Stairway To Heaven (7 page)

As the band sprinted from the stage, perspiration dripped from their faces. But the adrenaline was still flowing. “I loved it,” Robert said, reaching into a cardboard container filled with spareribs from a local eatery. “It was good, wasn't it? It was good!”

No one disagreed.

 

Denver was only the beginning. For me, the most memorable concert was less than a week later in Portland, Oregon. Midway through Zeppelin's set, Bonzo seemed possessed during his marathon drum solo, blasting through a powerful thunderbolt of rhythm. For ten minutes, the rest of the band was offstage, watching from the wings, stunned by Bonzo's blinding, energetic performance.

I turned to John Paul, who was standing beside me. “Jesus Christ,” I said. “Bonzo is incredible! This whole band is incredible!”

A sly smile came over John Paul's face. He winked at me, nodded, and then walked back onto the stage. He knew it, too. We all felt that Led Zeppelin was going to be monstrous.

Two weeks after the opening night in Denver, Peter flew from London to San Francisco to get his first look at the band in America, performing three nights at the Fillmore West. On the way to the San Francisco airport to pick him up, I contemplated my own future and decided that if Led Zeppelin was going to be the next Supergroup, I wanted to be part of the coronation.

 

During the drive back to the hotel, I mustered up my courage and told Peter, “I'm fed up with fucking around with all these other bands you're sending me out with. I want to stay with Zeppelin. They're going to be big.”

Peter paused for a moment. I thought he might be figuring out the best way to fire me.

Finally, he said, “Okay, Cole. When they're on the road, you'll always be with them.”

I was so excited. “Damn it, thank you, Peter.” For the next twelve years, Zeppelin and I were almost inseparable.

For those dates at the Fillmore West, the band opened for Taj Mahal and Country Joe and the Fish. And it was a mismatch from the beginning. Country Joe was a band whose music burst with political messages and black humor about everything from the Vietnam War to drug use. Their rebellious songs like “Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag” became anthems for millions of young people in the 1960s. But at the Fillmore, Country Joe had to follow Zeppelin onstage, which could have triggered a nervous breakdown in just about any musician placed in the same position. As Zeppelin walked offstage, leaving behind an audience limp with exhaustion, the quieter, more cerebral sounds of Country Joe were about as appropriate as an hour of Mitch Miller or Mantovani.

During the Fillmore performances, Zeppelin didn't disappoint anyone—including themselves. After the second of the San Francisco gigs, Jimmy turned to me on the ride back to the hotel and said, “This is a turning point for us, Richard.” He laughed with excitement. “When a supporting band starts overshadowing the headliner, you know something's happening. Brace yourself for a pretty thrilling ride.”

Even in that first tour, I found it impossible to sit through a Zeppelin concert and not feel an emotional high, not feel moved, not feel like I was part of a special, unique experience. I told Kenny Pickett, “If this band can stick to
gether and not let their personalities and their egos get in the way of the music, they could be one of the longest lasting in show business.”

To a large degree, those three Fillmore concerts became the oil that fueled the Zeppelin machine, creating a flurry of attention not only in Northern California, but in other parts of the country as well. A New York disc jockey on an underground FM radio station talked about the band as “Beatle incarnates.” Fans stormed record stores, demanding an album that didn't yet exist. Atlantic Records was being barraged with orders even before the vinyl was off the assembly line. The momentum was building.

On two occasions during that first U.S. tour—once at Detroit's Grande Ballroom and again at Miami's Image Club—John Paul left the stage during Bonham's drum solo, with a dismayed look on his face. “What's wrong with this damn equipment?” he yelled over at me. “I can't even hear my own bass!”

In fact, the music had to compete with the deafening crowd noise. And often the crowd won.

If any doubt still existed about the power of Zeppelin, it vanished at the end of January at the Boston Tea Party. The Tea Party was a converted synagogue that had become a great showcase for rock musicians. By this point in our tour, thirty-three days and twenty-eight performances into it, the band had solidified as a unit. Groups tend to either become closer on a tour, or they begin to rupture at the seams; in Zeppelin's case, as the four musicians got to know each other better, they began enjoying one another's company. And as their music really began to jell, it seemed as though they couldn't wait to get onstage.

“The other twenty-three hours of the day mean nothing,” Robert said. “It's that one hour of music that I care about.”

The Tea Party was sold out—in fact, the management had sold too many tickets for the 400-seat club. As Led Zeppelin began performing their sixty-minute set, both the musicians and the audience started working themselves into a frenzy. Jimmy walked to the edge of the stage, aimed the neck of his guitar at the fans as his fingers danced from fret to fret, and then extended his left leg like he was about to leap into the audience. He coaxed the crowd into an orgy of hysteria.

After an hour of playing, no one was ready for them to quit. For another fifty-five minutes, there was more ear-drum-splintering music. Standing ovations, sometimes right in the middle of songs. Fans storming toward the stage. Absolute delirium. Encore after encore. Twelve in all.

At that point, the band had only a three-month history together, and as one encore merged into the next, they simply ran out of songs to play. They would spring off the stage after each encore, with odd expressions that showed both exhilaration and panic. “What other songs do you know?” Jimmy would excitedly ask the others. “What can we play next?”

After they had performed the entire Zeppelin repertoire—some of them more than once—they moved on to “Good Golly, Miss Molly”…“Long Tall Sally”…old Elvis standards…Chuck Berry songs…anything that all of them could improvise.

Once the last note had reverberated off the walls and finally faded away, and the crowd had caught its breath and began to disperse, John Paul heaved a sigh. “It was a spectacular night, wasn't it?”

On the way back to the hotel, as Bonzo toweled off his face and howled with joy, he screamed, “The show hit them like a thunderstorm.” That night at the Boston Tea Party, it really was a torrential downpour.

D
espite the early success that Led Zeppelin enjoyed, there was nothing very glamorous about their first American tour.

As well as providing physical security for the band and making sure that their equipment was set to go at every venue, I had the responsibility of taking charge of all the flight and hotel arrangements—and not much of it was first-class. We flew coach in commercial planes and pinched pennies on air fares by milking TWA's “Discover America” plan, which allowed us to buy airline tickets that routed us through the U.S., saving us 50 percent on every connection. It cut our travel expenses by thousands of dollars. In most cities, we stayed at Holiday Inns or other reasonably priced hotels. At the airports, there weren't limousines waiting for us, but rented cars, usually Ford LTDs from Hertz or Avis. But since none of us had credit cards, renting a car was usually a challenge.

At the airport counter in San Francisco, the clerk simply refused my request for a car. “It's a company policy,” she said matter-of-factly. “No credit card, no rental car.”

We argued for ten minutes. I explained that we had been able to rent them elsewhere. I offered her free tickets to a Zeppelin performance. Nothing worked. Finally, I lost my cool. I pulled $6,000 in cash out of my pocket, threw it on the counter, and shouted, “I'll buy the goddamn car! Just give me the fucking keys! Now!”

She backed away trembling, hurriedly filled out the paperwork, and pushed the keys toward me. “You guys are crazy!” she said, choking back tears. Maybe so, but we finally had a car.

 

The band members would drive with me in the LTD, with personal luggage squeezed into the trunk. Kenny Pickett would steer the three-ton, U-Haul truck with our equipment, including Pagey's 1958 Fender Telecaster, bass gear, Vox AC-30 amps, a kit of Ludwig drums for Bonzo, and some back-up items. They played so hard on them during the American tour that by the time we headed home, most of the equipment was wrecked.

One harrowing ride from Spokane to Seattle almost put an early end to that tour—and to Led Zeppelin—just a few days after the band had arrived in the States. We had just finished a performance at the Gonzaga Gym in Spokane and were about to depart for the Spokane airport for a flight that would eventually take us to Los Angeles. But an Arctic blizzard had moved into the region and was increasing in intensity. Our flight—and every other flight—out of Spokane was canceled.

We were stranded and cold. The state of Washington is beautiful, but being stuck there in Siberia-like weather, including eight inches of snow, is not how we had planned to spend New Year's Day, particularly since the band had a gig scheduled at the Whisky a Go Go in L.A. on January 2.

“Get us out of this fucking deep freeze!” Robert shouted at me. “Charter us a plane if you have to!”

“Charter you a plane?!” I screamed back. “And who's gonna pay for it? Should we take it out of your damn wages?”

After a couple of frenetic phone calls, I found out that we could catch a flight from Seattle to Los Angeles—if we could just get the rented LTD through the storm to the Seattle airport. As a native of London, I didn't have much experience driving in snow flurries, but escaping Washington was all the motivation I needed.

The band climbed into the car and I got behind the wheel for the 200-mile drive. Kenny Pickett was by himself in the U-Haul truck. The road conditions started out bad—slush and snowbanks—and it only deteriorated. As we slipped and slid, the visibility became worse. And I was becoming more anxious.

“Do you guys have your wills made out?” I nervously joked.

No one laughed.

To try to calm myself, I reached into the backseat and grabbed a bottle of whiskey. I handed it to Bonzo and said, “Open it! Quick! I need something to relax me!” We passed the bottle around, and everyone had a few swigs.

At about the halfway point, the road conditions became almost impossi
ble. Through the storm up ahead, I could see some state police cars parked with their red lights flashing. They had erected roadblocks. “Shit,” I thought. “These bastards better not be turning us around.”

As we came to a stop, a cop on foot approached our car. I cracked the car window, and he yelled to us, “The Snoqualmie Pass is impassable. It's just snowing too hard. Take the exit off the highway and turn around.”

We groaned at the possibility of spending another night in Spokane. I started thinking about other bands—the Beatles, the Rolling Stones. I doubted that they had ever gotten themselves into messes like this. And I began to wonder whether I'd ever get us out of this one.

In the time it took me to drive off the highway, however, I had already decided to keep heading for Seattle. Maybe the whiskey had given me some extra courage, but when we got to the top of the exit ramp, I announced, “We're gonna fuckin' go down the other side of the ramp and get back on the highway. I don't care what those cops say. They're never going to be able to see us or catch us.”

I drove around the cloverleaf and back onto the highway, and we continued on to Seattle. I felt victorious, like I had put one over on the state police. But after just a few minutes, I realized that maybe the cops had been right.

Sheets of snow alternated with torrents of rain and hail. The winds were ferocious. We were the only car on the highway. Parts of the road were caked with ice, and the car was skidding from lane to lane. If conditions got any worse, I could have turned off the ignition and just let the car slide all the way to Seattle.

By this point, I was really scared. But I didn't dare let the band know that. Because Jimmy and I had worked together in the past, he had confidence in me and figured—probably erroneously—that I knew what I was doing. He also was struggling with the Hong Kong flu and didn't have much energy to complain about anything.

The rest of the band, however, was absolutely terrified with my driving, particularly during the hairpin curves. They had every reason to be. At one point, we approached a long, narrow suspension bridge that was actually swaying in the wind gusts. If we had taken a vote in the car, we wouldn't have gone any farther. In fact, by that point, I was finally almost ready to turn around.

We started across the bridge. I could feel it trembling beneath us, and my heartbeat quickened. We were so close to the edge—and to a drop of about 100 feet—that Bonzo and Robert became absolutely frantic.

“Richard, you fuckin' asshole, you're about to get us killed,” Robert shrieked, grabbing the bottle of whiskey from John Paul's hands.

“Oh, my God,” screamed Bonzo. “Can't you pull over until this storm ends?”

I shouted back, “Shut up, you fuckers, just drink some more whiskey.” In fear and frustration, I pressed the accelerator to the floor and the car bolted ahead. Within another minute, we were safely on the other side of the bridge.

Another mile up the road, I stopped the car. I needed to wipe the windshield—and relieve myself of some of the booze I had drunk. It was cold so I was working fast—but obviously not fast enough. As I peed into some nearby bushes, the car started to slide backward on the icy road. The emergency brake was on, but the car was somehow skidding toward a precipice and a fifty-foot drop.

The boys were screaming. Perhaps their lives were flashing in front of them. Mine was.

Somehow, while furiously zipping up my fly, I managed to dive back into the car and jerk the steering wheel. Robert had dove into the front seat and was feverishly pressing on the brake pedal with his hands. Miraculously, we brought the car to a halt before it took flight.

Robert was absolutely livid. “I'm gonna get you fired, Cole,” he shouted in exasperation. “Either that, or I'm gonna kill you.”

Eventually, we made it to the Seattle airport. I turned in the rented car and all of us headed for the airport bar to thaw out and have a swig or two. We were emotional wrecks after that drive and desperately needed a drink.

“Give us a round of Scotch,” I said to the bartender.

As the bartender reached for the bottle, he nonchalantly said, “Let me take a look at your IDs.”

I glanced at Bonzo, whose chin had just dropped to his chest. “You've got to be kidding,” he moaned. Bonzo and Robert were both under twenty-one.

“Give us a break,” I told the bartender. “We've just been through hell out on the highway.”

Plant and Bonham ordered some coffee and snuck a few sips of our Scotch.

Kenny Pickett, meanwhile, finally showed up at the airport, too. He had also navigated the Snoqualmie Pass by sneaking past the roadblock, but not without an eventual mishap. His U-Haul skidded off the highway, crashed through a fence, and ended up in someone's front yard. All in a day's work.

 

When our plane finally touched down in Los Angeles, the sight of the sunshine lifted our spirits. Even better, the three-night engagement at the Whisky a Go Go turned out to be simply spectacular—and so was the nightlife we discovered in L.A.

The band became enamored with the Whisky, which was on the cutting edge of the transformation occurring on the Sunset Strip. Old clubs like the Crescendo and Ciro's had closed down, replaced by rock venues that attracted kids as young as preteenagers—would-be tarts eager to divest themselves of
innocence and join the rock and fashion revolution, even if it meant waiting in line for hours to become part of the scene inside.

The Whisky occupied a building that had once been a branch of the Bank of America. It had been painted green, and the safes and desks had been removed and replaced with a stage, oversized speakers, and glass-enclosed cages bulging with dancing girls who could keep you entranced for hours. The club soon had an international reputation, and even the Shah of Iran stopped by one night, undoubtedly wondering why there was nothing like this in Teheran.

Even when we weren't performing at the Whisky, the band just liked hanging out there, where we could drink to the point of near collapse—something which we all could do quite well. For years, I had relied on booze to relax me and numb whatever I might be feeling. John Paul liked gin and tonic. Robert would drink mostly wine and sometimes Scotch. Jimmy was attached to Jack Daniels. But Bonzo and I weren't as fussy. From Drambuie to beer to champagne, we'd drink just about anything.

Substance abuse eventually became part of the Led Zeppelin legend, and we got off to a fast start on that initial tour. Frankly, part of the rock music game was to get as stewed as possible, as often as possible. With all the stresses that come from launching a new band—and from touring in general—alcohol became our constant companion. We had plenty of marijuana, too, and occasionally a snort or two of cocaine. But alcohol was nearly an everyday indulgence. It helped pass the time. It eased anxieties. And it loosened inhibitions in all kinds of social situations.

 

In just five days in L.A., the band discovered that we could create a lot of good-natured mischief, particularly at the Château Marmont. The Marmont is an old hotel with an incredible history. Jean Harlow had an affair with Clark Gable there. Paul Newman met Joanne Woodward at the Marmont. John Belushi died there in 1982.

Rock musicians developed a special fondness for the hotel. Graham Nash lived there for five months. Alice Cooper's roadies played football naked on the mezzanine. Jim Morrison tumbled out a second-story window, injuring his back and legs.

Jimmy and I had stayed at the Château Marmont with the Yardbirds, and I had returned there when I toured with Terry Reid. In early 1969, as Led Zeppelin checked into the Marmont, I decided that we'd share bungalows to cut down expenses. Robert and Bonzo roomed together downstairs. Jimmy and I stayed in a room upstairs, and John Paul and Kenny were together.

Bonzo used to say that it was impossible to come back to the hotel after a performance and sip tea or hot chocolate and watch the telly. After flailing at
the drums with the force of an atomic bomb, Bonzo literally needed hours to calm down and unwind. “I'm too hyper,” he would complain, tapping his foot, scratching at his arms. “I gotta let loose and blow off some steam.”

That's how the legendary Zeppelin high jinks got started. They weren't designed to create chaos, but rather to deal with excess energy and cope with the boredom of life thousands of miles from home.

At the Marmont, it began pretty innocently. One night, after we had played the Whisky, Jimmy and I decided to have a little fun. We prepared buckets filled with water and eggs and then waited for Robert and Bonzo to drag themselves back to their bungalow.

We were rewarded for our patience. Just as they were about to walk through their front door, we attacked. The buckets were tilted on their sides, bombarding our targets with the gooey potion. Robert and Bonzo were absolutely drenched. It was purely kids' stuff, a schoolyardlike prank that Jimmy and I should have outgrown years earlier. But we roared with laughter at the success of the practical joke.

 

From Los Angeles, the band flew to San Francisco, where the juvenile delinquency continued. We stayed at a hotel called the Alta Mira across the Golden Gate in Sausalito. To save a few dollars and to cater to Jimmy's vegetarian tastes, I decided to get rooms that had kitchens—which also gave us plenty of ammunition for food fights. Our rooms faced one another across a hallway, and at midday Bonzo suggested, “Why don't we serve them their lunch by air mail?”

He picked up some uncooked eggs and began throwing them from one room to the other. The eggs didn't last long, so we found other ammunition—tomatoes, oranges, potatoes, cheese, doughnuts, cookies, nuts. The mayhem continued for about fifteen minutes, with food soaring across the hallway. When it was over, there was enough cholesterol splattered on the walls and windows to clog the arteries of half of San Francisco.

Peter would sometimes become concerned about our antics, convinced that I had lost control of the band. My philosophy was that if we made it to the concert halls on time and Led Zeppelin performed up to par, there was no reason to live like nuns or librarians offstage. I saw our horseplay as harmless fun; but perhaps it was a stepping-stone to something a lot worse—the destruction of property or, ultimately, the destruction of ourselves.