Stairway To Heaven (32 page)

Bonham tried to act as innocent as possible. “I wondered what all that noise was, too,” he told the baffled assistant. Then he raised his voice. “Look, I'm a guest at this hotel, and I sure would appreciate it if you could cut down the noise around here!”

The assistant manager actually apologized to Bonham. As he left, I walked into Bonzo's suite, and we both burst out laughing. “Guess what goes out the window next?” Bonham said. With a malicious grin on his face, he pointed to the white grand piano in the center of the room.

“Nooo, Bonzo, nooo,” I told him. Within seconds, however, he and I tried lifting the piano and carrying it to the window. Finally, however, we realized that even if our brawn could handle the challenge, the piano could never fit through the window. “Damn it,” he said. “That would have gotten their attention down on Sunset.”

T
here were certain people who Led Zeppelin considered just this side of God. Elvis, of course, probably headed the list. But there were others whose talents we respected, too. Bob Dylan was one of them. No wonder, then, that we were excited when Dylan showed up at a reception we held in L.A. for the press and some of our friends.

The band exchanged cordial greetings with Dylan, but he acted shy and withdrawn. He pretty much kept to himself, staying near the buffet table and politely shaking hands with whomever approached him. If that's what happens when you're famous, Bonzo thought, I don't want to become any better known.

Late in the evening, as I was chatting with Jimmy and Robert, Ronnie Wood staggered over, almost crippled by his own hysterical laughter. “I just heard a killer,” he said. “You gotta hear this one.”

“Okay, Ron,” Robert said. “Calm down and tell us what happened.”

Ronnie finally brought his laughter under control. “Peter just walked up to Bob Dylan and introduced himself. He said, ‘I'm Peter Grant, and I'm the manager of Led Zeppelin.' And Dylan looked at him and said, ‘Don't come to me with your fucking problems!'”

Ronnie was right. It was a killer. It also showed just how far our reputation had spread.

 

Just before we left L.A., John Paul and I got another opportunity to meet with our
real
folk hero, Elvis. He was staying in a rented house in Bel Air, and when
I called in hopes that I'd be invited to stop by, Jerry Schilling passed along the following message from the King: “Bring John Paul Jones with you because he's so quiet.”

We brought a couple of bottles of cold champagne with us, and I had stuffed my pockets with heroin, which was my own drug of choice for the evening. When we arrived, Elvis was sitting in the living room, wearing a very ordinary pair of blue-striped, cotton pajamas, a simple robe, and slippers that had little blue pom-poms on them. There were nearly a dozen aides and bodyguards in the room, too, and not one of them cracked a smile as we moved forward to shake hands with Elvis.

After we had exchanged greetings, the somber mood of the group hadn't changed. Eventually, I remarked, “It's like a fucking morgue in here!”

In an instant, Elvis leaped forward and grabbed me by the lapels. At first, I thought he was kidding. But then I wasn't sure.

“You don't swear and curse in my house, Mr. Cole!”

He pushed me backward, then assumed a karate posture that looked rather intimidating, particularly since I knew Elvis had been studying the martial arts for years. John Paul was standing a few feet from us, stunned by what was unfolding before his eyes.

I was leaner and nimbler than Elvis, but was already stoned by the time we had reached the house. And I didn't want to be remembered as the tour manager who was killed by Elvis.

The King cocked his right arm and took a swing at me. I blocked the blow with my left forearm, but as I did, his hand struck my watch with enough force to snap the watchband. It was an expensive gold Tiffany watch that Ahmet Ertegun had given me, and it bounced on the plush white carpeting.

“Oh, no,” Elvis said, dropping to one knee and, at least for the moment, forgetting that he was in the process of trying to spill some of my blood. He picked up the watch, wrapped it around his wrist, and said, “Your wrist must be huge, Richard. This is a great watch! A great watch!”

I didn't know quite how to react. Finally, I said, “Well, please accept it as a gift from me. You can have it, Elvis.”

Elvis couldn't take his eyes off the watch. After a while he stood up and, without saying a word, turned and disappeared down the hallway. A minute later, he returned with another gorgeous watch in his hand. “Here,” he said, “this one's got thirty-two diamonds.
You
can fuckin' have
this
one!” He was swearing now, too.

The swap meet wasn't over yet.

Elvis turned toward John Paul and asked, “Well, what have you got?”

Jonesy loosened the strap on the cheap Mickey Mouse watch he was wearing and handed it to Elvis. The King laughed and, once again, left the room,
returning with a lapis-faced Baume & Mercier watch. He handed it to John Paul.

For the next few minutes, the evening became something akin to a New Guinea tribal ritual in which everyone was trying to prove his manhood—in this case, by giving a bigger and better gift than the last one. I asked Elvis what his sign was, and when he said Capricorn I removed a large amethyst birthstone ring I had bought in Brazil when I was there in 1968 with the New Vaudeville Band. “Go ahead, it's yours,” I said.

Elvis left the room again, coming back with a gold ring in the shape of a John Wayne cowboy hat. It had a full carat and a half diamond, surrounded by nine smaller diamonds and was inscribed with the words, “Love, Linda.” He handed it to me.

The evening continued like this for the next half hour, with an orgy of gift-giving that Elvis seemed to find exciting.

By the time John Paul and I were ready to leave, Elvis escorted us out his front door, telling his security guards, “I'm okay out here with these guys; Richard will take care of me.” As we approached our limousine, Elvis even opened the car door for us. The chauffeur's face registered complete shock. So did mine.

When we returned to England a month later, there was a note waiting for me from Jerry Schilling. “We haven't seen the Boss have such a good time in years,” he wrote.

 

Before we left L.A., a skinny, redheaded girl, covered with freckles and wearing beads and a wrinkled minidress, was meandering through the lobby of the Riot House, pestering the desk clerks and bellhops, insisting that she had to meet with Led Zeppelin, particularly Jimmy. The hotel management finally called Danny Goldberg, who had joined up with us in L.A. He went to talk to the girl.

“I need to see Jimmy Page,” she pleaded in a high-pitched, emotional voice. “Something terrible is going to happen to Jimmy, maybe at the concert tonight.”

She proceeded to describe a vision she had in which Jimmy's life was in jeopardy. “The last time I had a vision like this,” she said, “someone was shot and killed right in front of me!”

Danny let her ramble on for a few minutes, then losing his patience, interrupted her.

“Look, Jimmy isn't available to talk to you now. If you want to write him a note, I'll see that he gets it.”

The girl sat down, scribbled a few sentences on a piece of paper, and
handed it to Danny. She reluctantly left, whereupon Danny crumbled the note and threw it away.

A few months later, the girl resurfaced—this time on television. The band was staying at a rented beach house in Malibu, working on material for the next album, and the TV was on one evening. They all watched in horror at news reports identifying the freckle-faced girl as Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a member of the Charles Manson cult. She had been arrested several days earlier for pointing a loaded gun at President Gerald Ford in Sacramento.

Fromme clearly was a girl with violence on her mind. Fortunately, she and Led Zeppelin never directly crossed paths.

I
n April 1975, shortly after the American tour ended, Marilyn and I agreed to work at patching up our marriage. I was still more involved in heroin than she would have liked, but she tried to be understanding. We decided to take a vacation in the Canary Islands, where we could concentrate just on one another for a while.

Nevertheless, I routinely checked in with Led Zeppelin's office. And having me away for two weeks was more than Peter could bear, particularly since he already was plotting the group's next move.

“Here's what I've been thinking,” he said. “I want the band to play at Earls Court. I want to go in there for at least three nights, maybe more. How soon can you get back to start arranging those shows?”

“Well, I'm on a holiday,” I told him. I didn't want to come back at all.

“Richard, listen to me,” he said. “Earls Court is one of the biggest venues in England. It's real important to me.
Real
important.”

So Marilyn and I caught a plane to London the next morning. In the days we had spent in the Canary Islands, we seemed to have done some repair work on our relationship. “Let's see how we do back in the real world,” I told her on the flight home.

By the following day, I was back in Peter's office, working out details for the Earls Court performances, which were scheduled to begin May 17. Earls Court had a seating capacity of 17,000, and Peter felt we shouldn't cut corners. “I want to stage the entire American production—laser beams, special
lighting, and PA equipment, plus adding an oversized video screen,” he said. “And I want to keep the ticket prices down.”

Of course, we could have charged just about anything and still been assured of sellouts. But even though Peter was very good at making money for the band, he also was sensitive to their image. These would be the first Zeppelin concerts in Britain in more than two years, and after a lot of thought he concluded that the public relations benefits of inexpensive seating would outweigh the financial gains of a much higher price. At his insistence, the ticket prices were kept low—one to two and a half pounds a seat.

On April 19, 51,000 tickets went on sale for three dates. In five hours, they were completely sold out. Two more concerts were added, and those 34,000 tickets were gobbled up instantly, too. Many of the ticket buyers had been Zeppelin fanatics since those earliest days in late 1968. Others had only come aboard with the
Physical Graffiti
album. But their shared enthusiasm transformed the lines at the ticket windows into outdoor festivals in their own right, a celebration of rock music's biggest band.

I chartered a 747 private cargo plane to fly the high-tech equipment from the American tour to London, and we brought in Showco's experienced crew to oversee the entire production. A 20' × 30' video screen was positioned high above the stage. The 70,000-watt speaker system was carefully erected in place. Meanwhile, trains were chartered to bring fans from throughout the country for the five concerts.

The band rehearsed for three days, but after the American tour they knew exactly what they wanted to do. From the first bars of “Rock and Roll,” Zeppelin exploded with some of their most energetic, memorable shows. Robert, wearing denim jeans and with his blond curls longer than most British fans remembered them, told the crowds that the band was offering more than music. “This is a journey through some of our experiences—the positive ones and the negative ones—over the last six years.”

The band guided the audience through a three-hour Zeppelin retrospective, playing songs from every era, from the early days of
Led Zeppelin
to the gentler acoustic sounds of
Led Zeppelin III
to the most contemporary songs of
Physical Graffiti
. On the final night, after the last encore and the last notes of “Black Dog,” Robert shouted a thank-you to the packed house. “We've enjoyed playing for you so much. We'll see you again, maybe in the nineteen eighties.”

In fact, the band would only play in the U.K. two more times—both at the Knebworth Festival in Hertfordshire. For many, perhaps most, of the 85,000 who saw them at Earls Court, that was their last live glimpse of Led Zeppelin.

A few weeks later, Peter told me his own reasons for the Earls Court concerts. In a sense, he saw them as “good-bye gifts” to the country. “We're mov
ing out,” he said. “The tax man is driving us out of England. These will be the last concerts here for quite a while.”

Essentially, Led Zeppelin was just making too much money. And for financial reasons, their accountants had recommended that they become tax exiles. Other rock stars like the Stones had preceded them in seeking refuge outside Great Britain. But even though it made financial sense, it wasn't an easy decision for any member of Led Zeppelin to make. At first, all of them resisted. “This is home,” Bonzo told himself. “I'm not going anywhere.” Then the numbers were laid out on the table in front of them. It would have been foolish to turn over most of what they made to the government.

Robert had some second thoughts, too. It didn't feel right to abandon his homeland purely because of money. But he and the others had worked like hell for the riches they had accumulated. They felt they might as well keep as much of it as possible.

All the members of Zeppelin maintained their homes in England, but were limited on the number of days they could spend in the country without being gouged by an atrocious tax bite. One by one, they started relocating themselves and their families to Switzerland or France.

Bonzo held out longer than the others. Pat Bonham was pregnant with their second child, and John wanted them to stay together in England, at least until the baby was born. “Fuck the money,” he said at one point. “I'm gonna spend time with my wife right here where she needs me.”

But once their daughter, Zoe, was born, Bonzo came to his senses. He still had time to start his tax exile that year, which he began in Europe.

Eventually, the entire band ended up in Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands near the west coast of Normandy. Jersey is a popular tourist spot, but according to Bonham, “The natives here don't seem to do much but drink and wife-swap.” For a while, the band rented a big house, and we spent weeks killing time, largely by drinking Pimm's, then Tropical Pimm's, then King Pimm's. It was the next best thing to wife-swapping.

While on Jersey, Bonham had even more time to indulge himself with his passion for cars, particularly luxury models. He had purchased dozens of automobiles over the years—twenty-eight of them in the first eighteen months of Zeppelin's success. After that he stopped counting. He never kept any of them very long; he didn't buy them as investments, but rather because he loved driving fast cars. Still, perhaps not surprisingly, his selection of vehicles sometimes leaned toward the bizarre. Once, he even purchased a Model T bread van, just because he felt in the mood to buy one.

During the time that Bonham owned the bread van, it was one of his most prized possessions. Once while the band was rehearsing at Shepperton Studios, he had parked it in front of the building. A priest from the church
down the street paused as he walked by the van. “This is a very
dangerous
-looking automobile,” he told Bonzo and me, making a stab at some light humor. “I better bless this car and this boy.” Bonham smiled politely while the priest actually fetched some holy water and sprinkled it on the car—and on Bonzo. It was probably the closest Bonzo had been to a religious experience in years.

On Jersey, Bonzo's favorite vehicle was a Rolls-Royce that he used to drive around the island. One afternoon, he had parked the Rolls outside one of his favorite pubs. Dressed in cutoff jeans and a T-shirt, he began washing the car with a sponge and a bucket of soapsuds and was making quite a mess of himself.

An elderly man in a coat and tie walked by and paused a moment to survey Bonzo's efforts. He was clearly amused by what he saw. Finally, the bystander said with an arrogant smirk, “Well, well, well…this is the first time I've ever seen a man have to wash his own Rolls-Royce!”

The comment struck Bonzo the wrong way. He gritted his teeth and shouted, “Is that right!” He slammed shut an open door and began furiously kicking the Roll's side panels…one kick after another, pounding and pounding again the sides of the car. He'd take a brief break to catch his breath, and then the bizarre outburst would continue, ultimately lasting for several minutes. By the time he was done, there were dozens of dents in the expensive automobile.

Both the elderly man and I stood there, startled by Bonzo's behavior and wondering what he had planned next. But just as quickly as his anger had erupted, Bonzo suddenly calmed down. He turned to the startled onlooker. “I suspect that's the first time you've ever seen a man
smash
his own fucking Rolls-Royce as well! Why don't you fuck off and mind your own business!”

Bonzo strode into the pub and ordered a Pimm's. The passing years had had no sobering effect on his eccentric behavior.