Stairway To Heaven (10 page)

The hostility between the band and the press reached a peak during the final three weeks of the tour when Ellen Sander, a
Life
reporter, began to travel with us. It wasn't a particularly pleasant experience for anyone. Sander had actually suggested to her editors that she cover the Who's American tour instead; when that didn't work out, she turned to Led Zeppelin as a backup.

Because Zeppelin was such a new band, we probably should have welcomed attention from a magazine with the stature of
Life
. In fact, Peter sat down with us one afternoon and said, “Please give her a little polite attention. She's with a big American magazine. Whatever she writes is going to be read by millions of people.”

So we tried. We took turns casually chatting with Sander, but none of us could find anything too endearing about her. She wasn't that much fun to be around. She didn't seem particularly fond of our music, and she clearly had contempt for our lifestyle.

Sander's journalism was reflective of the ongoing problems that Led Zeppelin had with the media. When she finally did write about her experiences on the tour, her recollections were thoroughly unflattering and, from our point of view, largely inaccurate. Sander's most provocative claim was that as she was departing the tour and bidding us “good-bye and godspeed,” she was attacked by two members of the band (whom she did not identify). As she recalled it, they grabbed at her clothes and shredded her dress. Peter Grant, she insisted, rescued her before she was thoroughly sacrificed to these monsters/musicians.

“What a bunch of crap!” Bonzo told me later. “We may have been teasing her a little, and maybe our drunkenness offended her. But if she thought we were trying to rape her, then she's got a lot wilder imagination than most writers.”

Sander's observations were brutal. “If you walk inside the cages of the zoo you get to see the animals close up, stroke the captive pelts, and mingle with the energy behind the mystique,” she wrote. “You also get to smell the shit firsthand.”

 

Peter asked me to try to find some way to help the band live with the pressures that were building up during that tour. “It's torture,” Pagey once told me on a plane flight on the way to a recording studio in New York. “This band is a newborn, and I'm already ready for a break.”

B
y the second American tour, we always had plenty of girls hanging around the stage doors and the hotels. Plant and Page seemed to be their main interests, but many of the young ladies weren't particular. While the band began to rely on me to arrange whatever late-night entertainment they desired, the girls made it easy.

Even by this early period in Zeppelin's history, I could already see recreational patterns developing that would persist throughout the band's lifetime. There were the girls, of course, whom we began to party with, sometimes to excess. And there were endless bottles of alcohol, too. Both, of course, were welcome diversions from the stresses of traveling and the record-company pressures that hit us hard during that second U.S. tour. But we soon began to overdo it. The alcohol and later the drugs, too, eventually caught up with the band and began taking their toll. And as early as 1969, there were already signs of an eventual downhill slide.

When it came to girls, Jimmy would say, “The younger, the better.” More than the others, Jimmy seemed to lust after the girls whose faces were childlike and innocent and whose bodies had barely taken shape. But he wasn't the only one who enjoyed the young ones. Maybe it was a sign of our immaturity, but after all, we were only twenty or twenty-one ourselves, so a fourteen-or fifteen-year-old wasn't total madness—or at least it didn't seem so at the time. And as for the married members of the band, most were able to at least tem
porarily overlook the fact that they had wives waiting for them back in England; if there were ever any guilt pangs, I never saw them.

“My dream,” Jimmy once told me, “is to find a young, Joni Mitchell look-alike…thin, angular features, long blond hair, a voice that could sing you to sleep.”

I kept my eyes open, but never really filled the prescription to his satisfaction. In fact, I don't think he ever would have been content with anyone but the real thing.

“Richard, I'll tell you what I fantasize about,” Jimmy said. “I'd like to have Joni Mitchell sitting on the end of my bed, playing the guitar and singing for me.” He didn't elaborate on the fantasy any further, but I presumed that he would have liked a little more from Joni than guitar strumming.

I would often saunter down to the hotel lobbies where the young ladies would congregate and invite some of them up to our rooms. Even though Led Zeppelin and dozens of other rock bands were often accused of exploiting these girls, I thought it was a bum rap. We rarely went looking for them; they made themselves available to us. We never forced them into doing anything they didn't want to. They were looking for some fun—and so were we. There was no emotional involvement on either side. As a blonde in Boston told me, “I just want a good time. If any of you guys want to have some fun, I'm available.” She was wearing her high school cheerleader outfit.

Some of the girls were hangers-on from the Yardbirds' days. They had been fans of Jimmy's and hadn't broken their addiction to him. They also appeared to have created their own groupie hierarchy, determined to stay on the first team rather than slip down to benchwarmers. A few became madly jealous if they sensed a decline in attention from Jimmy. And their exchanges with each other often got bitter (“Jimmy always treated me like a lady, which is more than I can say for you!”). Occasionally, their hostile words would deteriorate into hair-pulling, eye-gouging free-for-alls.

 

The girls and the booze usually went together. But sometimes the liquor was enough. In a few cities in those days, we did two shows a night, usually at 10 P.M. and midnight, and during the hour break between the two performances, we'd uncork some champagne, sometimes several bottles of it. “The booze helps calm my nerves,” Bonzo would tell me. “I just feel better when I've had a drink or two.” In actuality, he would have ten to twelve drinks.

One night in Kansas City, after the second show at a club just south of the Missouri River, I drove the band back to our hotel, the Muehlbach, one of the finest old inns in the city. We went into the hotel bar, and after a few more drinks—Scotch, champagne, gin and tonic—John Paul, Robert, and Jimmy took
the elevator to their rooms. Bonzo and I decided there was still more drinking to do. So we kept the bartender company.

Eventually, we became so intoxicated that I doubted we would ever find our way to our rooms. But we tried, weaving through the hotel lobby like a couple of drunks—which we were becoming. Bonzo couldn't stay on his feet any longer and collapsed into an oversized chair and refused to budge.

“Go up without me, Cole,” he said, his speech slurring one word after another. “I'll be fine here. I'll be just fine.”

I wasn't in any shape to argue. I just wanted to get some sleep. Once inside my room, I took a couple of Mandrax to help me doze off and crawled into bed, expecting to snooze peacefully until morning. But Bonzo had other plans. At about 3 A.M., the phone in my room jarred me awake.

“Richard!”

“Who is this?” I mumbled.

“Hey, Richard. You gotta get me outta here!”

I recognized Bonzo's voice, but was still trying to orient myself.

“It's me, Richard. Come down and get me.”

“Where are you, you cunt?”

“Where do you think? I'm in jail, that's where I am. Come and bail me out.”

Bonham then apparently handed the phone to a cop, who proceeded to explain that Bonzo had been taken to jail for being drunk in a public place—namely, the Muehlbach lobby. He gave me the address of the jail, which was about two miles down the road.

I was furious, but my anger was related more to being awakened than to a concern over Bonham's well-being. Cursing under my breath, I got dressed and stuffed $5,000 in cash into my pocket. Ten minutes later, I was in the police station.

“I'm here to get John Bonham,” I told the sergeant at the desk. “I'm his manager.” I figured calling myself his manager sounded more impressive than tour manager. “What's it going to cost to bail him out?”

“Cost!” The sergeant snickered. “That son of a bitch isn't going anywhere. He's gonna sleep it off. Come and pick him up in the morning when he's sober.”

So at nine the following morning, I returned. Bonham had a sheepish look on his face as they led him to the waiting area of the police station. His face was bruised with one contusion below his left eye and another on the cheek next to it.

“I think the cops roughed me up a little,” he whispered. “I really don't remember.”

None of us learned much from experiences like that. There were many
more drinking episodes during that tour. Particularly when Peter wasn't with us, I was the only one to try to keep Zeppelin in line. And I was usually just as possessed with alcohol—if not more so—than the rest of the band.

 

In May—not long before Bonham's twenty-first birthday—Zeppelin performed two shows at the Rose Palace in Pasadena. Barry Imhoff, the promoter of the event, knew what our life-style was becoming by then. So he chose a birthday gift that John couldn't have appreciated any more—a four-foot-tall bottle of champagne!

Between the first and second shows that night, Bonzo single-handedly guzzled nearly a third of the bottle. When it was time for him to maneuver back into the drummer's stool for the second show, he dragged the oversized bottle onto the stage with him. For a sober observer, it was probably a sad sight: There, like a weightlifter pressing a barbell, he raised the bottle over his head between songs and flooded his mouth and throat with alcohol. He was so drunk that he fell off his stool twice. By the time the performance ended, the bottle was empty.

Imhoff still had one more gift for us: Four live octopuses.

“What are we supposed to do with octopuses?” I asked.

“They make great bathtub companions,” he claimed. “They're much more fun than a rubber duck.”

Back at the hotel, we had invited a couple of girls up to our rooms, and I figured they might be able to make better use of the octopuses than I could. “You girls look like you need a little cleaning up,” I told them. “Take off your clothes and climb into the bathtub.”

They agreed, and after they had jumped into the tub, Jimmy and I carried in the octopuses and tossed them into the water. “We figure you need something to keep you company,” Jimmy giggled.

The girls remained remarkably calm, considering there were these creatures swimming around them. As we watched them play, the octopuses somehow instinctively knew just where to congregate and just where to place their tentacles. One of the girls, a little brunette who Jimmy couldn't take his eyes off, gasped and then sighed as one of the octopuses explored her genitals.

“Oh, my God,” she squealed. “I've gotta get one of these. It's like having an eight-armed vibrator!”

“Maybe we oughta market these things,” I told Jimmy. “It would probably have even more universal appeal than music.”

 

We were in the Los Angeles area for almost a week, and at the Château Marmont we ran room service ragged with our appetite for booze. “Los
Angeles is something special,” Bonzo used to say. “It's different. It's decadent.”

Back in England, Zeppelin lived quite normal lives with storybooklike families or girlfriends. But the road—particularly Los Angeles—was becoming a place of excess. Of course, we probably spent many more hours in the States sitting in airports, watching television or talking about music. There were many hours spent in recording studios and even more time onstage. But it's some of the wild, reckless episodes that still stick most vividly in my mind. Seemingly overnight, we found ourselves in a position to do almost anything we wanted, and in L.A. there seemed to be a tidal wave of free-spirited girls who were always cooperative and compliant. For a group of working-class boys from London, it was like finding the Promised Land.

I was in John Bonham's bungalow at the Marmont late one night, and each of us had a girl in tow. Although we certainly weren't Casanovas, we still could have added several notches to the Marmont's cluttered bedposts. By this point, we had devoured a few bottles of booze, and Bonzo and I were each occupying one of the beds in the room, with our clothes in a single pile on the floor.

While I was intertwined pretzel-like with my girl—a bird from Santa Monica named Robin—Bonzo decided to walk into the kitchen to catch his breath and grab a drink of water. While there, he spotted two large industrialsized cans of baked beans. The chef in him apparently took over.

Bonzo opened the cans, and then, while cradling one in each arm, he pranced into the bedroom.

“Dinnertime!” he announced. “Come and get it!”

As Robin and I looked up in horror, Bonham stood over us, held the cans over our heads, and then tilted them simultaneously on their sides, pouring their cold contents onto our naked bodies.

“You fucker,” I screamed, rolling to the opposite end of the bed in a futile attempt to escape the line of fire.

Within seconds, Robin and I were swimming in a gooey, sloppy puddle of beans that covered us from our eyebrows to our ankles. It was a scene out of
Tom Jones
.

Before Robin and I could come up for air, Peter Grant had walked into the bungalow and surveyed the scene. On occasion, Peter would show anger or disgust over incidents like this. But not that night.

“Peter,” yelled Bonzo, “grab a spoon and dig in!”

Peter chuckled and then was overcome with a mischievous urge of his own.

“Cole, you fucking slob, don't you have
any
class?” he roared. “Let me add a little sophistication to your life.”

Peter grabbed a full bottle of champagne on the nearby dresser, shook and then uncorked it, and proceeded to spray Robin and me with its contents.

 

Bonham would become almost teary-eyed when we finally had to check out of the Marmont. On our last night there, he had been drinking pretty heavily and decided that he wanted to play doctor. He borrowed a white coat and a room service cart from a hotel valet and lifted a girl named Candy onto the cart. Candy was a pretty, blond teenager from Miami who we had met during the first tour. She showed up unannounced at the Marmont, salivating for some Zeppelin high jinks. We didn't disappoint her.

Bonham undressed her on the cart, cackling as he removed each piece of clothing. Once she was nude, he proclaimed, “It's time for some surgery, my dear.”

He scampered into the bathroom and returned with a shaving brush, shaving cream, and razor. “This won't hurt a bit, sweetheart,” he told Candy, who lay there submissively as he applied shaving cream to her pubic hair.

For the next ten minutes, the band and I took turns shaving her vagina: Robert with vitality and broad strokes…Jimmy with the passion of Rodin or Michelangelo. All the while, Candy giggled her way through the procedure.

When it was over, as we admired our artistic efforts, Robert suddenly interrupted the festivities with a shrill, agonizing wail. “Oh, fuck!” he screamed. “Bonham, how could you? How could you?”

Robert picked up the shaving brush and waved it in the air. “This is mine. This is my fucking brush.”

Everyone in the room burst into laughter. John Paul patted Robert on the back. “Enjoy your next shave,” he said.

 

Not all the girls we ran into during that second tour were as pretty as Candy. And, of course, we were in a position to be quite selective. For the unattractive birds—the ones who were painfully hard on the eyes—well, as Bonham said, “If you let any of those dogs up to the room, you're fired!”

The Plaster Casters were some of the most persistent girls, stubbornly overstaying their invitation despite our repeated pleas that they simply vanish. They were determined to make casts of the band members' erect penises, perhaps someday displaying them in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. One day at the Marmont, Cynthia P. Caster explained to us how they created the casts that had made them so famous. “First we get the musician excited, any way we can,” she said. “Then my assistant does the actual casting while I keep the hard-on going. She's quite talented. You guys should try it. This is really an art form.”