Stairway To Heaven (12 page)

“It's amazing how little time Berry spends at a show,” Peter advised us in advance. “He'll show up just minutes before he goes onstage and leave before the applause has faded.”

Berry drove up in a mauve Cadillac about twenty minutes before his set began, looking thinner than I had imagined him, with his familiar mustache trimmed to perfection. He brought his guitar with him and picked up a local band in Seattle, a three-piece combo that had been rehearsing Berry's tunes
on their own for three days. “I've been playing ‘Sweet Little Sixteen' since I was seven years old,” the keyboard player told me. “I can't believe I'm playing it with Chuck Berry himself today! This is a day I'll never forget.”

What a contrast to the way Zeppelin operated. Although the band wouldn't arrive at a venue until perhaps thirty minutes before the curtain rose, our crew would usually show up at eight or nine in the morning, a half day before the concert was scheduled to begin. They'd work nonstop until about four-thirty in the afternoon—tuning Jimmy's guitars, setting up the drums for Bonham's brutal attack, making final adjustments to John Paul's bass. They would test the special effects rack and run sound checks until they felt absolutely confident that Robert's voice would resonate with the same intensity captured in the recording studio. The crew were artists in their own right, creating the technical environment that the band demanded. Yes, they took occasional breaks during their eight hours of preparation—snatching some Jack Daniels or Blue Nun wine stored in Zeppelin's dressing room. But even so, there was none of the nonchalance that we saw with Chuck Berry.

Three years later, I was in Birmingham, England, with Bonham and Plant. It was between tours, and we were barhopping, drinking beer and flirting with the girls. Chuck Berry happened to be performing at a club called Barbarella's, and we sat down to listen.

Midway through “Johnny B. Goode,” Bonham was experiencing one of his fidgety, nervous fits. “I can't believe the drummer!” he groaned. “Chuck Berry's a rock 'n' roll legend, and they got this worthless drummer backing him. Richard, I gotta do something. This guy can't play worth a damn!”

“Well, what the hell can you possibly do?” I yelled at him. “Sit tight. We'll leave soon.”

As the show dragged on, Bonham's anxiety began to overtake him. Finally, he had had enough. “I can't take it anymore. The fucking drummer is
useless
! I gotta get him out of there!”

Bonham suddenly climbed onto the stage, grabbed the drummer by the shirt, and exclaimed, “Chuck wants me to take over!”

Berry was startled, but didn't say a word. Bonham sat down behind the drums, grinned at Berry, and looked eager to start playing. I presume Berry knew who his new drummer was, but we'll never know for sure. As Berry began twanging the opening bars of “Roll Over Beethoven,” Bonham slid into a drum accompaniment that was so seismic, so potent, that Beethoven himself may have felt the vibrations. Bonham sat in for three songs, waving to the cheering crowd when he finally left the stage. Berry gave him a wink that said, “Now
there's
a real drummer!”

That was a sentiment that a lot of people felt. At one time or another, all of
us worried whether Bonzo was operating too close to the edge. He often acted as though he were one of the original escapees from the cuckoo's nest. But when you can play drums the way he could, people are willing to put up with a lot more crap than they would from someone with less talent. As a result, Bonzo's erratic behavior continued almost unabated.

C
ole, I know it's four in the morning, but have all the fucking sharks in Puget Sound fallen asleep?”

John Bonham was growing impatient.

“I'll give 'em another ten minutes, Cole. Just ten more minutes. Then I'm going into the water myself.”

Bonham was talking nonstop, the meaningless kind of chatter that after a while was starting to drive me crazy. I was trying to keep my cool, not to respond at all. Maybe if I don't say anything, I thought, Bonham will just shut up.

“I'm really starting to get bored, Cole. If I have to, I'll swim out and wrestle those little bastards to the shore. With my bare hands. I mean it. I'm gonna do it!”

Finally, I had had enough. “Shut the fuck up, Bonzo! If you don't keep your voice down, you're going to wake up half of Seattle! You're probably scaring the goddamn sharks away!”

We were sitting on the balcony of Bonham's second-floor room at the Edgewater Inn, with our fishing poles positioned over the dark, still waters of Puget Sound at the edge of Pier 67. The Edgewater was an extraordinary hotel—a motor inn, really—and its novelty never wore off for Led Zeppelin. There was nothing elegant about it, but the four-story structure hung directly over Elliott Bay and the fishing could be exciting. The hotel gift shop supplied the
fishing rods, and if the mud sharks were biting, it was as much fun as a big-game hunt in Africa.

In fact, Bonham and I really didn't know much about how to fish. Just stick some bait on the end of the hook and wait for something to happen. Still, we had heard enough fishing terms to keep the conversation lively—at least for a while—although we weren't exactly sure what any of it meant.

“What are we doing wrong here tonight, Cole? Are we jigging when we should be spinning? Should we be angling from a different angle?”

“Hell if I know. We never have this much trouble in the Thames, do we?”

Even the one-liners, perhaps because they were so weak, couldn't amuse us for long. “Have those fucking sharks simply left town?” I asked at one point while taking the lamps from our hotel rooms and, with the help of extension cords, perching them on the balcony ledge to light up the water below. “I don't see any of those sons of bitches out there!”

Earlier that evening, Jimmy Page had been fishing from the adjacent balcony, but had given up as the night wore on. “He obviously doesn't have the blood of a fisherman running through his veins,” Bonham quipped. More likely, Jimmy may have drowned himself in so much alcohol that he had finally become weary and turned in for the night. Throughout the tour, we indulged in a little more cocaine than in the previous trip to America, but I also made sure that all of us had plenty of booze available, and no one stayed sober for long.

Bonham picked up a bottle of champagne—our third that night. “Let's pour a little of this on the bait,” he said. “Let's get 'em drunk. Make 'em a little more cooperative.”

By this point, Bonham had consumed way too much champagne himself. In fact, we were both pretty inebriated—so much so that it's somewhat of a miracle that neither of us stumbled off the balcony into the forty-five-degree water. We really didn't know what our limit was—how much we could drink and still remain somewhat functional—and, frankly, we rarely cared. On this summer tour, Bonzo and the others had learned to try to temper their alcohol consumption in the hours immediately before a concert, but beyond that, the word “limit” really had no place in their drinking vocabulary.

Maybe it was the music that brought us to America, but fishing (and drinking) at the Edgewater Inn were clearly some of the more interesting diversions we had found to kill the long hours from one concert to the next. At this juncture in Zeppelin's history—its third American tour—we could have afforded to stay in any hotel in the city. But in Seattle, the Edgewater Inn—despite its modest accommodations and the lingering, fishy aroma that seemed to have become entrapped in even the towels and the bed sheets—was clearly our sentimental favorite.

“If you ever put us up anywhere else but here, Richard, you'll be looking for other work,” Robert told me one day, jabbing his index finger into my chest. He probably was only half joking.

My own familiarity with the Edgewater Inn dated back to 1968 when I had toured with Terry Reid. He was opening for the Moody Blues one night in Seattle, and before the show, I was chatting backstage with Ray Thomas, the Moody Blues' flute player, and Pete Jackson, their tour manger. “Where are you staying?” Pete asked. “Next time you come to Seattle, you gotta stay at the Edgewater Inn. It's unbelievable. You can fish right from your hotel room!”

I was skeptical. “Fish from your hotel room! I find that hard to believe, Pete.”

“He's telling the truth,” Ray said. “The Beatles used to stay there. They're the ones who told us about it. When you're there, go into the gift shop. They've got pictures of the Beatles fishing.”

So when Led Zeppelin launched their third American tour, we had fishing on our minds. In the three weeks it took us to weave our way to the West Coast by way of Atlanta, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Saint Paul, the band often seemed preoccupied with reaching Seattle.

“How many more days until we get to the Edgewater?” Jimmy would ask.

“I'm itchin' for some fishin',” Bonham roared one night in a drunken stupor at the Steve Paul Scene in New York.

Everyone groaned. Bonham's rhymes weren't the kind that would have intimidated Cole Porter. “It's comforting knowing that Jimmy and Robert, and not you, are writing the songs for this band,” I told him.

When we finally reached Seattle, I called a local market and ordered five pounds of fresh salmon and five pounds of steak. That was our bait for the next two nights.

On that first attempt at fishing, however, Bonham and I were well into our third hour and just about ready to give up. Then suddenly, he got a bite.

“My God, Cole, it's happened,” he bellowed. “I got one!”

He leaped from his chair and furiously began reeling in the line.

“It's a huge one, Cole! I can feel it! Get the camera ready! It might be Moby Dick.”

I urged him on. “Do you need a hand? Bring that fucker in!”

We were shouting loud enough to arouse the entire hotel. Lights came on, one by one, in many of the rooms. “Grab the harpoon!” Bonzo shrieked. “Thar she blows!”

As Bonham continued to grapple with the fishing line, I lifted up one of the lamps, holding it farther out over the water to give us a clearer look when the monstrous catch came into view. “Hang on, Bonzo,” I shouted. “Don't let that bastard get away!”

In the excitement, I lost my grip on the lamp. It plunged into the water, sinking faster than an anchor.

“Fuck the lamp! What did you catch, Bonham? Do you think it's a shark?”

As the fish got within a few feet of the balcony, I realized that Bonzo's flair for the dramatic had consumed him. It wasn't Moby Dick after all. Nor the Loch Ness monster. Bonzo had hooked a rather anemic-looking red snapper that had stopped struggling long before it left the water.

Bonham wasn't the slightest bit disappointed. “Richard, it's a start,” he exclaimed, almost giddy with excitement. “We can fish until dawn. We'll have a dozen bigger ones by morning.”

He was right. Over the next three hours, we caught one after another, mostly red snappers, but a couple of mud sharks, too. And with each catch, we made even more noise than with the previous one—particularly when we'd shriek upon cutting our fingers on the hooks. Pity the poor folks in the hotel who were trying to sleep.

 

The next day, we were bragging to a roomful of people—including Pagey, Plant, and a couple of the roadies—about our success the night before. “Charles Atlas couldn't have reeled in a couple of those suckers,” Bonham boasted. “They grow 'em big in America.”

“So what are you gonna do with the fish now?” Plant asked, pinching his nostrils and peering into the wastebasket that we had filled with water and dead fish. “I bet they can smell these things all the way back to London.”

“We'll find something to do with them,” I said.

That night, we did. And it turned into probably the most notorious offstage incident ever associated with Led Zeppelin. It became known as the Shark Episode, the subject of gossip in rock clubs and concert halls around the world. As with any piece of gossip, the story got twisted and distorted every time it was told. But here is what really happened.

We had some girls in our rooms, and one of them seemed particularly playful. Her name was Jackie, a tall redhead from Portland, seventeen years old, who was one of the few birds I had ever met who could drink us under the table. She was chugging champagne from the bottle, talking openly about sex, spicing up her sentences with salty language. And she seemed to be trying to bait us into doing something daring.

“Are you guys into bondage?” she asked at one point. “I really like being tied up. I really do.”

I looked at Jimmy, and we smiled at one another.

“Well, let's give the girl what she wants,” I announced. “Let's do what we can to make her happy.”

I got on the phone to the front desk.

“Pardon me, this is Richard Cole. We need some rope up in Room 242 as soon as possible. Have you got any?”

There was a long pause on the phone line.

“What do you need rope for?” the desk clerk asked in a startled tone of voice.

I was afraid he'd want to know. “What do we need the rope for?” I was groping for an answer. “Well, luggage, of course. We've got a couple pieces of luggage coming apart here, and unless we tie them up tightly, they're going to come apart on our plane.”

Ten minutes later, we had the rope. “Not too tight,” Jackie giggled as she took off her clothes and made herself comfortable, waiting for us to tie her to the bed. We bound her hands, then her feet, and wrapped the rope through the bed frame.

“Just relax,” I told her. “I think you're going to like this.”

I picked up one of the red snappers and gently inserted it into Jackie's vagina.

“What the hell is that,” she shrieked.

I was almost too busy to answer. “I'm putting this red snapper into your red snapper!” I roared.

Then I inserted the fish into her ass. She let out a gasp.

The proceedings were filmed by Mark Stein of Vanilla Fudge. The Fudge had performed with us at the outdoor festival in Woodinville, and Mark had a home-movie camera with him. “Smile!” Mark laughed as the camera continued to run. “Everyone look at the camera and say ‘Cheese.'”

The whole incident was something that I just wanted to do and that I had never done before. Perhaps it was a cheap thrill. I knew we could get away with it simply because we had gotten away with most things. And no one ever said, “That's enough!” or “Give the girl a break!”

Jackie certainly never complained. Her only words were exclamations, seemingly in response to the physical sensations she was experiencing. “Oh, my God!” she shouted at one point. “Shit! This is fuckin' amazing!” At one point, she asked me not to stop. When I finally did, it was because I had finally become bored with the whole thing. Even the kinkiest type of sex loses its appeal after a while.

Word about the escapade spread quickly. Rumors circulated that the girl had been raped…that she had been crying hysterically…that she had pleaded for me to stop…that she had struggled to escape…that a shark had been used to penetrate her. None of the stories was true. But for years, when people wanted to criticize Led Zeppelin, they referred to the incident as a metaphor for the worst of rock music's personal vandalism. The thirty-minute episode was used as the definitive example of the “debauchery” and
“depravity” running rampant through the rock music world. And Led Zeppelin was cast as the worst of the lot.

That kind of behavior really was more the exception than the rule for us. When it occurred, Bonham and I were clearly the gang leaders; if the others participated, they were often coaxed into it, or they joined in more as a breather from the boredom or the frantic pace of life on the road.