Robert Plant: A Life (18 page)

“When you saw them on-stage and looked out at the faces of the audience . . . it was an amazing experience. As a band, they loved performing. And Robert, in particular, loved the adoration.”

Says Michael Des Barres, singer with the band Detective, soon to be signed to Swan Song: “The mythology that grew up around Zeppelin was created out of a universal and almost spiritual need in kids that had no band to ally themselves with, other than the decadence of the Stones or the cuteness of the Beatles—or the diluted versions of those bands, which was everyone else. Then, suddenly, you had Valhalla in the parking lot of stadiums and people just flocked to it.

“There was something magical about the whole thing. What the critics didn’t grasp was the potency of the band. Being around it, one did. They were the greatest live rock ’n’ roll band I’ve ever seen—and I’ve seen them all.”

For all this, the influences that would bring Zeppelin to their ruin had become more prominent and corrosive. Their road manager, Richard Cole, claimed that this was the first tour on which heroin was freely circulated, but only some partook. A cocaine dealer was attached to the flotsam that tagged along with them, attired at all times as a cowboy.

Both the drugs and also a sense of unchecked self-indulgence began to haunt the shows. Bonham’s drum solo expanded to fifteen, twenty minutes in length. “Dazed and Confused,” replete with Page’s guitar-mangling act, could run to twice as long. The writer Stephen Davis, assigned to the tour, recorded how Plant regularly returned to the stage after such overblown interludes and would jokingly announce, “What a wonderful blowjob in the dressing room.”

On the road the soul of the band had started to seep away. Grant was by now nursing his own cocaine habit. This ratcheted up the levels of paranoia surrounding Zeppelin and the propensity for violence to flare. Bonham had slipped the last of the moorings keeping him in check. His appetite for destruction had grown to such an extent that the Plaza Hotel in New York demanded a $10,000 deposit before allowing him to stay there.

“In my view, this was the point at which the boisterous, fun-loving, couple of pints after a show properly developed into something more serious,” says LeFevre. “There was this fucking game they were playing, being late on stage at every show. Three hours late going on at Madison Square Garden. I wonder why! Maybe the subtle blend of the cocktail certain parties were imbibing wasn’t right on that night.

“Of course, the American kids just loved it when they came on two, three hours late. The whole audience was off their heads anyway. Instead of losing the buzz, everyone just got higher and higher.”

“Richard Cole had a beady eye,” recalls Dennis Sheehan. “He was quite a character, and he was doing anything and everything that one could do. If you look at the demeanor of the people around the band it would almost seem as if their way of sorting out every problem was with an iron bar or a baseball bat. Forget about sitting down to discuss things. I can laugh about it now but it certainly wasn’t amusing at the time.”

Offstage, and among the principals, the most complex of the various psychodramas being played out was between Plant and Page. Having begun as the apprentice, there for Page to mold and shape, Plant had long since grown into the twin roles of being his creative partner and the band’s lightning rod. It was him that all the girls leered at.

Page had helped and coaxed him this far, no doubt, but while Plant continued to bask in the limelight he was withdrawing to the shadows. And there into the embrace of whatever it was he used to see him through the long, dark nights. Petty jealousies festered and were picked at, and after that deeper cuts began to open up.

“Between ourselves there was a lot of unspoken rivalry,” Plant later told
Rolling Stone
’s David Fricke. “Jimmy employed a very democratic approach to the whole thing. He encouraged me a lot. Then, suddenly, we were side by side, and he didn’t quite like that.

“Occasionally, I could sense it. If the shoulders were close, you could feel the flinch a little bit. Especially when we were both sitting in the same bar, and a woman walked by and we both liked her. Then it was, ‘Oh no, here we go.’ ”

“Jim has this division within him,” maintains LeFevre. “He can be absolutely delightful. But as soon as you say ‘L,’ he becomes Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin and it’s his baby. He’s always considered it to be that and it’s all he’s ever done. And as soon as he’s the other Jimmy Page, he’s fucking ruthless.”

But then the glare of Zeppelin’s extraordinary success had exposed each member of the band. For seven years now it had been unstinting and become harsher, shaping and changing them and, at its sharpest point, damaging them, too.

“Being an acolyte of Zeppelin’s you saw the flaws,” suggests Michael Des Barres. “The humanity and the vulnerabilities that were most illustrative of what was happening. They were four individuals, all with very different ways of dealing with things. Jimmy hid, Bonzo anaesthetised himself and John Paul Jones could give a shit.

“Definitely ‘cock’ is a word one could use to describe Robert. The thing about him was he knew what was going on. All that posturing was for him, I think, absolutely fun. I don’t think he ever walked into a room not knowing for one second that everyone would turn and look at him. A lot of people don’t want to embrace that, but he did. I made a movie with Mick Jagger a couple of years ago and he disdained that sort of thing; he’d go from A to B as fast as he could. Robert, by contrast, strutted through many a young girl’s fantasy.

“Jimmy is a very complex man. He’s very erudite, very well read and a curious fellow. But you know, cocaine is a spectacular and treacherous drug.”

The band set up camp in Los Angeles through March. A clear division opened up between them: Plant and Jones each fled Sunset Strip and rented houses on the beach; Page and Bonham remained holed up on the upper floors of the Riot House.

As ever was the case, it was in L.A. that the band’s dark heart beat hardest. Porn actress Linda Lovelace, star of
Deep Throat
, introduced them on-stage for the last show at the Forum on March 27. The scene at the Riot House was more bacchanalian. The elevators teemed with teenage girls, greedy and desperate, cruising from floor to floor in the hope of spotting a band member. On the floors occupied by Page and Bonham, security guards were stationed at the elevator doors—there to “take care” of any undesirables.

Since they barely went out during the day, Page and Bonham found other ways of amusing themselves. Page hired a Harley-Davidson bike and drove it up and down the sixth floor corridors. Bonham held a party in his ninth-floor room, the noise from this being loud enough to be heard on the ground floors.

“When the band got into town, I think Richard Cole used to break off to go and see the local authorities, just to make sure they could party without implication,” says the DJ Bob Harris, a guest at the hotel at the same time. “They had power in spades.

“The lobby of the hotel was so packed with people at 2 am, you couldn’t get across it to the elevators. There was a frightening edge around the fringe of the band. If anyone was trying to get at them it wasn’t unusual to see them being physically restrained. Their security was heavy. You really didn’t want to mess with Richard Cole.

“I spent a night in Jimmy’s room and Robert was there. I remember at 1 am Robert got a call from David Bowie, who was somewhere else in town. David had some kind of problem and he’d called Robert to help him out. Robert put the phone down and the whole tone of the moment changed completely. He said, ‘I’ve got to go and do stuff now.’ I left him to it, but God knows what problem David had got.

“I got the feeling around that time, particularly about Jimmy, that there was this black-magic aspect that was beginning to come into the mix. I wonder if karma applies, that notion of what you put out you also get back. As Zeppelin began to drift to the darker side, so things began to happen to them that were really distressing. I don’t know—how do you explain all of those things?”

There was little time for Plant to gather himself at home. The previous year, the incumbent Labor government had raised the top rate of income tax on Britain’s wealthiest individuals to a prohibitive 83 percent. To get around this, Grant planned for the band to spend a year out of the country in tax exile. This was due to begin after the last five shows of the tour, all of them being held at London’s 17,000-capacity Earl’s Court in May.

The
Financial Times
, Britain’s most august business paper, reported that Zeppelin’s earnings for 1975 would top $40 million. Plant took great pride in presenting this article to his father.

“Robert’s dad hated the lifestyle he’d chosen,” says John Ogden, a journalist at the
Express & Star
newspaper in the Midlands. “It is true he read that piece in the
Financial Times
and it was only then that he said, ‘Perhaps you’re right after all.’ ”

Ogden ran into Plant again at this time. He had been working with a local rock band called Little Acre, whom Plant began to take an interest in. Plant recommended the band to some of his record-label contacts but without success. Later, he appointed the band’s guitarist, John Bryant, as his farm manager. Bryant was married to Shirley Wilson, Plant’s wife Maureen’s younger sister, and the couple moved on to the Jennings Farm estate.

At Earl’s Court, Zeppelin peaked. Using their full U.S. production, the stage flanked by a pair of giant video screens that magnified them still further, there was something regal about them—with Plant, never more full of himself, their crown prince. On the last night, a Sunday, they played for four hours, concluding just after midnight with a scorching “Communication Breakdown.” It was the last time the four of them together would have it this good.

After the show Plant held court backstage, perching himself on the bonnet of his limousine, looking resplendent. Dave Lewis, now the editor of the Zeppelin fanzine
Tight But Loose
, met the singer for the first time that night. “For a fan, it was literally like coming face to face with God,” he says. “He had Maureen with him and all his jewelry on. I remember asking him where he’d got one of his rings from and him telling me about finding it in the back streets of Bombay.

“They had an all-night party afterward. Jeff Beck and Chris Squire of Yes were there, and Dr. Feelgood did the live music. A few of us waited outside. When Robert came out, he sang the first line of ‘Kashmir’ to us. Jimmy was nice, too, but he was quite out of it.”

Two days later, Plant, Maureen and their two children left the U.K. for Morocco. They holidayed in Agadir on the country’s south-west coast, traveling from there to meet Page, Charlotte Martin and their daughter Scarlet in Marrakech. Hiring cars, the two families wound their way down through the country and into the Western Sahara, which was then the center of escalating tensions between Moroccan forces and those of the autonomous Sahrawi.

“I was idly researching the possibility of recording various ethnic groups of different tribes in Morocco,” Plant told
Creem
’s Chris Charlesworth. “In one city we had lunch with a local police chief and received his blessing before carrying on. We showed him an old map of where we wanted to go. He called around one of his friends, a tourist guide. This guide told Jimmy and me that he had been on that route once in his life, but wouldn’t go again because he was a married man.

“We still went. Into a land of nice, honest people who found a Range Rover with Bob Marley music very strange.”

They broke off to travel to Montreux in Switzerland for a band meeting with Grant, staying on for the city’s jazz festival, Cole having rented them a couple of houses in the city. By the end of July, they were off again, this time to the Greek island of Rhodes, where Maureen’s sister Shirley and her husband joined them.

On August 3 Page left for Sicily, intending to buy Aleister Crowley’s old home on the island—the Abbey of Thelema. The next day the others set out on a drive across Rhodes. Maureen was driving a rented Austin Mini sedan, Plant beside her in the passenger seat, Carmen, Karac and Scarlet Page in the rear. John Bryant, Shirley Wilson and Charlotte Martin were in a following car.

At a certain point on the drive Maureen lost control of the car, spun off the road and crashed into a tree. She broke her skull, pelvis and leg. Plant broke bones in his right leg and ankle, and in his wrist. Karac suffered a broken leg, Carmen a fractured wrist, and Scarlet Page cuts and bruises. The others flagged down a passing fruit truck. Loading the stricken Maureen, Plant and the children onto the flatbed of his vehicle, the driver took them to hospital.

Speaking about the accident to Chris Charlesworth the following year, Plant said: “The memory is very vivid, but it’s like spilt milk and there’s no time to cry over it. I had the normal instant reaction of anybody and that was for my family who were in the car with me.

“[In hospital on Rhodes] I had to share a room with a drunken soldier who had fallen over and banged his head. As he was coming around, he kept focusing on me, uttering my name. I was lying there in some pain, trying to get cockroaches off the bed, and he started to sing ‘The Ocean.’ ”

“I can’t recall whether I was in the office or the pub when one of the secretaries came and found me,” says Cole. “She told me Charlotte wanted to speak to me and that there’d been an accident on Rhodes. The communication was that Maureen was going to die if someone didn’t get down there. Being an Anglo-Indian she didn’t have a common blood type. Fortunately, what saved her life was that her sister was with her.

“One of our roadies, Clive Coulson, knew of a Harley Street doctor, John Baretta, who was fluent in Greek. I called him, told him the situation and he said we’d also have to take an orthopaedic surgeon with us.”

John Baretta recommended Mike Lawrence, a prominent orthopaedic surgeon. Baretta was also personal physician to the construction magnate Sir Robert McAlpine and from him secured the services of a private plane equipped with medical facilities.