Led Zeppelin, page 53
But the atmosphere of the tour was strangely out of whack. In Minneapolis a few nights later, Led Zeppelin showed up at the Met Center an hour and ten minutes late. After the show, Jimmy got into a shouting match with the tour doctor, Larry Badgley, over Quaaludes that had gone missing from the doctor’s black bag. (Later Jimmy admitted, “I really did steal the Quaaludes from Dr. Badgley.”) They were late getting to St. Louis, too. And to Indianapolis. And to Louisville. And to Cleveland.
Bad behavior was ratcheting up the stakes. In Chicago, Bonzo destroyed his suite at the Ambassador, jettisoning the couch, end tables, air-conditioner, and television set ten stories onto the street below before demolishing an entire pool table by lifting it repeatedly and smashing it to smithereens. The damage added $5,100 to the room charge.
In Cleveland at the end of April, the rampaging reached epic proportions. At Swingos Hotel, an illustrious rock ’n roll pitstop, where every room had a different motif, “Led Zeppelin,” according to the Plain Dealer, “turned it into their own private Sodom and Gomorrah.”
“I was staying in the Bamboo Room,” recalls Danny Marcus, who joined the band’s entourage through the Midwest swing. “All four of them showed up in my room. They each grabbed a post of the bamboo four-poster bed and pulled them out until the mattress dropped. Bonzo’s post broke off, and he used it to whack at the bamboo fan until the blades broke off. They destroyed the entire room.” Everything was fair game. According to Jim Swingos, who owned the hotel, “They smashed light fixtures, walls, windows, mirrors—everything.” Bonzo then went from room to room, using that bedpost to inflict as much mayhem as was possible. The bill came to $13,000 just for damages.
“It goes as far as it does because it’s a laugh,” Robert explained. “We only do what we do because it’s fun.”
But it was hard to overlook the underlying current of anger. For a band that had been on top of the world for eight years and was admired—beloved—by untold numbers of fans, wealthy beyond means, doing a cool, creative job, the anger and hostility were incomprehensible.
Cocaine played a major role. There was so much of it on the tour—“boatloads of it,” according to a key member of the entourage, “and the more coke people did, the more paranoid and aggressive they got.” The music, too—or at least the tone it set. The fans had bought into the legend of the band’s bad behavior and acted accordingly. There were rioting and arrests in St. Paul, Minnesota, when hundreds of ticketless fans stormed the arena, and again in Cincinnati, where local papers reported that “legions of rowdy gatecrashers” battled with police, leading to more than a hundred arrests. In Miami, a thousand fans waiting to buy tickets vandalized the Orange Bowl and were tear-gassed by police. A second night in Cincinnati was marred by a fan’s death after he fell from the third tier in Riverfront Coliseum. Wherever Led Zeppelin went, the legend went with them.
Jimmy’s condition had changed; you could see it physically. He was an ethereally beautiful man, always super-skinny, but he’d become wraith-like; he ate less and less. And he started nodding out. He got sloppier onstage. By the time the band rolled into Detroit at the end of April 1977, Jimmy was a full-blown mess.
Led Zeppelin had an important date at the Silverdome, a mega-arena in Pontiac that held more than 75,000 people. For convenience, the band had registered at a classic seedy drive-in motel right next door to the facility. Jimmy had agreed to do a phone interview an hour before the concert.
“I went to his door and got no response,” recalled Janine Safer. “I knocked louder and louder—no response, nothing.” She got someone from the office to unlock the door. “There was a wing chair knocked over in his room, and Jimmy was sprawled on top of it, on the floor, unconscious. I slapped him a few times and got nothing. It was clear he’d OD’d.” She struggled him to his feet and dragged him around the floor until he gradually came to. He begged her to let him lie down and sleep. A few minutes later, Richard Cole arrived on the scene. He took one look at the situation and knew exactly how to handle it. Ricardo was dealing with heroin himself.
And so was Bonzo. He’d been nodding off onstage while playing tambourine during the acoustic set of the shows. Alcohol was not enough of a payload for him. His obsessive personality demanded a more potent kick. In Paris, during the tax exile, he’d begun snorting heroin. “We had three junkies on that tour,” says Janine Safer, “and a morbidly obese, profoundly unhappy manager snorting way too much cocaine.”
Were the concerts suffering as a result? Not if the reviews were any indication. Everywhere Led Zeppelin played, accolades followed. Newspaper headlines swelled with praise. zeppelin’s sheer power, ability, and show of integrity delight 20,000 fans in stadium . . . zep: no messing . . . zeppelin keeps audience in frenzy . . . zeppelin flies high . . . led zeppelin lands triumphantly . . . led zeppelin thrills packed house. About 20 percent of the time the band played brilliantly. About 60 percent of the time they put on a workmanlike show. Benji Le Fevre, who was stationed at the band’s soundboard, says, “I don’t think any of the shows on that tour were any good.” But the audience loved it 100 percent of the time. “With the kids, it was total infatuation.”
Things began to come apart on the second leg of the tour, which began in the South in mid-May. The rhythm of the shows, once a smooth, buoyant sail, had run aground. John Paul’s classical intro to “No Quarter” meandered for an excruciating twenty minutes, while Bonzo’s nearly half-hour drum solo sent fans winging to the refreshment stands. Jimmy’s playing, always a highlight of any show, lapsed into gratuitous displays of pyrotechnics that were often riddled with mistakes. “The tightness and precision of early days is gone,” noted one reviewer, “replaced by excess and sloppiness.” ( “I wonder if Page, Bonham and Jones realize how crowded the snack bars and rest rooms get every time they start into one of their solo jaunts,” the Los Angeles Times critic Robert Hilburn wryly noted of a later show.)
It all came down to what state Jimmy was in on any given night. “There were evenings, when it came to his solos, that I cried because he’d played so brilliantly, but there were many more times I cried when he played so badly,” recalls Le Fevre. “Twice, during those long, drawn-out spectacles, Robert didn’t leave the stage as he usually did. He just stood by the piano, glaring at Jim with a stare that said, What the fuck are you doing?”
The reviews started to pick up on the ruptured vibe. In Fort Worth, where Bad Company’s Mick Ralphs appeared with the band to juice up the encore, the Star-Telegram’s critic asserted, “Their 1977 tour is tedious to a fault.” Aubrey Powell—Po—who caught the show from backstage, says, “It was the worst concert I’d ever seen. They weren’t together, Jimmy was not on it, and the sound wasn’t good—the audience wasn’t having it.” At the Capital Centre, outside Washington, DC, the reviews were brutal. The Washington Post’s reporter called the show “polished but uninspired” and the band “lazy and self-centered.” The Washington Star, usually a more forgiving authority, observed, “Rarely has a major rock act come through Washington and played as badly, with as little feeling, as Led Zeppelin did last night. The entire evening had all the trappings of a concert by a group that is on the slide but hasn’t realized it.”
Eyewitnesses pointed to “a very wasted-looking Page.” There was no disguising Jimmy’s condition. He looked emaciated, frail, at times unkempt and abstracted, his drug problem no longer simply kept under wraps. His playing was so ragged that a reviewer in North Carolina expressed his unqualified disgust. “Jimmy Page ought to be ashamed of himself. Was Page drunk? Was this an off-night?” During “The Song Remains the Same,” which he played on his double-neck Gibson, “he’d have the chord shape on the twelve-string, and he’d be strumming the six-string,” which had happened other times, while Robert looked on, cringing.
Bonzo’s playing was similarly affected by drugs, with missed beats and choppy syncopation. “I didn’t realize how bad off Bonzo was,” says Phil Carson, who saw him fall asleep on his drum kit one evening. Usually lionized for his technical excellence on the drums, the slipshod execution began catching up with Bonzo. A respected reviewer chastised him as “the clumsiest and most simpleminded percussionist in any major rock group.” Another complained, “He can barely keep 4/4 time.” Almost every review sought the demise of “Moby Dick.”
Robert and Jonesy began pairing off from their mates. On days off, they hung out with Danny Marcus, Atlantic’s facilitator, steering clear of Jimmy and Bonzo’s escalating drug activities. They also put distance between themselves and Grant, Richard, and Bindon, who were stoking fear and mistrust among the inner circle. “Everybody was nervous,” said Sam Aizer, Swan Song’s Bad Company liaison, who joined the tour for the Texas gigs. “ ‘Should I stand here?’ ‘Did you see that?’ ‘What’s he looking at?’ It was a constant look-over-your-shoulder.”
“Jonesy especially stayed away from the madness,” says Michael Des Barres. “He seemed disgusted by the whole seamy business. You could tell the camaraderie was coming apart.”
“Robert and Jonesy enjoyed each other’s company because it was the only company they had,” says Benji Le Fevre. “Their pals were too fucked up. I don’t know if the camaraderie had gone, so much as one half of the camaraderie had drowned under the influence of drugs. It was a sad fucking thing to witness.”
The atmosphere grew darker on the way to Florida. Caesars Chariot flew with a full cabin of passengers. Po, the Hipgnosis designer, had joined the tour, as had John Bindon’s girlfriend, Vicki Hodge, who proceeded to do a cartwheel down the aisle of the plane in her miniskirt-and-no-undies getup, amusing the boys in the peanut gallery. G made sure everyone had a line or two of coke to settle flight fear, but nerves in general were jumpy.
Bindon was fulminating about an incident that had occurred in the Speakeasy in London with Steve O’Rourke, the manager of Pink Floyd. “Johnny had stolen money out of the trunk of Steve’s car and was seriously planning to kill Steve,” said Po, who wondered what “a well-known villain” was doing in Led Zeppelin’s entourage. “Peter knew Bindon would follow through on the threat and changed my seat on the plane so I couldn’t be construed as an accomplice.”
Bindon was increasingly hyper. He was itching for a fight, some kind—any kind—of altercation that would allow him to engage in violence. Rage radiated off of him. He scared the hell out of people. There was an uneasiness on board that flight, courtesy of John Bindon, that cast a pall over the collective spirit.
The weather added to the anxiety. The weather report for Tampa was not encouraging. It was steamy hot in the city, and afternoon thunderstorms were forecast by the National Weather Service. Peter Grant was reasonably comfortable with the situation because Led Zeppelin’s contract with the promoter specifically stated that a metal roof would be constructed over the stage. He took extra precautions because he remained freaked out by the memory of Leslie Harvey, Stone the Crow’s guitarist, being electrocuted during a concert. But there was an added, unexpected wrinkle.
“We were flying to the gig and Cole showed me the ticket for the gig, which clearly stated: ‘Come Rain or Shine,’ ” Grant recalled. Below that was written: “Good This Date Only.” This meant there was no provision for rescheduling the show if weather intervened. “This was a big mistake.” If, for any reason, the band couldn’t perform, seventy thousand ticket holders would be extremely disappointed—irate was more like it.
The signs were discouraging from the get-go. It had rained earlier in the afternoon before the sun returned full strength. Fans had been sitting—baking—in Tampa Stadium for three or four hours. “By the time the band was ready to go on,” Po said, “you could see it getting darker and darker. Lightning flashed all over the place.” And Peter Grant was hopping mad. The roof over the stage was canvas, not metal.
Janine Safer, who had decided to watch the show from the audience instead of her usual backstage perch, had misgivings about the crowd, which was enormous, packed tightly together, and hot, uncomfortably hot. “There was also a massive police presence,” she says, “far more than I recall seeing at any other show—and they were in full riot gear. Huh?”
The heavens opened up twenty minutes into Led Zeppelin’s show, a blistering downpour. Benji Le Fevre, who was monitoring the soundboard, says, “The canvas roof over the stage had been put up in such a way that it had gathered an enormous lake of water in it.” The band was in the middle of playing “Nobody’s Fault But Mine.” According to Peter Grant, “I quickly actioned Robert to wind it up, and we ran off stage.”
“Everybody into the dressing room!” Richard barked, commanding the action like a demented general. “Fucking get in there quick!”
G argued ferociously with the promoter, who felt the band could return once the rain had stopped. Peter agreed to comply, but only after he tried sending two fighter jets into the air to determine whether there was a break in the clouds. Clearly, his concept of Led Zeppelin’s importance had gotten away from him.
“There were about twenty thousand kids sitting on the grass who started getting really uptight once they sensed the band wasn’t coming back,” recalls Le Fevre, who had moved to safety at the right of the stage. The police, using megaphones, ordered the sound crew to lie down behind the speaker cabinets, cover their heads, and not get up. “All of a sudden, the riot cops came charging in around the crash barriers in front of the stage—they were just swinging batons, clubbing kids, laying into everybody. It was brutal, frightening.”
It was a bloodbath, the kind of carnage Led Zeppelin had witnessed at the Velodromo Vigorelli in Milan in 1971. There was no way the band would return to the stage, not under those conditions. G ordered everyone into the limousines for an immediate getaway. There was panic at first: Jonesy’s car was missing; the driver had gotten lost with John Paul’s wife and children in it.
Fortunately, the airport was close to the stadium. Caesars Chariot had been alerted and was idling on the tarmac, ready to take off as soon as its passengers were buckled in. Everyone piled onto the plane, nervously eyeing the airport perimeter. “The crowd had followed us from the stadium and were trying to break through the fences,” Po recalled. “We could see them through the portholes in the plane. They felt Led Zeppelin was deserting them, and they were pissed.”
The city was of the same frame of mind. Tampa’s mayor not only refused to grant permission for a makeup date, he went one step further. “Led Zeppelin will not perform in Tampa again,” he decreed. “There will be no future concerts scheduled by that group. We have to protect the health and welfare of the police officers as well as the citizens of Tampa.”
Peter Grant wasn’t overly concerned. There were myriad places for Led Zeppelin to perform, cities that would welcome the income and prestige derived from their shows. Tampa might have been a bust, but Led Zeppelin was richer for the experience. G invited a few guests into his stateroom at the back of the plane and dumped the contents of his holdall onto the bed. He’d taken a page out of the Chuck Berry playbook, the one that said “Make sure to get paid before you go on.” He tossed a fistful of the $1 million in cash into the air.
“At least we got the fucking money,” he said.
Chapter Twenty
A TRANSITION PERIOD
[1]
Led Zeppelin fixed on America’s two coasts in an effort to regroup and pump fresh enthusiasm into their 1977 tour.
New York was an obvious place to hunker down after the catastrophe in Tampa. Manhattan was a psychological pick-me-up for a band on the road. Jimmy Reed said it best: Bright lights, big city. There was always something exciting going on, fascinating people, and they could walk on the streets without security shadowing every step. Even better, the band could reconnect with friends and resume their hedonistic lifestyles.
They had three days off before opening a six-show stretch at Madison Square Garden, a place every group loved to play. Robert and Jonesy killed time poking through record shops and bookstores. Robert treated himself to Big Macs at McDonald’s, one of his favorite pastimes, and a shiny new Lincoln Mark IV with red-leather interior. Jimmy mostly slept through the days and spent the nights in clubs, cavorting with Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards. “Keith was the last guy Jimmy should have hung out with,” says Janine Safer. Bonzo also slipped further into addiction. “I went to visit him one afternoon at the Plaza [Hotel], where the band was staying,” Po recalls, “and he was in terrible shape, incoherent and nodding out. It was obvious he’d done some smack in addition to binge-drinking.” In his more lucid hours, Bonzo once again overcame boredom by heaving furniture out the hotel window, a stunt that may have been tolerated in Chicago and Cleveland, but not at the courtly Plaza. The band was barred from ever staying there again.
The bullshit was starting to get to Robert. “I see a lot of craziness around us,” he complained in an interview from that time. “Somehow, we generate it and we revile it. This is an aspect, since I’ve been away from it, which made me contemplate whether we are doing more harm than we are good.”
It was certainly worthy of his consideration. Tampa had unnerved him. It was one thing to deal with an excitable crowd, another to admit you had helped set off the violence. Would things have been different had they shown up on time—or returned to the stage after the rain had stopped? Could they have helped to calm the volatile situation if Jimmy and Bonzo were together enough to deal with a crowd? Had John Bindon’s presence infected the entire atmosphere?
