Led Zeppelin, page 36
Marcus intended to make it up to him by introducing the band to Chicago’s nightlife. He recalls, “I took the guys to see Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland at the Burning Spear,” a storied blues club on State Street that played host to the likes of Little Milton, Junior Parker, and the Kings—B. B., Albert, and Freddie. “I brought Bobby over to meet Robert, who he called Led, because he thought his name was Led Zeppelin.” That didn’t stop Robert from getting up and jamming with Bland and Otis Clay, one of the city’s great R&B vocalists, with Bonzo sitting in on drums.
Chicago proved an exceptional warm-up to the tour, with both shows received warmly by fans and critics alike. But Chicago was a notoriously tough town; there were places where one had to watch one’s back. During Bonzo’s drum solo, Benji Le Fevre took a bathroom time-out and was mugged by two hooligans determined to swipe his all-access pass. By the time he crawled back to the mix tower, Benji was covered in blood. Peter Grant escorted him into an ambulance and directed it to the hospital. “This isn’t necessary, G,” Benji protested. “The siren isn’t even on.” Peter pulled a wad of cash out of his pocket and thrust a couple bills through the ambulance window. “Oh, driver,” he said, “here’s a hundred bucks. Put the siren on.”
G could be caring and solicitous, especially to anyone in his employ, but since returning from the June hiatus, he’d developed a monster cocaine habit that wired him tighter than a sailor’s knot. “Peter was sure that cocaine wasn’t additive,” says Phil Carson. “The cost didn’t mean anything to him. He had so much cash at his disposal.”
Cocaine was prevalent in the rock ’n roll scene but ubiquitous on the Starship. “Definitely the Zeppelin crowd was coked all the time,” says Danny Goldberg. That was especially true when it came to Peter, whose appetite for anything was notorious to begin with. “Orgasmic,” was how a friend described his habit. Peter wouldn’t even wait to chop his coke into lines. He’d thrust a long car key into a bag and snort directly from his stash. Other times he simply put his nose in the bag. “He seemed to have the constitution of an ox,” said one onlooker.
“The amount of cocaine was insane,” says Benji Le Fevre, “there was so much of it—and never enough.”
Jimmy was already pursuing a bigger high with a better payoff. In Milwaukee, three nights later, someone left a line of coke on one of the dressers in a hotel room. Not to let a perfectly good gift go to waste, it was shared by a resourceful group. “It turned out someone had put heroin in with the coke, and we were all absolutely ill,” said Gyl Corrigan-Devlin. “Jimmy was really the only one who wasn’t [ill], and it was obvious to me that the line had been a gift for him.”
Contrary to what every musician believes (or needs to believe), drugs had an impact on the way they played. Most nights Led Zeppelin performed brilliantly, but there were nights when they veered out of control. “Jimmy’s guitar playing got sloppy,” says Benji Le Fevre, who monitored the music through headphones at the soundboard. Nor was Robert always in exceptional voice; music critics who were enlightened fans of the band and well versed in the songs noted how he was unable to reach many of the high notes and defaulted to a lower register. And performances routinely started late, often thirty minutes but sometimes as much as an hour or more, and the young, inebriated crowds could get ugly. In Boston and again in Pittsburgh, delayed starts led to clashes with police.
The fans, however, gave Led Zeppelin a pass. The band delivered an eruptive surge of high-energy music and stellar theatrics that obliterated any recognition of glitches. Three hours of mostly solid, sustained rock ’n roll by virtuoso musicians was a rare and exceptional treat. The interplay between the musicians was contagious. There was a lot of acrobatic movement on stage—mugging, prancing, high-stepping, duck-walking. Jimmy and Bonzo were especially snuggly, often playing into each other’s faces.
“I think we always start off shaky, and it’s at the end when the whole thing builds,” Jimmy explained. “We build up the—I don’t know what you might call it—the ESP aspects of it when you do start jamming and entering areas which are open to free-form. . . . A lot of that is just off the cuff. And that’s where everybody’s really working.”
The band made sure to include highlights from each of their five albums. No matter that they were bored churning out “Whole Lotta Love” and “Stairway to Heaven.” They made every effort to play the fan favorites as though for the first time. And the effects—the dry ice, the massive light show, and the dazzling overhead screen—delivered an assault on the senses. The audiences weren’t just ecstatic, they let themselves be overcome, whipped into a frenzy. As one reviewer noted, “Led Zeppelin doesn’t give concerts; they perform physical transformations.”
On July 17, 1973, the entourage landed in Seattle and checked in to the Edgewater Hotel, scene of the legendary mud shark affair. There must have been something in the Edgewater’s air ducts that drove rock ’n rollers to anarchy. Ahmet Ertegun threw a party for the band in the hotel’s banquet room, which the guys decided to bail on. The real party was in Bonzo’s room, where Peter, sprawled across a king-size bed and chugging from a quart bottle of ouzo, conducted the action as if it were a three-ring circus.
“The freaks had come out of the woodwork,” recalls one of the guests. “It was like a Fellini slow-motion debauchery, filled with ugly chicks in hot pants and green-painted fingernails.” Bonzo pulled back the shower curtain with a flourish to reveal a bathtub full of near-dead mud sharks flapping around. He and Richard Cole had reeled in about thirty of the unfortunate creatures. The stench was incredible. “He intended to rub those fish over the girls in hot pants, which depended on what level freak they were—a full-on ‘rub the fish on me’ freak or ‘just pour ouzo on my head.’ ”
The gig that night at the Coliseum served merely as an intermission to the hijinks. After the show, back at the hotel, Robert and Bonzo rifled through the luggage belonging to Vanessa Gilbert and paraded about in her clothes and high heels. From time to time, depending on the circumstances, they, along with John Paul, enjoyed larking about in drag. Robert’s stage outfits alone provided ample flouncy apparel—gauzy shirts studded in rhinestones, midriff-baring blouses, and shirtwaists.
John Paul, however, had other mischief on his mind that night. While the Midlands lads were cavorting in the corridors, he’d crept into Bonzo’s deserted room with a suitcase full of tools. With the precision of a master craftsman, he began undoing everything that was bolted to the floor—the ugly orange couch, the TV, the dresser, the lamps, even the mattress and bed—and sent all of it sailing over the balcony into the sea. When Bonzo returned, there was nothing left in the room.
The next morning at checkout, the desk manager congratulated Peter Grant on Led Zeppelin’s restraint—only trashing a single room. “Rod Stewart’s gang destroyed five,” he revealed, before going down the list of other visiting bands that had done greater damage. “But the Methodist Church trashed ten rooms!” Grant was impressed by the young Christians’ handiwork. “Apparently the Methodists didn’t just throw out the TV sets and fridges—even the carpets went,” he said.
“The guy was so frustrated about not being able to just go bonkers in a room himself,” Peter said. G famously led the desk manager up to a vacated suite and offered him the experience of trashing it himself. “Here you are.” He peeled off $670 in cash and folded it into the manager’s palm. “Have this room on Led Zeppelin.” Roughly another $1,000 covered John Paul’s vandalism. Peter was used to it. Hotel rooms on tour were collateral damage. But the cost to Led Zeppelin was about to soar.
[2]
On July 14, 1973, just prior to a concert in Buffalo, New York, Peter Grant phoned Joe Massot, a filmmaker on the fringes of the artistic mainstream, and asked him to join the tour in Boston on July 20 to begin shooting sequences for a Led Zeppelin movie. This had been on the band’s drawing board for some time—as a logical phase of their overall career strategy—but relegated to a back burner due to various scheduling obstacles. For some unexplained reason, G decided the time was right. They’d filmed parts of the illustrious Albert Hall concert in 1970, but the footage was dark and grainy, basically unusable. “By 1973, we had moved on so far in such a short time that we felt the Albert Hall footage was passé in every respect,” Jimmy said. “We looked and dressed differently, and the whole communicative quality of the music had been improved.” If Led Zeppelin was going to allow a film to be made, it had to be a first-class affair, subject to their creative control and approval at every stage of the process.
Joe Massot was an unconventional choice to handle the job. His CV was slim in the filmmaking department. He’d done a few short films about pre-Castro Cuba and assisted George Harrison in providing the soundtrack to the 1968 film Wonderwall, a messy psychedelic romp starring Jane Birkin. He’d also written a forgettable art-house western based on Siddhartha called Zachariah, with Don Johnson and various rock ’n roll cameos that had slipped through the cracks. That was about it. But Massot had badgered Peter for years about undertaking a Led Zeppelin documentary and had become friends with Charlotte Martin and Jimmy Page. He did a number on Jimmy, who was impressed by Massot’s proposed structure for such a film—interweaving live concert footage with dreamlike reenactment sequences featuring each of the band members, as opposed to talking-head interviews.
Peter gave him five days to assemble a crew and to meet the band at Boston Garden. They could begin filming the five concerts remaining on the tour, starting with the Baltimore show on July 23. Money and irritating studio production overlords wouldn’t interfere. Led Zeppelin intended to finance the entire enterprise themselves.
If Massot had any illusions that the venture would go smoothly, they were snuffed out in Boston. He took the opportunity to tag along with Peter Grant in order to get a feel for what Led Zeppelin’s backstage life was like. That night, the crowd out front was especially rowdy, ignoring Robert’s pleas throughout the show to settle down. A handful of overenthusiastic fans eventually pushed through the barriers in front of the stage, prompting the manager to organize a hasty getaway.
The band charged out the back of the Garden into the employee parking lot. Most of the limo drivers had taken off at the first sign of violence. G ordered the one remaining driver out of his Cadillac. “You call your boss and tell him this car is now mine,” he declared, handing over his gold American Express card while the band clambered over one another, squeezing into the back seat. Peter took over the chauffeuring himself. “He drove like a maniac,” recalled a member of the film crew, who stared in disbelief, “right through a fire hydrant which exploded. He bumped over the gutter and onto the main road,” flooring it all the way to the hotel.
The next installment, at the Baltimore Civic Center, was no less bumpy. Mickie Most and Steve Weiss showed up to keep G company as he led Joe Massot on a stroll through the arena. As chance would have it, they encountered a rogue entrepreneur doing brisk business selling posters of the band. The film crew’s camera captured Peter at his most monstrous. The confrontation was a terrifying big-screen scene.
The stage manager, Larry Vaughan, who worked for Concerts East, was brought before Grant to answer for the offense. The pirate poster seller sat quivering in the corner. Peter lurched out of his chair and swooped down on the man, like Mothra about to devour his prey.
“Don’t fucking talk to him,” Peter growled at Vaughan, “it’s my bloody act!”
“I don’t know how this guy got in the building,” Vaughan said, and turned to exchange a word with Steve Weiss.
Peter was indignant. “Talk to me! I’m the manager of the group. You had people inside the building selling posters, and you didn’t know anything about it.”
It didn’t matter what Vaughan said or how diplomatically he handled the situation; Peter was out to eviscerate the poor guy.
“How much kickback are you getting?” G demanded, even though he knew that wasn’t the case. This was a star turn, and he was ready for his close-up.
It was all leading up to a point where Peter could lord over the man and call him a “silly cunt,” one of his trusty rebukes, displaying the kind of rage that turned grown men into Jell-O.
For the live concert footage, everything depended on the three consecutive shows Led Zeppelin played at Madison Square Garden in New York. It was the perfect venue to capture the magic, an intimate crowd of eighteen thousand as opposed to the masses at monolithic stadiums. The Garden had history, it was a landmark, a New York institution. “For me,” Robert Plant maintained, “Madison Square Garden was a seminal moment.”
The entourage that arrived in New York was massive and defied reason. Since Pittsburgh, folks had been joining the tour the way a snowball rolling downhill picks up detritus. The Starship added a team of journalists from Playboy and various insignificant publications, Ahmet Ertegun, half a dozen groupies of disparate stripes, Iggy Pop, who had come in from LA, and sundry hangers-on. Of the latter, Roy Harper had just about worn out his welcome. In LA, he’d spent a lot of time at Led Zeppelin’s expense frolicking with a groupie from Phoenix who made love potions and cast spells. “When I think that I was sixteen, and he must have been thirty”—Harper was thirty-two—“it’s kind of like, ‘Wow!’ ” she exclaimed. Since then, Harper’s sole function on the tour had been to stand at the side of the stage and shake a toy stuffed monkey on a stick at Jimmy while he performed. The crew was not amused.
Headquarters in New York was the Drake Hotel on Park Avenue at Fifty-sixth Street. The place had a regal, old-world charm, but it might have been Grand Central Station for all the foot traffic in and out of the suites. The parade was nonstop—friends, well-wishers, old girlfriends, record-company reps, deejays, promoters, drug dealers, guitar salesmen. Enough! Led Zeppelin was exhausted and craved peace and quiet, but there was no rest for the weary. Jimmy especially was a shadow of himself. He looked haggard, wraith-like. Drugs had begun to take a toll. The pace was killing him. He claimed he hadn’t slept in five days.
“We’re all terribly worn out,” he admitted. “I went past the point of no return physically quite a while back, but now I’ve gone past the mental point too, I think. I’ve only kept going by functioning automatically.”
It was essential they pull it together for the three Garden shows. They were proof to G that his scheme to cut out the middlemen was on the money—90 percent of the money. “We announced the dates via Scott Muni’s radio show, and [they were] instantly sold out,” he said. No other promotional costs were incurred. “It was the demand from the street and the fans.”
The shows served as the only opportunity for the film team to get exciting concert footage. They’d shot 16mm footage in Pittsburgh and Baltimore, but those were dry runs to allow the film crew to work out camera strategy on such short notice. No attention was paid to continuity—that is, making sure songs on different nights were played in the same key and that the band members wore the same clothes, to make it seem like a single take once editors got their hands on it. In New York, everyone was going for broke—three nights, plenty of opportunity to cover all angles of a Led Zeppelin concert, and a big step up in quality to 35mm film stock.
Good plan, lousy execution. For some unknown reason, John Paul Jones missed the memo about continuity and wore different clothes on the successive nights. “I would ask if we were filming tonight but be told that nothing was going to be filmed,” he said, “so I’d think, ‘Not to worry, I’ll save the shirt I wore the previous night for the next filming.’ Then I’d get on stage and see cameras all ready to roll.” It would be a nightmare in the editing room. His outfits would never match up. Perhaps worse was the decision about the film stock. “They started filming on 35mm film, but on four hundred-foot rolls, which only gave [them] about three-and-a-half minutes,” according to one of the crew. “During reel changes, the cameramen were missing so much material.” It would be impossible to sync and sequence during the edit.
In the end, there were too many distractions. Richard Cole claimed that on the second night, while John Bonham was in the throes of his interminable “Moby Dick” solo, Ricardo had arranged for a teenage girl to give the other band members blowjobs in the dressing room. This hearkened back to Led Zeppelin’s first appearance at the Garden in September 1970. “I went to the locker room while the band was onstage,” recalls Henry Smith, their primary roadie during the early tours. “There was a policeman’s hat sitting on a bench, with his belt and gun right next to it. Richard and Peter were practically pissing themselves with laughter. They had a groupie giving the cop a blowjob in the stall. Richard organized scenes like that on a regular basis.”
As far as scenes went, the third night at the Garden was the pièce de résistance. Just prior to the beginning of the show, word drifted to those backstage that the safe-deposit box behind the desk in the Drake Hotel, where the band had secured cash and other valuables, had been rifled. A little over $200,000 was missing. In the best show-must-go-on tradition, the band soldiered through as details were emerging from various sources.
Upon check-in, Richard Cole and Steve Weiss had placed stacks of hundred-dollar bills, along with everyone’s passports and a few credit cards, in the box for safekeeping. The cash was mostly for incidentals—for the film crew’s expenses, spontaneous purchases like antiques for Jimmy or a car for Bonzo, or as Ricardo noted, “in case we wanted to buy a guitar in the middle of the night, or a bit of blow.” As a matter of fact, Jimmy had called him around three in the morning on the second night in New York and requested $800—in some retellings it was $600, even $8,000—for a Les Paul that a fan was offering him. Cole went to the box and swore that all the money had been there at that time. When he returned the next morning, only the passports remained.
