Led Zeppelin, page 34
Peter Grant was far from satisfied. He got into Danny Goldberg’s face and said, “This is Atlanta. We’ve got to get somebody to say that it’s the biggest thing that happened here since the premiere of Gone with the Wind.”
“Do you want to say it?” Goldberg asked. It seemed to him such an irrational request.
“No, no—somebody important has to say it,” G insisted. “Just make sure it fucking happens.”
Panicked, not wanting to incur Peter’s wrath, Danny told Lisa Robinson that the mayor of Atlanta, Sam Massell, had said it. “I’m pretty sure she knew I was lying,” Danny says, “but she dutifully led with it in her column. The mayor’s office never complained. No one there ever noticed it, but Peter saw it, and it established a trust that I was listening to him.”
The next night, in Tampa, Led Zeppelin broke the Beatles’ record for a single performance—at New York’s Shea Stadium in August 1964—drawing a crowd of 56,443, a fact picked up by the two major wire services and republished in newspapers across the United States. A festive atmosphere was palpable. As The Tampa Times reported, “The majority of the crowd had arrived at the stadium by 3 p.m. in the afternoon to secure coveted positions on the field.” Frisbees flew back and forth across the bleachers, and giddy fans were tossed high into the air on tautly held blankets. But in Tampa, the band found it harder to connect. Gusty winds prohibited putting up the video screens, making intimacy almost impossible to achieve. The excitement was lost on a lot of fans at the back. Robert could feel it; the backbenchers were left to pick up on the vibe as best they could. The crew tried to make up for the remoteness by resorting to gimmickry. During the “Whole Lotta Love” medley, two crates of white doves were released from the stage, turning the stadium into a cheering, worshipful mass. By the finale, “Communication Breakdown,” the entire crowd was on its feet.
The tour adopted its own surge of momentum. Jacksonville, Tuscaloosa, Mobile, New Orleans, Houston, Dallas, and right across the American Southwest, with the Led Zeppelin engine chugging at full throttle, a remarkable driving force. Immense crowds—immense. Shows lasting an average of three hours without a break. Unimaginable wads of cash jammed into Peter Grant’s bulging red holdall. At 90 percent of the net receipts, there was often several hundred thousand dollars at a clip resting between G’s legs on plane flights.
Disc’s Lisa Robinson, now part of the band’s entourage, churned out the kind of copy that might have come from a PR factory’s assembly line. “I had heard that on a good night Led Zeppelin is magic, is Rock ’n Roll,” she wrote after the Jacksonville gig. “This has GOT to be what Rock ’n Roll was all about; what it was meant to be.” In New Orleans, she heaped praise on Jimmy, noting that “his guitar-playing is so consistently great. Perhaps he only hears the differences each night; to us mortals it just sounds SO bloody GREAT.”
Local, honest-to-goodness critics were less effusive. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch considered the Led Zeppelin show an “unusual, maddening performance.” It was too big, too loud, too too. The Mobile Press-Register reviewer decided “the band just isn’t inventive enough, or varied enough, to warrant three hours.” The Dallas critic had a bone to pick about the group’s identity, that Led Zeppelin “has become a showcase for individual stars . . . and that rock music may have lost something in the process,” while his colleague in San Antonio dismissed the concert as “a show one could take or leave.”
But critics be damned. Led Zeppelin’s fans, the ultimate judges of showmanship, critics whose opinions were registered in ticket and record sales, expressed general agreement that the band delivered everything they had hoped for—the staging, the theatrics, the enthusiasm, the music. The audiences were totally involved, from “the thunderous opening notes of ‘Rock and Roll’ blasting through 33,000 watts of amplification” to the high-octane encore, “Communication Breakdown,” often played well after midnight. The excitement in those arenas never let up. The experience, for most kids, was unforgettable.
At the end of May, Led Zeppelin took over the ninth and eleventh floors of the Continental Hyatt House, their home away from home on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. It served as their base for two sold-out shows at the Forum, as well as bookend gigs in San Diego and San Francisco. The band couldn’t wait to get to LA. There were plenty of sensual pleasures to be gleaned on the road, but nothing compared to the hedonism of California.
“L.A. in particular was like Sodom and Gomorrah,” Jimmy said. “You just ate it up and drank it down.”
He’d been indoctrinated with the city’s charms by Jackie DeShannon in 1964, and from that time on he’d indulged himself freely. He pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable behavior and what he was entitled to by virtue of his place in the pantheon. To a disciple of Aleister Crowley, there was no such thing as excess. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Nothing, no desire or fantasy, should be denied, no matter how extravagant, immoderate, wicked, or plain offensive. Drugs, sex, pain, degradation, you name it. Women? Sure, whatever you wanted. They were there to feed the egos and urges. And they were disposable.
In LA, Led Zeppelin were a law unto themselves. “It was the feeling of ‘We can do absolutely anything,’ ” Jimmy said. “There were no rules.” Besides, where the girls were concerned, he’d famously said, “Everyone knows what they come for.”
The Hyatt House was crawling with women—young girls—when Led Zeppelin arrived. Rodney Bingenheimer, who owned Rodney’s English Disco, put the word out when the band hit town. “He was like the Pied Piper or Mercury, the guy who led all these rich debutantes from Pacific Palisades and grubby Valley girls to the front door of the hotel,” says Michael Des Barres. “There would always be a phalanx of beautiful Porsches driven by teenage girls behind Rodney, who sat regally in the back of a Cadillac.”
Richard Cole would scope out the prettiest candidates—he knew each musician’s tastes, his proclivities—and make sure the girls had access to the restricted floors, where private security patrolled the corridors. The coke dealers also got a pass. “Management made it all run smoothly,” Des Barres says. “The elevator guys were getting their cocks sucked. They were in on the game.”
When it came to frolicking in LA, Jimmy Page had his hands full. Since Led Zeppelin’s performance at the Whisky in 1969, he’d had an ongoing relationship with Pamela Miller, a doe-eyed, twenty-one-year-old “muse” (a gussied-up term for groupie) from Reseda, California, whom everyone referred to as Miss Pamela or Miss P, depending on the degree of intimacy. She and Jimmy weren’t exclusive. Jimmy, of course, had Charlotte Martin and his daughter stashed at home in England. Another girlfriend, Catherine James, drifted in and out of his life. And Miss Pamela had her share of rock-star lovers, among them Jim Morrison, Noel Redding, Chris Hillman, and Mick Jagger. But Miss P had been through the wars with Jimmy Page, from giving him extensive notes on the band’s albums to accompanying him on a buying trip of Crowley artifacts to entertaining his “wicked sexual side” and fascination with a suitcase full of whips, chains, and handcuffs.
“Pamela loved Jimmy,” says Michael Des Barres, who later, for a short time, became her husband. “He was the love of her life to a great degree. Jimmy desperately wanted to connect, and Pamela is the person to connect to because she is so guileless, with an open heart. She has great style and is a great therapist, who happens to be really sexy. She adores music and has great musical knowledge. She brought out in Jimmy what he really needed.”
But the bedrock of girlfriends, like LA’s tectonic plates, was shifting, realigning. Jimmy was tiring of Miss P. Now twenty-four, she had, he felt, outlived her shelf life. There were more desirable—younger—muses in the pipeline, and Jimmy had his eye on a successor.
Beep Fallon had shown him a picture of several “models” who’d appeared in a rag called Star that made the rounds at Rodney’s British Disco. There was a layout in the June 1973 issue entitled “Your Very Own Superfox” that was basically an excuse to publish photos that sexualized underage girls. Some of the copy, for want of a better word, expressed the publication’s underlying intention. “It is written that the time must come for a girl to move forward and up from the ranks of the shy, blushing Teenybopper, and to express herself as a brave new woman in a brave new world.”
During an earlier LA visit when Beep was in town with a band called Silverhead, a few of these girls wound up in his hotel room at the Hyatt House. Two, in particular, caught his fancy: Sabel Shields, a fifteen-year-old from Palos Verdes who was known throughout the club scene as Sable Starr, and Lori Mattix, a friend of hers who had just turned fourteen.
Lori recalls, “We were cutting school, very much part of the scene, hanging out at the Mainman house,” a crash pad headed by David Bowie’s manager, Tony Defries, where a party was in full swing twenty-four hours a day. “Star had dressed us up to look like groupies. Sable really was one; she was the original groupie, an iconic, legendary character who had lost her virginity to David Bowie when she was twelve and was dating Jim Osterberg—Iggy Pop.”
Michael Des Barres, the vocalist for the band Silverhead, who had accompanied the two girls to Beep’s room, says, “Sable’s morality was something out of Hieronymus Bosch. She was capable of anything.”
“She was after Jimmy [Page],” says Lori, who also claimed to have lost her virginity to David Bowie a year earlier in the singer’s suite at the Beverly Hilton after being braced with champagne and ganja.
Beep decided to photograph the girls but became infatuated with Lori. “Oh my God, Jimmy’s going to love you!” he exclaimed.
He intended to share Lori’s picture with Jimmy, along with an offer to introduce them. He saw nothing improper about the transaction. “Why would I not photograph her?” Beep offered in his defense. “The thing about groupies that’s misunderstood is that it was all consensual. The girls were the predators, not the bands.”
In any case, he showed Jimmy the photos while Led Zeppelin was performing in Texas. As Beep had figured, there was instant attraction. Lori was tall, darkly Italianate, and very pretty, with a suggestive allure that was well beyond her years. “She’s magnificent,” Jimmy cooed. “Give me her phone number.”
Later that night, Lori’s phone rang. “Hi, this is Jimmy Page. I’m going to meet you when I’m in LA.”
Figuring it was a crank call, she hung up on him.
The competition was fierce in LA. There were girls at the Hyatt, at Rodney’s, at the Whisky, and at the Roxy. There were girls backstage, in the bathrooms, and under the beds. Girls “outrageously gorgeous, draped over one another, rubbing against one another, caressing each other in their seductive dance,” ratcheting up the heat. “They came out of the woodwork,” says Vanessa Gilbert, an eighteen-year-old recent high-school graduate at the time, who was part of Led Zeppelin’s SoCal entourage.
Gilbert and her friend, Gyl Corrigan-Devlin, were living at the Chateau Marmont, earning their keep by doing drug runs to Mexico. “I happened to drive by the Hyatt House and [the marquee] said Welcome Led Zeppelin. Gyl was in Mexico on a run and instructed me to call Richard Cole, whom she knew, so we could see the guys when she returned. They got us our own room key, an expense tab, took us to Trader Vic’s with them, and the Roxy, where they pushed all the tables together to accommodate all the girls. You always felt like you were at a happening with Led Zeppelin. The energy was high, the music was loud, the girls were game, and the drugs were pure.”
Occasionally, to scope out the youngest girls on tap, they’d head to Rodney’s, where Watneys Red Barrel and Bass ale were imported to enhance the British disco vibe. “Rodney’s was amazing,” recalls Lori, a denizen of the club, “prepubescent teenagers dressed up like groupies, glam rock, the best music, no age limit.”
“It was a glitter cathedral, like Clockwork Orange,” says Rodney Bingenheimer, its master of ceremonies. “We had a mirrored dance floor and strobe lights. Every kind of girl you could imagine. The kids wore vintage stuff they bought at Granny Takes a Trip and Berman’s Costumes, and four-inch platforms from Ed Slattern’s. They dressed ‘beyond’ because people wanted to look at themselves in the mirrors. And the girls wanted to be noticed by the rock stars. We’d get a call in advance that Led Zeppelin was coming. We’d clear the VIP section, have the beer ready, tell the girls—the Rodnettes—to be ready for anything.”
If you were Led Zeppelin, you had the pick of the litter—mostly junior high school girls from the Valley, Palos Verdes, or Orange County. “These guys were party animals, beyond party animals,” Bingenheimer said. “The wild guy, of course, was Bonham. Robert was a little crazy. John Paul Jones never participated. And Page just observed.”
Jimmy was a voyeur. He found the action interesting to watch and occasionally encouraged it with commentary. But he liked his privacy; he rarely made the first move. “If you went to a disco or a club with him, he wouldn’t go up to girls,” Danny Goldberg recalled. “He would want the road manager or someone else to get them to come over. A ‘Jimmy wants to meet you’ kind of thing.”
That’s how it happened during a pool party on the roof of the Hyatt House. It was a rowdy, high-spirited affair. Lots of young girls in bikinis—and less. Jimmy, who did not know how to swim, steered clear of the action as one nubile lass after the next got thrown into the deep end. His radar zeroed in on Lori Mattix, the fourteen-year-old, whom he recognized from Beep’s photos. He let it be known to her that she was on his radar.
That same night, there was a caravan to Rodney’s—the band, a stable of young girls, many of whom had been at the rooftop pool party, and the usual cordon of minders to keep gawkers away. Jimmy showed up with Miss Pamela but took Lori aside long enough to whisper, “I told you I was going to be with you.”
“Please,” she implored him, “you’re going to get me in trouble with my friends.”
She had been warned by Sable Starr to keep her hands off Jimmy. His relationship with Miss P was rumored to be on the rocks, and Sable intended to move in on him postbreakup. It wasn’t a gentle warning. Sable had said, “If you go near Jimmy, I’ll kill you,” and Lori took her at her word.
No one knew that better than Rodney Bingenheimer. He’d seen a lot go down that put him on his guard. “The girls would scratch your eyes out if you crossed their path,” he said.
The action soon moved from Rodney’s to the Rainbow Bar & Grill, where the crowd was slightly older, the music harder, less glam. Following several rounds of drinks and lines of coke, Richard Cole and Peter Grant grabbed Lori in the parking lot outside the club and hustled her into a waiting limo. “If you move, we’ll have your fucking head,” she was told. Richard jumped in next to her and told the driver to take off.
“Where are you taking me?” she cried. She was fourteen and frightened. These men meant business. It felt to her like she “was being kidnapped.”
At the Hyatt, she was escorted up to Led Zeppelin’s ninth-floor stronghold and marched down the corridor into a candlelit anteroom to one of the suites. A man sitting there in a wide-brimmed hat and holding a cane looked up at her in a slow reveal.
“I told you I’m going to have you,” Jimmy Page said.
He was a man of his word. “He just swept me off my feet and made me fall madly in love with him,” Lori says. “He was the rock-god prince to me, a magical, mystical person who was really convincing. I know he fell in love with me because of my innocence. He was twenty-nine; I was fourteen. It was no secret he liked young girls.”
The age difference was an obvious concern for Jimmy. In 1973, scrutiny of such matters was pretty loose, but dating a girl who was in the eighth grade pushed the limits. “He had the respect enough to call on my mother,” Lori says. “He didn’t want to get in trouble because I was underage. He worried she might have him thrown in jail.”
There was little chance of that. Lori’s mother, who ran the concession stand at Chasen’s restaurant, understood the byways of Hollywood. She’d even accompanied her daughter and Sable Starr on their first visit to the upper floors of the Hyatt House, when Silverhead was the main babe attraction. She knew the score. “My mom knew that I wasn’t a virgin,” Lori says. But Jimmy Page was another matter. He was the big score. “She knew he was a huge rock star. He sent me flowers and limousines. She said, ‘Well, Priscilla’s with Elvis . . . Lori’s with Jimmy Page.’ ”
Lori knew he lived with Charlotte Martin and their daughter in England. But he assured her, “She’s not in tune with me or what my needs are. There is no romance left.”
For the most part, they kept a low profile, confining their swooning to Jimmy’s suite. As it happened, he’d hurt his left hand—his chording hand—reaching through a wire fence to sign autographs for fans when the band arrived at LAX. It was his finger, a bad sprain, causing Led Zeppelin to reschedule their May 30 concert at the Forum. Fortunately, the band traveled with its own doctor, who gave Jimmy a vitamin B-12 shot and a supply of Dilaudid, a powerful opioid guaranteed to dull the pain (and just about everything else). The Dilaudid got him through their follow-up Forum performance on May 31, which coincided with Bonzo’s twenty-fifth birthday.
Bonzo hadn’t been on his best birthday behavior. The night before, he’d attended a press party for Jo Jo Gunne, an Asylum Records band from LA, at the Encore Theater in the Valley. While everyone gathered to watch campy films, Bonzo wandered into the lobby, where the theater manager was keeping an eye on an exhibit of artwork. John removed one of the framed pictures and asked the manager how much it was worth. When he was told $150, Bonzo broke the artwork over the manager’s head and threw enough bills at him to cover the cost.
A similar incident occurred at a movie premiere the band attended, where “Bonzo got really drunk.” Richard Creamer, a noted rock photographer, was taking pictures of the guests for an LA magazine when Bonzo grabbed him. “What the fuck are you doing?” he demanded. According to a bystander, “He took a picture off the wall and slammed it over Richard’s head.”
