Led Zeppelin, page 54
It was imperative that Led Zeppelin change up the tempo, beginning with their performances in New York City. It was the hottest ticket in town—hotter than Annie at the Alvin Theatre. The New York Swan Song office was besieged with requests. “Every single celebrity in the entire goddamn world seemed to decide that day they wanted to see Led Zeppelin that night.” Key press would attend, major broadcast media, record-company bigwigs, the most important names in rock ’n roll. It was like appearing in front of the Supreme Court. Even Jimmy and Bonzo understood that scoring with the New York audience was vital to the band’s reputation. “Before each of the shows, we met in the Oyster Bar or Trader Vic’s and hung out for a while before getting into the limos,” Janine Safer recalls. “It was clear the guys were looking forward to playing, showing everyone they were still the best damn band in the world.”
New York audiences, as everyone knew, weren’t as forgiving as those elsewhere. Shows were expected to begin on time, at 8:00 p.m., exactly as advertised. Keep New Yorkers waiting half an hour and they’d likely be into their second drink at Ashley’s or Maxwell’s Plum.
It said something about Led Zeppelin’s stature that at nine fifteen, when the lights finally went down, everyone was still in their seats. And a good thing, too, because the Garden shows were as good as it got—“spellbinding,” in the opinion of a hard-nosed critic, delivered with “such an exciting edge.” The band was light on its feet, “good-natured and almost puckish.” Jimmy, decked out in a white embroidered suit, stretched out his solos as if he were getting paid by the note; otherwise he was on top of his game. His playing “was positively kaleidoscopic,” according to The New York Times. Robert had never sounded stronger or as fresh, especially during the acoustic set. Jonesy and Bonzo’s deep-in-the-pocket rhythm section added a puncture-proof, muscular backbeat. “Kashmir” was a knockout. “Whole Lotta Love” and “Rock and Roll” succeeded in bringing down the house. John Rockwell, the Times’s buttoned-down critic, whose tastes ran to artsier fare, felt it “was the best Led Zeppelin show this observer has ever heard . . . a triumphant reassertion” of the band’s preeminence.
The shows on the West Coast were as spellbinding—maybe better, “some of the finest concerts in their history,” according to a keen observer. “L.A. is our spiritual home,” Robert declared from the stage of the Forum, and there wasn’t anyone who sought to take issue with that.
Led Zeppelin always seemed to end up in Los Angeles. The city was where their reputation had become legend, and they were not content to let it stand without a good embroidering. Evenings at the Rainbow and the Whisky were typically riotous affairs, attracting a full retinue of slightly older groupies. “They were a mystery to me,” says Janine Safer, “but I adopted the band’s view that these girls weren’t quite human. I certainly never thought of them as sentient.”
Lori Mattix was still on Jimmy’s dance card. He sent Betty Iannaci, an Atlantic Records receptionist, to pick her up at a motel room in Westwood, where she was now living with her mother. “I felt so conflicted,” Iannaci says. “She was a young teenage girl who looked and acted like she was twenty-five, wearing a $300 beaded-crystal dress. It was clear that her mother was grooming her for a night out with Jimmy Page. And I knew he was mixing it up with heroin.”
LA meant it was party time. Swan Song and Atlantic rented a fabulous house in one of the canyons and packed it with a guest list of relatively high-profile friends, everyone from Roger McGuinn, Keith Moon, and Rod Stewart to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. It was a glittery champagne-and-cocaine affair that soon devolved into debauchery. The company pulled out all the stops, somehow sensing this might be a send-off, the last time Led Zeppelin performed in LA.
“I brought along a friend unlike Lori, a thirty-five-year-old, successful woman who knew how to take care of herself,” says Betty Iannaci. Later, Peter Grant invited Iannaci’s guest to his room. “He had come into a large quantity of cocaine and was feeling very generous.” Eventually Betty’s friend wound up naked and handcuffed to the pipe under Grant’s bathroom sink so that, for an entire weekend, she was at the disposal of anyone who came in. Jimmy came across her almost by accident and, in an uncustomary show of gallantry, found a key to unlock the cuffs and helped her to escape.
The behavior on the West Coast, beyond outrageous, had reached a point of no return. Jimmy functioned admirably once he took to the stage but was pretty well knackered otherwise. Bonzo was so wasted, so starved for attention, that he acted out any chance he got. In one strange misadventure, for no apparent reason he bit a woman’s finger so hard it bled. Jonesy wisely adhered to the press guidelines: “Never talk to the band unless they talk to you first. Do not make eye contact with John Bonham.” Robert also made sure he kept his distance. On the tour plane, he buried his nose in a book, even if sometimes the book was upside down. The musicians no longer left gigs together. Each man had his own limo and they never rode with one another.
Management wasn’t providing any semblance of management. Richard Cole had ceded control of his authority to Quaalude, cocaine, and heroin. He took stupid chances, which he’d never done before. On an Air India flight from Heathrow to New York, he’d been arrested for creating a disturbance. And on July 17, 1977, on his way back to the States from a break in the tour, he was met at the Seattle airport by local police for general drug-induced bad conduct. Mick Hinton, Bonzo’s roadie, was a full-blown alcoholic and addict, as was Ray Thomas, Jimmy’s assistant. Peter Grant was another sad story. “Peter had lost it by then,” says Phil Carson, who was Grant’s lifeline to Atlantic Records and an unswerving admirer. “Cocaine had taken such a terrible toll on him that he wasn’t capable of dealing as shrewdly anymore.” He was tethered to John Bindon “and people still feared him,” but having Bindon around also made Grant vulnerable.
The confluence of misbehavior came to a head in Oakland, California, on July 23, 1977. Led Zeppelin was a featured headliner at the “Day on the Green” festival, a two-day extravaganza promoted by Bill Graham at the Oakland Coliseum. The band had arrived directly from a pair of lackluster dates—the Kingdome in Seattle and Arizona State University—where Jimmy’s and Bonzo’s conditions precluded efficient showmanship. Graham spared no expense at his events. There were plush trailers at the band’s disposal, a first-class banquet laid out, not the usual cold cuts curling at the edges. He even provided Led Zeppelin with an elaborate stage backdrop, a cringeworthy replica of Stonehenge. No one made much of it at the time, but it would haunt them ever after when Spinal Tap hit movie screens.
The show seemed to drag on forever. Led Zeppelin was late, as usual. The crowd had been waiting all day, then suffered through two pedestrian warm-up acts, Rick Derringer and Judas Priest. Led Zeppelin’s performance was a huge step up, and the band was inspired by the reception from their fans to play at peak form, “a rock legend come to life,” as The Oakland Tribune noted. Jimmy had been unresponsive before the show—“he was so loaded that they had to lead him up on the stage,” according to Graham’s production manager—but he found his sea legs during “The Song Remains the Same.”
While they were winding up the crowd, Peter Grant and John Bindon walked up the ramp toward the backstage area. It was set at a steep incline, and Jim Downey, one of Graham’s able stagehands, quipped, “Jeez, it’s a long way up that ramp.” Peter misinterpreted it as a dig at his girth and took offense. Without any provocation, Bindon threw a punch, knocking Downey out cold.
“Bindon had been spoiling for a fight from the second he got on that tour,” says Janine Safer. “He’d been walking around with his hands balled into fists. You could tell he was waiting for something—anything—to set him off.”
The assault on Downey whetted his appetite for a more violent encounter. It would not be long until he got his wish.
Shortly before the end of Led Zeppelin’s show, Grant’s eleven-year-old son, Warren, cruised the backstage caravan of Winnebagos that served as dressing rooms for the bands. “Bill Graham used to have these lovely hand-carved wooden dressing-room signs with the band’s name attached to the trailer door,” says Phil Carson.
“I thought it looked cool,” Warren said later. He began pulling Led Zeppelin’s sign off its mount.
Jim Matzorkis, one of Graham’s colleagues, happened to be walking by. He told Warren they needed the signs for the next day’s show. They had to remain on the door until then.
“I’m taking them,” Warren insisted.
“No you’re not,” Matzorkis said, and he took them from the boy.
Warren ran directly to his father and reported the incident, but he enhanced it. In his retelling, Matzorkis had slapped him and knocked him down.
“I had been standing right there,” recalls Janine Safer. “Nobody had slapped Warren Grant. I turned to John Bindon, who was whipping Peter up, and said, ‘Nothing happened. Nobody touched him!’ ”
Her exhortation fell on deaf ears. Bindon and Peter were pretty coked up and heard what they wanted to hear. “They were like two incendiary creatures,” Safer says.
Storm clouds had been brewing since they arrived at the site. Grant and Graham had a love-hate relationship, stemming from hard-nosed negotiations at early Fillmore shows—two self-styled tough guys used to having their own way. Steve Weiss, another hothead who had an antagonistic relationship with Graham, was part of Led Zeppelin’s entourage in Oakland. There was only slightly concealed hostility between the two factions from the moment they’d encountered each other that afternoon.
In fact, temperatures had begun rising a day before the show. Richard Cole had, on Grant’s orders, phoned Graham and demanded $25,000 in advance. Right now! And in cash. That wasn’t part of the deal. They were making hundreds of thousands of dollars for the weekend event. A cash advance late on a Friday afternoon, when the banks were already closed, seemed like an unsporting request, if not heartless. It felt like a shakedown. But Bill knew that if he didn’t comply, there was a good chance Led Zeppelin wouldn’t show. So he scrounged up the cash, stuffed it in three shoeboxes, and took it himself to the Miyako Hotel, where G was staying.
As soon as Graham walked into Peter’s suite, he got the whole picture. There was another man in the room, a character in a cowboy hat, someone Bill recognized as Oakland’s biggest drug dealer. “What I should have done was walk right out of there with the money,” Graham said, regretting his complicity as the bag man in an obvious drug deal. But he had too much invested in the two-day festival and couldn’t risk alienating Peter Grant.
As it was, Led Zeppelin’s set the next afternoon was neither their best effort nor their worst. Jimmy took some time to get going. He seemed disoriented, sticky-fingered. His myriad solos sounded too similar, one bleeding into the another. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, his playing “frequently did not make the kind of guitar sense that has established him for years as one of rock’s greatest stars.” But the rest of the band was in fine form, especially Robert, whose voice hadn’t sounded as strong in years. In any case, they covered all bases, playing a full three and a half hours, finishing with a tactical bombardment of hits: “Kashmir,” “Achilles Last Stand,” “Stairway to Heaven,” “Whole Lotta Love,” “Rock and Roll,” and “Black Dog”—one right after the other. The fans left not knowing what had hit them.
The same could be said of Jim Matzorkis, who was storing equipment in a trailer just behind the stage. As Led Zeppelin walked off, Peter Grant and John Bonham detoured to accost Matzorkis. “You don’t talk to my kid that way,” G fumed, working off a highball of anger that had been building throughout the afternoon. “Nobody does. Who do you think you are? Roughing this kid up. I’ll have your job.”
“No, you can’t have my job,” Matzorkis replied.
Before he could turn around, Bonzo strode up a few metal steps and planted a kick squarely in Matzorkis’s crotch, causing him to fall back into the trailer. Bonzo was about to go in for seconds when he was held off by his own security detail long enough for Matzorkis to scramble away and take cover in another trailer.
Shortly thereafter, Bill Graham sought out Grant, who was in a murderous, coke-induced rage. “Your man put his hands on my people. On my son,” G seethed. He insisted on meeting Matzorkis—“to make my peace with him and settle this.”
That was not a good idea. Graham had gotten a good look at Led Zeppelin’s security team and concluded they “were vicious fucking wild animals,” thugs who “were just waiting to kill.” He was more than familiar with Grant’s penchant for violence. He tried talking Peter down, trying to gain some assurance that no one was going to get hurt. “Do I have your word?” Graham asked. When Grant answered, “Yes,” they went to find Matzorkis.
Jim Matzorkis had withdrawn to another Winnebago. Graham unlocked the door, ushered Peter inside, and made introductions. Matzorkis reached out to shake Peter’s hand. In an instant, Grant pulled the man toward him, then hauled back and punched Matzorkis in the face with a fist covered in bulky metal rings. Graham tried to intercede, but as he recalled later, “he picked me up like I was a fly and handed me to the guy by the steps.” That guy was John Bindon, who now joined Grant inside the trailer. Richard Cole stood guard outside, with a length metal pipe as a weapon.
“Bill! Help me! Bill!” Matzorkis cried.
Bindon was wound up and in his element. Invigorated by cocaine, he put Matzorkis in a full nelson from behind while Peter Grant continued to punch him in the face. He knocked Jim’s tooth out, then kicked him in the balls. Bindon pummeled Matzorkis to the ground, jumped on him, and went for his eyes. Somehow the bloody, badly beaten man managed to break free and escape, which was when Graham’s security team arrived. They had gone to their cars to get guns out of the trunk and were ready to square off with Led Zeppelin’s posse. In any case, they intended to avenge their mate.
Graham had a problem. He wanted nothing more than to exact vengeance for what happened, but there was another sold-out concert the next day to think about. If there was a turf war and Led Zeppelin canceled their appearance, sixty thousand kids would exact their own brand of vengeance and the repercussions would be ruinous for Graham. The show had to go on; he ordered his men to back down, promising them he’d turn them loose afterward.
Led Zeppelin had fucked with the wrong guy this time. Bill Graham wasn’t about to let them get away with it.
* * *
—
Richard Cole hustled the band and the staff into waiting limousines and sped off to the Miyako Hotel. “We all attended a big powwow in Peter’s suite, a spin conversation,” recalls Janine Safer, the band’s press manager. Steve Weiss and Richard Cole were there. So was Steve Rosenberg, the head of Led Zeppelin’s security detail. “They were nervous, more than usually so. Peter was paranoid. They feared being busted by local law enforcement.”
Myriad charges could be leveled by Graham: Bonham, Grant, and Bindon for inciting assault, Cole for assault with a deadly weapon. Because Peter had been a professional wrestler, his fists were considered deadly weapons as well. Weiss immediately phoned George Fearon, the band’s outside counsel at Phillips Nizer. “Do we flee the jurisdiction?” Weiss wanted to know. “Do we turn ourselves in?” Everyone agreed, says Safer: “Let’s get out of Dodge.” “It’s the prudent thing to do.”
But Bill Graham had the exits covered. And Led Zeppelin’s limo drivers were his guys, who had driven for hundreds of his shows. They had been instructed to report any movement by the band’s people, especially if they tried heading to the airport.
For some unknown reason—perhaps a sense of obligation to fans, perhaps greed—Led Zeppelin decided to remain in Oakland and play the Sunday-afternoon concert. Steve Weiss called Graham to inform him that before showtime, he would have to sign a waiver stating no one could be sued for more than two thousand dollars for the incident at the stadium. And they were demanding Jim Matzorkis’s home address, because he was expected to sign a waiver as well. “Please understand,” Weiss made clear, “if that document is not signed, there may well be no performance.”
A team of civil lawyers was called by the head of Graham’s company to determine the validity of such a document. Sign it, they reported back. If it was signed under “economic duress . . . the signature’s not worth the paper it’s signed on.”
A half hour before the show on Sunday, Steve Weiss arrived at Graham’s trailer with the waiver. “Look, the boys got a little bit out of hand yesterday. We hope there are no hard feelings.” Graham signed it without a word.
Despite his compliance, Led Zeppelin arrived an hour and twenty minutes late. No one spoke to them or made any effort to get them situated. Peter Grant and Richard Cole couldn’t have cared less, but the band felt it. They had heard about the altercation and were exasperated by it. “There was a very nasty, heavy energy about the whole day,” Jimmy said. “It was getting very ugly behind the stage. . . . It was just abhorrent.”
Robert agreed. “It was an absolute shambles,” he recalled. He felt sad having to sing “Stairway to Heaven,” a song he cared deeply about, “in the shadow of the fact that the artillery that we carried with us was prowling around backstage with a hell of an attitude.” Robert made an effort to engage Bill Graham, who was too disgusted to respond. He genuinely liked Robert—they had sons the same age and, under normal circumstances, shared stories about them—but it was “good riddance” as far as Graham was concerned. He promised himself he’d never play Led Zeppelin again.
It was an easy promise to keep. It was the last concert Led Zeppelin ever performed in the United States.
* * *
—
Getting out of Dodge was not going to be easy. Bill Graham’s security team was headed by a retired San Francisco police sergeant who recognized the ex-cops on Led Zeppelin’s detail. Monday morning, a trio of cars converged on the Miyako Hotel. Details from the Oakland Police Department, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, and the California Highway Patrol came roaring in and surrounded the place. There was a face-off in the hotel lobby, with everyone flashing badges. It was explained as a fait accompli that Peter Grant, John Bindon, John Bonham, and Richard Cole were going to be arrested, and no one was leaving the hotel before that happened. It was advised that the four men surrender themselves so as not to require a full-scale police raid. An hour later they were led through the lobby in handcuffs, heads bowed, eyes averted. Graham made sure they were met at the police station by every TV reporter he could scrounge up.
