Led Zeppelin, page 52
One afternoon Peter arrived without notice. “He looked awful,” Brown says, “like he’d been sleeping under a bridge. He went into his office and closed the door. I was trying to get as many calls to him as I possibly could.” At some point, G’s son Warren called. “I told him, ‘Your dad’s on the phone. Let him get some of these business calls out of the way. As soon as he comes up for air, I’ll give him the message that you called.’ ”
When Brown told Peter that Warren’s call hadn’t been put through, “he went ballistic,” she says. He called her a cunt, said he’d have her head for this. He was so furious, even Richard Cole fled the room. Brown calmly leashed the two dogs she brought to the office with her, grabbed her handbag, and marched out the door. “I can’t do this anymore,” she said. “I have too much self-respect.” Grant let her go without so much as a word. They had worked together intimately for more than ten years. She never heard from him again.
Peter had turned the running of Swan Song over to a friend of Jimmy’s named Alan Callan. Callan, competent and personable like Danny Goldberg and Abe Hoch before him, was given no mandate and no real authority. “Call Peter and discuss what it’s all about,” Jimmy advised him. That was a typical blind alley, during which G and Callan “just talked and laughed about stuff.”
Callan’s goal was to sign two artists to Swan Song: Vangelis, the progressive-electronic music composer who collaborated on projects with Yes’s vocalist, Jon Anderson; and John Lennon, who at the time was bumping around his Dakota apartment compound in New York, supposedly baking bread and tending to his son Sean. Callan and G spent a few days at Horselunges bombarding Lennon with messages—to no avail. Vangelis eventually signed with RCA and Lennon with David Geffen’s label.
Callan realized soon enough that Swan Song was all about Led Zeppelin. The other artists on the roster—Bad Company, Maggie Bell, the Pretty Things, Detective, and Dave Edmunds—were window dressing, “signed as a musical adventure,” he acknowledged. If they made money, like Bad Company, so much the better, but Led Zeppelin was the motor—and for that matter, the chassis and the wheels—that drove the label. And the new 1977 model, much like its well-admired predecessor, was about to be unveiled on February 27, 1977, in Fort Worth, Texas.
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In early December 1976, the band got serious about toning up for the tour. “The first task was to clean off the rust,” Jimmy said, “after eighteen months without being on stage.” He was concerned about stamina and “the fatigue aspect” of playing three-and-a-half-hour shows on a nightly basis. The schedule, as G had formulated it, allowed for a three-days-on, one-day-off routine in order to keep the endurance level strong throughout.
Mostly, during rehearsals, they concentrated on the repertoire. They had eight albums to draw from—a wide variety of material—and strove to introduce a number of songs from Presence while reuniting with favorites from the past. “Achilles Last Stand,” “Candy Store Rock,” and “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” won immediate approval. So did “Ten Years Gone” from Physical Graffiti, which they’d never played live before due to the challenge of all the guitar overdubs. To attempt it, John Paul had a special three-neck guitar made so he could synchronize with Jimmy to create the “feel” of the original song. Of course, the epics—“Stairway to Heaven” and “Kashmir”—would be given pride of place. And for nostalgia, they worked on new versions of “The Battle of Evermore” (with Jonesy grudgingly singing the Sandy Denny part) and “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” accompanied by pedal steel guitar.
“Trampled Under Foot,” “Whole Lotta Love,” and “Rock and Roll” were added as insurance to raise the roof at key moments. To appease Bonzo, “Moby Dick” stayed in the set, although it had become something of an albatross by this time.
No concession was made to the rumblings generated by punk or what was being referred to as “new wave,” punk’s friendlier, more accessible cousin, which would soon establish the Police, Elvis Costello & the Attractions, Squeeze, Blondie, and the Talking Heads in the foreground of popular music. Led Zeppelin had an eagle eye trained on these upstarts.
Robert loved the punk movement. “It was marvelous,” he said, “especially if you discounted the lack of originality in most of it.” But he appreciated punk’s “year zero” mentality, which dismissed everything that came before in rock ’n roll. “I could understand that because it wasn’t that much earlier I’d felt exactly the same, especially about English rock ’n roll, which was always so flaccid.” Robert knew the score. “To a large degree, the punks were right,” he said. “Groups like Deep Purple and Black Sabbath had lost the point, if they ever had it.” He was insightful when it came to Led Zeppelin’s durable life span—and its inevitable mortality. “You can’t be in the youth club forever.”
John Paul Jones, on the other hand, couldn’t have been less interested. Punk offended his trained-musician sensibility, “it just sounded loud and horrible,” and he was unwilling to concede Led Zeppelin’s relevance to the revolutionary scene. “For us, it was just a case of carrying on regardless,” he said. “We could still turn our hand to that high-energy stuff and have great fun in the process.”
BP Fallon, the PR elf who seemed to lock onto every scene of the moment, had landed at Stiff Records, an emerging independent record company concentrating on punk and new wave, and invited Jimmy and Robert to see the Damned, one of the label’s rising stars, on a twin bill with Eater. On January 13, 1977, the two Led Zeppelin front men slunk into the Roxy, a converted fruit and vegetable warehouse in Covent Garden, hoping to avoid being recognized.
Glen Matlock, who played bass for the Sex Pistols, encountered Robert and Jimmy at the bar between acts. “Everybody was winding everybody up,” he recalled. “ ‘What are those old hippies doing here?’ ”
“I was aware there was a bit of nudging going on from the audience when they saw us in there,” Jimmy admitted, “but we felt very comfortable. And when the Damned kicked off it was absolutely fantastic. You felt this wall of sound pressing down on you.”
The band was hyperkinetic—mad. They didn’t play so much as attack—bam! bam! bam!—at a volume that gave Led Zeppelin a run for its money, but without all the fuss. “It was phenomenal,” Jimmy declared. “The energy coming off them nailed you to the wall.”
Four nights later Robert went back for seconds, this time taking John Bonham along. Beep had called ahead to give the Roxy a heads-up about the VIPs, but the doorman pointed Robert and Bonzo to the back of the queue and insisted they fork over cash for their tickets. It was punk all right, but the point was made. There’d be no limos waiting at the stage door after the show.
According to Brian James, the Damned’s guitarist, “[Bonzo] was out of his head, drinking vodka all night.” At some point, he jumped onstage and challenged the band’s drummer, Chris Millar, who went by the name Rat Scabies, to play longer than the two-and-a-half-minute songs that flew by without solos. At the end of the short set, Bonzo shouted, “Where’s the fucking band gone? They’ve only been playing for fifteen minutes—we play for three fucking hours because we’re real men, not a bunch of wimps! Get the band up there without that Mouse Scabies. I’ll show him how to play drums!”
A chant of “Fuck off!” emanated from the crowd as Bonzo was ushered roughly off the stage. “Piss off you old hippie!”
Robert had famously referred to Rolling Stone as “mainlining Geritol” and its writers as “old farts.” Now he was getting a taste of his own medicine.
The punk bands put up a take-no-prisoners front, but they exhibited a sense of humor about themselves. Robert recalled how, one night, John Lydon—the Sex Pistols’ notorious Johnny Rotten—“fawned at my feet in mock respect.” And when the Damned were invited to visit Led Zeppelin at Manticore Studios, they actually showed up, expressing considerable respect. Rat Scabies even grinned when Bonzo pinned him against the wall and said, “Listen you little fucker, I used to be that fast!”
They’d had their fun. They’d endured Switzerland, Jersey, Malibu, France, Munich, Morocco, even Greece. They’d banked their tax savings. They’d made a new album, released a documentary film and a soundtrack. They remained out of the public eye and they’d come out whole on the other end. But to a man, the members of Led Zeppelin knew it was time to get back on the horse. As Robert Plant noted: “After two years off, there’s nothing in the world I want to do more than get on that stage.”
Jimmy was fired up. “The last day of rehearsal was pure magic,” he recalled, “and I thought, ‘Right, we’re going to have a go. We’ve got the stamina to play ten hours straight.’ ”
At long last they were ready. They were going to perform.
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But not so fast. A week before the tour was set to launch, Robert spent a few days relaxing at the cottage in Wales. “I was in the hills when I woke up one morning with soreness in my throat.” He knew right away: laryngitis and a fever. “Oh, good Lord,” he thought, “isn’t there any end to this?”
He couldn’t sing—let alone travel. It meant postponing the tour at least a month and scrambling to reschedule concerts. Jimmy was demoralized, flustered, “pacing around like a caged lion.” His guitars had already been shipped overseas, leaving him with only a dulcimer to pluck, strum, or bow. “After the postponement, I didn’t touch a guitar for four weeks,” he said.
The beloved Starship was another casualty. The jet had been grounded at an airport in Long Beach, California, after encountering engine failure in midflight. Its return to service was uncertain. Fortunately, there was a similar jet available—Caesars Chariot, owned by Caesars Palace, the Las Vegas casino. It was every bit as posh, up to Led Zeppelin’s standards. Richard Cole provisioned it with the usual inventory of liquor and delicacies and had it waiting to transport everyone to the first gig, in Dallas on April 1, 1977.
The entourage that arrived in Texas instilled an ominous note. Some new faces raised an alarm that the nature of the tour had taken an ugly turn. “There were bodyguards everywhere,” according to Jaan Uhelszki, one of Creem’s cofounders, who wrote often about Led Zeppelin. Don Murfet, the fear-inspiring security head, had a crew of itchy goons. Peter had hired Rex King, an ex–rug fitter with a stony, no-nonsense disposition, to keep Bonzo out of trouble—or at least limit his mischief such that it would protect him from himself. Robert had his own new tail, Maggie Bell’s former roadie Dennis Sheehan, another no-nonsense minder who didn’t suffer fools or indulge hotheads like Ricardo. Two other faces that spelled trouble belonged to Steve Weiss, Peter Grant’s slit-eyed Salieri, and the notorious John Bindon, whom friends called Biffo.
“I couldn’t really figure out what Bindon was doing on the tour,” said Dave Northover, whose job was tending to John Paul Jones. As far as anyone could tell, Biffo attached himself to Grant as his alter-ego bodyguard, armed to take issue with any irritant that needed trodding on. “Peter liked to think of himself as a gangster,” says Phil Carson, “so having Bindon around satisfied that urge.” He was also a clown, a court jester with an untapped reserve of funny stories. “But mostly he wasn’t funny,” says Benji Le Fevre. “He traded in intimidation, and there were times I saw him swing a fist for no apparent reason.” The unwritten rule was to stay out of Bindon’s way.
There were written rules, too. Anyone from the rock press or print media who was invited to accompany the Led Zeppelin road show received a printed form that laid out ground rules:
Never talk to anyone in the band unless they first talk to you.
Do not make any sort of eye contact with John Bonham. This is for your own safety.
Do not talk to Peter Grant or Richard Cole—for any reason.
Keep your cassette player turned off at all times unless conducting an interview.
Never ask questions about anything other than music.
Most important, understand this—the band will read what is written about them. The band does not like the press, nor do they trust them.
The crew was given the same set of instructions.
Led Zeppelin tuned out the cosmetic changes. In Dallas, they were focused obsessively on getting back into the spotlight—not only performing but reclaiming their old lives. They wanted to play, to see if they still had the power.
“Everyone was excited because the Butter Queen was there,” recalls Janine Safer, Led Zeppelin’s press officer for the tour. Barbara Cope was a well-known rock ’n roll groupie in the South, a hefty woman with a big personality, so nicknamed for her fond use of a stick of oleo during sex. “Was she the band’s friend? No,” Safer says. “Would they sleep with her? Yes. But more than the sex, they looked forward to seeing her because she was a familiar face. That was the peculiar, insular world they’d constructed for themselves.”
The Butter Queen was given VIP status backstage before the Dallas show, but the band was too wrapped up in the moment to pay much attention to anything but the task ahead. Despite being old troopers, their hearts were in their throats. Robert, especially, suffered opening-night jitters. “I was petrified,” he recalled. “For the ten minutes before I walked up those stage steps, I was cold with fright.” His right foot, which was swollen and tender, was killing him. It felt like an anchor. Supposing he couldn’t move properly, was unable to stalk the stage like the virile Robert Plant everyone expected to see? “I was so nervous,” he said, “that I almost threw up.”
The roar of the crowd and the glare of the lights succeeded in sweeping the jitters aside. From the opening notes of “The Song Remains the Same,” the old Led Zeppelin machinery clicked into place. Robert became unglued, “swirling . . . strutting . . . his amplified voice rolling up through the octaves.” Jimmy danced from foot to foot like a demented leprechaun—he called it his “psycho strut”—wielding his guitar with gladiatorial panache. The rhythm section, never a chink in the machinery, did its level best to keep the beat, despite a bum PA system that buzzed without mercy.
The sequence of songs gave the band time to find its swing. There was a variable mix of rhythms through “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” to “In My Time of Dying” to “Since I’ve Been Loving You” to “No Quarter.” “I could feel tenseness in my throat for the first couple of songs,” Robert said. “I kept telling myself to loosen up.” Jimmy, too, took time to hit his stride, fumbling a lead here, a solo there in the opening moments. “Since I’ve Been Loving You” began uncharacteristically out of sync, but the band recovered nicely, building to a fine, dramatic climax.
One could judge the outcome by the expressions on the musicians’ faces. As the rust came off, as the butterflies flew away, they acknowledged the triumph, cutting grins at each other. “The whole show possessed an element of emotionalism that I’ve never known before,” Robert confessed. Led Zeppelin was back. They were in near-peak form. Three hours later, there was no question about stamina.
The reviews were, for the most part, glowing. The Dallas Morning News called the show “amazingly professional—loose, easygoing, but never sloppy.” And the Los Angeles Times, recognizing the importance of the event, flew Robert Hilburn, the paper’s pop music savant, to Texas, where he documented “a stirring performance that reassured both the group and its fans about Zeppelin’s ability to continue.”
But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. A week later, in Chicago, things went sideways. The band moved into Chicago’s Ambassador East hotel for a four-night stand in the city and as a base to gigs in Minneapolis, St. Louis, Louisville, and Detroit. “The mood was ugly,” recalled Jack Calmes, Showco’s sound-and-lighting impresario. Jimmy appeared dressed in storm-trooper regalia, with a braided magenta waistcoat, military jodhpurs, sunglasses, peaked visor cap, knee-high jackboots, the works. Backstage at Chicago Stadium, he was prancing around and goose-stepping.
“We’ve got a new Jimmy Page,” Robert announced snarkily. “He’s the leader again, the führer of the Fourth Reich.”
No one knew what possessed him to wear the tasteless uniform. Was it the effect of seeing the Damned at the Roxy, a punk statement? There was nothing in his character that pointed to Nazi sympathies. He wasn’t political. He was flamboyant, sure, but never outrageous. Everyone in the organization, including the other band members, looked at him with an expression that read: What the fuck are you wearing?
It got weirder and uglier. Because of that persistent PA buzz during the first part of the set, Jimmy threw a trash can at one of the technical crew. The next night, during the acoustic interlude, he leaned his guitar against an amp, walked to the side of the stage, and spit in the face of a sound man. The atmosphere turned dark—and tense.
The third night in Chicago, April 9, 1977, was one for the record books. It began badly, with Jimmy playing “Since I’ve Been Loving You” while the band broke into “In My Time of Dying.” In general, his guitar work was sloppy, the syncopation jagged. Forty-five minutes into the concert, Jimmy sat down, clutching his stomach, smack in the middle of “Ten Years Gone.”
“Jimmy has got a bout of gastroenteritis,” Robert announced, explaining they were going to take a five-minute break. But ten minutes later, Richard Cole grabbed the mic, canceling the rest of show.
Jimmy attributed the ailment to food poisoning, although rumors circulated that it was drug related. “He definitely wasn’t Junkie Jim at that point,” says Janine Safer, who was backstage during the show. “He was on a weird diet, drinking odd smoothie concoctions which might have been the cause.” Since arriving in the States, his meals had been entirely liquid—bananas and vitamins with a daiquiri mix that he whipped up in a blender. Might Jimmy’s problem have been caused by the smoothie and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, or the smoothie and a Quaalude, or the smoothie and something stronger? It was anyone’s guess.
