Stairway To Heaven (39 page)

Since Stairway to Heaven was published in the early 1990s, I've received many requests from readers and fans of Led Zeppelin to update my own story. Some asked what I've been doing since the book first arrived on bookstore shelves; many wanted more information about my successful battle to overcome years of drug and alcohol abuse. This new edition of the book has given me the opportunity to spend a few pages describing my own life since becoming sober, including the bands I've worked with in recent years, and a glimpse at how the lives of the surviving Zeppelin members have evolved.

 

In the immediate post-Zeppelin period, you might think that I could have called my own shots. After all, I had spent twelve years as tour manager of the biggest rock band of all time, so it would make sense that I'd be besieged with offers to take over the reins of other major bands during their national and international tours.

But that didn't happen, and I really shouldn't have been surprised. I had taken a vacation in Manila in January 1981, and then flew to Los Angeles to look for work. But I was so wasted by my continuing drug and alcohol use—and still had such a tough gangster image—that no one would touch me. It was frustrating, and left me increasingly anxious, but in those first months, I had no idea how miserable my life was going to become or how hard life would be in the “real world.” I had already gone from riding in Cadillac limousines to being “chauffeured” by friends in their battered old Toyotas. I had gone from sleeping in the grandest suites in the world's finest hotels to crashing on the couches of friends.

I remember awakening one morning in a strange house, with no job to go to, and feeling overwhelmed with despair. Immediately I sought solace and escape in a bottle of Jack Daniel's, hoping it would smother my distress and give me the courage to start making phone calls for work. Instead I chose to make a connection for buying some cocaine, then heroin.

It was a terrible time for me. I was living on credit cards and beginning to drown in my own misery and substance abuse. One night at the Rainbow Bar and Grill in West Hollywood, after an evening of drinking too much tequila and sake, a waitress tried to remove a drinking glass from my hand because it
was closing time. Infuriated, I bit off a chunk of the glass and spat it at her. Let's face it—I was self-destructing.

Before long, I was in the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, bleeding from my mouth and rectum, and with a hole in my esophagus. Transferred to Los Angeles County Hospital (because I didn't have insurance), alongside people who were shooting victims, I was treated in the “red room,” which one doctor described as a place from which patients usually don't emerge alive. Somehow the doctors there patched me up, but when a friend visited me in my hospital room, my first question to him was, “What drugs have you got?” Within a few seconds, I was snorting speed in my hospital bed.

All I seemed interested in was the next high. Before I was discharged from County Hospital, a doctor asked me what I drank on an average day, and then had the audacity to say, “Do you think you might be an alcoholic?” How dare he! At the time, his question really did offend me, and I let him know in a raised voice and with an onslaught of expletives. Of course, the doctor advised me not to drink again, but seven days after leaving the hospital, I was arrested for drunk driving on Sunset Boulevard.

 

Amid this personal chaos, there were actually some positive things occurring in my life, although I was too stoned to fully appreciate them. I met Lea Anne, who was working at Barney's Beanery, and she soon became the mother of my beautiful daughter, Claire. But with opportunities to snort heroin and freebase cocaine, I was usually preoccupied with drugs, at the expense of the people in my life.

I had heard many stories of men and women losing everything, including their houses and their families, because of their drug and alcohol habits. But how could that possibly happen to me? Well, one “good” week of drug-taking cost me my beloved Austin Healy 3000, a Christmas present from Peter Grant in 1976, which went up in smoke in just days. Before long, I had received a letter from my accountants in London informing me that they had sold my house there to pay off my debts. I went to my friend Elliott, a pawnbroker on Santa Monica Boulevard, who was willing to let me pawn some of my gold and platinum Zeppelin records, some artwork, a watch or two, a few rings, and anything else I could find in exchange for some beer money.

When Claire was born, I was hoping on some level that this wonderful addition to my life would make me a more responsible person, perhaps encouraging me to stay home more and give up alcohol and drugs. Maybe I'd even become sober enough to hold down a long-term job. But that wouldn't happen for several more years of making myself and the people closest to me miserable.

 

Before long, after getting two DUI citations (one in a car, one on a motorcycle) in a single week, I decided that I needed to fly to London to visit my mother, whom I hadn't seen in three years. So with the proceeds from selling my motorcycle to Elliott, I headed to England. My ex-wife, Marilyn, met me at the airport, and I stayed with her for the first couple days of the trip.

During that visit to the U.K., I called Peter Grant at his country estate. After a quick chat, he suggested that I catch a train to Sussex, where he would have a car waiting to take me to Horselunges Manor, his large period house surrounded by a moat that you needed to cross by bridge. When I arrived at the estate, Ray Washburn, Peter's assistant, greeted me with a hug. Peter was sitting in his drawing room, surrounded by his growing collection of art nouveau and art deco paintings and decorative objects. As Peter gave me a hug, Ray asked the question that I yearned to hear: “What would you like to eat and drink?” For a few moments, as Ray went to start the alcohol flowing, I almost felt time-machined back to the Zeppelin days, when I thought I was on top of the world. I told myself that, somehow, I had to get back as an active player in the music business.

 

But I was a long way from a comeback. In fact, while in England I so desperately needed money that I took a job on the scaffolds, working as an erector—something I hadn't done since 1966 when I had left the Who. My first job was at Amberly Road School, just a couple of bus rides from my mum's home. The best explanation I could invent to tell the other men on the scaffold was that I had gone to live in America and was a little rusty. By the end of the first day, I was also pretty sore, and needed to plaster on the Ben-Gay to soothe my muscle pain.

Actually, I was surprised that I hadn't lost more of my skills to do the job—but my heart still wasn't in it. In fact, at one point, after a day of hard labor, I was feeling unusually desperate. I bought some flowers and put them on my father's grave. As I walked home along the canal bank, I began screaming at God for the life he had given me, wondering why I could not have been like the other kids I had grown up with, ignorant of the glitz and glitter I had once experienced, now with little hope of ever returning to that extravagant lifestyle. There were moments when I wanted to end it all, but that would have broken my mother's heart.

Then there was an unexpected turn of events. After I had been sober for three months, Caesar Danova, an old pal, sent me a telegram, asking me to call him collect in Tokyo about a job in rock and roll. I rushed to a call box as excited as if I were going to score.

Caesar told me, “I'm going to stage a concert on the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, in collaboration with the Japanese government, and I want you to help me.” The details were sketchy at the time, but I didn't care. As far as I was concerned, this was a gift from God. Caesar said, “I'll put a few grand in your bank account, and send you a first-class round-trip ticket to Japan. I'll see you soon.”

I was ecstatic. I finally thought I had a foot back in the music industry's door.

The Hiroshima concert, however, never worked out—at least not before I resigned from the project because it seemed so disorganized. But before I left the Far East, I spent a couple of weeks becoming blind drunk in Thailand, and came home penniless. Because I had walked out, Caesar had taken back the home in Mayfair that he had allowed me to live in, so I went back to living with my mum and erecting scaffold. Nevertheless, the whole experience still gave me hope that perhaps I could find other work in rock and roll.

I continued to go through some hard times, however. At one point back in London, my mum threatened to throw me out of her flat, convinced that I had become a “no-good alcoholic” (imagine that!). During the visit, I had even tried (unsuccessfully) to take some money from her purse without her permission. That's how desperate I was for a drink.

 

Then came the day that changed my life. It was January 2, 1986—my fortieth birthday—and I had pawned my Cartier watch and had joined my “villain” friends for a birthday drink at the Adelaide Pub in Chelsea. Halfway through a pint of beer, a voice in my head said, “That's it, Richard. It's over.”

I put the beer down and haven't picked one up since! But at that moment, I felt frightened and I quickly called my heroin dealer to buy a gram of heroin. I did half of it at his house, and the other half the next morning—the last time I ever used drugs. I went for a swim and then I called a close friend, composer Lionel Bart, who told me, “I'm going to Chelsea to a meeting of clean drug addicts.”

Almost on a whim, I told him, “I think I'll go too. I'll meet you there.”

When I walked up the stairs and into the meeting hall, it was like entering a room of old friends with whom I had drank and used drugs over the previous twenty years. I took my coat off and sat down.

As I looked around, I felt as though the weight of the world had been lifted from my shoulders. I somehow knew I was home at last. I felt that I was in a safe place—and I was.

That meeting in 1986 became the launch pad for my sobriety. Yes, at times I've struggled along the way, but have never taken another drink or used co
caine or any other drug since then. That afternoon, I finally recognized how important it was to get my life back on track. And I have. Sobriety has dramatically transformed my life for the better.

 

Perhaps not surprisingly, once the word spread that I was sober my phone eventually began to ring. No, the ringing wasn't constant, but I began to work again, and at times, the gigs have been steady and rewarding. Yes, I still erected scaffold for a while, and at one point sold some gold records to pay for a plane ticket to Los Angeles to visit Claire on her fourth birthday. But then one night I bumped into Patrick Meehan, a manager and old friend. He was so impressed that I had been clean and sober for almost a year that, on the spot, he offered me a job as tour manager for Black Sabbath. The offer came so quickly that it stunned me, and I actually began to panic a little. But I said yes.

My first shows with Black Sabbath started in Athens, Greece, in 1987, and we then moved on to Sun City, South Africa, for two weekends. Next we were touring Germany and Italy. All the while I was going to plenty of sobriety meetings.

The most surprising part of that tour for me was that everything seemed effortless—so much so that I thought I must have been forgetting things. Then I realized that in the past, most of my time had been taken up looking for and using drugs. Touring while sober was a lot easier and much less time-consuming. Instead of finding a way to score, I used the time to go to sobriety meetings.

After working with Black Sabbath, it was much harder to land another job as a tour manager than I thought it would be. I moved to Los Angeles to be near Claire and to look for a job. Running out of money, I worked for a time for my friend Marcus, who had just launched a messenger service and needed drivers to make deliveries. So I rode a motorcycle all over Los Angeles delivering messages to offices, including those of people with whom I had worked in the Zeppelin days. One delivery was to Danny Goldberg's office. Danny had overseen Zeppelin's publicity for many years, and was now an owner of a management company.

When I told Goldberg's receptionist that I wanted to speak to Danny, she glared at me, figuring that this messenger boy had some nerve asking for the boss. But I gave her a look that said, “It would be in your best interest to tell Mr. Goldberg that I'm here.” In a few minutes, Danny came out to greet me, and was surprised to see me delivering messages, but was genuinely thrilled when I told him I was sober. “Call me anytime,” he said. “I don't have anything for you at the moment, but please keep in touch, Richard.” Like working on the scaffolds, delivering messages was a quick way to learn humility.

As I mentioned in chapter 57, Sharon Osbourne (Ozzy's wife) had become one of my greatest friends in the music business. I had driven Ozzy to a few sobriety meetings, and this reunited me with Sharon, who invited me to help with some of the acts she managed, beginning as tour manager with Lita Ford. I began by working out of the Sunset Marquis Hotel, arranging Lita's twelve-week tour that was intended to promote her new album (which became my first gold record while sober!). It was also my first-ever bus tour in the U.S., and because I was sober for the first time while touring in the States, I got to visit cities I had been to many times, but now saw through fresh eyes.

With Lita, I had to get used to touring without a private Boeing 707 to transport us, and I had to become accustomed to sleeping on the bus so we could travel the distances we needed to cover from one venue to the next. The bus was an Eagle 10, accompanied by a U-Haul truck carrying the band's instruments, and a team of crew members, each of whom had his own title (such as drum tech or guitar tech) and business card. All of us received a per diem for food—a far different situation than my experience with Zeppelin, where I just signed for anything that the band and I wanted.