Led Zeppelin, page 37
The Drake turned into a major crime scene. New York City police and the FBI moved in to investigate, but so did the paparazzi. To safeguard the band’s privacy, the musicians were stashed in an apartment on East Eighty-sixth Street belonging to Shelley Kaye, Steve Weiss’s assistant, until things cooled down. Meanwhile, Richard Cole, the FBI’s primary suspect, combed the band’s rooms, scrubbing them of drugs. There was plenty for him to worry about. At the same time that law enforcement arrived, so did a shady character who called one of the suites and got Vanessa Gilbert on the phone.
“Hey, I’ve got some stuff for Zeppelin,” he said. “Stuff,” code for drugs. A few minutes later he was in Gilbert’s room, the gigantic corner suite Peter had awarded her, unpacking a briefcase with an assortment of powders. “Here’s the good stuff, and here’s the great stuff.” Although she’d never seen brown cocaine before, she chose the great stuff, which she snorted to assess.
A heroin bust would have been fatal to Led Zeppelin. Ricardo was already in enough hot water. No one else had access to the strongbox at the Drake; he had the only key. It certainly looked to the cops like an inside job. He was interrogated and fingerprinted. Cole also said that he had taken and passed a lie detector test. Nevertheless, he remained a primary suspect, as did a bellman who, according to Phil Carson, “was watched by the FBI for years.”
There have been many theories about the theft, which was never solved. Questions remained about all the cash floating around, unaccounted for, doled out for arbitrary purposes, often to avoid paying income tax. The British rate for the kind of money Led Zeppelin made was 90 percent, and no less an aggrieved tax drudge than Peter Grant alluded to his “false-bottomed suitcases” stuffed with cash being smuggled into Great Britain to avoid the levy. Maybe that’s what happened to the safe-deposit-box stash. No less than five sources close to the band told this author that Grant had admitted spiriting the Drake money away. Michael Des Barres, who later recorded for Led Zeppelin’s record label, says, “Peter told me that Richard did it. It was a tax thing. He said, ‘Why would you let all that money go to these other cunts?’ ”
The band didn’t seem too put out by the theft. “Jimmy and I just laughed about it,” Robert said cavalierly. He thought it “somehow made sense.” In the scheme of things, a loss of $200,000 was pocket change to Led Zeppelin, but it sure didn’t look that way to the outside world. The New York dailies converged to try to make their own sense of the theft. When a New York Post photographer arrived at the Drake, G grabbed his camera and smashed it, doing a bit of damage to its owner’s face as well. For that, Peter was promptly arrested and tossed into a cell at 100 Center Street, the nerve center of the New York City criminal court system.
Steve Weiss leaped into action. He placed a call to a young attorney a couple years out of the DA’s office named Jeff Hoffman. “I was in a new private practice,” Hoffman recalls, “and when we opened the firm, we took whatever walked in the door. And what walked in the door were drug dealers from Harlem.” Among his principal clients were Frank Lucas, the heroin kingpin who was later immortalized in American Gangster by Denzel Washington, and “the money people between organized crime and the wannabes.” The latest addition to his client roster, Peter Grant, was in fine company.
“Do whatever you have to, but get him out of jail,” Weiss instructed. “He has a plane to catch.”
An hour later, Hoffman encountered Peter in a night-court holding cell. “He was off the wall, a monstrous guy stalking around the cell,” Hoffman remembers. “He growled at me: ‘Get me out of here!’ ”
Before G’s arraignment, one of the court personnel pointed out the Post photographer to Hoffman. They huddled outside and agreed to a reasonable settlement, which allowed the case to be dismissed on the spot. But the young lawyer knew a tall story when he heard one when Peter told him about the Drake robbery. Hoffman, who was savvy when it came to clients who dealt strictly in cash, concluded, “It had all the markings of an inside job.”
The robbery, the publicity, the nonstop travel, the breakneck schedule, the vast sums of money, the death threats and security, the drugs, the rumors, the push-pull, push-pull, push-pull, the Led Zeppelin phenomenon—the whole thing was becoming too much to handle. The band was knackered. The guys were in a daze.
“I was just totally and completely spaced out,” Jimmy admitted. “There was an enormous amount of adrenaline that we were building up on stage, and just taking it offstage into the land of mondo bizarro.” Drugs had become a pacemaker—drugs to stay awake, drugs to fall asleep, and drugs for in between, when it was essential that the pace stayed nice and groovy. “And part of the condition of drug taking,” he said, “is that you start thinking you’re invincible.” He recalled a recent episode when circumstances veered toward disaster. “I remember one night climbing out of a nine-story window in New York and sitting on one of those air-conditioning units, just looking out over the city.”
Peter promised them a sabbatical from live appearances, not just a token break but a year, more if necessary. Time off was a good start, but the overriding issue was larger than that. Perhaps a reevaluation was due. Overdue. The band’s five-year deal with Atlantic Records was ending. Jimmy was physically sick, Jonesy was disillusioned, Robert had missed seeing his son’s first steps, and Bonzo was Bonzo. It was time for a reset.
“Nothing’s preconceived right now,” Robert explained upon returning to the United Kingdom. The band, he said, was coming to different decisions and conclusions. “We’ll work a bit and then we’ll take a break. That’s the way it works—that’s Led Zeppelin right now.”
Chapter Fourteen
LED ZEPPELIN WAS OTHERWISE ENGAGED
[1]
The aftermath of a tour was always unsettling. Rejoining the family, sleeping in your own bed, tuning to a new, slower pace, the peace and quiet, the sanity—all of it necessitated a major readjustment. When the screaming ceased, when the retainers departed, when the music faded, the return to normalcy had a sobering and disorienting effect. Star treatment was limited to extra helpings at the table. Wives took over a dignified groupie role. Even at the pub, a golden god got no more of an oblation than a friendly nod or a deferential pint. What a welcome relief!
It was time to take stock of home and hearth. In Jimmy’s case, that meant finding a residence in London, closer to his business interests. He’d only recently acquired a driver’s license, and despite owning a gorgeous Bentley, he never drove anywhere. To get from Plumpton Place to a studio in the city, he depended on hitching a ride with Ricardo or on public transit. “Jimmy would hop on a train and come up to Victoria Station, then get a bus to the office,” says one of the staff. But in the last year, his face had become too familiar. He started getting hassled by fans. A home in London made more sense, and not just any home but Tower House in Holland Park, considered by many to be “the most beautiful residence in London.”
Tower House was a veritable redbrick fortress built in 1881 by architect William Burges in the French Gothic revival style. It was opulent in every detail, from its eponymous turret poking up above the tree line to its exotic interior rooms, adorned with intaglios and marquetry inlays of astrological signs, mythical creatures, and pagan symbols. The place was fantastic in every sense of the word. It was a residence that befit an eccentric personality, and that Jimmy bought it from no less a flamboyant character than actor Richard Harris is no coincidence. The house was also conveniently located a short walk from Holland Street in Kensington, where Jimmy was in the process of opening a bookshop, the Equinox, dedicated to the occult and all things Crowley.
Not to be outdone, Peter Grant purchased his own estate called Horselunges, a sixteenth-century Elizabethan manor house surrounded by a moat near Eastbourne, in leafy Sussex. “It was a very spooky place,” says Carole Brown, G’s longtime assistant, who spent the first night in the house with Peter and his family. “There were suits of armor and stuffed hunters’ trophies and a portrait of a former owner whose eyes seemed to follow you everywhere.” The kitchen staff told Brown that the house was haunted by a dog that had jumped out of a window, and sure enough, that first night Grant’s wife, Gloria, swore she heard a dog scratching at her bedroom door. Horselunges became a repository for Peter’s enormous collection of art nouveau—Tiffany lamps, Mistinguett posters, and a bed that had belonged to Sarah Bernhardt. Grant chose the house much for its location, convenient to Gatwick Airport.
The Horselunges housewarming party was an unforgettable affair, Grant style. “The catering team were dressed in Elizabethan clothing and served traditional mead,” Carole Brown recalls. Gloria “Glo” Grant, Peter’s wife, was especially vivacious, though she turned a reproachful eye on Richard Cole, who remained upstairs throughout the evening, inhaling poppers of amyl nitrate.
Peter also needed a new base of operations. During Led Zeppelin’s tour in the States, he’d notified Mickie Most that their twelve-year partnership on Oxford Street was at an end. There was too little overlap; it had outlived its usefulness. Most decried the breakup and ordered Carole Brown out of the office while a search team looked for another headquarters. “Jimmy and Peter were considering purchasing Hammer House, where they made the Hammer horror movies, for their offices,” she says. In the end, Mark London, Peter’s partner in Stone the Crowes, found a much more suitable space on the King’s Road in Chelsea, a two-floor suite above the Royal British Legion Hall and directly across from the World’s End pub. The rent was a ridiculous £19 a week.
“Peter particularly liked it,” says Ed Bicknell, “because of a fire escape that led from the first floor, where he had his office, onto an alley in the rear.” He liked to say, “The perfect office was any building with two staircases.” It allowed him to slip out the back to avoid an unwelcome visitor, be it an artist, an underworld rival, or the law. Carole Brown recalls such an instance when a genial folksinger named Duster Bennett dropped in unexpectedly one afternoon. “He’d been pursuing Peter, who wasn’t keen to get involved,” she says. “Duster sat in the reception until eight or nine o’clock, waiting for Peter to finish his calls. When I finally knocked and opened his door, there was no one there and the fire escape was wide open.”
Peter Grant wasn’t a natural office-bound soul. Before Carole Brown handled his day-to-day calendar, he was assisted by an Irish woman named Irene, who complained that he’d lock himself in the office and be “unavailable” for days on end. The only way she could communicate with him was to slip messages under the door.
In any case, the King’s Road office was a refuge away from the hustle of 155 Oxford Street. The only other occupant was a ground-floor council of mostly older women who met there once a year to organize the sale of poppies honoring Remembrance Day’s fallen heroes. Otherwise, the building was devoted entirely to Peter Grant Ltd. Grant’s private sanctum was furnished with a brown leather sofa and a stunning old barge door coated in resin and converted into a coffee table. A gaudy chandelier lit a gallery of Gerald Scarfe illustrations that decorated the walls. The focal point, however, was a large, plush carpet with a red wine stain on it, the victim of one of Led Zeppelin’s mishaps at a hotel in California. When told that the band would be held responsible for the damage, Peter responded, “If you’re going to charge me for the carpet, you’d better roll it up and ship it to England.”
The first order of business in the King’s Road office was renegotiating Led Zeppelin’s contract with Atlantic Records, which was expiring on October 28, 1973. The initial five-year period had flown by with the kind of payoffs that gamblers dream about. “The band was thirty percent of Atlantic’s turnover,” Phil Carson says. Both parties were eager to re-up.
The initial plan was to send Steve Weiss in to negotiate the new deal, but his relationship with the label had frayed at the edges. He had a running fight with Atlantic to get his acts paid and employed Jeff Hoffman, the lawyer who defended Peter Grant during the Drake fracas, to put the squeeze on Ahmet Ertegun. “From time to time, I would threaten him with a RICO* lawsuit,” Hoffman recalls, “and Ahmet would always relent and pay up.”
Instead, Peter Grant and Ahmet hammered out the terms in an all-night session that tried both moguls’ patience. Ahmet’s initial solution was to give Led Zeppelin a five-year extension on the original deal. They’d both profited handsomely—more than handsomely. Why tinker with a winning formula? Peter was having none of it. He’d brokered that deal for an unknown band that had transformed itself into a financial gold mine. He wanted a new deal structured to reflect the band’s stature, something not just more respectable but crowned with laurel. Led Zeppelin wanted a label deal—their own label—like the ones that Ahmet had given to David Geffen and Elliot Roberts for Asylum Records and to the Rolling Stones. Zeppelin wanted not only their own label but the freedom to run it with autonomy in every aspect other than marketing and distribution, crumbs they’d leave to Atlantic. It was unfair, Grant argued, to compare it to the Stones deal. That was basically a vanity label with one act on it. Grant assured Ahmet that Led Zeppelin intended to sign a full slate of new artists and to promote the hell out of them. In fact, they were already compiling a list of potential acts, including one built around Free’s former singer Paul Rodgers; another around Maggie Bell, the vocalist from Stone the Crows; and the omnipresent Roy Harper.
There were other alternatives. “I had great ambitions as a label boss because I really wanted to promote good music,” Robert said. “Jimmy and I were in a position to buy both Sun Records and Chess. They were for sale and we took it to the other guys and said we can take these labels and reintroduce them into mainstream popular music.”
Ahmet got wind of this and relented. He agreed to the terms Peter demanded, which ultimately torpedoed the Sun and Chess courtships. “The deal was a great one for the band,” says Phil Carson, who consulted on the negotiations. Most attractive was the new royalty rate. The standard deal Atlantic offered bands was a percentage on 90 percent of sales, less 15 percent for what was referred to as “free goods”—albums for promotional purposes. Led Zeppelin was awarded 18 percent on 90 percent, which was extremely generous. They also got an allowance for their office overhead and for expenses.
The label would operate out of Peter’s King’s Road office in London and Steve Weiss’s law office in New York, a warren of rooms in the Newsweek building on Madison Avenue. The band asked Phil Carson, whom they affectionately called Phyllis, to handle the label’s day-to-day operations, an offer he was tempted to accept until Ahmet Ertegun intervened. According to Carson, “Ahmet said, ‘Are you nuts? You’ve got this great career at Atlantic.’ ” Carson had signed AC/DC and brought in Richard Branson’s new Virgin Records venture, and he re-signed Yes after Atlantic had mistakenly let the band depart. A healthy promotion and raise convinced Carson to reconsider and remain where he was.
In addition to finding a suitable label head, there was plenty of work that went into launching the start-up, not only staffing two offices but coming up with a name that would pop. “Led Zeppelin Records” didn’t cut it; they felt it would overshadow other acts on the label. A number of names were proposed—“Slag” and “Slut” were two that were rejected for obvious reasons. Something more appropriate was a harder nut to crack.
In the meantime, there was important work to be done on the film they’d begun in New York City. The band knew those performances left a lot to be desired. There’d been too much tumult, too many distractions, the end-of-the-tour blahs, no magic, to say nothing of the robbery. The three nights at Madison Square Garden would never make a Led Zeppelin highlight reel. Collectively, Jimmy referred to them as “an honest sort of mediocre night.” The trouble was, mediocre didn’t cut it in the editing room. The footage was spotty, the soundtrack wasn’t syncing up. There was no complete take of “Whole Lotta Love”! Jimmy castigated the film crew—director Joe Massot, Ernest Day, who’d been behind the camera for Lawrence of Arabia, and Bob Freeman, who had shot the resplendent cover for Meet the Beatles (With the Beatles in the UK)—whom he blamed for being “really out of it.” Filming additional concerts was out of the question. Considering it had already cost the band $85,000, the strategy turned to salvaging what was already in the can.
Joe Massot reverted to his original concept: interspersing fantasy sequences into the concert footage, fictional reenactments that would portray each of the band members in a representative way. It was a means of beefing up the sparse coverage and producing something unconventional, artistic, something outside the traditional concert film fattened by the usual self-serving interviews.
Led Zeppelin was game. During October 1973, Massot took a small crew on the road to shoot the vignettes. “It was weird,” he said. “I’d go to each one’s home, he’d show me around, we’d talk about the film, and two days later we’d be making it.” The whole thing was fly-by-the-seat-of-one’s-pants filmmaking.
John Paul was flummoxed by it. “I’m suddenly told that a film crew was coming down to my house to shoot a sequence,” he said, “and what was I going to do?”
He thought quick. He’d just finished watching a Disney TV miniseries, The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, in which a country priest named Dr. Syn leads a band of marauders against the king’s press gangs that are enslaving young men into the Royal Navy. Disney refused to license the rights to the main character, so John Paul simply fashioned his own version in which, according to Joe Massot, “one man and a bunch of masked riders terrify villagers, rape women, and act horribly,” after which the man returns home, removes his mask, and reads Bedknobs and Broomsticks to his adoring wife and children.
