Stairway To Heaven (27 page)

A
s the band headed for England for their planned hiatus, I spent most of the remainder of June trying to find a jet that would meet their extravagant tastes and ease their extravagant anxieties while making traveling more comfortable.

I contacted Lou Weinstock of Toby Roberts Tours, who used to arrange for planes for Elvis. Lou passed on a brochure to me about a Boeing jet called the
Starship
. It was a 720B—a forty-seater that had been customized specifically for rock stars, although no one had yet taken a long-term lease on it. Frankly, I doubted that anyone could afford it.

The
Starship
was owned by singer Bobby Sherman and one of the creators of the Monkees. And it was elegant. A lengthy bar. Televisions. An artificial fireplace in the den and a fur-covered bed in the bedroom. A Thomas organ built into the bar. A kitchen for preparing hot food. “It's like Air Force One with satin sheets,” I told Peter.

“See what kind of price you can negotiate,” Peter said. “It sounds like a great way to travel. And Danny Goldberg can probably get us some great publicity out of it.”

After several lengthy phone calls, I finalized the deal. The price: $30,000 for the remaining three weeks of the American tour. Yes, it was expensive. But once the band got used to the convenience, comfort, and luxury, the price wasn't important. As Robert said on our first flight, “It's like a floating palace.”

When we picked up the jet at Chicago's O'Hare airport in early July, it was parked next to Hugh Hefner's plane. Thanks to Goldberg, the rock press was swarming all over the tarmac as we boarded the
Starship
for the first time. One reporter asked Peter, “How does your plane compare to Mr. Hefner's?”

Peter thought for a second, and even though he had barely seen the interior of our own plane, he answered, “The
Starship
makes Hefner's plane look like a dinky toy.”

The comment made headlines in the rock press, although Bonham later told me, “I'd like to get some of those Hefner girls on the
Starship
!”

“Don't worry,” I told him. “We'll have plenty of girls. I'll see to that.”

The band not only fell in love with the
Starship
, but they enjoyed the status of having such an elegant plane, something that other rock bands would envy. Maybe the Stones got a lot more media attention, but no one had a jet quite like this one.

To take full advantage of the
Starship
, I devised a strategy to minimize the exhaustion—physical and mental—that had become an almost inevitable part of touring. For this and the remaining American tours, we based ourselves in a limited number of U.S. cities—New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Dallas, Miami, and Los Angeles—in hotels where we felt comfortable. From those launching pads, we would use the
Starship
to fly to concerts in Milwaukee, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Boston, and other nearby cities. There was no longer a need to move to a new, unfamiliar hotel every night.

On the flights to the concerts, the mood on the
Starship
was relatively quiet. But pandemonium reigned on the postconcert flights. No matter what the hour, no matter how tired we may have been, no one slept, not when there were hot meals to eat, beer to drink, and flight attendants and girls to flirt with.

Ironically, at a time when Zeppelin was firmly entrenched as the world's biggest band, there were fewer groupies throwing themselves into our laps than during the early days. One seventeen-year-old blonde who we met at the Riot House in Los Angeles during that '73 tour told me, “My friends didn't even want to try to get to you guys. Your security is becoming so tight that they just figured they'd never get near you.”

Many of the old groupies had disappeared. Some had simply grown up. A few had gotten married. Too many had died of drug overdoses. Still, we would meet girls, often in L.A. clubs like the Rainbow Bar and Grill, and few of them ever turned down the invitation for a ride on the
Starship
. When they were willing, the bedroom gave us some privacy, too.

Among its other toys, the
Starship
had an on-board telephone, and whenever we'd be flying into Los Angeles, I'd call from the air to let the Rainbow know we were on the way. I'd usually get Tony or Michael, who ran the
Rainbow, on the phone, and tell them, “We'll be landing at nine-thirty, and then we'll have a twenty-five-minute limo ride from the airport. Please have our tables cleared and some Dom Perignon ready for us.” The Rainbow never said no. They spoiled us rotten, but at this point in the band's career, we expected—and almost always got—special treatment.

Linda and Charlotte, who were our favorite Rainbow waitresses and “den mothers,” would cordon off an area for Led Zeppelin, and no one got beyond the line of demarcation unless one of us signaled for her safe passage. Usually, adolescent girls with layers of makeup, tight-fitting tops, short skirts, and spike heels had the best chance of winning admission to our asylum.

There were other diversions on the
Starship
. The refrigerators were always well stocked—plenty of champagne, beer, wine, Scotch, Jack Daniels, and gin. The belly of the plane was crammed with cases of Dom Perignon (1964 and 1966 vintage) and Singha beer. We'd drink just about anything, but at times we'd be in the mood for a particular type of alcohol—or drug—and that would become the “substance of choice” for that particular tour.

When he wasn't in a corner playing backgammon, John Paul often would sit at the Thomas, and, with the booze flowing, we'd sing pub songs. We'd encourage the flight attendants—two girls and a guy—to join the partying, and while they took their in-flight responsibilities seriously, they began to feel like part of the Zeppelin family. We didn't fuck around with the stewardesses, Susie and Bianca, because they wouldn't stand for it. But there was a lot of teasing.

Susie was an attractive eighteen-year-old blonde; Bianca was twenty-two years old, with a dark complexion and a good sense of humor. Years later, Susie told me, “Back in nineteen seventy-three, when you guys would get off the plane and we'd be straightening things up, we'd find one-hundred-dollar bills rolled up with cocaine inside them. We knew we weren't on a chartered flight for the Queen of England, but in the beginning I was shocked.”

 

One afternoon, on a flight to Cincinnati for a concert at Riverfront Stadium, the
Starship
had been in the air only fifteen minutes when I heard banging and shouts coming from the bathroom.

“Get me out! Get me out!”

It was Bonzo. The bathroom door was locked. I hit it with a couple of Bruce Lee kicks. The door trembled, then it collapsed. There, before my eyes, sat Bonzo, perched on the can with his pants down, literally unable to move.

“Help me, damn it!”

As hard as he was trying, Bonzo couldn't stand up. Apparently, a mechanic
had not properly sealed the vent beneath the toilet, and air pressure was literally sucking him down, keeping his ass anchored to the seat.

I grabbed Bonham by the arms and pulled him free. “Oh, my God!” he gasped, feeling terribly shaken but not hurt. He pulled up his pants and didn't seem the least bit embarrassed by what had happened. He was probably just happy to be alive. As he returned to the main cabin of the plane, he mumbled, “I'm never gonna trust a toilet seat again.”

 

The
Starship
became a symbol of just how high Led Zeppelin was flying. Yes, it was extravagant, pretentious, and snobbish. But the band felt they had earned it. It wasn't the only sign of their belief in their own importance. On those airplane flights, Peter talked to me about his plans to commit the band's life and times to a motion picture. It was another sign of their growing egos.

My first real exposure to the reality of the movie came near the end of the 1973 American tour. When we were at the Sheraton Boston Hotel, I noticed two unfamiliar names on our rooming list. I called Peter and asked, “Who the fuck are these guys?” He invited me over to his room to meet one of them.

“This is Joe Massot,” Peter said. “He's a film director, and he's going to be traveling with us on the last few dates.”

If the band was going to make a film, Peter and Jimmy wanted it to be something more than just a documentary of the band's concerts. Each member of the band would have input into the film, and it would reflect their personalities.

Massot was one of the filmmakers with whom Peter had talked about the project. Massot was in his forties, tall, dark, and smoked Havana-sized cigars. He was a friend of Charlotte Martin's, which obviously gave him an inside track on the project. Two years earlier, he had been involved in a movie called
Zachariah
, a rock Western that developed into a cult film, thanks in part to appearances by actors like a young Don Johnson and music by Doug Kershaw and Country Joe and the Fish.

A lot of filmmakers had approached the band, but Massot went beyond envisioning just another
Woodstock
. “The movie has to make a statement about rock music and the way that musicians live,” Massot said. “I want to include some ‘fantasy scenes,' too, with each band member helping to develop the sequences that he appears in.”

Initially, Peter was turned off by Massot's idea of fantasy scenes. But the more he thought about it, the more he liked it. He had a few meetings with Massot and after a handshake, unleashed him with a camera and complete access to the band.

Peter insisted that we use Zeppelin's own money to finance the film. “I don't want to feel obligated to anyone,” he said. “Let's keep an eye on these guys to make sure they don't spend us dry. But I want it to be
our
movie.”

The crew traveled with us into Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and then three days in New York and Madison Square Garden. Massot did some offstage shooting and next set up his cameras to capture all three of the Madison Square Garden performances. The crew used hand-held cameras, as well as dolly shots during the concert filming.

From the beginning, however, the band sometimes had the feeling that the crew not only didn't know what they were doing but were also becoming a real imposition. Some crew members would often bark questionable orders and instructions. “This is very important,” Massot once said. “We need everyone in the band to wear the same clothes for all three shows at Madison Square Garden. If your clothes change, there won't be any continuity in the movie.”

Robert thought he was kidding. “Is he a filmmaker or a fashion consultant?” he asked me.

Peter, too, was getting nervous. “Do you think they know what they're doing?” he asked as we watched the crew at work. Admittedly, Massot had put his team together in less than a week, but during moments of confusion, some of these guys acted like they would have had trouble with a Brownie Instamatic, much less anything more professional. Fortunately, they shot so much footage that, amid it all, some of it was bound to be good.

 

Occasionally, we insisted that certain things be kept off limits to the cameras. During the second Madison Square Garden show, Bonzo was in the midst of his “Moby Dick” solo, which gave the other band members twenty or more minutes of rest while he banged and battered the drums. We had a teenage girl from Brooklyn in our dressing room, and as Bonzo took control of the crowd she was performing oral sex on the other band members.

A New York policeman had been assigned to guard our dressing room door, a job that included keeping the camera crew at bay. At one point, the cop shook his head in disbelief at our extracurricular activities. “You guys lead quite a life!” he said. “They don't offer us these kinds of services at the police department.”

 

Those shows at Madison Square Garden were a fitting climax to the 1973 tour. With every seat filled and fans standing and dancing in the aisles, we grossed more than $400,000 for the three nights. If Led Zeppelin had owned printing presses, we couldn't have printed the money any faster.

B
y the Madison Square Garden concerts, I was relieved to see the tour finally coming to an end. Yes, the fan response to the band had been invigorating, and it was always there, night after night. But along with it, there were the usual stresses of touring…the hectic rushing from hotels to airports to stadiums…the need to deal with overzealous fans who somehow snuck up elevators or stairways, knocking on hotel room doors and showing no sensitivity to our desire for privacy. I was ready for this tour to end.

“It does get to be a real drag after a while,” Bonham complained on the last Sunday in July, just hours away from the final concert of the tour, the last of those three nights at Madison Square Garden. Each of the New York performances was a sellout. But everyone was itching to get them over with, climb aboard the plane, and head home.

In New York, we were staying at the Drake on Park Avenue. It was a small, quiet, elegant hotel, a place you'd more likely associate with British royalty than with British rock musicians and their groupies, drugs, and late-night escapades. But the hotel staff patiently put up with middle-of-the-night room service orders and girls wandering through the lobby and navigating their way up via the elevators. Occasionally, the band would escape the confines of the hotel, journeying to Greenwich Village to drink and carouse at Nobody's. But on the whole, by this point in the tour, everyone was usually so tired that we brought in almost everything we wanted, and even passed some idle hours watching the televised Watergate hearings. “No matter how many problems
we might have,” I chuckled one afternoon, “Nixon's always going to have it a little worse.”

At seven o'clock on the night of the final concert, my hotel phone rang.

“Richard, the limos are downstairs. Let's get the boys down here and get moving.”

Within three minutes, we had crowded into the elevators. Once in the lobby, we moved briskly toward the pale blue limousines being guarded by two police cars in front of the hotel. I took a detour toward the front desk to clear out our safe-deposit box, where I had stored $203,000 in cash, mostly in $100 bills. We were leaving for London the next morning, and I planned to organize the finances that night.

Of course, $203,000 was a lot of cash to carry. But in those days, I usually had at least $50,000 in my pocket, primarily to satisfy the whims of band members who might venture out for a spontaneous shopping spree. Jimmy often purchased antiques when we were in America. Bonham would sometimes buy a car at the end of a tour, and he always found it easier to negotiate a good deal if he could put cash on the table.

As the 1973 tour wound down, however, I was carrying more cash than usual. Before leaving the country, I would have to pay the movie crew, and I also needed to pay for the
Starship
before we left for home.

At the hotel safe-deposit boxes, I inserted the key into Box 51, pulled the drawer from its slot, and opened the lid.

The money—all $203,000 of it—was gone.

“Oh, no, it can't be,” I said to myself. I was absolutely stunned. I gazed blankly at the box for a few seconds and could feel an uncomfortable chill sweeping through my body. I picked up all that remained in the drawer—our passports and Jimmy's American Express card—and then set them down again. I swallowed hard, returned the box to its slot, removed the key, and walked out into the lobby.

Peter Grant and Steve Weiss, our attorney, were waiting there.

“Peter, the money's gone.”

Ordinarily, Peter might have thought I was joking. But there was a quiver in my voice and a startled expression on my face.

“What do you mean, it's gone?” he asked.

“Go look in the safe-deposit box. The money's not there.”

“Oh, my God.” Steve gasped.

The three of us stared at one another for a moment.

“Let's get the band to Madison Square Garden,” Steve said. “They don't need to know about this yet.”

Steve went outside to release the limos for the five-minute drive to the Garden.

Peter had a violent temper, but at least for the moment he seemed remarkably calm. “When was the last time you were in that box?” he asked.

I explained that at about three o'clock that morning, three fans had ridden up in the hotel elevator to Jimmy's room, four guitars in hand, knocked on his door, and offered the instruments for sale. Jimmy had played each one and, after a few minutes of contemplation, chose a Les Paul model, agreeing to pay for it in cash. He called me and asked for $800 to buy the guitar.

“So I went to the safe-deposit box and took out eight hundred dollars,” I told Peter and Steve. “I took the money to Jimmy's suite and gave it to these fellas, asked them to write me a receipt, and then went back to my room. Someone got into the box between then and now.”

Steve said, “Well, we better call the police.”

As we walked toward the front desk to ask them to summon the police, I suddenly began to panic. Of course, I was concerned that the money had been stolen. But I had an even greater, more pressing worry: In investigating the robbery, the police might decide to search our hotel suites—suites that were filled with illegal drugs, mostly cocaine. If the cops found it, the missing $203,000 would pale in comparison to a drug bust.

For this tour, as with most others, we had drugs that had been given to us by fans and friends. I had made a lot of connections over the years, so I also knew whom to call when we wanted something. The band never turned anything down. Looking back, it was miraculous that we never got busted.

So after the police were called, drugs became my primary concern. I instructed one of our crewmembers to get the drugs out of our suites. “I stashed some cocaine under the carpet in my room by the lamp near the window,” I told him. “There's probably cocaine and marijuana in the other rooms, too. Look in Jimmy's suite, Robert's suite, go through all of them. Look under the carpets and under the mattresses. Get rid of everything. Quick.”

Minutes later, about a dozen New York policemen arrived from the Midtown North station. Because of the size of the robbery, the FBI was called in, too. Peter, Steve, and I met them in the lobby, and I explained how I had discovered that the money was missing. They listened, took notes, and examined the safe-deposit box.

Because the box hadn't been broken into—and since I supposedly had the only key—I was immediately a prime suspect. For more than an hour, the FBI interrogated me. Yes, I was shaken by the robbery, but if I appeared nervous during the interview it was because I was desperately trying to drag it out for as long as possible to make sure the housecleaning upstairs was completed. Bob Estrada, a young, bright FBI agent, asked most of the questions.

“How much money was in the safe-deposit box, Richard?”

“I can't tell you exactly. I need to figure it out. When one of the band mem
bers would want to go shopping or something, I would just grab a handful of cash out of the box and keep track of what was spent. At the end of the tour, I make all the calculations. I think we had about two hundred thousand dollars in there.”

“Where did you keep the key?”

“I hid it on the lip of my bed frame, between the box spring and the frame.”

“Who else knew it was there?”

“No one.”

“Could anyone else have seen you put it there?”

“Well, I had a girl named Diane with me. She spent the night last night. But I know she didn't see me hide it.”

“If you had the only key, Richard, how could anyone else get into the box except you?”

“I don't know. I hope you can find that out. The people behind the front desk had seen me go into the box and take out and put in money. If there was a way they could get into it, they knew a lot of money was there. Maybe there's a duplicate key somewhere.”

I couldn't tell whether Estrada believed me or not. But by the end of the questioning, I was tired, dazed, and depressed and just wanted to get this entire episode behind us. Later that night, the FBI searched our suites; fortunately, by then, they had been fully “sanitized.”

The band had learned about the robbery during the concert that night, while Bonham was performing his drum solo on “Moby Dick.” Peter, who had arrived backstage by then, broke the news to Jimmy, Robert, and John Paul. Surprisingly, the band barely flinched. “They were like professionals,” Peter told me later. “They weren't happy, of course. How can you be when someone tells you that you're two hundred thousand dollars poorer? But they returned to the stage and finished the concert.”

By the time the concert was over, the press had learned about the robbery. Suddenly, Led Zeppelin's music was again overshadowed by offstage events. Reporters swarmed through the lobby of the Drake, but not in search of stories about the band's music. It seemed that Led Zeppelin was about to be crucified anew by the media.

The limousines deposited the band at the hotel entrance, and they made their way toward the elevators. They were already tired at the end of a long tour, and they weren't in any mood to be hounded by the media. But reporters began shouting questions (“Who took the money, Jimmy?”) and flashbulbs exploded. “I don't know a thing about it,” Jimmy told the journalists. “Maybe we can talk about this later. We'd really like to be left alone for now.”

Peter, growing increasingly tense and frustrated, yelled at a
New York Post
photographer, “Stop fucking around with your camera! No pictures!”

The photographer ignored the request. “Just a couple more,” he insisted.

Peter flew into a rage. He grabbed the fellow's Nikon and flung it across the lobby. The lens cracked. The flash attachment shattered. The photographer stumbled to the ground in a futile effort to rescue his camera.

The police, who were still at the Drake interviewing the hotel staff, moved in and arrested Peter. The charge was assault. It wasn't our night.

“This is so absurd,” Robert said with exasperation. “Is this the way they treat people in this country? Somebody fucking robs us, and they throw one of
us
in jail!”

Peter was taken to the Tombs, although he spent only an hour there. During that time, he was photographed, fingerprinted, and led to a cell filled with hardened criminals. By then, a sympathetic guard—a rock and roll fan who had loved Jimmy Page when he had played with the Yardbirds—recognized Peter and instructed him to take off his turquoise rings, gold bracelet, and chains to avoid any trouble in the cell. “When you get in there,” the guard said, “don't even talk to anyone.”

As Peter withstood the evil stares from his cell mates, Steve Weiss was working frantically to get him released on bail. In the meantime, the FBI arrived to interrogate Peter about the robbery.

“Grant,” yelled the guard.

“Here!” shouted Peter.

“Grant, the FBI is here to see you.”

The FBI? Peter's cell mates looked at one another in disbelief. Peter had instantly earned their respect. One of them muttered, “You must be some heavy motherfucker if the FBI wants you.” Little did they know that he had been arrested for assaulting a Nikon!

 

Back at the Drake, the FBI was interrogating the band, one by one. And most of the questions were about me and my character.

“I can't believe that Cole had anything to do with it,” Robert told the FBI agent. He was sitting on his bed, sipping a soft drink, growing more impatient with each question.

“He's been our tour manager and handled our money for years,” Jimmy said. “He works for us because he's trustworthy. My God, if Richard was going to steal some money, he's smart enough to have waited until there was a hell of a lot more of it to take.”

The band knew I wouldn't try to fuck them over. I had managed their money on the road, and the books always balanced—at least they did eventually. Occasionally, my calculations would come up a few hundred dollars short, and I'd ask the band for some help remembering how the money was spent. “Don't you recall,” Bonham once said, “that you gave me three hundred dollars
for drinks in that bar two nights ago?” Or Jimmy might remind me, “Richard, don't forget about the two hundred I spent on that hooker.” Everything balanced out. There was never any dishonesty.

 

Late on the night of the robbery, after the FBI had finally run out of questions, the band and I headed for a party at the nearby Carlyle Hotel, where they were being honored by Atlantic Records. Atlantic president Ahmet Ertegun planned to present the band with a gold record for
Houses of the Holy
, which by then had been at or near the top of the sales charts for three months.

The party was the first chance I had to talk to the band since the robbery. “I'm sorry for all this commotion tonight,” I told them, feeling both embarrassment and dismay. “It sure doesn't end the tour on a high note.”

“Don't worry about it, Richard,” Bonham said. “With all the guns and the crazy people in America, we should be grateful no one got shot. Have a good time tonight.”

In a sense, I already was making the best of it. A friend from the record company had replenished my supply of cocaine, and I was sufficiently numb a few minutes into the party. I shared the drugs with the band—we needed some kind of escape from the evening's events—and all of us were pretty relaxed by the time Ahmet presented us with gold records.

“If we melt this gold down,” Bonham chuckled, “how much coke do you think we could buy with it?”

 

The New York newspapers were filled with stories of the robbery. The
Daily News
's front-page headline blared, “Led Zeppelin Robbed of 203G.” The press was calling it the largest robbery of a safe-deposit box in New York City history.

Danny Goldberg realized that the robbery had instantly undermined his well-planned campaign to focus attention on Led Zeppelin's music. He tried to remain calm, but he showed signs of stress, sometimes answering reporters' questions abruptly, particularly when they were the same questions he had answered a dozen times or more already. He had to deal with dozens of interview requests that day, but not because of our album sales or record gate receipts. Instead, the press was obsessed not only with the robbery itself, but with the band's financial “excesses” and “extravagance,” our “bizarre” lifestyle and our “irresponsible” business practices that allowed more than $200,000 in cash to sit in a safe-deposit box. It was a press agent's nightmare.