, New York City: A very clear-eyed Jimmy Page still only wants to talk about the music. “I can understand why we got bad reviews,” he says. “We went right over people’s heads. One album would follow another and would have nothing to do with what we’d done before. People didn’t know what was going on.” He coyly referred to the band’s reputation as “offstage antics” and said, “We were doing -a-half-hour concerts. We unleashed floodgates of music. By the end of that, you come offstage and you’re not going back to the hotel to have a cup of cocoa. Of course it was crazy; of course it was a mad life.” Later, in another room, Robert Plant said, “How can we be reviled in so many different generations and then find out that we were people’s favorite band? We were considered underground, and I’ve got band members whose parents wouldn’t let them listen to us; they thought it was the devil’s music. We questioned the whole order of things, and not just for one or two albums, but for 10 years. We took a whole core of people who knew we were nothing like Bobby Goldsboro, or Rod Stewart. Led Zeppelin wasn’t an aerobics session. It was dealing with the devil, taking all that beautiful blues music, and screwing around with it.”
