Stairway To Heaven (22 page)

“What did I do?” I halfheartedly pleaded, not expecting Peter really to fire me.

At about this point, Tats Nagashima was on the brink of hysteria. He was a wonderful guy, but as the pandemonium unfolded, he seemed to panic. He found a phone on the train and placed a transcontinental call to Ahmet Ertegun in New York.

“Ahmet, there's terrible, terrible trouble here.” Tats's voice was trembling. “We're all on a train to Osaka, and the band has gone nuts! Mr. Grant has punched Mr. Cole and Mr. Bonham. He has started to fire people. I don't know what to do. They act like they're trying to kill each other.”

Ahmet took the news in stride. “You're dealing with Led Zeppelin,” he told Tats with a chuckle. “This is normal behavior for these guys. Don't worry about it. They'll be all right after they sober up and get where they're going.”

And that's exactly what happened. We were like siblings who fight but whose family ties can withstand the storm. We all apologized to one another the next day and got on with the rest of the tour.

 

If there was any expectation that Peter's rage on the train would put an end to our tomfoolery, it never came to pass. Atlantic's Phil Carson had accompanied us on this Japanese tour, and at one point he asked me, “Don't you guys ever slow down?” The answer to his question was “No.” That tour was like a nonstop Marx Brothers movie.

In Osaka, the band asked Phil if he wanted to make one of his occasional appearances on stage playing bass. He was a damn good bass player, and since Led Zeppelin rarely asked anyone to perform with them, Phil was honored at the invitation. He didn't know, however, that the band had an ulterior motive.

Phil ran onto the stage on cue. John Paul had moved to the keyboards, and Phil picked up the bass. From the start, Phil fit right in. He was feeling so wonderful, gazing out upon the crowd, thoroughly enjoying the experience. But about four minutes into the song, he suddenly realized that his bass was the only instrument he was hearing. He quickly looked around—and he was alone on the stage. As a prank, the band had snuck off in the middle of the song, leaving Phil to fend for himself. He made a valiant attempt at a bass solo, but he gave up once it was clear that the guys weren't going to rescue him. Phil put down his instrument and ran off the stage, too, as the band rollicked in laughter.

The incident was hilarious. But there was something about it that bothered me, too. Led Zeppelin had always taken its music very seriously—and still did. But this was one time that they allowed a practical joke to take precedence over the music. The Japanese audience was completely baffled by what had taken place onstage. It was very out of character for this band, and it was troubling.

The next night, Phil was “Zeppelinized” again, although this time it was
after
the second Osaka concert. We squeezed in some night-clubbing until the wee hours, and at one club, the band members collectively decided to tear off Phil's clothes. They began groping at his shirt, then his pants. Phil soon realized that he was in a losing battle, and decided to cooperate with them, systematically removing his own clothes, including his underwear. He spent a few minutes naked in the club, and as we left, he took a white tablecloth off one of the tables and wrapped it around himself.

On the limousine ride back to the hotel, Robert and John Paul became un
usually apologetic about the way they had treated Phil. “I'm so sorry about what we did to you back there,” Robert said. Phil should have been suspicious about their newfound compassion.

When the limousine pulled in front of the hotel, the band and Phil (still attired only in the tablecloth) exited the limo, and as they reached the revolving door at the hotel entrance, Robert extended a friendly arm and told Phil, “You go ahead and I'll follow.” As Phil stepped into the door and it began to turn, Robert reached out, grabbed the tablecloth, and yanked it off Phil, while pushing the door forward to catapault Phil, stark naked, into the hotel lobby.

Even though the Atlantic Records corporate policy book didn't cover this kind of situation, Phil remained remarkably calm. He looked back at us with a startled expression on his face, but realized that he was outnumbered and would never get the tablecloth back. So he walked over to the desk clerk and asked, “Can I have the key to suite 332?” The stunned clerk handed it to him, and Phil paraded into the elevator, riding up to his room in his birthday suit.

 

When we reached Kyoto, I thought that Phil was trying to turn the tables on us. Late one night, he called me from his hotel room. “Richard, come down to my room quickly,” he said in a frantic voice. “I've got a bird here, and she's fainted.”

Oh brother, I thought to myself. Here comes his retaliation for our prank.

Jimmy and I walked down the hall, but when we got to Phil's room, there actually was a Japanese girl lying on the floor unconscious. “What the hell happened?” I said, as we all kneeled around her. I noticed that Phil's pants were unbuckled and the zipper was down. And he was terribly upset.

“I was kissing her,” Phil said. “Then I got my cock out, and she fainted!”

Jimmy was patting the girl on the cheeks, trying to awaken her. Finally, she started to come to.

“Thank God,” Phil said. “I thought maybe she had a heart attack or something.”

We stayed there for a few minutes until the girl felt better. Finally, she said, “All I remember is that he unzipped himself, I looked down, and he had one this big.” She held her hands about a foot apart—and then she fainted again.

From that moment, I figured Phil was a guy entitled to a lot more respect than we had given him.

 

Amid all our hell-raising, Zeppelin found out just how popular they were in Japan, with every concert a sellout. Even so, when I had finally added the numbers up, we actually
owed
money to Tats Nagashima—the first time we had ever ended a tour, big or small, in the red. We had spent so much of Tats's
money on a potpourri of items—cameras, antiques, electronic equipment, hotel damage, and, most of all, Japanese beer and other alcohol—that Peter had to issue a check for much more yen than he would have liked. I hand-delivered the money—a total of $2,000—and bid Tats farewell.

Peter was philosophical about the financial realities. “If it hadn't been such an important tour for us, you might call the entire tour a disaster,” he said. “But we made our presence felt in the Far East for the first time.”

Yes, it was a disaster from a financial point of view, but there were other considerations.

 

After the last concert in Japan, John Paul, Bonzo, and Peter jetted back to England, but Jimmy, Robert, and I weren't quite ready to go home. Eager to see more of the world, we decided to take advantage of our presence in the Far East and fly to Bangkok, Thailand.

In our first few hours there, we visited the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, some of the lesser-known Buddhist temples, and a museum. We went shopping in Thai stores, where Jimmy bought an almost life-size flying horse made of gold, glass, and wood. I bought Peter a wooden Buddha, about three feet high and three feet wide. As I looked at the rotund Buddha, I said to Jimmy, “If there were a few more pounds on this statue, we wouldn't be able to tell the Buddha and Peter apart.” Pagey suggested I keep the joke to myself.

That night, we had no difficulty finding Bangkok's red-light district with the help of Sammy, a driver we had hired for the duration of our stay there. The brothels were really more like bathhouses, and they were staffed by plenty of scantily clad girls. Sammy walked into one of the brothels with us. There were at least two dozen girls by the entrance, standing in rows, each with a number pinned to her negligee.

“Beautiful girls, eh?” Sammy said. “I could look at them all night.”

“Well, my friends and I don't want to look at them,” I told Sammy. “We want to screw them!”

“That's fine,” he said, taking my request in stride. “They do that, too.”

Sammy talked to one of the girls, who came over to us, smiled, and shyly asked, “We can give you what you want. Just choose the girls by the number.”

Suddenly, we were like kids in a candy store. “We've got plenty of money,” Robert said, calling out numbers. “I'll take eleven, nineteen, and forty-one.”

“Okay,” I said, “but I'd like forty-one, too, before the night is over.”

For the next two hours, the three of us indulged in everything from massages to good, old-fashioned sex. When we finally ran out of stamina and left, Jimmy said, “They must have invented the term ‘fucking your brains out' here.”

Walking the streets in Bangkok, we got quite a bit of attention, but since
no one in Thailand seemed to have heard of Led Zeppelin, it wasn't because of our music. “I think they're making fun of our long hair,” Robert finally concluded. We were wearing earrings, and that was a real novelty there.

“Billy boy! Billy boy!” the kids would yell as they looked at us and pointed. Later, Sammy told us, “In Thailand, ‘Billy boy' means that you are queer or homosexual. They think that's what your long hair means!”

From Bangkok, the three of us flew to Bombay for a four-day visit. We checked into the Taj Majal Hotel, directly opposite the Gateway of India archway, and then spent some time on the streets of the city. Outside the hotel, a dozen cabdrivers offered to exchange our money into rupees on the black market. “I don't think so,” I told them, nervous about turning over money to an unfamiliar face.

Robert, however, finally talked me into it. “What the hell,” he said. “Give one of them some bills and see what they come back with.”

From the balcony of my room at the Taj Majal, I could see our designated money exchanger talking to another cabbie, and some currency changing hands. The second driver didn't look like most of the other cabbies we had seen. Although he was wearing the same khaki uniform, his slacks were immaculately pressed, his shirt was freshly laundered, there wasn't a hair out of place on his head, and his mustache looked as though it had been transplanted from Clark Gable's upper lip. “This guy should be making movies in Hollywood,” I said.

After getting our money, we decided to introduce ourselves to the dapper taxi driver and ask him for a tour of the city. “Our Marathi is a little rusty,” I told him. “We could use a guide if you're available.”

His name was Mr. Razark, and for the next three days he became part of our entourage, taking us to Indian brothels, a disco where Jimmy jammed with some startled local musicians who couldn't believe his prowess on their Japanese-made guitars, and some shops where we bought musical instruments, scented oils, and an ivory chess set.

Razark even invited us to his own home for a meal. We were struck by the oppressive poverty in the run-down neighborhood where he lived. The streets were over-crowded with flimsy shanties that couldn't have withstood even a mild windstorm. “My home is very small,” Razark said apologetically. “My wife and I share one room with our four children. My mother lives in the other room. It isn't much, but it cost me seventeen thousand pounds to buy. Bombay is a very expensive city to live in.”

No wonder the poor people stay so poor, I thought.

On our last night in Bombay, we talked Razark into accompanying us to a local restaurant in his neighborhood. “We want you to take us where
you
go to eat,” Jimmy said.

“No, no,” he replied. “It's not good for tourists. It could be dangerous to your health.”

“Don't worry about us,” Jimmy said. “We'll be fine. We're tough.”

So Razark drove us to a small Indian restaurant that seated about twenty people; in London or New York, it would have been condemned by the health department months earlier. At Razark's suggestion, all of us ordered chicken curry, although when it was served we had trouble finding any chicken meat on the bones.

Within an hour, we regretted not having taken Razark's warning more seriously. We had stomach cramps and nausea that kept us awake most of the night. By morning, we had vicious cases of diarrhea. I dreaded the thought of spending the better part of the upcoming day on an airplane.

During the flight back to London, all of us had to sprint to the bathroom every few minutes. Fortunately, I had a container of Johnson's baby powder with me, which the three of us shared in a desperate attempt to provide some relief for our sore asses. By the time the plane had made a stop in Geneva, the baby powder was gone, and we suffered the rest of the way home.

Throughout most of the flight back to London, perhaps as a way to get our minds off our most immediate physical problem, we talked about what we had experienced in Bombay. It had been a hard dose of reality to see the conditions in which Razark, this thoroughly decent man, and his family lived. We certainly didn't feel guilty about our own extravagant life-style; after all, the band had worked hard for their riches. But caught up in our own way of living, it was easy to overlook the distress in the world. In Bombay, we got a tough lesson about how most of the world lives. At least for those few days in India, all of us felt their pain.

N
ot long after we had returned to England, the fourth Led Zeppelin album was finally released. “It was probably more painful to get this one out than childbirth itself,” Jimmy remarked.

As the band had insisted, Atlantic issued the new album without a title, which didn't deter fans from calling it
Four Symbols
or
Zoso
nor from buying it in massive quantities. The album never reached Number 1 in the U.S., but it settled into a comfortable Number 2 spot in the States. There was never any question that it would turn gold.

To support record sales, we embarked on a brief, twelve-concert British tour, highlighted by two sellout concerts at Wembley Empire Pool in London. At Wembley, all 19,000 seats were sold within minutes after they went on sale, with each ticket priced at $1.75 for a chance to see the hottest band in the world.

Throughout that short British tour, however, I had Australia and New Zealand on my mind. As soon as the tour ended, Peter had arranged for me to fly down under to lay the groundwork for the band's first concerts there, which were being planned for February 1972. So while Led Zeppelin was doing its Christmas shopping, I boarded a plane from London to Melbourne. Over the ensuing days, I hopped to Perth, then to Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane, and Auckland. I negotiated with the local promoters and inspected, photographed, and, when necessary, changed the venues. I also lined up our hotel arrangements.

In early February, I joined Led Zeppelin for the flight to Australia on Air India. The decision to fly on the Indian airline, however, was not an easy one. Thanks to Atlantic Records becoming part of the Warner Brothers family, we could fly at a 50 percent discount because of an arrangement Warner Brothers had made with Air India. Even so, our asses had barely recovered from our last bout with Indian food, and we didn't know quite what to expect. “I'm not sure there's enough baby powder in the United Kingdom to last us all the way to Australia,” Robert wisecracked. At least we had a sense of humor about it.

The plane made a stopover in Bombay, where we had arranged in advance for a break in our trip—the chance to unwind for a few days before resuming the journey to Australia. It was a blessing just to get off the plane. In Bombay, we called Mr. Razark, who drove us to a beach where we rode camels for an entire afternoon—one more Indian experience that left our rear ends feeling battered and bruised. He also took us to a music store where John Paul bought a beautiful set of drums.

Two days later, when we finally boarded an Air India jet taking us to Perth, it was like entering the Twilight Zone. This flight was so short on liquor that we were almost going through alcohol withdrawal by the time we finally arrived in Australia. “You got any cocaine, Richard?” Bonham asked. “I need something to take my mind off all of this.”

The way things were going, we should have known that we'd never get through customs in Australia without a glitch. As we moved through the line, John Paul was notified that his drums were being confiscated. “These drums are made of animal skin,” the customs agent told him. “I'm afraid they are illegal here.”

As we climbed into the limo at curbside, Jimmy predicted, “Our lives can only get better.”

Jimmy was the eternal optimist. But I had my doubts. Only time would tell.

 

“This is a drug bust!”

There was loud knocking at my hotel room door.

“We have a warrant to search your room! Open up!”

Only an hour after checking into our hotel in Perth, I had been trying to catch a nap when I heard unexpected loud banging on my door. The police were working their way down the hall, inviting themselves into my room and the rooms of the members of the band.

As soon as I opened the door, the cops stormed in, looking under the mattress, in the dresser drawers, and through my luggage. I sat on my bed, watching the fishing expedition, knowing that I, at least, didn't have any drugs on me. Fortunately, neither did anyone else in our entourage.

The cops were terribly disappointed. After all, busting a famous rock band is probably worth a promotion. And a band like Led Zeppelin, having built a reputation for decadence, must have seemed like a likely target. I figure we were lucky that they didn't plant anything on us. “That will probably come later in the tour,” Bonzo said.

The police left as quickly as they had arrived, without an apology or an explanation, seeming not the least bit embarrassed that they had needlessly harassed us. All in a day's work, I presume.

Pagey shook his head. “Those stupid assholes!” he said. “If they had waited a day or two, we might have had something!”

 

The band
was
actually becoming even more involved in drug use—primarily cocaine and grass. But after the surprise visit by the men in blue, Peter offered us a warning: “We've got to be extra cautious here. I don't want anybody ending up in handcuffs in this country.”

Peter thought it was important to improve our odds of avoiding arrest. But that didn't mean insisting that the band keep away from illegal substances; it meant hiring some private security to serve as a buffer between us and the local police. At Peter's request, I made a few calls, and by the next morning a local security agency had provided us with three barrel-chested, retired police detectives to accompany us on the rest of the tour.

 

The Australian fans were more hospitable than those original cops. Every one of the Australian and New Zealand concerts was a record breaker. They drew the biggest crowds ever to see rock performances in those countries. To attract the largest audiences possible, we had scheduled every concert at an outdoor venue, and, according to Peter's instructions, there was a rain date set for each of them. Peter adamantly refused to let the band play in the rain, fearing that with all the electrical equipment, wires, and plugs, there was the real possibility of someone being electrocuted. The Adelaide show, in fact, was postponed a day when a drizzle turned into a downpour.

 

At all the Australian and New Zealand concert sites, I would arrive a few hours early to make sure the stage and the surrounding crash barriers were built to specifications. On occasion, the barriers were not high enough or strong enough, and I would grab a hammer and improve upon them myself. That's what happened in Auckland, where the band was scheduled to play at Western Springs. I talked Bonham into coming out to the site early with me, and we pounded a few nails and got things into shape.

Once the repairs were made, Bonham and I started looking for something to do until the gates opened. We raided the liquor cases backstage, and after a
few beers Bonzo spotted a pair of Honda motorcycles parked near the stage. “Well,” he said, “don't just stand there. Let's take 'em for a spin.”

The motorcycles belonged to Rem Raymond, the event's promoter, who let us ride them for a few minutes. “There's one more thing we should try,” Bonham finally suggested. “I've never played chicken before. Let's do it with the bikes!”

I gulped. “Forget it, Bonzo,” I said. “I don't feel suicidal today.”

“Richard,” he said. “Do it for your old pal. C'mon, Richard.”

He was starting to whine, and I was starting to build up my courage. Finally, in a moment of total insanity, I gave in. “Okay, but I should warn you: When I play chicken, I don't flinch.”

Led Zeppelin often lived by an “anything for a thrill” credo. It was an “act first, think later” attitude. This was probably the ultimate example of it.

As Bonham and I rode the bikes to an adjacent field, I told myself, “I have three beers to blame for this.” We positioned ourselves about a hundred and fifty yards apart, facing one another.

“If one of us dies,” I mumbled, “I hope it's me. If it turns out to be Bonzo, Peter will have me killed anyway.”

I gunned the engine, turned up the throttle, and, like a couple of lunatics, Bonham and I sped toward one another. Rolling at about thirty miles per hour, we were nearly on top of each other almost immediately. But about twenty feet away from Bonzo, despite my promise, I must have flinched. My bike skidded into the dirt, and I rolled over it.

“Damn it!” I shouted, turning to look at Bonham, who by this time was fifty yards past me, obviously amused by my ungraceful landing. Other than some torn jeans and bruised pride, I was unhurt, but the motorcycle did not fare as well—either during or immediately after the crash. “It must have been the bike's fault!” I yelled to Bonham.

Just then, I spotted an ax lying near some tools about twenty yards away. I walked over, picked it up, and hovered over the bike for a few seconds. “It's like a horse with a broken leg,” I said. “You gotta put it out of its misery.”

Flailing the ax, I systematically dismantled the motorcycle, swing by swing. Paul Bunyan couldn't have been any more vicious.

Rem Raymond was despondent when I told him what had happened. “Sure, I got a little carried away,” I explained. “But there must be a good repair shop around here. Send us the bill.”

Once we were out of Rem's earshot, Bonzo mumbled, “Sure, send us the bill. We won't pay it, but go ahead and send it anyway!”

 

In Auckland, people traveled up to 900 miles by train to see the group perform, coming from the farthest reaches of the island. They became part of a
crowd of 25,000 that paid an average of four dollars to see the band rock to the point of collapse. Western Springs was a stadium usually reserved for stock car races, but it had never seen as much horsepower as Zeppelin generated that day.

Even though Robert was a little under the weather—some mild indigestion, he said—that Auckland show was still one of the band's best concerts of the tour. “Stairway to Heaven” primed the crowd for what was to come. Then the place went nuts over “Whole Lotta Love,” now part of a medley with some old rock ‘n' roll songs and Zeppelin tunes (“Good Times Bad Times,” “You Shook Me,” “I Can't Quit You”). For a full sixteen minutes, the band pushed “Whole Lotta Love” to the point of no return, and the audience responded with its own eruption of emotions, reacting as though they were seeing history being made. As far as they were concerned, they were.

 

Those kinds of performances left the band feeling absolutely euphoric. They were reminiscent of the earliest American tours when fans were seeing Zeppelin for the first time. Bonzo came away from the concerts so energized that he proclaimed, “I won't be able to sleep for days.” Sometimes it seemed as though he didn't.

In Adelaide, Creedence Clearwater Revival had performed the night before us and were still in town when we checked into our hotel. Creedence's drummer, Doug Clifford, had a practice drum kit in his hotel room, and Bonham and he took turns pounding out a thunderous beat until almost daybrak. Amazingly, no one from the hotel complained.

 

For the most part, however, except for the music itself, this tour was pure drudgery. When we had checked into the White Heron Hotel in Auckland well past midnight, not much went right. The night desk clerk had difficulty figuring out what rooms we belonged in and ended up putting Peter and me in the same suite. To be more accurate, he put Peter, me, and a married couple whom we had never met in the same suite!

When Peter and I turned the key and entered our room, the fellow was in bed with his wife, looking as though the last thing he wanted was two late-night visitors. Frankly, I couldn't blame him.

“What the hell are you doing in my room?” he shouted as his wife grabbed a blanket to cover herself.

“I was about to ask you the same fucking question!” Peter yelled back. “We'd appreciate you getting the hell out of here!”

We went down to the front desk to try to straighten the matter out. Much to our surprise, however, our roadie Mick Hinton was working at the switchboard.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked.

“I bribed the fucking desk clerk into going into the kitchen and fetching some food for us,” he said. “He told me to take care of things while he was gone.”

Just then, the phone at the front desk rang.

“Front desk,” Mick said as he picked up the receiver, trying to sound as if he knew what he was doing. It was our “roommate” on the other end of the line, complaining about the unannounced appearance Peter and I had made a couple of minutes earlier.

Mick sounded angry. “Look, if you don't like things around here, then go fuck yourself!” he shouted.

The hotel guest apparently tried to reason with Mick, which was a futile effort. “You asshole,” Mick hollered into the phone, “this is the way we run our hotel! I suggest you get the hell out of here!”

Fifteen minutes later, the man and his wife checked out.

 

When we reached Sydney in the first week of March, we stayed at the Sobell Townhouses, and, for a change, we really tried to be on our best behavior. One night, I asked the desk clerk to point us toward some clubs that could withstand a Zeppelin onslaught. Our second stop was at Les Girls, owned by an American named Sammy Lee. “It's full of female impersonators,” the desk clerk had told us.

Actually, Les Girls was much more…it had a stage show featuring transsexuals who were really quite talented—good singers, even better dancers, and they were pretty attractive, too. About midway through the show, Bonzo asked a waiter the question we all were interested in. “Are they men or women?” he said.

“Well, they've had their dicks cut off and their breasts enlarged,” the waiter answered. “As far as they're concerned, they're women now!”

“Yeah, that sure doesn't sound like they're men anymore!” Robert said with a bit of understatement.

We found out that the “girls” at Les Girls were actually quite famous in Australia. And once they heard that Led Zeppelin was in the audience, they came over to greet us. We invited them to our concert the following night and then to go drinking with us after it.