Led Zeppelin, page 60
Benji volunteered to tip him out of bed and started up the stairs, Jonesy a few steps behind him. “I opened the door and immediately knew that something wasn’t right,” Benji recalls. “Bonzo was laying on his arm, with his back to the door, but . . . it wasn’t right. I pushed Jonesy into the hall and said, “ ‘I don’t think you’d better come in here, man. Let me just have a look.’ ” Benji had seen a warning: a pool of vomit on the pillow next to Bonzo’s head. “I knew he was dead, but I tried to take his pulse. He was cold, half blue. He’d been dead for a few hours.”
Benji and John Paul went downstairs, encountering Jimmy and Robert, who were in the parlor, laughing. “I had to go in and say, ‘Hold it!’ and tell them what happened,” Jonesy said.
Robert reacted with disbelief, mumbled, “Are you sure?” Benji nodded wordlessly. “I’ve got to go and have a look.”
Benji put a gentle hand on Robert’s chest, restraining him. “I don’t think you should,” he cautioned. “You don’t want to remember him like that.” Instead, Benji placed a call to Horselunges and gave the news to Ray Washburn.
“Ray came up to me and said, ‘Come downstairs,’ ” Peter Grant recalled later. “He sat me down, handed me some Valium, and said, ‘Take these.’ ” At first, G resisted, but Ray eventually told him that Benji had news. “John Bonham’s died.”
G was in shock. Bonzo . . . Still, he recovered enough to tell Benji to phone for an ambulance, then called Don Murfet to “contain the situation, limit the damage—and that meant keeping the police and the press at bay.”
Back at Jimmy’s, Robert pulled on Benji’s sleeve. “We’ve got to go,” he said. “We’ve got to get to Pat before she hears it from anybody else.”
Benji hustled Robert into the car and then gunned it, doing 120 miles per hour all the way from Windsor up the M1 to the Midlands. Neither man spoke through the entire journey. They found Pat Bonham at home, alone.
“I don’t know how to say this . . . ,” Robert began.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Pat said.
Robert hung his head and nodded.
* * *
• • •
Peter Grant and Ray Washburn arrived at Jimmy’s house an hour or two later. By that time, word had gotten out about Bonzo’s death, and the media circus was already forming in the road. “The three of us discussed all the angles,” Murfet recalled, “made contingency plans, and decided how we would box for the next few days.”
When he arrived in Windsor, Murfet encountered a scene that summed up the mood. “Jimmy was sitting there by the stairs smoking cigarette after cigarette,” Murfet recalled. “He didn’t say anything. Not a word. To be honest, he didn’t need to. Jimmy just looked . . . lost.”
Ray Washburn called the Swan Song office and got Unity MacLean on the phone. “Peter wants everybody out of the office,” he insisted. “Turn out the lights. He wants the office locked, and he doesn’t want anybody to take any phone calls. Stay at home until you’re told to come back.”
“What’s going on?” Unity asked.
“None of your business,” he snapped. “I’ve told you what to do. Lock up and go home until further notice.”
What was Peter up to now? she wondered. Had he been alerted to a drug bust? Had the business gone belly up? Did he want the office to himself for a private assignation? Locking the place up was a new one for her.
When MacLean got home, her husband, Bruce, was waiting and said, “Let’s go around to the pub and have a drink.”
“It’s a little early for that,” she protested.
At his insistence they went to the Goat, where he ordered her a large brandy. He explained that before she arrived home, he’d had a call from the Daily Express asking for a comment about “the untimely death of John Bonham.” Unity nearly fell off her chair.
Richard, she thought—someone has to get word to Ricardo. Before she could figure out how to reach him, Richard contacted her from his prison cell in Italy.
“The guards told me one of Led Zeppelin had died,” he said, certain the victim was Jimmy Page.
“No, it was Bonzo,” she told him and could make out a sob on the other end of the line.
Richard was crushed by the news. “Bonzo had been my closest friend and ally in the band,” he reflected later.
They were two of a kind, a couple of “wide boys,” as both might have acknowledged in jest. They’d burned the candle at both ends and raised hell wherever the spirit took them. Now Bonzo was dead and Richard was in jail. They’d both pressed their luck too far.
John Henry Bonham’s funeral was held on October 10, 1980, at St. Michael’s Church in Rushock, close to his farm. It was a family affair, and he had a big extended family, from his bandmates to the Swan Song and Atlantic teams and an army of Midlands musicians—Bev Bevan, Jeff Lynne, Roy Wood, Denny Laine, Tony Iommi, all of them, like Bonzo, once scrounging for work on the Midlands circuit and now headed to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The wake afterward was held at Chequers, Bonzo’s favorite pub. The amount of alcohol consumed there would have impressed even the deceased as he was toasted repeatedly throughout the day and long into the night—until everyone was just plain toasted.
Nobody knew quite what to do after that. The surviving members of the band fled to Jersey to avoid the media and to mourn. “We went to a hotel,” says Benji Le Fevre, “and they tried to come to terms with what had happened. But it was clear that Led Zeppelin was over. Everyone knew it.”
“They came back from Jersey, and I booked a suite for afternoon tea at the Savoy,” Peter Grant recalled. The powwow was called ostensibly to discuss the band’s future, but it was pretty well determined before anyone said a word. Still, they asked for G’s opinion. “I said it just couldn’t go on because it was the four of them. They were relieved because they had decided the same.”
“I couldn’t even think how to do this without John,” John Paul reflected. Led Zeppelin was a band, a performance-based band. For all their differences, the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. He felt it would have been a different band without Bonzo behind the drums. The chemistry would have been all wrong. “No John Bonham, no Led Zeppelin—it’s as simple as that.”
“We’ll be together certainly until one of us punts out,” Jimmy had told Lisa Robinson in 1973, and his attitude had never changed. “It would be silly to even think about going on with Zeppelin,” Jimmy said. “It would have been a total insult to John.”
“For me, there was no debate,” Robert said. “The band didn’t exist the minute Bonzo had gone. There was no Led anything.”
Atlantic Records wasn’t so sure. “The record company were absolutely a hundred percent pressuring me into talking the lads into reforming,” Peter recalled. Steve Weiss reminded him that Led Zeppelin still had an outstanding commitment to the label for another album and pressed to consider replacing Bonzo with another drummer. He already represented the most likely candidate, Carmine Appice, Vanilla Fudge’s heavy hitter, who was currently employed by Rod Stewart. Simon Kirke, Bad Company’s drummer, was mentioned, as were Bev Bevan, Aynsley Dunbar, and Carl Palmer, the usual suspects. “Within a day of Bonzo’s death, drummers were coming out of the woodwork, calling the house, saying, ‘I’m the man for the job,’ ” recalls Phil Carlo, who was running interference for Peter at Horselunges. When he felt up to it, G would grab the phone out of Phil’s hand and say, “How dare you fucking ring up? We’re not the fucking Who.”
His reaction wasn’t only about sentiment. Bonzo had extraordinary talent; his drumming was essential to Led Zeppelin’s driving sound. Historically, he was one of the most influential drummers in all of rock ’n roll, his legendary foot and wrist control an astonishing feat of dexterity, his sense of rhythm and beat as precise as the tides. Replace Bonzo? Not just unlikely but unimaginable.
Swan Song made it official on December 4, 1980. To end speculation once and for all, the company issued a statement that said, “We wish it to be known that the loss of our dear friend and the deep respect we have for his family, together with the sense of undivided harmony felt by ourselves and our manager, have led us to decide that we could not continue as we were.”
Jimmy was devastated. Led Zeppelin was his baby; he had conceived it, fed it, nurtured and educated it—and buried it. The shock left him dazed. “I just felt really insecure,” he said in retrospect. “I was terrified. . . . I just didn’t know what to do. I lived in a total vacuum. In the end, I went to Bali and just thought about things.” He says he didn’t touch a guitar again for two years.
Robert wasn’t in much better shape. “He was trying to come to terms with what happened,” Le Fevre says. He asked Benji to stay in Kidderminster for a while to keep him company but steered clear of anything that reminded him of Led Zeppelin. “We went down the pub, the Queen’s Head, we went to football, occasionally we’d arrange a football game in Wales on Sunday. That’s all there really was: football and beer.” Benji and Rex King positioned a mobile home at the foot of the Plants’ driveway and stood sentry there for weeks to keep the paparazzi away.
Jonesy had less of a problem with the press. He was a cipher, the man who, even after a decade of worldwide celebrity, could walk into an arena lobby filled with Led Zeppelin fans and go completely unnoticed. “On the European tour, Jonesy and I had been in town one day and came back to the hotel, with fans clustered around the front door,” says Phil Carlo. He told John Paul they’d have to go around the corner and in the back door. “Why, Phil?” Jonesy replied. “Nobody’s going to recognize me.” And he walked straight through the crowd.
Now Jonesy burrowed in at home, consumed with anger. “It seemed such a waste,” he said. Bonzo’s death hit him as hard as it did the others. He also struggled with frustration over the recklessness in which they’d all indulged. “After all, it could have happened to any one of us.”
Of all of them, Peter Grant had the most difficult time adjusting to the tragedy. “After John’s death, Peter just disintegrated,” says Po, one of the few friends permitted to visit the manager. “I’d never seen such a powerful man fall apart so quickly.” He went into a very dark place—“the beginning of the period of blackness,” G called it. “He sunk deeper and deeper into depression and the knowledge that the adventure was over,” says Phil Carlo.
Bad Company had also broken up—Paul Rodgers had had a falling out with Boz Burrell—contributing to Peter’s melancholy. He was unable to function. The business went completely ignored. “Nothing was getting taken care of,” recalls Shelley Kaye. “Steve [Weiss] couldn’t get in touch with Peter. He and I ran scenarios: Was Peter okay? What was he thinking? Was he even functioning?”
Steve Weiss’s livelihood was at stake and he demanded answers. Unable to reach Peter, he flew to London for a face-to-face, but Grant refused to leave his home to meet him. “They sent a limo for him,” says Benji Le Fevre, “then a helicopter. He refused to even acknowledge them.” Eventually, Benji was asked to mediate. He drove to Horselunges and was told by Ray Washburn that Peter was out by the moat, that he’d been there for most of three days.
“I found G sitting on a little bench with a loaded shotgun across his knees, staring into the water. He kept repeating: ‘I know that fucking pike’s in there, Benji, and I’m going to have him.’ ” Benji asked him about meeting Steve Weiss. “Fuck Weiss,” Peter said. “I’ve got to get this pike.”
It had come to that. Horselunges, once an architectural showpiece, had fallen into disrepair, like its owner. There was garbage strewn everywhere, the once-beautiful drapes lay in tatters, cobwebs laced rafters in the corners of rooms, cigarette burns pockmarked the Georgian pool table. Similarly, the Swan Song office on King’s Road was abandoned.
“I used to go in and answer phones, trying to keep it going,” says Maggie Bell. “I did it for a couple weeks, on and off, but there was nothing there anymore. The only things left were the phones.” One day, as she arrived, the front door gaped wide open. The office had been ransacked. “All the beautiful paintings that had belonged to Peter and Mark London—gone. The Chesterfield couches and stereo equipment—gone. The art nouveau and Tiffany lamps—gone. There were villains from the King’s Road who knew about Swan Song and just came in and took the lot.”
The New York headquarters was hardly in better shape. “Atlantic was paying a certain amount every quarter for us to run the office and pay salaries,” says Shelley Kaye. “The uncertainty of it rattled Steve [Weiss], who became an alcoholic. Finally, Swan Song ended for us with no notice. The quarterly checks from Atlantic just stopped coming, and everybody got fired instantly.”
Atlantic had run out of patience. “There were no records coming out, so we were no longer supporting the label,” says Phil Carson. “Ahmet decided he’d had enough—everybody decided they’d had enough.”
[2]
There was to be a final Led Zeppelin album. The band still owed Atlantic a record or two on their existing deal, but that obligation had been mutually terminated with the understanding that there was material in the vault that could be stitched together for one last rodeo. “That was an agreement we struck with Ahmet,” Peter said, referring to a separate deal called the Omega contract. “Ahmet was great and paid an advance even knowing that it was sub-standard and we couldn’t find enough material for a decent set.”
Jimmy was already working on his live-album concept. “When we lost John, I was very keen to do a chronological live album, because I knew we had the tapes that spanned these periods,” he said. He felt it would showcase the excitement the band produced onstage, “that Led Zeppelin’s live performance was so important to the sum of the parts.”
There was a trove of material to work from—a few tapes from the first U.S. tour in 1969, the 1970 debut at the Royal Albert Hall, BBC recordings, great material from the soundboard at early shows—“all that sort of naiveté and the absolute wonder of what we were doing—and the freshness of it,” Robert chipped in. Of course, the bootleggers had archives that made Jimmy’s head spin. “When I saw all the oceans of live bootlegs about,” he said, “I thought fans would prefer the last of the unreleased studio material.” Atlantic knew there were unreleased masters of songs, and the record company wanted—insisted on—a studio album.
Dutifully, Jimmy Page began sifting through tapes in the storage vault, selecting random cuts before taking them, for a touch-up or new coat of paint, to Sol Studios, a converted two-hundred-year-old water mill he’d bought at a fire sale from producer Gus Dudgeon. There were some interesting chestnuts they’d recorded but, for whatever reason, socked away for posterity. Now Jimmy dusted them off in an effort to dish up a viable compilation.
All told, it was like a sorry potluck from a bad Cantonese restaurant menu: one from column A, two from column B. Eight lackluster tracks mostly in chronological order—reelin’ in the years, so to speak—lasting a charitably brief thirty-three minutes. The opener, “We’re Gonna Groove,” was recorded on the fly in June 1969, in London, during a frantic week when a young Led Zeppelin spun from one event to the next every day, culminating in a Sunday night appearance at the Royal Albert Hall Pop Proms. The song was a Page/Plant “original,” lifted from Ben E. King’s “Groovin’ ” and earmarked for a track on Led Zeppelin II. “Poor Tom,” a laid-back, folksy tune in the mode of “Gallows Pole,” came out of the Bron-Yr-Aur trip Robert and Jimmy made in 1970 and was recorded later that June during sessions for Led Zeppelin III at Olympic Studios in London. Also credited to “Page/Plant,” it was a reworking of two Reverend Robert Wilkins originals, “Poor Tom” and “That’s No Way to Get Along.”
Earlier in 1970, at the band’s Royal Albert Hall concert in January, they warmed up during the soundcheck with “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” the Willie Dixon classic from their debut album. Jimmy considered this “live” version a suitable example of Led Zeppelin’s blues roots, and their spontaneous, catalytic performance was fleshed out with inventive vamps and a stupendous windup at the end.
The basic track for “Walter’s Walk” was recorded in 1972 at Stargroves for Houses of the Holy. Whether a vocal was added at the time is a matter of dispute. In any event, Robert’s vocal for the new album was recorded in 1982 at Sol Studios. And more than any song in the compilation, “Walter’s Walk” paid tribute to Led Zeppelin at their heaviest and most action-packed. It was a full-throttle hard-rock extravaganza, with Bonzo flaunting the bass-drum triplets he first showcased in 1969.
“Ozone Baby” and “Darlene” were rejects from the sessions in Stockholm for In Through the Out Door, both resembling loose, lighthearted jams more than carefully finessed songs. And “Bonzo’s Montreux,” a rather unspectacular drum solo enhanced electronically with a harmonizer during the mixing stage, was included, if for no other reason, as a posthumous tribute, while “Wearing and Tearing,” also from the Polar Studio sessions, was the album standout.
“We wrote ‘Wearing and Tearing’ because of the punks,” Robert explained, “to say we could make challenging, crashing music just as well as they could.”
“Wearing and Tearing” wasn’t punk by any stretch of the imagination, but it was aggressive and unruly—manic—just attack-attack-attack, with Robert screaming, “Medication!” as the song approached its mushroom cloud of a conclusion. The plan had been to offer it as a commemorative single at Knebworth. “We wanted to put it out on a different label under the name of a different artist alongside the Damned and the Sex Pistols because it was so vicious and emphatically fresh,” Robert said. “And if you hadn’t known it was us, it could have been anybody at all who was young and virile and all the things that we were then not supposed to be.”
What Led Zeppelin was not supposed to be had always been an issue: not heavy metal, not traditional, not progressive, and, yes, not punk. “I don’t know what category we fit into,” Jimmy said. “It’s just music.” No critic or magazine had managed to typecast the band in a way that put them snugly in a box. Led Zeppelin refused to be pigeonholed. Jimmy insisted the band, from album to album, was “highly intent on change and ever onward pressing as far through the boundaries as one can possibly go.” Perhaps that was true for the collaborative albums, but he was stretching the point with Coda.
Benji and John Paul went downstairs, encountering Jimmy and Robert, who were in the parlor, laughing. “I had to go in and say, ‘Hold it!’ and tell them what happened,” Jonesy said.
Robert reacted with disbelief, mumbled, “Are you sure?” Benji nodded wordlessly. “I’ve got to go and have a look.”
Benji put a gentle hand on Robert’s chest, restraining him. “I don’t think you should,” he cautioned. “You don’t want to remember him like that.” Instead, Benji placed a call to Horselunges and gave the news to Ray Washburn.
“Ray came up to me and said, ‘Come downstairs,’ ” Peter Grant recalled later. “He sat me down, handed me some Valium, and said, ‘Take these.’ ” At first, G resisted, but Ray eventually told him that Benji had news. “John Bonham’s died.”
G was in shock. Bonzo . . . Still, he recovered enough to tell Benji to phone for an ambulance, then called Don Murfet to “contain the situation, limit the damage—and that meant keeping the police and the press at bay.”
Back at Jimmy’s, Robert pulled on Benji’s sleeve. “We’ve got to go,” he said. “We’ve got to get to Pat before she hears it from anybody else.”
Benji hustled Robert into the car and then gunned it, doing 120 miles per hour all the way from Windsor up the M1 to the Midlands. Neither man spoke through the entire journey. They found Pat Bonham at home, alone.
“I don’t know how to say this . . . ,” Robert began.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Pat said.
Robert hung his head and nodded.
* * *
• • •
Peter Grant and Ray Washburn arrived at Jimmy’s house an hour or two later. By that time, word had gotten out about Bonzo’s death, and the media circus was already forming in the road. “The three of us discussed all the angles,” Murfet recalled, “made contingency plans, and decided how we would box for the next few days.”
When he arrived in Windsor, Murfet encountered a scene that summed up the mood. “Jimmy was sitting there by the stairs smoking cigarette after cigarette,” Murfet recalled. “He didn’t say anything. Not a word. To be honest, he didn’t need to. Jimmy just looked . . . lost.”
Ray Washburn called the Swan Song office and got Unity MacLean on the phone. “Peter wants everybody out of the office,” he insisted. “Turn out the lights. He wants the office locked, and he doesn’t want anybody to take any phone calls. Stay at home until you’re told to come back.”
“What’s going on?” Unity asked.
“None of your business,” he snapped. “I’ve told you what to do. Lock up and go home until further notice.”
What was Peter up to now? she wondered. Had he been alerted to a drug bust? Had the business gone belly up? Did he want the office to himself for a private assignation? Locking the place up was a new one for her.
When MacLean got home, her husband, Bruce, was waiting and said, “Let’s go around to the pub and have a drink.”
“It’s a little early for that,” she protested.
At his insistence they went to the Goat, where he ordered her a large brandy. He explained that before she arrived home, he’d had a call from the Daily Express asking for a comment about “the untimely death of John Bonham.” Unity nearly fell off her chair.
Richard, she thought—someone has to get word to Ricardo. Before she could figure out how to reach him, Richard contacted her from his prison cell in Italy.
“The guards told me one of Led Zeppelin had died,” he said, certain the victim was Jimmy Page.
“No, it was Bonzo,” she told him and could make out a sob on the other end of the line.
Richard was crushed by the news. “Bonzo had been my closest friend and ally in the band,” he reflected later.
They were two of a kind, a couple of “wide boys,” as both might have acknowledged in jest. They’d burned the candle at both ends and raised hell wherever the spirit took them. Now Bonzo was dead and Richard was in jail. They’d both pressed their luck too far.
John Henry Bonham’s funeral was held on October 10, 1980, at St. Michael’s Church in Rushock, close to his farm. It was a family affair, and he had a big extended family, from his bandmates to the Swan Song and Atlantic teams and an army of Midlands musicians—Bev Bevan, Jeff Lynne, Roy Wood, Denny Laine, Tony Iommi, all of them, like Bonzo, once scrounging for work on the Midlands circuit and now headed to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The wake afterward was held at Chequers, Bonzo’s favorite pub. The amount of alcohol consumed there would have impressed even the deceased as he was toasted repeatedly throughout the day and long into the night—until everyone was just plain toasted.
Nobody knew quite what to do after that. The surviving members of the band fled to Jersey to avoid the media and to mourn. “We went to a hotel,” says Benji Le Fevre, “and they tried to come to terms with what had happened. But it was clear that Led Zeppelin was over. Everyone knew it.”
“They came back from Jersey, and I booked a suite for afternoon tea at the Savoy,” Peter Grant recalled. The powwow was called ostensibly to discuss the band’s future, but it was pretty well determined before anyone said a word. Still, they asked for G’s opinion. “I said it just couldn’t go on because it was the four of them. They were relieved because they had decided the same.”
“I couldn’t even think how to do this without John,” John Paul reflected. Led Zeppelin was a band, a performance-based band. For all their differences, the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. He felt it would have been a different band without Bonzo behind the drums. The chemistry would have been all wrong. “No John Bonham, no Led Zeppelin—it’s as simple as that.”
“We’ll be together certainly until one of us punts out,” Jimmy had told Lisa Robinson in 1973, and his attitude had never changed. “It would be silly to even think about going on with Zeppelin,” Jimmy said. “It would have been a total insult to John.”
“For me, there was no debate,” Robert said. “The band didn’t exist the minute Bonzo had gone. There was no Led anything.”
Atlantic Records wasn’t so sure. “The record company were absolutely a hundred percent pressuring me into talking the lads into reforming,” Peter recalled. Steve Weiss reminded him that Led Zeppelin still had an outstanding commitment to the label for another album and pressed to consider replacing Bonzo with another drummer. He already represented the most likely candidate, Carmine Appice, Vanilla Fudge’s heavy hitter, who was currently employed by Rod Stewart. Simon Kirke, Bad Company’s drummer, was mentioned, as were Bev Bevan, Aynsley Dunbar, and Carl Palmer, the usual suspects. “Within a day of Bonzo’s death, drummers were coming out of the woodwork, calling the house, saying, ‘I’m the man for the job,’ ” recalls Phil Carlo, who was running interference for Peter at Horselunges. When he felt up to it, G would grab the phone out of Phil’s hand and say, “How dare you fucking ring up? We’re not the fucking Who.”
His reaction wasn’t only about sentiment. Bonzo had extraordinary talent; his drumming was essential to Led Zeppelin’s driving sound. Historically, he was one of the most influential drummers in all of rock ’n roll, his legendary foot and wrist control an astonishing feat of dexterity, his sense of rhythm and beat as precise as the tides. Replace Bonzo? Not just unlikely but unimaginable.
Swan Song made it official on December 4, 1980. To end speculation once and for all, the company issued a statement that said, “We wish it to be known that the loss of our dear friend and the deep respect we have for his family, together with the sense of undivided harmony felt by ourselves and our manager, have led us to decide that we could not continue as we were.”
Jimmy was devastated. Led Zeppelin was his baby; he had conceived it, fed it, nurtured and educated it—and buried it. The shock left him dazed. “I just felt really insecure,” he said in retrospect. “I was terrified. . . . I just didn’t know what to do. I lived in a total vacuum. In the end, I went to Bali and just thought about things.” He says he didn’t touch a guitar again for two years.
Robert wasn’t in much better shape. “He was trying to come to terms with what happened,” Le Fevre says. He asked Benji to stay in Kidderminster for a while to keep him company but steered clear of anything that reminded him of Led Zeppelin. “We went down the pub, the Queen’s Head, we went to football, occasionally we’d arrange a football game in Wales on Sunday. That’s all there really was: football and beer.” Benji and Rex King positioned a mobile home at the foot of the Plants’ driveway and stood sentry there for weeks to keep the paparazzi away.
Jonesy had less of a problem with the press. He was a cipher, the man who, even after a decade of worldwide celebrity, could walk into an arena lobby filled with Led Zeppelin fans and go completely unnoticed. “On the European tour, Jonesy and I had been in town one day and came back to the hotel, with fans clustered around the front door,” says Phil Carlo. He told John Paul they’d have to go around the corner and in the back door. “Why, Phil?” Jonesy replied. “Nobody’s going to recognize me.” And he walked straight through the crowd.
Now Jonesy burrowed in at home, consumed with anger. “It seemed such a waste,” he said. Bonzo’s death hit him as hard as it did the others. He also struggled with frustration over the recklessness in which they’d all indulged. “After all, it could have happened to any one of us.”
Of all of them, Peter Grant had the most difficult time adjusting to the tragedy. “After John’s death, Peter just disintegrated,” says Po, one of the few friends permitted to visit the manager. “I’d never seen such a powerful man fall apart so quickly.” He went into a very dark place—“the beginning of the period of blackness,” G called it. “He sunk deeper and deeper into depression and the knowledge that the adventure was over,” says Phil Carlo.
Bad Company had also broken up—Paul Rodgers had had a falling out with Boz Burrell—contributing to Peter’s melancholy. He was unable to function. The business went completely ignored. “Nothing was getting taken care of,” recalls Shelley Kaye. “Steve [Weiss] couldn’t get in touch with Peter. He and I ran scenarios: Was Peter okay? What was he thinking? Was he even functioning?”
Steve Weiss’s livelihood was at stake and he demanded answers. Unable to reach Peter, he flew to London for a face-to-face, but Grant refused to leave his home to meet him. “They sent a limo for him,” says Benji Le Fevre, “then a helicopter. He refused to even acknowledge them.” Eventually, Benji was asked to mediate. He drove to Horselunges and was told by Ray Washburn that Peter was out by the moat, that he’d been there for most of three days.
“I found G sitting on a little bench with a loaded shotgun across his knees, staring into the water. He kept repeating: ‘I know that fucking pike’s in there, Benji, and I’m going to have him.’ ” Benji asked him about meeting Steve Weiss. “Fuck Weiss,” Peter said. “I’ve got to get this pike.”
It had come to that. Horselunges, once an architectural showpiece, had fallen into disrepair, like its owner. There was garbage strewn everywhere, the once-beautiful drapes lay in tatters, cobwebs laced rafters in the corners of rooms, cigarette burns pockmarked the Georgian pool table. Similarly, the Swan Song office on King’s Road was abandoned.
“I used to go in and answer phones, trying to keep it going,” says Maggie Bell. “I did it for a couple weeks, on and off, but there was nothing there anymore. The only things left were the phones.” One day, as she arrived, the front door gaped wide open. The office had been ransacked. “All the beautiful paintings that had belonged to Peter and Mark London—gone. The Chesterfield couches and stereo equipment—gone. The art nouveau and Tiffany lamps—gone. There were villains from the King’s Road who knew about Swan Song and just came in and took the lot.”
The New York headquarters was hardly in better shape. “Atlantic was paying a certain amount every quarter for us to run the office and pay salaries,” says Shelley Kaye. “The uncertainty of it rattled Steve [Weiss], who became an alcoholic. Finally, Swan Song ended for us with no notice. The quarterly checks from Atlantic just stopped coming, and everybody got fired instantly.”
Atlantic had run out of patience. “There were no records coming out, so we were no longer supporting the label,” says Phil Carson. “Ahmet decided he’d had enough—everybody decided they’d had enough.”
[2]
There was to be a final Led Zeppelin album. The band still owed Atlantic a record or two on their existing deal, but that obligation had been mutually terminated with the understanding that there was material in the vault that could be stitched together for one last rodeo. “That was an agreement we struck with Ahmet,” Peter said, referring to a separate deal called the Omega contract. “Ahmet was great and paid an advance even knowing that it was sub-standard and we couldn’t find enough material for a decent set.”
Jimmy was already working on his live-album concept. “When we lost John, I was very keen to do a chronological live album, because I knew we had the tapes that spanned these periods,” he said. He felt it would showcase the excitement the band produced onstage, “that Led Zeppelin’s live performance was so important to the sum of the parts.”
There was a trove of material to work from—a few tapes from the first U.S. tour in 1969, the 1970 debut at the Royal Albert Hall, BBC recordings, great material from the soundboard at early shows—“all that sort of naiveté and the absolute wonder of what we were doing—and the freshness of it,” Robert chipped in. Of course, the bootleggers had archives that made Jimmy’s head spin. “When I saw all the oceans of live bootlegs about,” he said, “I thought fans would prefer the last of the unreleased studio material.” Atlantic knew there were unreleased masters of songs, and the record company wanted—insisted on—a studio album.
Dutifully, Jimmy Page began sifting through tapes in the storage vault, selecting random cuts before taking them, for a touch-up or new coat of paint, to Sol Studios, a converted two-hundred-year-old water mill he’d bought at a fire sale from producer Gus Dudgeon. There were some interesting chestnuts they’d recorded but, for whatever reason, socked away for posterity. Now Jimmy dusted them off in an effort to dish up a viable compilation.
All told, it was like a sorry potluck from a bad Cantonese restaurant menu: one from column A, two from column B. Eight lackluster tracks mostly in chronological order—reelin’ in the years, so to speak—lasting a charitably brief thirty-three minutes. The opener, “We’re Gonna Groove,” was recorded on the fly in June 1969, in London, during a frantic week when a young Led Zeppelin spun from one event to the next every day, culminating in a Sunday night appearance at the Royal Albert Hall Pop Proms. The song was a Page/Plant “original,” lifted from Ben E. King’s “Groovin’ ” and earmarked for a track on Led Zeppelin II. “Poor Tom,” a laid-back, folksy tune in the mode of “Gallows Pole,” came out of the Bron-Yr-Aur trip Robert and Jimmy made in 1970 and was recorded later that June during sessions for Led Zeppelin III at Olympic Studios in London. Also credited to “Page/Plant,” it was a reworking of two Reverend Robert Wilkins originals, “Poor Tom” and “That’s No Way to Get Along.”
Earlier in 1970, at the band’s Royal Albert Hall concert in January, they warmed up during the soundcheck with “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” the Willie Dixon classic from their debut album. Jimmy considered this “live” version a suitable example of Led Zeppelin’s blues roots, and their spontaneous, catalytic performance was fleshed out with inventive vamps and a stupendous windup at the end.
The basic track for “Walter’s Walk” was recorded in 1972 at Stargroves for Houses of the Holy. Whether a vocal was added at the time is a matter of dispute. In any event, Robert’s vocal for the new album was recorded in 1982 at Sol Studios. And more than any song in the compilation, “Walter’s Walk” paid tribute to Led Zeppelin at their heaviest and most action-packed. It was a full-throttle hard-rock extravaganza, with Bonzo flaunting the bass-drum triplets he first showcased in 1969.
“Ozone Baby” and “Darlene” were rejects from the sessions in Stockholm for In Through the Out Door, both resembling loose, lighthearted jams more than carefully finessed songs. And “Bonzo’s Montreux,” a rather unspectacular drum solo enhanced electronically with a harmonizer during the mixing stage, was included, if for no other reason, as a posthumous tribute, while “Wearing and Tearing,” also from the Polar Studio sessions, was the album standout.
“We wrote ‘Wearing and Tearing’ because of the punks,” Robert explained, “to say we could make challenging, crashing music just as well as they could.”
“Wearing and Tearing” wasn’t punk by any stretch of the imagination, but it was aggressive and unruly—manic—just attack-attack-attack, with Robert screaming, “Medication!” as the song approached its mushroom cloud of a conclusion. The plan had been to offer it as a commemorative single at Knebworth. “We wanted to put it out on a different label under the name of a different artist alongside the Damned and the Sex Pistols because it was so vicious and emphatically fresh,” Robert said. “And if you hadn’t known it was us, it could have been anybody at all who was young and virile and all the things that we were then not supposed to be.”
What Led Zeppelin was not supposed to be had always been an issue: not heavy metal, not traditional, not progressive, and, yes, not punk. “I don’t know what category we fit into,” Jimmy said. “It’s just music.” No critic or magazine had managed to typecast the band in a way that put them snugly in a box. Led Zeppelin refused to be pigeonholed. Jimmy insisted the band, from album to album, was “highly intent on change and ever onward pressing as far through the boundaries as one can possibly go.” Perhaps that was true for the collaborative albums, but he was stretching the point with Coda.
