Stairway To Heaven (3 page)

I
saw John Bonham for the last time just days before I had left for Italy in summer 1980. We met at a pub called the Water Rat on the King's Road, after an evening rehearsal in which the band was preparing for a summer European tour. While John and I drank Brandy Alexanders, I grumbled about Peter Grant, the band's manager, sending me to Italy to kick my heroin habit rather than accompanying the band on their upcoming tour.

“Don't worry,” John said, “you'll get off that shit and be back with us before the summer's over.”

When we left the pub, John took me for a ride in a Ferrari Daytona Spider convertible he had bought two days before. As he dropped me off in front of the pub, I turned to Bonzo.

“Do you realize that this European tour will be the first Zeppelin gigs I've ever missed?” I told John. “I hope you bastards miss me.”

Bonzo smiled. “Very unlikely, Cole,” he quipped. “Don't count on it.” Then he asked, “How pissed off are you at Peter?”

“
Very
pissed off. But I also know that I need to get off smack once and for all. And so do you, Bonzo.”

Bonham laughed. “It's not a problem for me,” he said with exuberance. “If it becomes a problem, I'll just quit!”

Even though I wanted to go on the European tour, I also recognized that I was losing interest. As good as Led Zeppelin's music continued to be, I could
see the organization beginning to suffocate in its own personal turmoil. For me, the hassles were starting to outweigh the joys.

In the early years of Zeppelin, we had been a close, six-man unit, with Peter and me providing the support for the four musicians. There was real joy in seeing the fame of the band mushroom so quickly, which translated into enormous financial rewards and the chance to live an incredible fantasy lifestyle that a bunch of musicians from mostly working-class backgrounds found irresistible and intoxicating.

But from the inside, the signs of Led Zeppelin's disintegration began to surface in the late 1970s. Jimmy, Bonzo, and I were becoming increasingly caught up in the quagmire of drugs, enough to really anger Robert and John Paul. “You're one of the people in charge of this operation,” Robert once told me. “And it makes us nervous to see what's going on. Can't you see what's happening?”

I thought Robert was crazy. From the earliest years, Zeppelin's concert tours had always been drenched in alcohol…champagne, beer, wine, Scotch, Jack Daniels, gin…and brimming with drugs, even though we rarely paid for any of the illegal substances. Drugs for the band were often given to me by fans, by friends, who would knock on my hotel room door, hand me a bagful of cocaine or marijuana, and say something like, “We have a present for you.” The band rarely turned anything down.

When Bonzo, Jimmy, and I began using smack, no one aggressively intervened, even when it started having a noticeable impact. Jimmy became so caught up in his drug habit that he sometimes showed up an hour or two late for rehearsals. Bonzo's behavior, already unpredictable, became more volatile. As for me, I was buying heroin from dealers within a few hundred feet of Peter's office in London and was becoming less attentive to my day-to-day responsibilities in the Zeppelin organization. I still felt I was in control, but I wasn't; I'm sure Bonham and Pagey were deteriorating, too.

By 1980, Peter and I were constantly at each other's throats. Peter never fired me, but we weren't getting along at all. He was fed up with my heroin habit and gave me an ultimatum.

“Pick where you want to go to clean yourself up, and I'll pay for it,” Peter said. “But you're not going to bring down this organization with you.”

At times, the thought of getting away actually sounded appealing. Particularly while we were on tour, Peter wanted to know where I was and what I was doing at every moment of every day. I felt I was on the spot all the time, and I didn't like it. “Why are you bugging me?” I would scream at him. My drug use was making me paranoid.

I even thought of quitting. But at the same time, I was unwilling to give up
the glamorous life-style of limousines, luxurious hotel suites, drugs, and groupies.

Peter was an intimidating presence, a mammoth man, overweight, with an unkempt beard and a fast-receding hairline. More important, he was a hands-on, loyal manager who knew every twist and turn of the music industry. He deserved nearly as much credit for the band's international success as the musicians themselves.

 

As for Bonham, I began seeing a very nasty side of him at times—an anger built on frustration—that grew out of his own mixed feelings about Led Zeppelin itself. He loved playing with the world's number one band, and he glowed when critics called him the top drummer in the business. But with increasing frequency, he resented having to go out on the road or showing up for a particular concert when he just wasn't in the mood. Like the rest of the band, Bonham no longer needed to play for the money. So when his state of mind just wasn't in sync with catching a plane to the next gig—when his big heart and his loneliness for his family would make him ache to be back home—he would say to me, “It's becoming harder to be somewhere where I don't want to be. I'll follow through because people are depending on me. But someday soon, I'm going to give it all up. I have to.”

Bonham's thirty-minute drum solos—which sometimes left the drumskins torn and his hands bloodied—were a way of getting out all that anger and all that pain.

 

Jimmy Page was just as complex, although his commitment to the band never wavered. Because Zeppelin was his baby, his creation, his enthusiasm remained strong. But his health was a constant worry to those of us around him, thanks to a vegetarian diet that sometimes bordered on malnutrition. He appeared frail and was more prone to colds than the rest of us. Still, his passion never ebbed onstage.

Jimmy and I were very close during the early days of Zeppelin, although we spent much less time together in the later years. Offstage, we had once shared an excitement for art collecting, but as I began spending more of my money on drugs, I could no longer afford to indulge my own artistic interests, and so Jimmy and I drifted apart. He never seemed particularly impressed with his own wealth, perceiving it as a means of buying him seclusion—and maintaining his cocaine and heroin habits. But more than anything, music and Led Zeppelin were his real loves.

 

Through all the band's travails, John Paul Jones somehow emerged unscathed. When he dabbled in drugs, it seemed to be more out of curiosity than any
thing else, and never to excess. He was almost always level-headed and in control. He was also reclusive, even on the road, often content to be by himself, away from the chaos and the excesses that he may have seen bringing Led Zeppelin down. He avoided much of the band's craziness, and his marriage survived intact after all the years of touring; his wife and children seemed to be enough for him.

“Richard,” he would sometimes say on the road, “here's the phone number where I'll be for the next forty-eight hours; unless there's an absolute emergency, don't tell anyone—and I do mean
anyone
—how to reach me.”

Peter would become outraged when John Paul would disappear. But perhaps Jonesy was smarter than any of us, keeping his distance while the rest of us were gradually sinking in the quicksand.

 

Until Bonham's death, I had always felt that Robert Plant had borne most of the brunt of any negative energy that may have surrounded Led Zeppelin. From the beginning, through his soulful singing, I knew there was a sensitive side to Robert. So I wasn't surprised to see him emotionally devastated in 1975 when his wife, Maureen, nearly died from internal injuries and multiple fractures in an automobile accident on the Greek island of Rhodes or two years later, when his son, Karac, died of a serious respiratory infection. At Karac's funeral, Robert was stoic and composed through the services. But later that afternoon, Bonham and I sat with him on a grassy field on Jennings Farm, Robert's home near Birmingham. As each of us drank from a bottle of whiskey, Robert opened up, bewildered by the tragedies in his life and where Led Zeppelin was headed.

Clearly, Robert was hurt that Jimmy, John Paul, and Peter hadn't been by his side during his son's burial. “Maybe they don't have as much respect for me as I do for them,” he said in a pained, monotone voice. “Maybe they're not the friends I thought they were.”

A few minutes later, Robert pondered all of our pasts and futures. “We couldn't ask for any more success than we've had,” he said. “Professionally, we couldn't ask for more. But where the hell has it gotten us? Why do these terrible things keep happening? What the hell is going on?”

They were questions without answers.

 

And then Bonham died. In my prison cell, I found myself reflecting upon the talk of a Zeppelin “jinx” that had haunted the band for years. It was something that disc jockeys and fans discussed much more than any of us did. When the subject did come up, we mostly just scoffed at it.

“It's bullshit,” Jimmy once said angrily. “People take my interest in the occult and give it a life of its own.”

Because the band rarely made efforts to court the press and discuss the intimate details of their lives with reporters, there was a mystique that surrounded the band that tended to fuel the rumors of a curse. “Let them think whatever they want,” Jimmy said. “If the fans want to believe all the rumors, let them. A little mystery can't hurt.”

The most ominous rumor was elevated to mythological status. It proclaimed that in their earliest days, the band members—except for John Paul, who refused to participate—had made a secret pact among themselves, selling their souls to the devil in exchange for the band's enormous success. It was a blood ritual, so the story went, that placed a demonic curse upon the band that would ultimately lead to the deflating of the Zeppelin. And perhaps to the death of the band members themselves.

To my knowledge, no such pact ever existed. Jimmy was a great one for spinning yarns, especially with young ladies who were fascinated with the “dark” side of the band, so maybe that's how the story got started. But despite Jimmy's preoccupation with the supernatural, he rarely discussed his dabbling in the occult with the rest of the band. One of our roadies once said to me, “I tried to broach the subject once, and Jimmy went into a rage. I'd never raise the issue again.”

Jimmy was fascinated with the whole idea of black magic, and in the hours after learning of Bonzo's death, I began to wonder just how powerful his obsessions were. Jimmy owned a home that once belonged to Aleister Crowley, the British poet who experimented with spells, rituals, séances, heroin, and “sexual magick.” Jimmy's neighbors were convinced that the house was haunted, and they told stories about a young man who was once decapitated there, with his head rolling down the stairs like a basketball.

After Bonzo died, the London tabloids had a field day. They blared with headlines like “A Jinx Haunts Led Zeppelin.” According to one British reporter, “Bonham died as retribution for guitarist Jimmy Page's obsession with the occult.”

Jimmy became furious with that kind of journalism. “They just don't know what they're talking about,” he roared. “They should keep their ignorance to themselves.”

As I sat in my cell, my thoughts kept returning to the possibility of a hex. Was Led Zeppelin susceptible to cataclysms because of some type of undefinable evil force? Was Jimmy's fascination with the occult somehow responsible? Or had our own hard living and personal excesses finally caught up with us?

Whatever the reason, I knew that Led Zeppelin would never be the same, if the band survived at all. Even before Bonham's death, during those first few weeks in the Italian prison, I had tried to deal with my predicament by re
peatedly telling myself, “This is going to be over any day. I'll be out of here, I'll be off heroin, and I'll join the band for their American tour. Things will be good again, just like they had been in the early days.”

But John Bonham's death forced me back to reality. Not only would I have to deal with my grief over the loss of a friend, but I knew Led Zeppelin itself was finished. Over the years, even though the band had never talked about anyone dying, they realized there was the possibility that one of them might decide to leave the group.

“If that happens,” Jimmy said matter-of-factly, “that will be the end of Led Zeppelin. The organization will close down. Why bother going on after that?”

Bonham was such an integral part of the band. He and Robert in particular had known each other as young musicians, years before Led Zeppelin. And although they had their fights and disagreements—usually over petty matters like who was going to pay for the petrol in one of their cars—they had a strong emotional bond. I couldn't imagine Robert singing with anyone other than Bonham behind him. It would be like trying to drive a car with three wheels. When Karac died, Robert had put his arms around Bonham at the funeral and said, “You're my oldest mate, Bonzo; I can count on you to always be there for me, can't I?”

 

Jimmy put it bluntly: “It would be an insult to find a replacement for John Bonham in order to keep Led Zeppelin aloft.”

R
obert, why would you want to waste your life in a rock band? You have an opportunity for a wonderful education and a good career. Don't let yourself get sidetracked. Don't blow it.”

The words were spoken by Robert Plant, Sr., whose son was itching for a life as a rock singer. For the elder Plant—a civil engineer who felt more comfortable with Beethoven than the Beatles—his son's musical ambitions were becoming his own nightmare. He could not tolerate his boy wasting his life chasing impossible dreams.

Robert Sr. spent many idle, anxious hours wondering how to steer his son back toward a more “respectable” life and career. All the while, the younger Plant was making his own homemade instruments (harmonicas and kazoos) and treating each as if it were a Stradivarius. While his dad was dejected over Robert's disinterest in making the most of his education, the teenager was poising himself in front of a mirror, teaching himself to sing by imitating Elvis records.

Most of the rock musicians—from the Beatles to the Stones to Led Zeppelin—who emerged in the sixties came from a working-class background. Their parents had survived the terrors and the heartaches of World War II—including Germany's savage bombing of London that ignited the city in flames and left much of it in ruins. The British economy had been devastated as well by years of war, and it struggled to recover. For many young musicians
in Britain—who had grown up in households listening to Frank Sinatra and the Stan Kenton Orchestra—rock music became not only a way they might escape poverty, but it was their form of rebellion, too, a means of lashing out at the middle-and upper-class traditions that, to them, represented the oppression and the pain they and their families had endured. As the years progressed, rock music increasingly became one of their most potent weapons in the rebellion.

But while rock music may have primarily been the domain of the underclass, the Plants were purely middle class. Born in 1948 in West Bromwich, Staffordshire, and growing up in the west Midlands in the small rural town of Kidderminster, Robert had a background that was so highbrow that in the earliest days of Led Zeppelin, he used to look a bit disdainfully at the rest of us “commoners.” He never said much that was condescending, but he sometimes seemed to breathe arrogance, as though he were a cut above us.

Robert attended King Edward VI grammar school in Stourbridge, where schoolboy pranks were part of his way of life. One afternoon, he concealed a pair of tennis shoes inside a piano, making it impossible for the teacher to play—a caper that got him expelled from the music program, which was the class he most loved.

Beginning at age fourteen, Robert let his hair grow (ostensibly to attract girls) and started playing with rock bands. He began spending less time on his schoolwork, although he did show some interest in subjects like archeology. More than anything, he felt driven to pursue his musical interests, even if his family reacted skeptically to them.

At one point, Robert Sr. hoped that his son would eventually get his musical passions out of his system. He used to drop his boy off at gigs at the Seven Stars Blues Club, where the teenager sang with the Delta Blues Band, accompanied by Chris Wood's flute and Terry Foster's eight-string guitar. When the songs were familiar, the crowd cheered and the young singer became ecstatic. But Robert was also inclined to introduce blues songs by unknowns like Blind Boy Fuller, hushing the audience and leaving them as bewildered as if he were performing
Carmen
or
Madama Butterfly
.

Robert was bright enough to realize that his odds of achieving success were slim. “Even the most talented singers usually don't make it,” he said. “I'll give myself till the age of twenty; if I'm still struggling by then, I'll move on to something else.”

Robert bounded from one band to another: The Crawling King Snakes (named after a John Lee Hooker song)…Black Snake Moan (named after a tune by Blind Lemon Jefferson)…the New Memphis Bluesbreakers. As he played this version of musical hopscotch, his voice began to get more atten
tion. It literally brought people through the doors to hear that soulful, sensitive, powerful voice.

“Maybe something's starting to happen,” Robert told his friends, jacking up his hopes as he sang before full houses. But despite the increasing recognition, he still had to deal with more disappointments.

In 1966, after joining a band called Listen, some scouts from CBS Records liked what they heard. They were awestruck by Robert's strong voice and nearly as impressed with his nonstop body gyrations on stage. CBS signed the band to record three singles, the first of which was a slick remake of the Young Rascals hit “You Better Run.” It was released with little fanfare, however, and attracted even less attention from radio stations and record buyers. It was a brutal introduction to the music industry.

Robert was discouraged but not defeated by the lack of recognition the record received. “It'll happen,” he told friends, trying to keep his own confidence level high. “I believe in myself, and that's half the battle.” In fact, he was battling his own inner turmoil, beginning to wonder if anything would ever really start to break in his favor.

In 1967, CBS Records asked Robert to record two additional singles to fulfill its contract with Listen. It seemed like a wonderful opportunity—the chance to go into the studio on his own. But Robert's excitement was crushed by CBS's selection of the songs he would record. One of them, “Our Song,” was a lushly orchestrated Italian ballad for which English lyrics had been written. One of Robert's friends said, “What the hell are they trying to do to him? Turn Robert into the next Tom Jones?” Robert was embarrassed by the record. He almost felt like going into hiding or personally melting down all the vinyl on which it was pressed. His instincts about it may have been correct: “Our Song” sold an unremarkable 800 copies as the record company did, in fact, try to promote him as a Tom Jones incarnate—a campaign about as successful as the Edsel. At least for the moment, a very downcast Robert saw his recording career hit a nasty brick wall.

“If my mom hadn't bought a copy of the records, the damn things wouldn't have sold at all,” Robert joked. He wasn't exaggerating by much.

During this time, despite his middle-class background, Robert became a Mod, wearing Chelsea boots and snugfitting jackets and joining battles with Rockers in the borough of Margate. He also cut his long, blond locks into a French style that he patterned after Steve Marriott, the lead singer of Small Faces, who had posed the compelling musical question, “How's your bird's lumbago?” during a concert Robert attended in Birmingham.

With Robert's musical career sputtering, his parents tried again to steer him in more traditional directions. “Why don't you study to become a char
tered accountant?” his worried mother suggested. Robert was dejected enough already—and now this!

Even though Robert was intelligent enough to recognize that he might be reaching for an impossible dream, he was upset with the lack of support from his parents in his musical pursuits. He still thought he had a shot at stardom, even while his mom and dad wondered whether he would ever outgrow his “fantasies” about making a career in music. He felt frustrated, hurt, and sometimes angry. At times when he was home, he sensed a growing emotional wedge between him and his parents. On some level, he desperately wanted to prove to them that he could succeed in music.

Nevertheless, to make peace in the family, Robert finally agreed to some accountant's training, even though his heart was still possessed by blues performers like Robert Johnson, Tommy McClellan, Otis Rush, Muddy Waters, and Sonny Boy Williamson, whose records he often found in the junk shops he used to scour.

After just two weeks of accountant's training, Robert threw in the towel. He was being paid a forgettable two pounds a day, but even more important, he realized that there was much more to life than ledgers and balance sheets. “I just don't want to spend my whole life counting
other
people's money!” he complained to friends. “I'd rather be the one
making
the money!”

Without any regrets, Robert shifted his full attention back to music. As before, he jumped from one band to another, ending up with a group called the Band of Joy. Like Robert's earlier musical ventures, however, this one had only minimal success. The gigs came much too infrequently, and most of them played to half-empty houses. As if Robert wasn't feeling bad enough, he was constantly at odds with the band's manager.

“Do you know what the problem is, Robert?” the band's manager asked him one day. “I don't think you sing very well! You might think seriously about leaving the band.”

Robert left in a rage with his ego bruised. Yes, his voice was a bit wild, but he felt there was something unique about it, too. He tried to deflect the criticism, not let it grate upon him, but it was hard. He was determined to keep on going, even though his voice wasn't making him any money. He held onto the group's name, and the Band of Joy soon re-formed in a second—and then eventually a third—generation that went off in a number of unexpected directions. The last incarnation featured a zany, long-haired, mustachioed drummer named John Bonham, who was never fully content with the enormous power and fury he used to bring to his performing. To create even more gusto, Bonham would line his drums with aluminum foil to give them more of a crackling, explosive sound—and hopefully to attract more public attention to the group.

But, in fact, the Band of Joy had to resort to much more to win the hearts of its audiences. The members of the band sometimes performed with painted faces. They wore long tailcoats. They staged miniwars with one another, using toy machine guns. The overweight bass player, attired in a caftan and bell-bottom pants, would swan dive from the stage into the crowd, creating terror on the faces of its members, who must have thought the
Hindenburg
(or was it the
Zeppelin?
) was crashing upon them. If there was a message he was trying to communicate, no one could quite figure out what it was.

One night as the Band of Joy performed at Victoria Hall in Selkirk, an inebriated member of the audience heaved a pie at Plant. Since Robert was a constantly moving target, the pie splattered harmlessly a few feet from him.

“The Band of Joy played about two gigs a week, but we weren't making much money,” recalled Robert a few years later. “If I hadn't been married by then, and my wife, Maureen, didn't have a job, I wouldn't have eaten. It was that simple. I would have been in the welfare lines.”

In a sense, Maureen was Robert's savior, and he knew it. Without her financial support—not to mention her emotional support—he might have given up long before anyone had ever heard of Led Zeppelin. He had met her at a Georgie Fame concert, and they began living together shortly thereafter and eventually got married. When Robert wasn't bringing home any money, she made sure they still had a roof over their heads. When his self-confidence wavered, she helped stabilize it. He often said that if it hadn't been for Maureen, he might have gone nuts.

The Band of Joy continued to struggle. They worked their way up to about seventy quid a night, played songs by Sonny Boy Williamson and the Grateful Dead and even recorded a few demos at the Regent Sound studios. But much to their frustration, they never landed a recording contract. Finally, disheartened that the band wasn't going anywhere, Robert decided that the battle wasn't worth fighting anymore. The Band of Joy disbanded.

Once again, Robert was faced with making some hard decisions about his future. In early 1967, he did some construction work, pouring asphalt along West Bromwich High Street and using his earnings (six shillings tup-pence an hour) to buy Buffalo Springfield, Love, and Moby Grape albums. Most of the British rock scene, he thought, was an embarrassment and barely worth the vinyl on which the records were pressed. But the Grape—with its combination of blues, folk, rock, r&b, country, and bluegrass—left Robert humming and itching to get back to music, much to his parents' continued distress.

Even long after Led Zeppelin had turned Robert into a millionaire, a reconciliation with his father took years. Robert's dad still had trouble accepting
his son's rock music career, even with the enormous success—a fact of life that troubled Robert a lot. At a social function in Birmingham, I was chatting with the elder Plant and offered him a bottle of beer—with no glass. He looked at me with disgust, as if to say, “Who the hell do you think I am that I would drink out of a bottle?” He was from a different world.