Led Zeppelin, page 47
As Maureen’s condition improved, Robert gave some thought to resuming his career. But something had changed; his irrepressible spirit would never be the same. “I know that my kind of vision, or the carefree element I had, disappeared instantly when I had my accident,” he said. “That kind of ramshackle ‘I’ll take the world now’ attitude was completely gone.”
This wasn’t his first serious car crash, either. In February 1970, on his way home from seeing Spirit at Mother’s in Birmingham, he had been involved in an accident when he lost control of his Jaguar and collided with a minivan. Both cars were totaled. “It was a horrific scene,” Jimmy recalled. “The police came banging at my door with flashlights and asked me if I knew a Mr. Robert Plant.” It was the kind of encounter in which grim news is usually conveyed. Robert was lucky. He got off with lacerations above an eye, a dislocated shoulder, and a couple of lost teeth.
Then, as now, Robert faced a lengthy recovery process. “He looked white as a sheet, bewildered, traumatized,” says Benji Le Fevre, the band’s able crewman, who agreed to assist Robert for as long as he was laid up. “He was in a lot of pain, unable to walk.” It meant recuperating somewhere remote, away from the hustle—and getting there fast. The tax exile permitted him to be back in England for only one sixth of the time he’d been away, and that grace period was just about up.
Once again, Richard Cole pulled strings and found temporary quarters nearby, in Jersey, one of the Channel Islands off the coast of Normandy. Locals referred to their island hideaway as “sixty thousand alcoholics clinging to a rock.” It was a haven for financial magnates, with pristine, sandy bays, wall-to-wall yachts moored in the harbors, championship golf courses, and, of course, cattle—Jersey cows responsible for a bounty of rich cream and cheeses. A wealthy lawyer with ties to Led Zeppelin offered his estate to Robert and his entourage for as long as was necessary. Despite the proximity, it was an ordeal getting him there. He was immobile, confined to a wheelchair, and the plane was small.
Money, especially the kind of money Led Zeppelin knew how to wield, solved such problems. It’s how Peter Grant operated. “I bought the seats in front and then had them removed,” G said, shelling out a cool £7,000. “There was a bit of a row, but I got the captain to make sure we could unscrew the seats before we took off. That way, Robert got the space he needed.”
Too much space. The trip to Jersey meant leaving Maureen behind in the hospital, which sent Robert into a tailspin. He was depressed, his morale low. It cheered him somewhat when the rest of the gang showed up. G flew in first, with Jonesy, Jimmy, and Bonzo in his vapor trail. They had a big decision to make about continuing the tax exile. The general vibe was: “If Robert can’t do it, we won’t do it,” a generous sacrifice, considering the money at stake. Performing was out of the question, but everyone seemed to agree that they could still make music, using the downtime—however long it might last—to record a new album. G and Jimmy volunteered to find someplace suitable to spend a few months.
In the meantime, the band took some time to enjoy each other’s company without any obligations to the wages of rock ’n roll. “There were lots of days with everyone together on sun lounges, jumping in and out of the pool,” recalls Benji. There was an ornate snooker table, a first-class wine cellar, a fleet of luxury sports cars at their disposal, the usual cache of cocaine to keep everybody in the groove. “I cooked big Sunday lunches—a roast in the oven, potatoes, a beautiful laid table. Plenty of laughter. Jersey is where they reunited, where they realized how much they enjoyed each other’s company.”
But soon they were on the move. Again. Jimmy had settled on a place to lay down roots for a while, where they could live comfortably, rehearse, maybe even record, a place beyond the tax man’s greedy reach but where they would feel right at home. It was a place where women have love in their eyes and flowers in their hair and where the mountains and canyons tremble and shake.
No one was surprised. They were heading to LA.
[3]
Young girls may have been headed to the canyon, as the song implied, but once Led Zeppelin arrived in LA, they rapidly changed course.
The idea was to spend the exile in comfort, so houses were rented in the Malibu Colony, on the beach—five houses, one for each band member and Peter Grant. It was an idyllic setting. Acres of white sand and the hypnotic Pacific Ocean lay right outside the front door. Surfers rode waves in to the shore. California girls frolicked like water nymphs. The occasional whale drifting by sent spouts of water into the air. On a clear day, Catalina Island shimmered in the distance like a mirage. Movie stars strolled by and waved—Leslie Caron right next door, and on the other side, Rod Steiger. Robbie Robertson and Neil Diamond were neighbors. Dylan lived down the beach in Point Dume. Burt Lancaster pushed a cart in the supermarket. Idyllic, Hollywood style.
“They each had their own rhythm in LA,” says Abe Hoch, who’d arrived from London to help with arrangements.
Robert scheduled physiotherapy every day. “We drove into Hollywood, where they would work on his ankle, stretch his arm, and give him exercises to do at home,” says Benji Le Fevre. “There was so much weed and cocaine around. I had to be strict and say, ‘You’re not going to have any Charlie until you’ve done these exercises.’ He was still physically compromised, still in a wheelchair, and I had to lift him in and out of the bath.” Robert was unmoored. He drew inward, became philosophical. “We talked a lot about the meaning of life and what was important—really important. The accident had been a big wake-up call. ‘I nearly died! I could have died! I’m not invincible, and I’m only twenty-eight years old.’ ”
They rarely went down the road to Jimmy’s house, now referred to as Henry Hall, Henry being British slang for heroin. Jimmy wasn’t seen during daylight hours. Drapes and blinds were pulled in his windows until eleven o’clock at night, when a light would finally come on. “He was so far gone,” says Michael Des Barres, who was hovering, agitating for a record deal.
“Peter pulled me aside one day and said, ‘Go see what Pagey’s doing,’ ” Abe Hoch recalls. “His house was dark inside in the middle of the day, and he was passed out, unconscious, naked on the bed. There were strange-looking books strewn across the covers—Crowley books and shit like that. It was a pretty weird scene.” When Peter asked Hoch about Jimmy’s condition, he said, “I’ve seen more movement in a Timex.”
At night, Jimmy worked on music. The intention was to lay down riffs for new songs and develop them with the rest of the band. But Jimmy was unreliable, not communicating smoothly with Robert, not showing up for scheduled rehearsals. A guitar tech named Ray Thomas was supposedly looking after Jimmy, but Thomas was similarly in heroin’s thrall. This put a strain on Jimmy and Robert’s relationship at a time when they needed to produce an album’s worth of material. But nothing concrete was happening musically.
When Jimmy was lucid, he signed a band to Swan Song led by charismatic Michael Des Barres, who shared his fascination with Aleister Crowley and drugs. The two had first met in 1974, when Des Barres fronted a band called Silverhead and Led Zeppelin happened to check them out at a club in Birmingham. Des Barres was a lightning rod for attention, a natural onstage, cheeky, glam, and in his words, “narcissistic, decadent, and debauched.”
“I was different from the others,” Des Barres says. His father, a disgraced, opium-smoking marquis who eventually went to prison, gave Michael an upper-crust education and an endowment that allowed him way too much freedom. “I led the life of a prince. Middle-class Jimmy and working-class Bonzo had to respect the aristocracy because they were trained to do so. It elevated my status.”
Jimmy was especially impressed. “I used to meet him at his Plumpton home,” Des Barres recalls. “It was what you’d expect: closed drapes and black candles. We got deeply into Jimmy’s tarot deck, which had been Crowley’s personal deck. But we didn’t sit around listening to music. It was drugs. It was drugs all the time.”
Des Barres and Silverhead managed to eke out the beginnings of a career. “Our fan base was coke dealers,” he said. It seemed inevitable that the band scratched up a gig at the Whisky and found themselves occupying a suite at the Continental Hyatt House. “We pulled up to the hotel fresh off the plane from London, and there was a hearse parked outside with a tiger in the back. Turns out the tiger was the star of a TV show called Daktari.” Des Barres rented the tiger for a week and walked it around the Hyatt’s lobby, attracting his share of groupies. The go-to groupie was Lori Mattix, along with her mother and Sable Starr.
“It was indescribable. All of it. But none of it seemed incredible to me. I was Caligula at the time.”
Des Barres had been married only three weeks when he arrived in Los Angeles, but he took up immediately with Pamela Miller as Silverhead also fell by the wayside, and he moved on from that, too. “My managers put me with a teenage guitar player called Michael Monarch who’d been in Steppenwolf and a great drummer named John Hyde who was obsessed with Bonzo—and we became Detective.”
The hype machine cranked into full gear. Before a note was played, every major label was knocking at Detective’s door. Columbia Records offered $1 million, but Detective was entranced by the Led Zeppelin mystique.
“One of my managers got hold of Peter Grant and gave him a big bag of coke to come to our rehearsal,” Des Barres recalls. “Jimmy came too and didn’t say much.” But the next morning, negotiations began in earnest to sign Detective to Swan Song. “It was green-card rock ’n roll. Peter Grant arranged my divorce, and I married Miss Pamela. Jimmy Page agreed to produce our album. We’d get a support tour with Led Zeppelin. It was a dream come true. But from that moment—and I’m not kidding, that moment—I knew the jig was up. You give young guys a million dollars, and what do you think is going to happen? Everybody got strung out.”
* * *
• • •
With Bad Company, Maggie Bell, the Pretty Things, Dave Edmunds, and now Detective, Swan Song had assembled a reasonably enviable roster of artists. Including, of course, Led Zeppelin, the label’s mighty anchor. But a label needed a strong leader and a clear-cut business strategy, and in 1975 it had neither. Swan Song’s officers—Danny Goldberg in New York and Abe Hoch in London—were figureheads, powerless to make a significant decision. All authority resided with the inaccessible Peter Grant. Even his wife, Gloria, had trouble reaching him.
“She used to call the office and say, ‘I need to speak to my husband,’ ” recalls Unity MacLean. “Our standard answer was, ‘He’ll call you right back.’ But he’d never call back, and it angered her. When she did get through, he’d say, ‘Don’t give me this fucking grief.’ She was trying to keep the family together while he was away. She was lonely, neglected. He’d spent long stretches in Switzerland, Paris, and Jersey. Now, according to Gloria, he’d disappeared into America with his tax problems, living the high life.”
The very high life. Peter Grant’s cocaine habit remained prodigious, as outsize as he was. He was always in possession of a big pile of blow. “It was a bagful,” says Betty Iannaci, an Atlantic Records colleague, “and his coke spoon was the size of a ladle!” He was never without his stash, which was always replenished—easily done in the Los Angeles entertainment arena, where cocaine was ubiquitous. G had become dependent on it, often coked out of his mind. Whether he acknowledged it or not, he was in its powerful grip. “When something like drugs own you, they own you,” said Sam Aizer, Swan Song’s artist relations manager in the States. “Peter had another master, and it wasn’t Led Zeppelin. It was his own hell.”
His sense of entitlement grew all out of proportion. One night, on his way home from the Whisky, Peter grew exasperated with the way the car ahead of his was traveling. “Go on,” he instructed his limo driver, “drive into him.”
The driver hesitated. “Mr. Grant, I can’t possibly do that.”
G dug into his coat pocket and pushed a wad of bills at his driver. “Here’s a thousand dollars,” he said. “Do what you’re told!”
Peter was a pastiche of excessive highs and extreme lows. He was routinely late for appointments, a no-show more often than not. Always unpredictable, he’d become impulsive, erratic.
During the tax exile in LA, Jimmy was becoming ever more drug-addled and undependable. He’d agreed to participate in a signing photo for Detective at the Beverly Hills Hotel that would be distributed to the press and music trade magazines. It was a standard ceremony that all record companies practiced to draw attention to a new, unknown band, though it rarely raised an eyebrow. Having Jimmy in the picture, however, guaranteed plenty of coverage, so everyone involved was looking forward to the event.
Jimmy was late, which wasn’t unusual—but he was fifteen hours late. And when he showed up, he was anything but present. “He was carried into the photo session, and he was unconscious,” Michael Des Barres recalls. “ ‘Tired,’ we were told. He was ‘really tired.’ ”
Danny Goldberg knew from the get-go there was going to be difficulty. He saw Jimmy nod out in the limo on their way to the session. “Michael and I tried repeatedly to wake him, even going to the extreme of throwing cold water on his face, but it was to no avail. Although he was breathing, he was out cold.”
In true show-must-go-on tradition, they decided to salvage the session. Danny directed the band to pose around the comatose Jimmy, whom they propped up in Weekend at Bernie’s fashion, and gave the photographer the go-ahead to shoot it. It wasn’t your everyday signing photo, but it wasn’t boring.
No matter how fucked up things got, there was always plenty of action in LA. On nights when everyone was conscious and functioning, Led Zeppelin would pull together and hit the town as a band. Even Robert could be wheeled almost anywhere. “We’d all go to Trader Vic’s or to the Whisky,” says Betty Iannaci. “Uproarious times, but civilized. Not the way they usually acted in LA, which was almost as though they had been let loose in the Wild West.”
Sometimes it was a relief to exist as a face in the crowd, out of the glare and turmoil of their ridiculously public lives. How nice it felt to steal unnoticed into an Etta James concert or see George Burns, remaining anonymous in a darkened nightclub. There was a memorable Little Feat show at a club in Venice, Donovan at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, and Bob Marley onstage at the Roxy, where Bonzo sat wedged between Keith Moon and Ringo Starr. There were also small, private parties where Led Zeppelin could unwind and be themselves.
As the band arrived at one fabulous bash, at the Greenhouse Restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, they noticed a woman in a beret and smoking a cigarette seated by herself in the corner. Was it a mirage—or actually Joni Mitchell, their idealized muse, the subject of “Going to California”? It took a while for Jimmy to work up the nerve to approach her, but they wound up chatting for a while and exchanging phone numbers.
Abe Hoch recalled a party that Elton John threw in Malibu for director Bryan Forbes. “I brought David Cassidy and Warren Beatty, and Groucho was there,” he says. Groucho Marx sang a song called “Father’s Day,” after which Elton sat down at the piano and played through the entire Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player album. He just killed it. Afterward, Elton approached Abe and asked if he could help get Groucho to sign a picture he had of Margaret Dumont, the dowager straight lady of so many Marx Brothers movies. Elton claimed he was too shy to ask Groucho on his own.
“Who’s it for?” Groucho asked when Abe put the photo under his nose.
“Elton,” Abe said.
“Who the fuck is Elton?”
Abe replied, “Elton is the host of the party.”
“Oh,” Groucho’s face lit up, “the piano player. What’s his name?”
“Elton John.”
Groucho looked confused. “What a stupid fucking name. His last name is where his first name ought to be.”
So he autographed the photo: “To Elton John—Marx, Groucho.”
The life of a rock star in Los Angeles was always potentially precarious. Returning home one night, Benji Le Fevre noticed the lights on in Robert’s Malibu house. Benji was certain he’d turned them off before they’d left. “Just wait here a moment,” he suggested to Robert, who was stuck in a wheelchair in the back of an SUV.
Crawling up to a window, Benji peered inside. “Man, it was freaky,” he recalls. “There were two girls, with Robert’s clothes spread across the floor, and they were doing little rituals in the living room.”
Fortunately for Led Zeppelin, there was more of their security detail than coyotes lurking in the outlying Malibu brush, and in a flash the house was swarming with owl-eyed heavies. “It turned out to be a couple of the Manson girls,” says Phil Carlo, who helped to remove the perpetrators with a squad of rent-a-cops.
“There was a lot of tension about the period, all holed up in houses we didn’t really want to be in,” Peter Grant recalled. The main focus was supposed to be on music, coming up with songs for another album. But “it was an uphill struggle,” Grant admitted. “It was difficult in the writing and rehearsing stage.”
Jimmy and Robert had done their individual parts, but there was little communication between the two creative principals. Most days, Robert sat alone by his rain-soaked window, scratching out lyrics that were uncharacteristically autobiographical. Snatches of remorse and vitriol appeared in “The Wheelchair Song,” describing his car crash and subsequent exile from family and friends. “Tea for One” summed up his resentment about loneliness and being separated from his kids and Maureen, who was still recovering from her injuries. There was a scathing diatribe on the superficial Los Angeles lifestyle called “For Your Life,” which Robert described as “a sarcastic dig at one person in particular that I know who was a really good person but got swallowed up with the whole quagmire of the downhill slide,” a clear reference to Jimmy. Borrowing from the masters, as usual, he adapted a Blind Willie Johnson spiritual, “It’s Nobody’s Fault But Mine,” from an old Fontana EP he had called Treasures of North American Negro Music and inserted a line about having “a monkey on my back.”
