Stairway To Heaven (25 page)

“What is it about this chap Crowley that fascinates you?” I asked Jimmy on one of our outings.

“The guy was really quite remarkable,” Jimmy said. “Someday we'll talk about it, Richard.”

But we never did. If the public felt there was a certain mystery surrounding Led Zeppelin, they weren't alone. As close as I was to them, I sometimes felt there was something within Jimmy that he never let anyone see. Particularly when it came to Pagey's preoccupation with Crowley, séances, and black magic, I had a lot of unanswered questions.

I
t got to be painfully monotonous. No matter where Led Zeppelin performed, no matter how much advance planning we had done, it seemed like security became an overriding, nerve-racking concern. In the later months of 1972 and into 1973, the band made swings through Britain and Europe, performing at sites like Oxford's New Theatre and the Liverpool Empire and venues in Sweden, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Austria, and France. In France in particular, I began to wonder whether I'd ever have peace of mind again at a concert.

We had our worst experience in Lyon, where the security was simply atrocious. The concert was at a basketball stadium that seated 12,000. But hours before the performance, dozens of kids had already broken into the arena and were roaming through the stands. Peter warned me, “If it's necessary, you and the roadies are going to have to take matters into your own hands.”

Shortly after the show began, that's exactly what happened. Some fans began throwing debris, including empty bottles, from the highest deck of seats. One of the bottles sailed directly toward the band and shattered on the stage. Slivers of glass exploded onto Bonzo and his drums.

That was all I needed to see. I looked up toward the stands, located the culprits, and then sprinted up to the top deck. A couple of our crew members followed me. We grabbed the thugs, dragged them into the aisle, and roughed them up. I think those fellas bore the brunt of years of anxiety and frustration that I had felt about the band's safety. As we tossed them out of the sta
dium, one of them bleeding from a cut on his forehead, I realized that force seemed to be the only option that got the message across to fans who were intent on causing trouble. Touring was stressful enough without the added concerns of whether we were going to get through each concert without any harm to the band members.

After a show in Nantes, we decided to unwind by doing some serious drinking. The band, the roadies, and a few other hangers-on—sixteen of us in all—crammed into a rented Volvo. We were literally hanging out the windows and the sunroof, with Benoit Gautier, who worked for Atlantic Records in Paris, at the wheel much of the time. It was a death-defying ride to the watering hole, and as all of us continued to shift postures, trying to find a reasonably comfortable position, we kicked in the dashboard and shredded the upholstery. Bonham and I were standing up in the trunk, leaning forward and literally pulling the sunroof off its hinges.

Before we reached the bar, a cop spotted our car, with bodies extending out of every opening, and he pulled us over. He shook his head in disbelief and finally said in French, “I'm going to arrest all of you. You all have alcohol on your breath.”

“Alcohol!” Bonzo shouted. “We haven't even started partying yet. If you really want a good reason to arrest us, let us get in a few hours of drinking.”

We were put into cells, and at my request, we began singing British drinking songs, doing our best to drive the cops nuts. In the meantime, realizing that there really weren't any charges that could be pressed against us, the police captain called our hotel and asked the desk clerk if we were registered there.

“They sure are,” the clerk said. “But we don't want them back. The doors on their floors are all messed up, and someone threw a TV out the window!”

The cop acted as though he hadn't heard a word. “Well, we've had enough of them here. We're sending them back to your hotel. Good luck!”

A few minutes later, we were released and driven in police cars to the hotel. Once the cops were out of sight, we walked to a bar down the street and spent the rest of the night there.

 

In March 1973, Led Zeppelin's fifth album was finally released. It had been long delayed by endless problems with the cover artwork. Zeppelin kept looking at the prototypes coming out of the print shop and repeatedly rejected and sent them back, usually because of unacceptable, untrue, overly bright colors. Jimmy worried that the lavish colors on the album jacket would make it look like a cosmetics advertisement in a fashion magazine.

The album was called
Houses of the Holy
, an apparent reference to the spiritual aura that the band romanticized as hovering over its concert halls and
audiences. Again, Zeppelin's name did not appear on the album cover. The jacket instead featured young, blond, naked children climbing up a boulder-filled mountainside. Ironically, the title song was saved for the band's next album,
Physical Graffiti
, which was not released until 1975.

The band was quite proud of
Houses of the Holy
. Five albums and more than four years down the road, they had a strong enough belief in themselves as artists to go in whatever new directions their musical instincts drew them. Firmly entrenched at the top of the rock music world, the band was expected by many fans to dig in and keep giving the public more of the same. But in
Houses of the Holy
, Led Zeppelin showed that they were willing to explore new ideas in their evolution as musicians, even if they were risky.

In “The Rain Song,” John Paul single-handedly created a lush orchestration on his Mellotron that sounded as though it came from an entire symphony orchestra. “No Quarter” showed their flare for the mysterious and the dramatic. And John Bonham the songwriter was showcased on “The Ocean”; he received credit as a primary writer on the tune.

Maybe the band felt they were growing as musicians, but the critics hadn't evolved at all. Shortly after
Houses of the Holy
reached the record stores,
Rolling Stone
unleashed a savage attack upon it. Gordon Fletcher called it “one of the dullest and most confusing albums I've heard this year.”

With a big American tour set to begin in May, Zeppelin didn't want to be crushed by a hostile press at every stop in the U.S. Beep Fallon was no longer working for the band, and Peter contemplated hiring a top-flight U.S. public relations firm with major media contacts to try to turn things around with the press. “The Stones are going to be touring in America at the same time as us,” Peter told me. “If we don't actively go after some high visibility, the Stones will annihilate us in terms of publicity, even though we'll outdraw them at the box office.”

The Stones consistently got much more—and much better—publicity than Led Zeppelin, and that grated on the egos of the band. Of course, the Stones hung out with a different crowd than us, drawn to celebrities like Truman Capote, Andy Warhol, and Lee Radziwill. Jagger & Company were the darlings of the social register, and even though Mick had a devilish image, he seemed like a choirboy next to the way the media had portrayed Led Zeppelin.

We were perfectly content to camp out relatively anonymously at local bars and strip joints, but those weren't the kinds of social activities that got the publicity we felt we needed. For the most part, the press still treated us as though we were plotting World War III.

So Peter made the initial contacts with Solters, Roskin, and Sabinson, one of the most prestigious, high-powered, and expensive PR companies in the U.S. Peter talked to Lee Solters, a straitlaced, middle-aged man who made a
very nice living representing some of Hollywood's biggest stars. “We're on the final leg of a tour through France,” Peter explained. “I'd like you to fly over to meet the band. Despite their image, I think you'll find them to be quite civil, quite bright young men.”

Solters boarded a plane for that initial meeting with Peter and the band at the George V Hotel in Paris. He brought with him Danny Goldberg, who was in charge of the firm's rock 'n' roll division and who would be handling the Zeppelin account.

Goldberg was twenty-two years old, a tall, congenial, articulate fellow with his long hair usually tied in a ponytail. He wore his shirttails untucked over a pair of stylish, neatly pressed blue jeans. As an adolescent, he had attended a prestigious New York City prep school and then had dropped out of the University of California, Berkeley. Ironically, he had once written reviews for
Rolling Stone
, one of Zeppelin's biggest nemeses.

At that first meeting with the band, Solters suggested that Led Zeppelin needed a media face-lift. “Your music is taking a backseat to a lot of negative publicity about your offstage life, and that offstage image will require some rehabilitation,” Solters pontificated. “Because you've shied away from most interviews for so long, all the press has to go on are the rumors about your maniacal behavior. We've got to mainstream you and change that outlaw image. We also have to let the population at large know that you're accomplished musicians, not savages.”

They discussed nurturing a different relationship with the press. They talked about doing more interviews, although only carefully selected ones. They kicked around the idea of some benefit concerts. By the end of the meeting, Zeppelin made a handshake agreement to bring the PR firm on board, beginning with the American tour.

The band took an immediate liking to Danny Goldberg. “Everything just feels right with him,” John Paul said. When Danny's hair wasn't bound in a ponytail, it was longer than any of ours. So within days, the band had nicknamed him “Goldilocks.” He was a vegetarian, which won points with Jimmy, although he got some curious stares when he told us that he also stayed away from drugs and even cigarettes.

Zeppelin quickly developed a trust of Danny's media instincts and press prowess. When he arranged an interview, the band did it, no questions asked. When he recommended a press reception before or after certain concerts, they almost never said no.

As Peter and Danny ironed out a final strategy for the upcoming American invasion, Zeppelin themselves congregated in Shepperton Studios for rehearsals, mostly working on bringing songs from
Houses of the Holy
to the stage. Shepperton was owned by the Who, and it had facilities so the band
could work out its lighting for the concert tour while also refining its music. I had arranged for Showco in Dallas to fly its two best technicians to London to review the final lighting and sound arrangements with the band and test them out at Shepperton. For this tour, the band was not going to leave much to chance.

Before we departed for the States, Danny Goldberg had planted a story in
Rolling Stone
calling the upcoming tour the “biggest and most profitable rock and roll tour in the history of the United States.” The tour was projected to gross more than $5 million, which exceeded the claims made by Alice Cooper that he would take in $4.5 million for his current tour.

“By the end of this tour, everyone's going to say that Zeppelin is second to none,” Danny promised.

We took him at his word.

A
tangerine-colored sun lurked playfully behind a low-lying curtain of white clouds, hovering over Atlanta Stadium in Atlanta. As the sun gradually dipped toward the horizon, Jimmy Page stood out on the balcony of his hotel suite, peering into the distance. He wore faded jeans and a coal-black T-shirt and was holding a half-filled glass of red wine as he leaned against the rail. Less than a mile away, well within sight from his high-rise vantage point, he could see thousands—actually tens of thousands—of cars and people making the pilgrimage to Atlanta Stadium.

That wasn't an unusual sight around the ballpark in May 1973. But there was no baseball game that night in Atlanta. This was a night for Led Zeppelin to bring America to its knees.

As the traffic congestion around the stadium became worse, Jimmy marveled at the sight. Cars were sandwiched onto streets and highways, impatiently inching their way toward the stadium parking lots. Mustangs and Camaros, Jeeps and Volkswagens, each with its dashboard radio blaring, each filled with young people eager for a night of high-decibel music.

Since 1968, Zeppelin had performed more than 400 concerts worldwide. But for the band, this was different. This was Zeppelin's largest American concert ever, the first date on a grueling thirty-three-city, thirty-eight-concert tour.

Peter Grant was talking big numbers—the grosses of perhaps $5 million for this tour alone would add to coffers making this a $30 million year for the
band, including album sales. Judging by the rush for tickets in Atlanta—a sellout of 49,200 tickets just four hours after they had gone on sale in April—Peter was probably right on target. There were another 56,000 expected at Tampa Stadium…49,000 at San Francisco's Kezar Stadium…47,000 in Pittsburgh's Three Rivers Stadium. The list went on and on.

John Paul generally was pretty laid back, not prone to exaggeration or overstatement. But even he sensed that this trip to America would be unique. “This is going to be the tour that knocks America out,” he had predicted on the flight over. And if the music alone didn't overwhelm the country, then maybe the lasers, smoke generators, pyrotechnics, and spinning mirrors would. We had hired a crew of thirty-three technicians and stagehands just to provide support, making sure that the special effects and the music came together on cue.

Finally, just an hour away from that Atlanta concert—as long-haired, bellbottomed fans jostled their way into the stadium—the reasons for the hard work became apparent. “It's an absolutely incredible sight,” Jimmy said as he took another sip of wine. Pagey was beyond the point of experiencing stage fright, but for the first time in quite a while he felt a sense of nervous anticipation. A lot, he believed, was riding on this tour.

Houses of the Holy
was climbing fast on the record charts. But the band, whose yearning for critical acclaim had ebbed and flowed over the years, wanted to prove a point to the media and show them just how powerful and popular a musical influence they had become. And, of course, they had arrived better armed than usual, with Danny Goldberg and his publicity machine on board.

I had flown into Atlanta two days before the band to meet with Tom Hulett, the Concerts West promoter in the Southeast. In his office, I took out a notepad and sketched the specifications for the Friday night concert…the size of the stage (eighty feet by thirty-five feet) that we'd need…the height of the crash barriers (ten feet) that would keep zealous fans from overrunning the stage…the distance between the stage and the barriers (fifteen feet)…the precise location of the four towers that would support speakers powerful enough to stun the average eardrum into submission…and the placement of the Super-Trooper spotlights that could light up half the state of Georgia. Everything was put in writing.

On May 3, the night before the concert, the band was scheduled to fly into Atlanta. I had joined them in Miami and sensed the nervous tension as we prepared to board the flight.

Once we were at the Atlanta Hilton, we kept room service busy well into the night. With less than twenty-four hours until the Atlanta Stadium concert, we ordered everything from champagne to Irish coffee to midnight
snacks. Then, before any of us could feel either anxiety or boredom, Bonham took matters into his own hands. I had told him that the technicians who would operate the lasers the next day had stored the equipment in their hotel rooms. And Bonham just couldn't contain himself. “Get those fucking lasers in here, Richard. Let's see what kind of chaos we can create.”

Within minutes, with the help of the technicians, we were shining the red and green beams from our balcony onto the sidewalk below. A few pedestrians taking late-night strolls were startled by the bombardments of light that seemed to be coming from the heavens.

“The Martians have landed!” Bonham screamed out into the night. “Watch out for the Martians!” He was laughing so hard that, for him, the tour was already a success. More than four years into the history of Led Zeppelin, Bonham hadn't lost any of his childlike qualities.

By early afternoon the next day, the crew had left for the stadium to set up the lights, test the microphones, and plug in and tune the instruments. Mick Hinton assembled Bonham's drums. Ray Thomas checked Jimmy's guitar, and Brian Condliffe adjusted John Paul's Mellotron, an instrument that would be part of a Zeppelin concert for the first time. Benji Le Fevre sat at the special effects control board, running over in his own mind his responsibilities that night.

Despite my best-laid plans, the stage area wasn't constructed to specifications. The crash barrier in front of the stage had been built almost three feet too high, which might have made the security forces feel more confident, but it also would impair the view of the fans closest to the stage. I decided not to tell the band about it; at that point, it was too late to make any changes anyway.

At seven-fifteen, the limousines and police escorts had arrived downstairs. I rounded up the band, we rode the elevator down to the basement parking lot, and then moved quickly to the waiting limos. As soon as the doors slammed, the procession took off, accelerating to about forty miles per hour, with emergency lights on the police motorcycles flashing. The police had stopped traffic along our route as though we were part of a presidential motorcade. In less than five minutes, we were at the performers' entrance of the stadium, dashing for the home-team dressing room, escorted by half a dozen security men.

Even from underneath the stadium—even before the concert had started—the crowd was incredibly loud. With their enthusiasm building in intensity, the fans were already clapping, cheering, and stomping their feet.

Although Zeppelin had performed together hundreds of times, Robert described butterflies fluttering violently through his stomach. Everyone, in fact, seemed a little more strained than usual. And until Bonham hit that
first drumskin and Robert warbled his first note, tension just came with the territory.

Finally, the stadium lights dimmed. The band weaved its way onto the stage. Next, with everyone in position, Bonham lifted his sticks and crashed them into the drums. Spotlights illuminated the stage. The first notes of “Rock and Roll” exploded into the Atlanta night.

As Zeppelin began to play, they saw people everywhere they looked. With “festival seating,” thousands of fans had swarmed onto the field itself, packed as close to the outfield stage as possible. Even more were in the stands, on every level, down every aisle. They were on their feet, shrieking, frolicking, applauding, laughing. The noise became almost deafening. Throughout the stadium, flashbulbs burst like hundreds of fireflies that appeared and then vanished in an instant.

From backstage, Danny Goldberg thought, “If this is the sign of things to come, my job might be easier than I thought.”

For three hours, neither the band nor the crowd eased up. Robert strutted across the stage, chased by white spotlights that turned red, then orange, then yellow. He held the microphone just inches from his mouth, sometimes even resting it on his lower lip. As songs ended and the crowd roared its approval, Robert extended his hand-held microphone forward, aiming it toward the crowd as if to bless them and recycle their energy through the enormous speakers.

As Jimmy played, he danced on the balls of his feet, whipping and wheeling his weight from side to side. At times, he would raise his right knee, balancing his Les Paul guitar on his thigh as he picked the strings with blinding speed, making the music sing with every bit of emotion he could draw out of himself and his instrument.

John Paul, with his page-boy haircut, was a sharp contrast to his more active mates. Wearing a kaleidoscopic-colored jacket with oversized hearts sewn to the sleeves, he was welded to the keyboards for much of the show, content to let Jimmy and Robert enjoy most of the attention. Bonham, on the other hand, was a casebook study of hyperkinetic energy. His lips were moving almost constantly, not mouthing lyrics from behind his drooping mustache, but seemingly involved in self-talk, as if urging himself to find just a little more energy, to play with even a little more precision, as he lunged between drums and cymbals. In the brief interlude between each song, he would catch his breath and wipe his sweaty palms on his jeans.

At the beginning of “No Quarter,” dry ice released a thick bank of fog that quickly enveloped the stage—floating, bubbling, seeping, drifting into the crowd. As John Paul's Mellotron created an ethereal mood, Jimmy emerged from the haze, followed by Robert. With bracelets decorating his wrists,
Robert positioned his hands on his hips, then extended his fingers and projected his voice skyward.

The crowd went berserk. Green lasers soared into and seared through the night sky.

From there, the band moved into “Dazed and Confused,” and the remaining special effects were unleashed. Smoke bombs exploded. Cannons burst. Lasers formed rainbow patterns that could take your breath away, if you still had any left.

In the wings to the left of the stage, Peter was shaking his head in disbelief. “It doesn't get any better,” he said.

 

Three hours after it started, after four encores and screams pleading for even more, the band exited from the stage and raced into the idling limousines. They were absolutely euphoric as the cars accelerated, surrounded by motorcycle policemen who cleared a path from the stadium grounds.

“We showed 'em!” exclaimed Robert, referring to the critics. “Whew, what a night!”

Peter couldn't contain his excitement either. “We're the biggest thing to hit Atlanta since
Gone With the Wind
!”

 

Thanks to the sellout crowd, the band was $250,000 richer than they had been at the start of the day. But that was only the beginning. The crowd at Tampa Stadium the next night—56,000 people—shattered the single concert attendance record set by the Beatles at Shea Stadium in 1965, where they had been supported by several opening acts. That Beatles' concert had drawn 55,000 people and had grossed $300,000; Zeppelin's outdoor festival in Tampa grossed nearly $310,000.

There was reason to celebrate, and for Led Zeppelin, the celebrating began back at the Atlanta Hilton. Bonham ordered two Brandy Alexanders from room service to start, and when they arrived, he told the valet, “You better bring us up four more.”

The first two were literally gone within seconds, and when the tray of four arrived, Bonzo suggested, “Bring us up a pitcher as soon as you can.” On the valet's next trip, John's instructions were, “You better bring us two more pitchers.”

Before long, Bonham and I were each drinking Brandy Alexanders right out of the pitcher. An excess of alcohol would be as much a part of this tour as it ever had been for us. Some things with Led Zeppelin never changed.