Led Zeppelin, page 58
Oddly, no consideration was given to the sea change occurring in British music, not even recognition that audiences’ attention spans had grown shorter. “In the era of the Jam and Stranglers,” wrote journalist David Hepworth, “this looked almost like historical reenactment.”
For all the highs and lows, the reviews were mostly upbeat. Only Rolling Stone complained that “the group sounded woefully complacent and anachronistic, even obsolete.” Sounds, whose reporter had been ostracized by Led Zeppelin, said, “I quite like them. . . . They gave value for money” and “honored memories of their great days,” owing to the rich cross section of material in the set. Melody Maker, of course, couldn’t contain its rapture, proclaiming Jimmy’s solos “absolutely outstanding,” on par with Jonesy’s piano piece. Praising and nitpicking aside, NME hit the nail on the head, saying, “Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham enjoyed themselves and showed it.”
Jimmy was ecstatic. “It was fantastic,” he concluded. Robert, however, was full of mixed feelings. In retrospect, he considered it “a shit gig.” He was hard on himself—“I wasn’t as relaxed as I could have been”—and hard on the band. “There was so much expectation there,” he said, “the least we could have done was to have been confident enough to kill.” He wasn’t sure what the outcome really meant over the long term. The band, he felt, “had been on its knees” before Knebworth. “After it was over, I don’t know if I was breathing a sigh of relief because we’d got to the end of the show in one piece—or whether we’d actually bought some more time to keep going.”
Peter Grant was certain of one thing: the turnout at Knebworth had been better than he’d expected, guaranteeing the second week’s performance. On August 7, a few days after the concert, he sent his accountant, Joan Hudson, to collect the balance of Led Zeppelin’s fee—in cash. Freddy Bannister said he didn’t have it. The official attendance record for the August 4 show was 104,000, with barely 40,000 advance sales for the following weekend. That didn’t wash with Peter’s numbers. He insisted that 250,000 had showed up and expected the band to be paid on that figure.
Unbeknownst to Bannister, Neal Preston, Led Zeppelin’s pet photographer, had been sent up in a helicopter to shoot images of the crowd. G claimed he’d sent Preston’s negatives to NASA, in the States, for analysis and that the space agency had confirmed his estimates.
Bannister and his wife, Wendy, arranged to meet with Peter at Horselunges to discuss their differences of opinion. G wouldn’t share the data from NASA, nor would he budge off his attendance claim, even though Bannister insisted that the site couldn’t handle that many people. Eventually, Peter lost his temper, “jumped up, and began waving his fist in [Wendy Bannister’s] face, yelling, ‘Don’t get smart with me,’ ” causing the Bannisters to flee.
The next morning, a shady, hollow-eyed character named Herb Atkin arrived unannounced at Bannister’s office with a plug of a retired London cop in tow. The promoter knew from appearances they were there to intimidate. John Bindon wasn’t available to do G’s dirty work. While Led Zeppelin had been in Stockholm recording In Through the Out Door, Bindon had gotten into a knife fight at Fulham’s Ranelagh Yacht Club and killed his adversary. In the fracas, Bindon was also stabbed in the back and chest, and he had fled the country with Peter Grant’s assistance. Herb Atkin was a more sinister version of Bindon, furtive, insidious. He purported to be an ex-CIA operative with strong mob connections in Miami and Chicago. In fact, The New York Times, in a 1969 article, had unmasked him as Herbert Itkin, a flamboyant FBI informer involved in the takedown of New York City political boss Carmine DeSapio and the arrest of mob figures and corrupt union officials. Itkin resurfaced from a witness protection program as Herb Atkin and fell in league with Steve Weiss. For over a year, they had been preying on Peter Grant’s cocaine paranoia with trumped-up stories about plots to kidnap G’s children and Led Zeppelin’s giving him the heave-ho as manager. Atkin also warned that a group of villains was plotting to rob the box office during the second weekend of Knebworth, which precipitated hiding loaded sawed-off shotguns in the bags of cash.
Atkin did his number on Bannister, who was frightened out of his skull. The next day, Peter and several heavies paid a late-night visit to Bannister’s home and left with £300,000 in cash. G still claimed his band was owed more money and announced that he was taking control of the box office for the second show. He hired cashiers who reported only to him, put them in charge of £30,000 worth of tickets, and stationed his own security team at the festival gates. Bannister had more or less thrown in the towel. “If they want the tickets, they can have the fucking tickets,” he told his assistant.
G wasn’t done putting his stamp on the event. When Fairport Convention dropped off the second weekend’s bill, he insisted Bannister book the New Barbarians, a ragged, poorly rehearsed jam band that Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood had cobbled together. They turned up in Knebworth with a bass player borrowed from Rod Stewart’s band at the last minute and a replacement drummer. It was a rather cynical attempt to cash in by the Barbarians, and cash was very much on their minds. Peter Grant advised them not to go on until they’d been paid in full by Freddy Bannister, so the aptly named Barbarians held up the show for two hours, until Richard Cole delivered £18,000 in small bills and sat in the band’s trailer, counting it into Woody’s hand.
Money wasn’t a substantial problem. Throughout the evening, bags were being stuffed full of cash—from ticket receipts and sales of T-shirts, caps, programs, and posters—for easy transport off the site. “Peter and Zeppelin had two hundred grand each in bags,” Richard recalled, “thrown into the back of their cars.”
Meanwhile, after the two-hour delay, Keith Richards still refused to come out of the Barbarians’ trailer. “He was in pretty bad shape,” says Maggie Bell, who was a guest of Peter Grant’s. She overheard G tell Cole, “Get him out of that fucking caravan, or I’m going to go over there and move him in the caravan.” When that didn’t produce the desired result, G rocked the trailer until the Barbarians tumbled out and headed to the stage.
In the big picture, the music that night was almost incidental. The band played well, more confident and tighter than the previous weekend. But it sounded mechanical, unconvincing. “It wasn’t horrendous,” Jimmy conceded in a dubious postmortem. And the crowd that turned out—no more than forty thousand people, tops—came away convinced they’d heard some badass rock ’n roll. But the handwriting was on the wall. Led Zeppelin’s drawing power wasn’t what it had been. Knebworth had been less of a comeback than a comedown to earth. The layoff had come at a heavy price. In the interim, music had moved on, gotten younger, more biting, less slick, while Led Zeppelin played pretty much the same set they’d performed at Earls Court four years earlier. It was unfashionable, nostalgia.
Drugs and money had corrupted the organization. Peter Grant had lost his singular charm, as well as his focus. Once the savviest of managers, his tactics had taken on the nature of a criminal enterprise—lawyers, guns, and money, as the maestro sang. Jimmy and Bonzo were pale vestiges of themselves, their immense talents plundered by substance abuse. Robert and Jonesy seemed adrift. Even Richard Cole, who’d always kept the trains running, was little more than an unhinged lackey. Ricardo was in serious shape. His marriage had fallen apart, he’d lost his enthusiasm for work. His interests, he said, were “caught up in a world where drugs were the most important thing in my life.”
It was a sorry situation. Ten years on the road seemed to have taught them little, certainly not how to deal with success or to survive, not even how to get along. Was it the end of the line for Led Zeppelin? Were they now a reflection in rock ’n roll’s rearview mirror? As musicians, as performers, the band felt rejuvenated after Knebworth but desperately in need of direction. With a new album set for release, with the guaranteed airplay and reviews, they seemed determined to play off the momentum and kick the old chassis back into gear.
[3]
But the gears ground slowly.
In Through the Out Door—released in its brown paper bag on August 22, 1979, a long week after Knebworth—was a commercial success but a critical disappointment. Competition was fierce, with press attention more fixed on the Clash’s London Calling, Reggatta de Blanc by the Police, Michael Jackson’s breakout Off the Wall, Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, the Talking Heads’ Fear of Music, Joe Jackson’s Look Sharp!, and The Wall by Pink Floyd. Led Zeppelin had waded into a crowded field. Only Record Mirror, a minor-league voice among the music press, called the album a “grand reunion.” Rolling Stone bemoaned the lack of memorable songs and said, “With Page’s creativity apparently failing and no one able to compensate—even Led Zeppelin is not Led Zeppelin.” The Sounds critic, who was forced to buy his own review copy as a result of a silly Led Zeppelin vendetta against the magazine, delivered a crushing critique. “I’m sad, disillusioned, downhearted,” he wrote. “It’s the end of an era. The dinosaur is finally extinct.”
The most unexpected and cutting judgment, however, came from Melody Maker, which sharpened knives for the occasion. Rather than the review being handed off to faithful Chris Welch, as was the standard drill, it was left to Chris Bohn, a younger postpunk enthusiast, who wasn’t hewing to the paper’s party line. “The performances are generally dull,” he concluded, not pulling any punches. “Zeppelin are totally out of touch. . . . It’s time they accepted their fate like men. They squeezed their lemons dry long ago.”
Knocks like that hurt, but Led Zeppelin licked their wounds by limiting reading to Atlantic’s sales figures. The album racked up the same stellar numbers as their previous efforts and rose straight to the top of the charts on every continent. By the end of September, Atlantic had shipped three million copies. It also spurred sales of their entire back catalog, with all eight of their previous albums elbowing onto Billboard’s “Top Albums” chart the week of October 27, an unprecedented coup. They also took heart from Melody Maker’s annual Readers Poll Awards. Considering the paper’s review of In Through the Out Door and the band’s general malaise, Led Zeppelin wasn’t expecting much in the way of a response. In fact they were named Best Live Act, Band of the Year, Best Album, Best Guitarist, Best Composer, Best Producer, and Best Male Vocalist—seven out of the twenty awards.
The unexpected sweep prompted Jonesy, Robert, and Bonzo to show up to acknowledge the honors at a gala hosted by Melody Maker on November 28, 1979, at the Waldorf in London. Bonzo and John Paul arrived in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, confirmation to the new-wave upstarts, perhaps, that Led Zeppelin lived in their own bubble. Jimmy was conspicuously absent. Excuses were made that he was vacationing in Barbados, when in fact he was appearing in front of a magistrate at an inquest in Sussex.
On October 24, in the wake of a party at Jimmy’s Plumpton house, a twenty-four-year-old photographer named Philip Churchill Hale had collapsed and died. “It was the usual thing—drugs and drinking,” says Unity MacLean, who got a heads-up at the Swan Song office. Don Murfet, head of Peter’s security detail, was dispatched to “clean up” the scene—in other words, get rid of any drugs and make sure there was no evidence implicating Jimmy. “I arrived at the same time as the police,” Murfet recalled, so all he could do was to contain the damage to the guest room, where the body was found.
Jimmy managed to clear himself at the inquest, the final verdict ruling it an “accidental death” despite the autopsy revealing lethal doses of alcohol and cocaine, but as soon as it was over, he moved out of Plumpton and put the house on the market, replacing it with a retreat in Windsor he bought from Michael Caine.
The best way to stay out of trouble was to play music. The band agreed. It was time to get out in front of an audience again, if not simply to promote the new album, then to generate excitement in the manner they knew best. “It was a way of getting back to the people,” said John Paul. Led Zeppelin was a working band, first and foremost. Even Robert, “in a difficult frame of mind,” according to Grant, was on board, albeit somewhat reluctantly. “We desperately needed to come together and create a new directive,” Robert admitted. But his participation, he emphasized, depended on any tour being a low-key affair—no laser effects, no smoke bombs, no rear-projection screens, no stadiums, and no extended solos.
“I was really keen to stop the self-importance and the guitar solos that lasted an hour,” he said. There was a loose promise made that no song would last more than four and a half minutes, a real challenge when it came to “Stairway to Heaven.”
They dubbed it the “Cut the Waffle” tour (officially it was called Led Zeppelin Over Europe 1980)—a concise fourteen dates beginning in Germany on June 17, 1980, and ranging into Belgium, Holland, Austria, and Switzerland. Advance ticket sales were sluggish. They were going head-to-head against the European tours of Santana, Bob Marley, Roxy Music, Styx, Devo, and Stephen Stills. But a few killer performances would give Led Zeppelin momentum, should they head to the United States in the fall.
“Robert kept insisting at the time that he wouldn’t go back to America,” Peter recalled. He’d made his point clear onstage at Knebworth when he announced to the crowd: “We’re never going to Texas anymore . . . but we will go to Manchester,” casting a sidelong glance to the corner of the stage, where G was watching. Robert also decided he’d had enough of Richard.
“I found it very difficult to be a doting father on the one hand and have to deal with people like Richard Cole on the other,” he said.
Richard and Robert, whom he usually addressed as Percy, had always had a difficult relationship. Over the years, they had eyed each other with misgiving bordering on contempt. Richard considered Robert a prima donna. “From the beginning,” Ricardo said, “he had an aura of arrogance about him.” They’d clashed often, Robert treating Richard like the hired help, Richard dismissing Percy as “rude,” too self-involved, “being the center of attention.”
Personality conflicts aside, Richard’s heroin addiction made him a dangerous liability. He’d once attempted to kick out a window of Caesars Chariot while the plane was in midair, screaming, “I’ll teach you to fuck with me!”
No, Robert didn’t want Richard anywhere around him anymore. “He became progressively unreliable and, sadly, became a millstone around the neck of the group.”
In the tradition of Caesar, Robert’s knives were out for Richard. “Him and Jonesy were getting pissed off,” Richard said. “They’d had their fill of the fucking chaos when they were making In Through the Out Door.”
Robert left the dirty work up to G, who was now dabbling in heroin himself. Peter told Richard he wasn’t going on the tour and suggested instead that he go to Italy to clean himself up. Led Zeppelin would pick up the tab. Richard was floored. He’d been with the band from its first date in Denver in 1969, every day, every damn day. He’d always done everything that was asked of him. He’d put his life on the line for Led Zeppelin.
Nothing doing, he couldn’t talk his way out of it. G had already hired a replacement road manager, Phil Carlo, a Bad Company operative who had last worked for Led Zeppelin on the 1971 tour. “G had me to the house and said, ‘We’re going to strip the tour right down,’ ” Carlo recalls. “ ‘Robert’s had enough of the fucking huge entourage, the fisticuffs, the violence, the unpleasantness. We’re going to make it low-key—no smashing stuff up or knocking people around. Let’s make it enjoyable so that Robert will agree to an American tour.’ ”
The European dates were pocket change. Peter’s goal was to soften Robert up with a short, intimate tour so that he’d agree to a marathon in North America in the fall of 1980. That’s where the real money was, as well as the true-blue Led Zeppelin audience. “I reckoned that once Robert got over there and got into the swing he’d be okay,” Grant said. G also realized the competition was becoming fierce. Aerosmith had already benefited considerably from Led Zeppelin’s absence in America, and now the next wave of metal bands, like Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, Kiss, Rush, and Van Halen, were siphoning fans from Led Zeppelin’s deep reserves. If the band intended to hold onto their preeminence in the 1980s, they had to go back to the States. There was an all-night band meeting at Horselunges a few days before the tour launched when G laid out that scenario in no uncertain terms. According to him, “All the others said it was down to me to get Robert to go back to the States.”
First things first: the European tour. There were details yet to be negotiated for several of the dates, but G, never in the Swan Song office, had been lax in nailing things down. Alan Callan had quit as the label’s general manager. “There were too many fights going on, and there were too many drugs around,” he said. Unity MacLean, now the label’s senior executive, couldn’t so much as get Peter on the phone. “I would send him tapes of groups, bands I thought he’d really be interested in, and hear nothing, nothing, for days,” she says. “Then I’d finally get Ray Washburn on the phone and ask if Peter had a chance to listen to anything. ‘Oh sure, he’s listened. Just keep sending things.’ But he never responded, and I’m sure he never listened.”
“It was absolute chaos at Swan Song,” says Phil Carson. “Nobody would dare do anything without Peter Grant, and Peter had become reclusive. He never came out of his fucking bedroom.”
He’d left most of the European tour arrangements to Harvey Goldsmith, England’s foremost concert promoters, who had just organized the benefit Concerts for Kampuchea, at which Led Zeppelin–minus Jimmy—had performed. There were still outstanding contracts to be signed with German promoters, and expenses had already been flowing out. Goldsmith needed answers fast, but Peter refused to take his calls. According to Phil Carson, “Jimmy and Robert came to see me and said, ‘You’ve got to fix this.’ ”
Carson dreaded going to Horselunges. He knew the drill. He’d show up and have to sit in the living room for two days before being ushered into G’s bedroom. And even then, he’d have to withstand a rambling, circuitous exchange. “Peter had lost it by then,” Phil says. “He wasn’t capable of doing anything, but everyone was still afraid of him.” Eventually, Carson gained an audience and explained that Harvey Goldsmith’s hands were tied. He couldn’t finalize the equipment or put tickets on sale until Peter gave him the go-ahead.
