Led Zeppelin, page 22
The outcome was somewhat more favorable than the next time Led Zeppelin played the Singer Bowl Festival, later that August, at the old World’s Fair grounds in Flushing Meadows Park. Buddy Guy opened the show, and during the Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s middle set, Guy and Bonzo polished off a quart of Jack Daniel’s. Led Zeppelin came on afterward under a canopy of nighttime stars and launched into their opening number, “Train Kept a-Rollin’.” Jimmy delivered the opening riff and waited for the drums to kick in. Bonzo, however, was passed out cold, with his head on the snare.
Peter Grant grabbed one of the roadies by the pants. “Wake ’im up!” he barked.
“How should I wake him up?” Joe Wright asked.
“Push ’im!”
Wright gave Bonzo a less-than-friendly shove. When it failed to produce the necessary response, Grant said, “Hit ’im!”
Wright hiked up his shoulders. “What do you mean—hit him?”
“Hit ’im!” Grant demanded.
Jimmy and Jonesy kept the rhythm going while the drama played out in the background.
Wright threw the manager a hangdog look and did as he was ordered. “I slammed Bonzo in the back of the head,” he recalls, “and he got up, roaring like a bear.”
Unfortunately for Wright, Bonzo threw a cymbal at him, ripping four of the roadie’s knuckles. Then the drummer came in on cue without missing a beat.
It didn’t last. He eventually passed out again, which pissed off Jimmy. After the show, he and Peter huddled and discussed the possibility of replacing their drummer.
Bonzo’s behavior was erratic, often childish, sometimes violent, always unpredictable. Alcohol fueled much of his rowdiness. He was an unquenchable drinker; he’d drink until he dropped. The others could abide it, as long his antics didn’t intrude on the band’s performance. “You get hammered before the show, buddy, and we’re going to have problems,” Grant warned him. No one hoped it would come to that. Bonzo was a brilliant drummer, perhaps the best musician of his kind. But he was a walking time bomb.
Led Zeppelin’s behavior, in general, was evolving. They were developing an offstage persona that was edging into the realm of supreme indulgence. Ever since their album had turned gold, a sense of extravagance—extravagance awash in decadence—had come over the band. It played out in garish, outrageous, and occasionally freaky ways and unfolded as an integral part of their legend-in-progress. Robert Plant put voice to it quite pithily when, sometime later, he climbed a palm tree at a home in the Hollywood Hills and shouted, “I am the golden god!”
The rapturous audiences and the entourages that followed the band conferred godlike status—and Led Zeppelin took it to heart. They danced on tables at posh hotels, trashed their rooms, threw televisions out the windows, ran up room service bills in the thousand-dollar-plus range, ordered fifty drinks at a clip. Money was no object; they were making it hand over fist. At clubs, where an anything-goes ambience prevailed, their drink tabs were always comped, and girls eagerly crawled under the tables to give them blowjobs. They’d lost all perspective when it came to excess.
At times, it got out of hand. Groupies were never in short supply—Richard Cole would pluck girls out of the audience for liaisons backstage—but the scenes got freakier. The one that lives most prominently in Led Zeppelin legend—and perhaps the most lurid—occurred at the end of July 1969, when the band appeared at the Seattle Pop Festival, a three-day affair with the usual lineup of top rock acts.
Led Zeppelin had been on the road with Vanilla Fudge when they checked into the Edgewater Inn, situated on a pier over Elliott Bay. The hotel was famous for offering fishing rods to guests with waterfront rooms, and in fact its most famous guests, the Beatles, were immortalized in a photo showing them fishing from a balcony during a 1964 tour. The spirit of the two bands was unusually high. It was the end of the road for Vanilla Fudge—literally the end of the road—and in Seattle, they were casting fate to the wind.
“We recognized we were done as a band,” says Carmine Appice, who was in a lighthearted mood as the festivities there got under way. “We weren’t headliners anymore. Things were passing us by. It was the era of great guitar players, and our guy, Vinny [Martell], wasn’t one of them. Tim [Bogert] and I had already been in touch with Jeff Beck about forming a new band called Beck, Bogert & Appice as soon as Jeff ditched the guys he was playing with.”
The two bands were enjoying a rare day off, lounging about the hotel. Robert and Jimmy drove to the festival site in Woodinville, about twenty-five miles out of town, to check out the Doors, who were playing on a bill with the Youngbloods. They were intrigued by the notoriety swirling around Jim Morrison, who’d recently been arrested in Florida for flashing onstage. Robert, especially, was curious, inasmuch as he’d been compared to Morrison in press coverage and was genuinely flattered. Imagine his disillusionment when a bloated Jim Morrison ambled onstage in a skintight black leather jumpsuit and screamed, “Fuck you all!” at the audience. In between songs, which were delivered in a lethargic, indifferent way, he spouted endless pseudopoetic claptrap and nearly toppled off the side of the stage.
“It was really sickening to watch,” recalled Robert, who was crushed, doubly so in front of his wife, Maureen, who was visiting from England and had joined him and Jimmy for the show. “The sexual thing had gone. He was just miles above everyone’s head.”
Meanwhile, back at the hotel, the rest of the entourage idled away the hours in typical rock-star fashion. “We were camped out in John Paul’s room smoking some pot, watching the boats go by, and listening to Delaney & Bonnie on Robert’s portable record player,” Carmine Appice recalls. Their diversion was interrupted when a seventeen-year-old redhead named Jackie knocked on the door. Appice had picked her up the night before, and she’d returned to see if a party was in progress.
Cole and Vanilla Fudge’s road manager—a dubious character named Bruce Wayne, who was, naturally, nicknamed Batman—were in the room next door, where they’d been fishing for hours and guzzling champagne. Somewhat miraculously, they’d managed to haul in a catch of mud sharks and red snappers that lay festering in a wastepaper basket half filled with stagnant water. During a break, they grabbed the basket and joined the party in John Paul’s room, where Jackie was pretty high from the joints being passed.
“You wanted to party?” they said to her. “Take off your clothes.”
“Once she was naked,” Appice says, “they started hitting her with the fish, and it left little teeth marks on her back. Things got pretty ugly, pretty intense, so we went out into the hall, where Bonzo and his wife, Pat, joined us, and we watched the action through the door.”
The audience grew as others straggled back to the hotel. “In fact, we were invited to bring our wives to take a look,” recalled Robert, who had returned from the festival, “but after a while we left because it was all a bit unsavory.”
Everyone scattered when the hotel manager appeared to answer a complaint about the noise coming from the room. When he left, not entirely mollified, they reassembled in Carmine’s room and ordered room service, until Jackie reappeared wearing nothing but John Paul’s robe.
He was furious. “You bloody cunt, get my fucking robe off!” he screamed.
Handing it over, the naked Jackie sat on the bed, ignored and forlorn, while the others finished eating. Sometime thereafter, Cole and Batman resurfaced with their bucket of dead fish.
“Things got weird very fast,” Appice recalls. “They grabbed the butter off the cart and rubbed it around her pussy. Then they started screwing her with the nose of the fish, pushing the snappers into her as far as they could, and when they were done, they pissed and shit on her.”
If ever there was an example of behavior that was more about dominance than sexuality, this was it. It was a chance to offer up a shocking spectacle to the gang that had gathered to watch.
“Man, it was gross. We were all pretty disgusted,” says Appice. Though not disgusted enough to preclude his bandmate from filming it with a video camera, or from describing it in detail to Frank Zappa, whom Vanilla Fudge encountered during a layover at O’Hare the next day. Zappa couldn’t resist writing a song about it. “Lemme tell you the story ’bout the mud shark,” he sang on his live album, Fillmore East. “A succulent young lady! With a taste for the bizarre.”
The landscape was changing, and darkening.
Ellen Sander, who was traveling with Led Zeppelin for her Life article, overheard several guys plotting to lure two groupies they deemed undesirable to a motel in Detroit “and pelt them with some cream-filled donuts, then gang bang them.” She struggled to make sense of it. She understood the demands of the road—the endless travel, the boredom, the pressure to perform in front of enormous crowds, the mental and physical toll. On this tour alone, Led Zeppelin would travel fourteen thousand miles to play thirteen gigs, all the while attempting to record their next album. “The rock business is volatile, rapid, and dangerous,” Sander concluded. She never thought the danger applied to her. But on the last night of the second U.S. tour, at the Fillmore in New York, Sander stopped in the band’s dressing room following the show to say goodbye. Bonzo, along with others she couldn’t identify, attacked her, ripping her dress down the back. She fought them off, fearing they would rape her, and they might have, had Peter Grant not intervened, hustling her away.
What were the limits of behavior on the road? Where did one draw the line? Was it “just young guys having a good time,” as Robert suggested?
“There was a certain amount of hedonism that was involved,” Jimmy admitted, and why not? “We were young, and we were growing up.”
* * *
• • •
The summer of ’69 and its high points brought everything to a head. More was at stake than ever before. The hotbox conditions were hotter, the big-ass crowds even bigger, the expectations steeper and steeper. And Jimmy drove the guys hard, hustling them into oddball recording studios every chance he got, trying to capture lightning in a bottle.
“It was quite insane, really,” he recalled. “We had no time, and we had to write numbers in hotel rooms. We’d put down a rhythm track in London, add the voice in New York, overdub harmonica in Vancouver, and then [go] back to New York to do the mixing.”
The recording itinerary was indeed astoundingly peripatetic. At tiny Morgan Studios in North London, with Glyn Johns’s brother, Andy, at the board, they’d laid down the tracks for “Thank You,” “Livin’ Lovin’ Maid (She’s a Woman),” and “Sugar Mama,” the latter of which was eventually abandoned. “Heartbreaker” was recorded in New York, with the rhythm track taped at A&R Studios. Jimmy’s solo, however, “was an afterthought,” he said. “That whole section was recorded in a different studio”—farther uptown at Atlantic—“and was sort of slotted in the middle.” While at Atlantic, he put the finishing touches on “Bring It On Home,” which had initially been cut at funky R&D Studios in Vancouver. “Moby Dick” finally came together at Mirror Sound in LA, then back to New York for “Ramble On” at Juggy Sound before heading back to Olympic in London for a session that produced “What Is and What Should Never Be.”
“We recorded and overdubbed our way from West Coast to East Coast,” Jimmy said, gratified that they were able to pull it off. Miraculously, consistency wasn’t a problem, nor was what he called “the attack”—the way they bit into those songs “to get excitement onto a piece of plastic.” It was essential to match what was happening onstage—the dynamics, of course, but also the spontaneity and the experience. “Part of the excitement of the album is due to the fact that we were completely energized from the live shows and the touring.”
The action had intensified on- and offstage. In August 1969, Led Zeppelin routed back to LA, where they set up headquarters at a new location. The Chateau Marmont left the band too accessible to outside influences. Anyone could simply knock on their bungalow doors, and everyone did. There was little promise of privacy on the premises. More to the point, as the band left a gig in San Bernardino on August 8, the news was aflame with a grisly murder in the Hollywood Hills, just above the Chateau, that had claimed the lives of actress Sharon Tate and her friends. To beef up security, Peter Grant moved the band a few blocks west on Sunset Boulevard to the Continental Hyatt House, a traditional high-rise hotel that catered to the rambunctious rock ’n roll trade.
Security at the Hyatt House was in the eye of the beholder. “It was more like a nightclub than a hotel,” said Bebe Buell, a frequent visitor who knew her way around its nooks and crannies. To judge from the scene in the lobby, one might have thought the hotel was hosting the National Conference of Groupies. A swarm of scantily clad teenage girls held court in the lounge, leaving no doubt that this was their turf. They came and went as they pleased, no questions asked, and what pleased them most was a liaison with a musician. Led Zeppelin was catnip to the Hyatt House girls. The band’s reputation for frolic preceded them, and the marquee out front—welcome led zeppelin—did little to discourage the ever-expanding crowd.
Within days, the hotel would be forever dubbed the Riot House for the crazy scenes that took place under its roof. “It was the epicenter of rock ’n roll life,” according to Michael Des Barres. Led Zeppelin took over the entire ninth floor, where Peter Grant and Jimmy Page had booked themselves into several rooms apiece so they would be difficult to find, even for others in the band. “It was like one big playground,” said Danny Goldberg, who lodged there with Led Zeppelin on subsequent tours. “There was an attitude of great anarchy. Bonham would play his records very, very loud at three or four in the morning.” If a guest complained, management would move the guest. “And so it gave the group a feeling of omnipotence that was unique.”
Despite added security, girls could easily make their way to the ninth floor and beyond. Richard Cole maintained a steady flow of what he judged the best-looking and most willing women, with a weeding-out process that was short on civility. If a girl didn’t live up to his exacting standards, she’d be dispatched with a curt “Fuck off!” or worse. When sex grew tiresome, when boredom set in, one of the guys might heave a television out the window or stage a contest to see who could hit one of the billboards across Sunset Boulevard with a champagne bottle. Broken glass littered the street and pavement out front with frightening regularity. Occasionally, after too much beer, Bonzo would urinate off the balcony, aiming at a convertible idling by the door.
It was anarchy and omnipotence practiced at a heroic level.
Drug dealers—or fans bearing pharmaceutical gifts—also gained easy access to the ninth-floor sanctuary. Weed had always been as essential to tour paraphernalia as a new set of guitar strings, and neither was ever in short supply. But in Los Angeles, where everything was flashier and more excessive, cocaine was emerging as the rock ’n roll drug of choice. A bump of coke took the edge off the grind of a tour.
“How do you alleviate the boredom on the road?” asked Benji Le Fevre, who did sound, among other things, for Led Zeppelin for years. “You start off with a few joints, you get high for a laugh. Then you get into Quaalude and Mandrax. Then cocaine comes along and you feel fantastic, because it makes you feel invincible.”
Even a golden god felt more alive, ultraconfident, on top of his game. And the sex became more intense. “The bacchanalian quality was a shock and revelation to us young British boys,” Michael Des Barres says. Coke dealers earned a free pass to the ninth floor, where the clientele was dedicated and ready cash available. Lots of cash. As Led Zeppelin’s stock soared, as their fees and, thus, leverage increased, Peter Grant began demanding payment in cash after the shows. It wasn’t unusual to encounter him in a limo to the hotel clutching a hold-all stuffed with fifty- and hundred-dollar bills. He was generous with its disbursement; the guys got whatever they needed. And a portion of that cash now went for cocaine.
The scenes grew more extreme. In Stairway to Heaven, Richard Cole’s sensationalized account of his years with Led Zeppelin, he describes how, at the Chateau Marmont, he and Bonzo tried and failed to coax a Great Dane into a sexual encounter with a young groupie. By the summer of ’69, he’d tweaked the exploit.
Joe Wright recalls, “Richard invited me and Robert to a party in the Hollywood Hills with my buddies from Pacific Gas & Electric,” a local blues band of some renown. “He warned us, ‘You’re gonna see some stuff that might freak you out, so be cool.’ ” It was a midcentury-modern house nestled among palms with picture-postcard views of the city. They had a few drinks, did a few lines of coke, and hung out around the pool, chatting with the laid-back guests. At a certain point, Richard steered Joe and Robert toward a bedroom in the back with the curtains drawn. “Whatever you do, just be cool,” Richard repeated.
As their eyes adjusted to the darkness, they made out a giant bed—an orgy bed—that could accommodate multiple people. “On it was a beautiful Amazon, like a Las Vegas showgirl, completely naked, stroking the belly of a Great Dane,” Wright says. The scene eventually progressed into full-on sexual intercourse while Cole whispered reprimands—“Ssssh, don’t embarrass us”—to a squeamish Plant and Wright.
The world around Led Zeppelin was becoming something else. They were a long way from home.
[3]
The U.S. tour ended for Led Zeppelin on the last day of August, without an appearance at Woodstock, the granddaddy of summer festivals. They’d been invited to perform, but Peter Grant took a pass. “I said no to Woodstock because I knew we’d just be another band on the bill.” Instead, they finished up playing the Texas International Pop Festival in Dallas and returned home, knowing they’d be back in the States within six weeks’ time for the release of their second album.
Jimmy had remained in New York to mix the album, which he did over two days, huddling in A&R Studios with engineer Eddie Kramer, a veteran of Beatles and Jimi Hendrix sessions. There was real concern that recording levels would be problematic, having cut tracks in so many different studios—that the band “may have overstepped the mark,” as Jimmy feared—but the two men managed to achieve a uniform balance, working electronic miracles at a relatively primitive console.
