Led Zeppelin, page 45
John Paul agreed. “Nothing was preplanned about our solos,” he said. “We took some chances and sometimes we’d get lost a bit, but when that improvisation worked it was very satisfying.”
The audience sensed it right away. In San Diego, they abandoned all soundness of mind and plugged in to that high-voltage trance state. In a flash, fans seated on the floor of the arena leveled the folding chairs and rushed the stage, dancing and bouncing off one another like dervishes. Girls, many of them bare-breasted, were hoisted onto the shoulders of young men. Here and there, kids collapsed from the suffocating heat and were passed, hand over head, to safety at the side of the stage.
Despite the conditions, the show was superb, one of Led Zeppelin’s best. “What those eager fans got for their time and money was a virtuoso demonstration of hard rock by the skull-busters extraordinaire,” wrote the critic for The San Diego Union, “thunderous drums by John Bonham and lightning guitar by Jimmy Page, along with screaming, occasionally Janis Joplin–like vocals of strutting, bare-chested Robert Plant and the steady bass but somewhat unsteady piano of John Paul Jones.”
Overall, the tour’s pace was frenzied, feverish—and very uneven. Too many variables conspired to affect the outcome. One night, Bonzo struggled with intense stomach issues; another night Jimmy was too wasted to give it his all. In Long Beach, the night after San Diego, Led Zeppelin hit an obvious low. Despite the band’s showing up more than an hour late, the energy level in the arena was wildly enthusiastic, and the opening number—“Rock and Roll,” an ace in the hole—landed like a blast of nitroglycerin. It is impossible to sit still when that sound bomb discharges. After that, though, the bottom seemed to fall out. “The group ran through songs like ‘No Quarter,’ ‘Kashmir,’ ‘Over the Hills and Far Away,’ ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ and others with absolutely no concern for what they were doing,” observed a respected music journalist. For some unknown reason, the amps buzzed like a swarm of angry hornets. Jimmy’s twelve-string was noticeably out of tune and his solos, riddled with flaws, gave another journalist “cause to question his presence on the stage.” Robert Hilburn, the Los Angeles Times’s esteemed music critic, called the show “a numbing combination of intense, tenacious music and hopelessly limited imagination.” The reviewers weren’t alone in their assessments. “The audience was . . . bored,” said the columnist for the Long Beach Independent. You couldn’t fool a paying audience. They sat on their hands.
The next night, back at the San Diego Sports Arena, the band turned in an even more sluggish performance. Right off the bat, “Rock and Roll” was “almost unrecognizable,” with Robert singing it an octave lower than usual. Solos stretched into mind-numbing experiences. “It was always a toss-up over whose solo would be longest on a given night, Bonzo’s or Jimmy’s,” says Benji Le Fevre, “and whose was going to be most boring, Bonzo’s or Jimmy’s.” Bonzo extended his odyssey on “Moby Dick” to a bloated twenty-five minutes, but Jimmy won hands down for self-indulgence, including a ten-minute stretch conjuring weird, atonal sounds on the theremin during “Whole Lotta Love.” Meanwhile, his playing was notably sloppy. During one interlude with the Gibson double-necked guitar, a crew member observed Jimmy strumming the twelve-string neck but chording the six-string neck. Years later, Robert, who’d noticed the gaffe, would describe it as the turning point when he realized that “Jimmy was in the weeds.”
It was therapeutic to get out of California for a while. Half a dozen days in the Pacific Northwest did wonders for Led Zeppelin’s erratic showmanship. Gigs in Seattle and Vancouver drew the kind of kudos—“spectacular” and “stunning”—that pointed to their enviable strengths. Robert was especially delighted to be performing in Vancouver again. The last time the band had appeared there, on July 18, 1973, they had been forced to cut their show short. Someone had spiked his drink backstage with LSD and he had grown disoriented halfway through the set. Now, nearly two years later, Robert recounted the episode from the stage, saying, “Something strange happened to me that evening. I found the light show to be amazing, and I wondered what the name of the group was.” But all was forgiven, with the local critic calling the concert “awesome enough, in delivery and production, to rival almost any concert of its kind.” Portland’s Oregonian, covering one of the shows, concluded, “There is just no other rock band like this one—anywhere.”
Led Zeppelin recaptured their focus in the north. Los Angeles, alas, offered too many distractions, and the band’s return there for three shows at the Forum—the final engagements of the tour—stirred up a fresh share of high old times. The Continental Hyatt House was awash in drug dealers and groupies with valid passports to Led Zeppelin’s floors. Keith Moon, The Who’s resident bad boy, turned up to conduct a master class in mischief. According to Richard Cole, Moon and Jimmy treated themselves to a pair of underage girls, one of whose fathers turned up threatening to call the police. It was that kind of atmosphere, heedless hedonism.
Bonzo, particularly, was in rare form. His liquor intake consumed much of the waking day, augmented by unstinting rations of Quaalude and cocaine. “Bonzo was on everything except fresh air,” Danny Marcus recalls. For a while, a very short while, he succeeded in staying out of trouble. His new Corvette occupied a reserved space in the Hyatt’s underground garage, where he withdrew for hours each day. Unable to drive the car (his license had been revoked), he was content to sit behind the wheel with Mick Ralphs, Bad Company’s guitarist, just revving the engine, admiring his purchase. He also bought a souped-up Ford sedan. Unable to resist temptation, he dared to take it out for a spin, “doing about 90mph up and down the Strip,” according to John Paul Jones, who watched the action from his Hyatt House balcony. Predictably, Bonzo was pulled over by a pair of LA’s finest, who weren’t amused when he jumped out to confront them. Somehow, he managed to talk his way out of arrest, even showing off “the bloody size of the engine” and sending the cops on their way with a couple tickets to the next show.
But for most of the three days in LA, Bonzo was a hot mess. “After a certain point, the Beast goes on the prowl, and the only thing that amuses him is pillage,” a roadie warned. For a while, he amused himself by heaving half a dozen TV sets out the hotel window onto Sunset Boulevard, eight stories below. Dave Northover insisted he saw an upright piano from Bonzo’s room sail past his window, “missing a limo by about ten feet,” but that’s probably apocryphal. Otherwise Bonzo drank, and as more than ten sources for this book echoed: “Bonzo was a mean drunk.” He choked Steve Marriott during an altercation at the Whisky; he provoked fights at the Rainbow, where Deep Purple’s Glenn Hughes saw him “take an eight ball of coke out of his pocket,” cupping the entire ball “up into his face”; he terrorized NME journalist Nick Kent, dousing him with a Bloody Mary; and he cursed the tour doctor, who feared for his life.
The company line about John Bonham’s behavior was that he missed his wife and kids so intensely, so painfully, that he acted out. For every person who attested to his drunken rages, an equal number recounted tender moments when Bonzo reminisced about his family grievously, mournfully, often reduced to tears.
He’d soon have a better reason to sing the separation blues. One night, before Led Zeppelin departed for home, Peter Grant called a group meeting and laid out some hard facts. He had good news and bad news. On the one hand, the band had surpassed every expectation he’d ever had for them. Physical Graffiti was a runaway hit—it had gone gold and platinum on the day of its release—spurring sales not only of the group’s entire backlist but of Swan Song’s roster artists as well. Their projected income from record sales and the tour hovered around the $40 million range. That was the also the bad news. Inland Revenue, the British tax vultures, assessed a whopping 87 percent tax bite on England’s highest earners.
“Our accountant, Joan Hudson, told us of the massive problems we would have if we didn’t go,” Grant explained. Go meaning: into exile.
Tax exile allowed British high-income earners to hold onto most of their overseas income by living outside the UK for most of the year. The Stones had taken advantage of the economic dodge in 1971, with Mick hibernating in the Republic of Ireland, where, according to Irish Inland Revenue, someone recognized as “producing genuine original work of cultural artistic merit,” such as a composer, pays no tax on his earnings. Keith Richards fled to Montreux, Switzerland, and Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman to the South of France, where the tax rate was 60 percent. Peter Frampton had his songwriting royalties paid to companies in Jersey, with a flat tax of 20 percent. Rod Stewart was another energetic tax nomad. But it wasn’t as cut-and-dried as simply relocating. One couldn’t remain in any one place for more than six months, and living in the United States for more than 181 days required paying U.S. federal taxes, all of which meant you were constantly on the move. To dodge the tax bite, Led Zeppelin couldn’t return home until April 1976, almost a year away.
Jimmy and Robert were down with the plan. They’d intended to take some time off and travel anyway. No time like the present, they concluded. John Paul, imperturbable to the bone, would make do, although it meant putting his girls in boarding school for the duration. Only Bonzo balked. Home was his sanctuary. Everyone knew how much he hated being on the road, and uprooting his family seemed wrong to him. Besides, he had no intention of leaving his children anywhere. Peter eventually talked him into the plan, laying out exactly how much Bonzo stood to lose in pounds and pence. Bonzo gasped and decided to join the nomads—but he wasn’t going to like it.
Grant raised the possibility of touring in places they’d never played—perhaps in South America or Africa—but no one was in a hurry to consider dates there just yet. In the meantime, he would direct operations from Montreux, leaning on Claude Nobs, the promoter of the Montreux Jazz Festival and a friend of his and the band. Nobs had helped engineer the Stones’ year adrift and had contacts across Europe and elsewhere.
Excitement built around the plans, but Led Zeppelin still had one big obligation left to fulfill.
Chapter Seventeen
THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY
[1]
There were many loose ends to tie up before Led Zeppelin set off on its rock ’n roll diaspora.
The band remained in Los Angeles for several weeks while Peter Grant navigated a clear course for complying with the strictures of tax exile. It was going to take a group effort to conform to the timetable. Any slip-up could cost a musician millions of dollars.
John Bonham continued to chafe at the situation. His wife, Pat, was expecting their second child any day, and he was determined to be at her side through the birth. The delay in Los Angeles struck him as additional injustice. He was lonely, depressed. His behavior deteriorated further. Onstage, Robert had been jokingly introducing Bonzo as “Mr. Ultraviolence,” but it was no longer a joking matter. At the Rainbow, he misinterpreted the smile of a woman he knew who was in the midst of eating dinner and punched her so hard—in the face—that it knocked her off the seat. “Don’t ever look at me that way again!” he screamed. A few days later, he assaulted a clerk at Tower Records.
When it came to alcohol and drugs, his self-indulgence was stunning. Danny Goldberg expressed it succinctly: “Bonzo was a huge adult with the emotions of a six-year-old child.” Richard Cole was told to keep an extra-vigilant eye on him, which in retrospect seemed counterintuitive. Richard had his own short fuse that frequently led to violence. In early 1975, while still in LA, he pulled a gun on drummer Aynsley Dunbar during an altercation at the Beverly Hilton.
“I’ve never seen anyone behave worse in my life than Bonham and Cole,” said journalist Nick Kent, who was traveling with Led Zeppelin at the time. “I once saw them beat a guy senseless for no reason and then drop money on his face.”
At the end of March 1975, Ricardo was given the disagreeable job of shadowing John Bonham at a Swan Song press party for the Pretty Things at the Biltmore Hotel. He must have known it was a fool’s errand. During cocktails, Bonzo asked Atlantic’s West Coast artist relations manager to get him a cup of coffee, then poured it over the man’s natty beige suit. Later that same night, Cameron Crowe reported, Bonzo encountered Sounds correspondant Andy McConnell, with whom he had a friendly meeting earlier in the day. For some unknown reason, McConnell shone a flashlight in Bonzo’s face and said, “You’re an ugly fucker aren’t you?” To which “Bonzo responded by knocking McConnell across the room,” Crowe said. It took considerable muscle for Richard to extricate an unhinged Bonzo from the melee and hustle him out of the party.
As payback, Bonzo smashed up his suite at the Hyatt House, not an uncommon occurrence. It was almost a blessing when he finally passed out. Almost. It might have passed without incident, had he put out his lit cigarette. But the bed caught fire, activating the sprinkler system and summoning a quorum of firemen, who broke down his door.
It was the final straw. Led Zeppelin was evicted from the Hyatt, not for drugs, not for underage groupies, not for fistfights or motorcycles in the corridors, not even for the destruction of the hotel’s furniture, much of which landed in splinters on Sunset Boulevard. It took a cigarette, not even a joint, to ban them once and for all.
The move from West Hollywood to the Hilton in Beverly Hills wasn’t far enough from the action to sidetrack the drummer. He had no self-discipline. Soon after settling in, he picked a fight with the bouncer at the Rainbow, a man half his size who happened to be a black belt in karate and gave Bonzo a taste of his own medicine. A few knife-like strikes sent him to the hospital with two black eyes and a broken nose.
It was high time for a change of scenery. Led Zeppelin went back to London for two months, enough time to get their respective houses in order and to stage a farewell performance. “We want to find somewhere,” Robert indicated, “where we can make it into a bit of an event.”
It was settled soon enough—three shows at Earls Court Arena on May 23 through 25. The place was cavernous, the largest indoor hall in Britain, which staged the yearly auto show along with boxing events. It had been two years since the band’s last concert in the UK, an eternity, to hear the hometown fans complain. So the show would effectively serve as “hello”—and “goodbye.” Was Led Zeppelin still relevant in Britain? The 51,000 tickets sold out an hour after they went on sale, forcing the band to agree to two additional shows. Those, in turn, generated more than 100,000 mail-order requests.
First, there was housecleaning to do at Swan Song Records. Bad Company and Maggie Bell were both releasing sophomore albums in April 1975. Expectations were high, especially for Bad Company, with two obvious singles—“Good Lovin’ Gone Bad” and “Feel Like Making Love”—each with killer potential. Maggie Bell’s follow-up LP, Suicide Sal, was harder to nail. Producers seemed intent on polishing her edges, anesthetizing the badass truck-driver voice. Maggie was a rocker at heart. She’d fronted bands that knew how to utilize her gritty delivery, but the material producers fed her skewed mainstream pop, making her sound more like a cabaret act. It was going to be difficult conveying her image to record buyers, even with Jimmy Page handling guitar on two tracks.
To generate more product, Robert drove over to Rockfield Studios, a few miles from his cottage in Wales, where Dave Edmunds was producer in residence. Edmunds had had a monster hit a few years back with the Smiley Lewis cover “I Hear You Knocking,” but as an artist he’d gone cold since. “If you want a record deal, we’ll look after you at Swan Song,” Robert told Edmunds.
“I seduced Dave Edmunds,” Robert admitted, and the singer-producer fell for him in return. He talked it over with his razor-toothed manager, Jake Riviera, and decided that riding Led Zeppelin’s coattails might be worth a shot. Robert and Jimmy courted another of Riviera’s acts, Dr. Feelgood, a scrappy British R&B pub band whose lead guitarist, Wilko Johnson, played with a stony, unrelenting energy. Jimmy loved his attack, and Robert admired their protean singer, Lee Brilleaux. Dr. Feelgood would have been a perfect fit at Swan Song, but according to Jake Riviera, “Brilleaux didn’t like the hierarchy of it all.” Ultimately, they decided to stick with their original label, United Artists.
Dave Edmunds would be enough of a challenge. With Led Zeppelin banished to exile for a year, they’d have to leave the label in the hands of their minions. Besides, Peter Grant was sidetracked setting up another U.S. tour, to begin in August 1975.
The Earls Court gigs were also problematic. Led Zeppelin was determined to leave a lasting impression, so they went all in on the production, agreeing to install two gigantic video screens on either side of the stage so fans at the rear of the hall could follow the action. “It cost a lot of bread,” said Bonzo, though later he’d admit “it was worth every penny.” By Jimmy’s calculation, it took such a bite out of profits that the band would “come out of it with only a few hundred pounds over the five days.” There were also equipment headaches. One of the road crew had tried to bring a guitar back from the States without declaring it and had been stopped at Heathrow. “So Customs and Excise were on us like a ton of bricks,” says Benji Le Fevre. That triggered an investigation into why Led Zeppelin was importing instruments and speakers from America when they could be purchased in England. All of which required a wad of cash to change hands in order to make the problem go away.
