Stairway To Heaven (15 page)

“I'll tell you what we'd like,” I said to Jann. “We'd like to see Copenhagen's sex clubs!”

Jann suddenly became very quiet. “The sex clubs?” he mumbled in a disbelieving voice. He turned to glance at his passengers—Jimmy, Robert, John Paul, Bonzo, Peter, and me. We didn't exactly look like members of the British Royal Family. The expression on Jann's face screamed, “How did I ever get stuck with these six clowns?”

We drove for another ten minutes, and Jann pulled up in front of one of the city's most popular sex clubs. “Here it is,” he said. I figured we'd have to scoot out of the limo quickly, and that Jann would speed away, embarrassed to be seen in that neighborhood. But suddenly, he became a different person.

“I'll take you inside,” Jann said. “The manager's a friend of mine. I'll let him know that you're my special guests!”

Special guests! I guess Jann wasn't a prudish altar boy after all.

“Enjoy the show!” the manager told us. “Just remember, no audience participation.”

We walked into a dimly lit room, almost stumbling over one another until our eyes adjusted to the darkness. “Am I seeing things,” wisecracked Jimmy, “or are we almost the only ones in here with our clothes on?”

For the next two hours, the show took our minds off Eva von Zeppelin. There were plenty of girls, at least a couple dozen, and most of them were absolutely beautiful. A few were serving drinks; most were part of the performance—and they weren't performing Shakespeare. We sat just a few feet from the stage, when one of the naked girls began playing with herself in front of us. Bumping. Grinding. Moaning. Groaning.

“I think I'm in love,” Bonham sighed.

“I think she is, too,” Plant said. “Too bad it's with herself.”

Within minutes, the girl was joined by a friend, and the two of them began making love in front of us. Before long, they were joined by a third girl. And then a fourth. And then a vibrator or two. They were like one big happy family.

“Pardon me,” Bonham yelled at them. “Do you girls really get paid for this? I'd do it for free! I really would!”

Bonham moved toward the stage, grabbed a vibrator from one of the girls, and fumbled with it for a few moments until he had removed its batteries. Then he returned it to her.

“You gals have gotta work for your pay,” he shouted over the loud music. “Don't let modern technology do everything for you!”

Most of the other male customers were on the timid side and seemed stunned by our rowdiness.

“One of these girls is my sister,” Bonham told a startled patron. “Mom asked me to come down and make sure she's not getting into any trouble.”

We had never run into anything quite like this in London. We stayed another hour, and it was more of the same—the kind of raunchy sex that's a lot more fun to do than to watch, but we certainly weren't complaining. As we rode back to our hotel, Robert said, “Next time we're in Copenhagen, Richard, make sure this is part of our itinerary.”

 

Four months later, just before we returned to Denmark, I called the same sex club. “We want to reserve the club just for ourselves on Saturday night,” I said. “Let me know how much money you take in on a typical Saturday night, and we'll give you the cash to cover it.”

So on that second visit to the club, it was just us and the girls. It sounded like a perfect arrangement—but it wasn't nearly as much fun as the first time we had been there. Maybe it was because we had already seen the show once before. Or perhaps it was because we occasionally staged shows like this in our own hotel rooms—where audience participation was allowed! Also, since we were the only customers in the club, there weren't other people around to shock with our behavior. Whether at Carnegie Hall or a Copenhagen sex club, we liked being the center of attention. But there were competing interests at the sex clubs.

 

During that February 1970 stop in Copenhagen, our fascination with the sex clubs didn't mean that we had no other interests. In fact, we spent a lot of time in art galleries, too. Jimmy in particular was looking for some works of art to buy, although we found other ways to occupy our time there, too.

At Peter's suggestion, we had agreed to hold a press reception in a gallery adjacent to the Stroget. Reporters, critics, and music company executives crammed into the gallery, and there were plenty of hors d'oeuvres and champagne to keep them happy. At one point, a music critic cornered Bonham and me and began pontificating about one subject after another, none of which interested us. “Once a rock group achieves commercial success, I believe that they lose something,” he babbled. “Maybe it's their hunger that gives intensity to their music. You guys have to watch out for that. I'd hate to see it happen to you.”

Then his attention shifted to the pop art painting in front of us. He began analyzing it, placing even more of a strain on our patience. “It reminds me so much of Lichtenstein and perhaps a touch of Rauschenberg, too,” he said. “I find it so moving…so moving.”

Bonzo turned to me and whispered, “What fucking bullshit!”

“When I look at it,” the critic continued, “I see such a strong statement against abstract expressionism.”

Bonzo finally lost his cool.

“Do you want to know what I think of this painting?” Bonzo roared.

“Of course, I'd love to know,” the critic said timidly.

Bonzo walked toward the painting, lifted it off the wall, and screamed, “This is what I think of it!”

He raised the painting over his head and snapped it downward, crashing it
onto the head of the critic. The frame cracked. The canvas ripped down the middle. The critic was knocked to the ground. He grabbed his head, moaning in pain.

The stunned crowd became silent.

“Are there any other paintings you'd like me to critique tonight?!” Bonzo exclaimed as he walked toward the door.

The rest of us thought it was a perfect time to exit as well. We left Peter behind to try to mend fences. Before we had left town, we got a $5,000 bill from the art gallery to cover the cost of the painting Bonham had destroyed.

“That's the last time we ever have a press party at an art gallery,” John Paul said during the drive back to our hotel.

“From now on, let's hold them in strip joints,” I said. “It would be a lot more appropriate.”

H
enry Smith, one of our road managers, was gathering up our equipment at the Winnipeg airport. We had just flown into the Canadian city during our fifth North American tour, which was launched in March 1970. But as Henry surveyed the equipment, he noticed that one of the guitars was missing.

“Shit,” he said to himself. “It's one of Jimmy's. He's not going to be happy.”

The band and I were already in our hotel when Henry called me to report the missing guitar. “It's the old black one,” Henry said. “The Les Paul that Keith Richard gave him.”

I knew Jimmy wouldn't be happy. I walked down to his room to tell him what had happened. As soon as he heard the news, he snapped.

“Lost a guitar!” he shouted. “How in the hell can they lose a guitar?!”

He kicked at a nearby sofa. “Richard, this is ridiculous! Do you know how much I love that guitar?”

I couldn't recall ever seeing Jimmy quite this angry. I decided just to let him talk.

“How could somebody just walk off with it?” he shouted. “Don't the airports do anything to keep things from being ripped off?”

For a full hour, Jimmy continued to blow off steam. “Where were the road managers, Richard? Don't we pay them to keep an eye on the gear? I feel like firing every last one of them!”

When I finally left Jimmy's room, I thought to myself, “If this is any sign of what the rest of this tour is going to be like, I'm ready to go home now.”

Airport security never turned up any sign of the guitar. Apparently, someone had stolen it off a baggage truck or a conveyer belt. Our chances of getting it back were virtually nil.

Jimmy, however, was desperate. He placed an ad in
Rolling Stone
, pleading for help in locating the guitar. We waited for someone to contact us. But no one ever did. The guitar was never recovered. Somebody, somewhere, ended up with a remarkable piece of Zeppelin memorabilia.

During the course of the tour, Jimmy never seemed to fully recover from the loss. He got through all twenty-nine performances without any noticeable impact upon his playing. But he'd look dejected at times, and I figured it was related to the guitar. It really didn't matter that every show was a sellout, that it was a guaranteed $1 million tour before it had even begun. To Jimmy, the loss of the guitar ruined everything.

 

In planning that 1970 trip, Peter had made the decision that Led Zeppelin would have no opening acts during the entire tour. Night after night, it would just be two and a half hours of pure Zeppelin.

“When we have a support act, there's a lot of fucking around to worry about,” Peter said. “There are the gear changeovers and the worries about moving equipment and possibly damaging it. If we're out there alone, we can set up our own gear and leave it there. I don't have any doubts that the band can carry the show on its own.”

Peter also knew that fans didn't come to a Led Zeppelin concert to hear supporting acts. He had a “let's give the public what they want” attitude, and that meant a long night of Zeppelinmania.

The band felt liberated by Peter's decision. As the sole act on the bill, they would have full control of the entire show. And the idea excited them. Some nights, they felt like playing until morning.

As cocky as the band sometimes behaved offstage—and as their reputation grew as a band that used and supposedly exploited the young groupies who hung around them—they never took their fans for granted. They knew who bought the records, who paid for the tickets. “If the show's going well, let's just keep playing,” John Paul said. “As long as the fans will stick around, so will we.”

By the midway point of the tour, many of the shows were running three hours, occasionally even longer. Individual songs would go on for ten, fifteen, or twenty minutes. “Dazed and Confused” would routinely stretch for forty minutes. Crowds burst into standing ovations in the middle of songs.

There was never an intermission. Bonham would sneak off the stage while Jimmy and John Paul would showcase a lengthy musical rush. Then Bonham would reciprocate with a twenty-or thirty-minute drum solo of his own—
ripping off his shirt, tossing his drumsticks into the audience, and pummeling the drums with his hands until they formed calluses. Bonham's interlude was so gripping that none of us would stray too far from the stage. Very simply, the band was good, every night, all night.

Jimmy couldn't stand it when he'd hear about the big-name bands that played only a fifty-minute set—and would sometimes cut it even shorter if the vibes just weren't right. “They're on and off before the audience can ever blink,” he muttered. “It's just not fair to the fans.” Jimmy figured that maybe those bands just didn't have much to say. By contrast, Zeppelin had a lot of different moods they tried to express during the night. You can't do that in fifty minutes.

 

When the tour moved into the South—Memphis, Raleigh, Atlanta—we expected life to become a little more uncomfortable for us, although it had nothing to do with fan reaction. Particularly in the South, people in airports would stare, whistle, and chuckle over our long hair. It wasn't anything we couldn't deal with, although after seeing
Easy Rider
we had become a bit more anxious about how people responded to our hair.

“If you spot some rednecks driving in a pickup truck with a rifle rack in the back window, take cover!” John Paul nervously joked.

In Raleigh, the harassment escalated to a higher plateau. Henry Smith was in the restroom backstage just before the concert began and from the bathroom stall heard two cops talking about “planting some stuff on those Zeppelin bastards and sending them up the river for a while.”

Henry panicked and, while still buckling his pants, bolted out of the bathroom and darted through the auditorium until he found me. “They're gonna get us!” he jabbered. “The cops are out to get us!”

I generally wasn't as paranoid as Henry, but still became pretty unsettled by what he had told me. Not knowing quite where to turn, I found a pay phone and called the Raleigh offices of both Pinkerton's and Brink's, trying to arrange for some immediate security for the band.

“I'm the tour manager with the rock band Led Zeppelin,” I told the fellow who answered the phone at Brink's. I wasn't the kind of customer he was used to, and he was skeptical of my claim that Raleigh's men in blue could have an evil plot in mind.

“Sorry, fella,” the voice at Brink's said. “This story doesn't sound right to me. We protect bank presidents, not guitar players.”

By this point, my own anxiety had escalated considerably. I had visions of the entire band ending up in jail by the end of the night, and I knew that was something I didn't want to deal with. As a last resort, I called Steve Weiss, our
attorney, in New York City. I told him what Henry had heard and the problems I was having hiring some local protection.

“You're a lawyer,” I told him. “Maybe you'll have more clout trying to get some security out here to help us. I just feel very unsafe at the moment and think we need some protection in place quickly.”

Steve agreed. “The band has a lot of assets—including its reputation—that need to be protected,” he told me. “I'll see what I can do.”

From New York, Steve placed some calls, and within forty-five minutes, two security men—ties, coats, and short hair—arrived backstage. They were very businesslike, and if they felt out of place having to guard some longhaired musicians, they didn't show it. “We're here to make sure that your stay here in Raleigh is problem-free,” one of them said.

In fact, there were no problems. One of the security men positioned himself at the entrance to the band's dressing room. Another one was in the wings of the stage, keeping the band itself under surveillance for anything suspicious. The night proceeded without a hitch. The extra security may have kept the Raleigh cops from making life miserable for Led Zeppelin.

Late that night, when I told the band about the whole incident, they were flabbergasted. “That's fuckin' amazing!” Bonzo exclaimed. “Don't these cops have anything better to do than try to bust rock musicians? People are getting killed in the streets, and they're trying to create a marijuana bust! How absurd!”

From that point on, I tried to be more careful with the illegal substances that we carried with us. We usually had some cocaine and some pills, and sometimes the anticipation of taking the drugs—and the rush of the drugs themselves—would blind me to any risks we were assuming. But when I was thinking more clearly, when I allowed the anxiety to overtake the craving, the thought of a bust hovered in the back of my mind. It was one more source of stress in my job.