LZ 75 EPUB ED EB

Stephen Davis

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780007377954
• eBook ISBN: 9780007377961
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

Stephen Davis's brilliantly-written personal account of criss-crossing America with Led Zeppelin on their 1975 tour. A warts-and-all snapshot of the world's biggest hard-rock band at their peak.

As a young rock writer Stephen Davis landed the ultimate commission – touring America with Led Zeppelin.
This is a personal account by Davis of his journey, which saw him crossing the country with the band on board the Starship, their famous Boeing passenger jet, complete with deep shag purple carpet, electric pianos, girlfriends and star-struck hangers-on.
This is also the story of one of the hardest-living bands in the world at their peak. For Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and John Bonham, the most beautiful women in America tear their spangled jackets from them and riots start outside their gigs.
LZ-75 captures a few perfect months in rock, when Led Zeppelin epitomised the free-living rock dream, but, like Icarus, their wings were already beginning to melt. It wouldn't be long before John Bonham died of a vodka overdose, and punk killed their brand of monumental rock.
With it's up-close-and-personal accounts of band members, managers, groupies, fans and drug-dealers, there's a lot of Almost Famous about this book – Led Zep's 1975 tour is in fact the very one on which Cameron Crowe's film was based.
Stephen Davis was barely twenty in 1975, but now he is recognised as one of the best rock writers in the world. He is the author of the mega-selling Hammer of the Gods – a biography of Led Zeppelin. He recently unearthed his notebooks of the 1975 tour – which he didn't use for Hammer of the Gods – to write LZ-75.
LZ-75: Across America with Led Zeppelin is a wonderful and unique thing – a beautifully succinct account of a single moment in rock, when no lyric was too far-fetched, no drink went undrunk and no expense was ever, ever spared. It's a moment that will never be repeated.

CHAPTER 1
Cold Might on Boone’s Farm

The trouble started, as it often does in Boston, on a freezing winter night. This was in January 1975. The city’s radio stations and street papers had announced that tickets for Led Zeppelin’s first North American tour in two years would go on sale at the city’s main arena, Boston Garden, at ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning.

The kids started lining up on Causeway Street, outside the arena, at six o’clock on Monday night, January 6. They were a young crowd of suburban teenagers—Zeppelin’s hard-core audience—and by nine o’clock they numbered around 500. A few had tape players, and songs from Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin II, III, and IV, and Houses of the Holy blared in the cold night air.

By ten o’clock, it was ten degrees outside, and someone made the decision to let the kids on line spend the night in Boston Garden so they wouldn’t freeze to death before the box office opened the next morning. A cheer went up as the kids, most of them wearing blue denim, were let into the building.

Soon they were passing joints and swigging from bottles of cheap Ripple and Boone’s Farm apple wine. When that ran out, some kids broke into the beer concessions during a shift change of the security guards. Someone opened an exit door and let in a few hundred more kids who had arrived to line up for tickets. The kids turned on the fire hoses and flooded the arena’s hockey rink. The police arrived as Led Zeppelin’s fans were looting merchandise stands and lighting bonfires composed of the Garden’s old wooden seats. Drunken kids then turned the high-pressure fire hoses on the cops and their dogs. It took the riot squad three hours to chase the kids out of the building. The Zeppelin fans then fought the police in the streets until they were dispersed sometime after midnight.

The box office failed to open on Tuesday morning. Damage was estimated at $50,000. A Boston Bruins hockey game was canceled because the rink was fucked up. Then the mayor of Boston, after visiting the sacked and still-smoking arena, declared the city would refuse to grant the local promoter a permit to hold the February 4 concert. Led Zeppelin would be forced to bypass Boston on their 1975 American tour.

When things get out of control, everyone loses money. So promoters in other cities took note. An official from the Ticket-ron agency, the nation’s biggest ticket-seller, contacted Jerry Weintraub, the concert promoter Zeppelin shared with Elvis Presley, and asked him to postpone announcement of ticket sales, but Weintraub refused to go along. In New York, Madison Square Garden managed to avoid a riot by not announcing when Zeppelin tickets would go on sale.

“If we had,” a spokesman told The New York Times, “the youngsters would have stayed there all week.” But demand for Zeppelin’s three February shows in New York was so intense that lines began to form in substantial numbers anyway as word leaked out that the box office would open at one A.M. on Sunday morning. Sixty thousand seats for the three shows sold out in three hours. It was reported that 45,000 were sold through the box office and 15,000 sold through Ticketron.

It was different out on Long Island, one of the most passionate of Zeppelin’s suburban strongholds. Kids began to line up at the Nassau Coliseum, in Uniondale, three days before the box office opened. To prevent disorder, numbers were assigned to 2,000 people, who were then locked in the hockey arena’s exhibition hall and allowed to remain overnight, under guard. In the morning, only the first 900 buyers were able to buy all 20,000 tickets, leading to complaints about scalping and corruption in the ticket industry. When the cops told disappointed fans to go home, there was some shoving and cursing though no arrests.

But two miles away, six fans were arrested when an estimated 2,000 fans jammed into a Macy’s department store at the Roosevelt Field mall in Garden City. The line was orderly until twenty-five Nassau County policemen attempted to “reorganize” the waiting line. Some kids at the front of the line were evicted by the cops, and their places immediately filled by others, who seemed to be friendly with the police. Bryan Brett, nineteen, of Glen Cove, told the Times: “The cops pushed some of us out of the line, and other kids stepped in front, and they got the tickets while we got nothing after waiting for hours.”

Some of the kids told the cops they were crooks and assholes. There was shoving and threats. Six Zeppelin fans were arrested on charges of disorderly conduct and harassment. The Times reported that “the extent of any ticket scalping for the rock shows could not be determined yesterday. The Department of Consumer Affairs said it had not received any complaints.”

Led Zeppelin’s entire 1975 North American tour sold out within a few hours after its tickets went on sale. According to Jerry Weintraub, even Evis Presley was impressed.

“Well, I may not be … Led Zeppelin” the king of rock & roll would drawl. “But I can still pack ‘em in.”

Sure, Elvis. Anything you say. Viva Las Vegas.

CHAPTER 2
Key to the Highway

I clipped the press accounts of the Led Zeppelin riots from the Boston and New York newspapers because I was currently on a magazine assignment to cover the tour.

This had started the previous month when I received a message that my friend Danny Goldberg had called from New York. Danny was the twenty-four-year-old vice president of Swan Song Records, Led Zeppelin’s new record label. I was surprised to hear from him because I’d heard Danny was extremely busy. Swan Song was not only releasing Zeppelin’s own albums but was also putting out records by artists that the members of Zeppelin liked. Already signed to Swan Song were Bad Company, a new band made up of young veterans of the English rock scene; Maggie Bell, a bluesy rock belter who was often described as the British Janis Joplin; and the reconstituted Pretty Things, a legendary London band that had started at the same time as the Rolling Stones, playing the same Bo Diddley songs at the same venues as the Stones. Danny’s job was to coordinate Swan Song’s relations with the press and the media, as well as handle innumerable details concerning Led Zeppelin’s upcoming American tour.

I returned Danny’s call and left a message with his assistant. I had met him three years earlier, in 1972, when I was an editor at Rolling Stone magazine. A mutual friend had told me about Danny wanting to break into the music business in New York and asked if I could assign him a few record reviews so he could build a clip file and tell prospective employers that he wrote for Rolling Stone, which at the time was an instant entrée into the booming music industry of the 1970s. I met with Danny at our friend’s flat on West 79th Street, and he struck me as a sincere and very spiritual person who knew a hell of a lot about rock & roll and music in general. He was also totally hilarious, had survived a youthful era of contraband and firearms, and had come out of it something of a Hindu/Buddhist angel. I assigned Danny a review of the new comeback album by Lloyd Price, a star of fifties rock & roll, and Danny nailed it. A few clever Rolling Stone reviews later, he landed a job with Lee Solters, the doyen of Hollywood press agents, whose main client was, famously, Frank Sinatra.

One day in 1972, Danny flew to Paris with Solters to meet a new client—Led Zeppelin. The band had a serious problem with the rock press, who generally hated them for arrogance, pomposity, “heavy-osity,” and especially for their incredible success with young kids. Zeppelin also had a problem with the mass media in general, which totally ignored the band despite repeated attempts to alert the world that Led Zeppelin was outselling the biggest bands of the day—the Stones, The Who, Jethro Tull, and Yes.

Danny explained to Solters that Led Zeppelin had a negative reputation in the rock world. There were widespread rumors in the music industry and its demimonde that guitarist Jimmy Page, whose interest in black magic had been publicized in England, had made a deal with the devil to ensure the band’s success. There were stories about some of the band’s brutality toward the young women, so-called groupies, who were drawn to them, especially in Los Angeles. Rock writers, notably in England, claimed that members of the band insulted and abused them. A reporter for Life magazine claimed she’d been stripped of her clothes, and feared she was going to be raped, in the band’s dressing room in 1969. Rolling Stone’s critics complained that Led Zeppelin recycled old blues songs into bombastic anthems that sold millions without giving credit (and paying royalties) to the still-living bluesmen who wrote the original songs.

In short, Danny explained, Led Zeppelin had the worst reputation of any band in the world. All Danny’s friends in the influential New York music media thought Led Zeppelin were wild barbarians, and they were literally afraid of the band.

So, Solters asked, what’s our pitch?

Danny told his boss that Zeppelin were extremely famous among their young fans, but now the group needed the mainstream media in order to grow even bigger. He suggested that Led Zeppelin play a few well-publicized benefit concerts during their 1973 American tour, supposedly in aid of a hypothetical blues museum that would supposedly be located in some Southern locale. Solters said he thought this was an okay idea.

Danny and Solters attended Led Zeppelin’s sold-out Paris concert at the Palais des Sports that night. As the band blasted into their opening number, “Rock and Roll”—louder than bombs—Lee Solters, a middle-aged man in a suit and tie, stuffed tissue in his ears. Then he leaned over and said to Danny: “I want you to handle this.”

The next day, Danny and Solters met with Led Zeppelin’s manager, Peter Grant. A huge, flamboyant, ex-professional wrestler, Grant was like the fifth member of the band. He was also feared for outbursts of rage and violence against anyone who threatened his band, to whom he was fiercely loyal. Undaunted, Solters told Grant that he thought they could help with Zeppelin’s image problem. Grant glared at him. “What image problem would that be?” Quoting Danny, Solters told Grant that the media thought Led Zeppelin were wild barbarians.

Peter Grant exploded in laughter.

Later that day, Danny and Solters were introduced to Led Zeppelin in a luxurious suite at the Hotel Georges V.

Grant to Solters: “Tell the lads what our image is in America. What was that word you used?”

Solters nodded to Danny, who gulped. Danny to Led Zeppelin: “Well, uh, the press … at least in New York, think you’re like … mild barbarians.”

The whole band chuckled at this. Brushing long blond ringlets from his eyes, Robert Plant spoke first. He explained that when Led Zeppelin landed in Southern California in 1968, he was nineteen years old, and he just went crazy, but that was all in the past. Now Led Zeppelin were mature family men, successful artists, and all the old tales of groupies and mayhem were gross exaggerations anyway. Now they were looking for someone to tell their side of the story.

Drummer John Bonham was interested in the idea. Hulking, sober, and seemingly benign, he asked the two American publicists if they could help the band reach an even bigger audience—“the people that don’t know about us?”

Bassist John Paul Jones didn’t say a word. To Danny, it seemed as if he didn’t even want to be there and couldn’t care less what the press, or anyone, thought of Led Zeppelin.

Jimmy Page said very little, other than some bitter remarks about Rolling Stone and its persistently negative coverage of Zeppelin, when it covered them at all. Jimmy didn’t need to say much, Danny told me later, because “he was just such a star, with the long black hair, the eyelashes, the corrupt choirboy’s face. Stardom seemed to radiate out from him.”

Danny pitched the blues museum idea, and they seemed to like it. In the end they agreed that Danny would be Led Zeppelin’s publicist for their 1973 tour of America. Danny attended every show of the tour, riding with the band on their private jet, Starship One, and helped with the media frenzy when Led Zeppelin’s hotel safe deposit box was robbed of $180,000 in New York. When the tour was over, Peter Grant hired Danny to be Led Zeppelin’s full-time publicist, working out of the band’s Manhattan office on Madison Avenue.

Two years later, Led Zeppelin’s 1975 North American tour was looming, and Danny was on the phone to me. “Hey, man, how are you? Do you have a minute? Do you want to come on the road with Led Zeppelin? You do? That’s great! Can you get a magazine assignment? You think you can? Terrific. I only need a letter from your editor. Let me know. I’ll save you a seat on the Starship. Gotta go. God bless you—good-bye.”

CHAPTER 4
Vision of the Future

I had first heard about Led Zeppelin seven years earlier, in the autumn of 1968. I was a university student and the editor of the college newspaper. I knew a guy named Don Law, who had graduated the previous June and was now the manager of the Boston Tea Party, the city’s rock venue and electric ballroom. (Don’s father, also named Don Law, had produced all the recordings of blues legend Robert Johnson in the 1930s.) One day I heard that a new band from England, the Jeff Beck Group, was playing the Tea Party, so I called Don Law and arranged for press tickets for me and our paper’s star photographer, Peter Simon.

When we got to the Tea Party, housed in a former temple in Boston’s South End, Don ushered us into the dressing room to meet the band. I was excited because I was a massive fan of the rip-roaring Yardbirds, whose raving, improvised elaborations on the R&B format had revolutionized rock & roll and propelled it into what was being called hard rock. Jeff Beck had replaced original Yardbirds guitarist Eric Clapton a couple years earlier and had now left to go on his own with a new band.

Boston was considered an important tryout town by British musicians because it had a huge student population and the multimedia that catered to it. When Fleetwood Mac arrived from London earlier in the year, they became virtually the Tea Party’s house band. Many UK bands started American tours in front of generally friendly Boston audiences who were about the same age as the group. So Peter with his camera and I with my notebook were politely received by brilliant guitarist Jeff Beck, bassist Ronnie Wood, and drummer Mick Waller. Less effusive, in fact completely ignoring us, was the group’s young singer, Rod Stewart, who was staring at himself in the full-length mirror, using spit to straighten the ends of his exquisitely shag-cut hair.

The band was nervous. This was a big tour for them, and they were supporting a terrific record, Truth, that had several careers depending on its success. We told them we loved the record and played it all the time. The famously moody Jeff Beck loosened up a bit, and Ronnie Wood cracked a few jokes. When the drummer disappeared into the bathroom, Wood informed us that “Wanky” Waller liked to have a quick jerk before playing the show. Rod continued to obsessively tend his coiffure. We were invited to help ourselves to bottles of imported Watneys Red Barrel beer from the ice chest and hang out backstage while the opening band, the Hallucinations, finished their set.

As I was sipping beer, standing against the wall while Jeff Beck and Ron Wood tuned their guitars, my eyes gradually adjusted to the dressing room’s low light. After a while, I noticed two figures sitting in a dark corner. One was a huge man of enormous girth, the other a slender figure in velvet clothes and very long dark hair. Don Law explained that the large one was Peter Grant, who managed the Jeff Beck Group. The slender hippie was his other client, Jimmy P...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Prologue
• CHAPTER 1 Cold Might on Boone’s Farm
• CHAPTER 2 Key to the Highway
• CHAPTER 3 Vision of the Future
• CHAPTER 4 A Giant Hug for Led Zeppelin
• CHAPTER 5 He Cried Twice That Night
• CHAPTER 6 Hell-Bent for Valhalla
• CHAPTER 7 A Complex Die-Cut Affair
• CHAPTER 8 The True Pride of Led Zeppelin
• CHAPTER 9 Expansive Spiritual Vistas
• CHAPTER 10 Savant of the Occult
• CHAPTER 11 Lap of Honor
• CHAPTER 12 Journey to Middle Earth
• CHAPTER 13 Hot Tea with Lemon, Please
• CHAPTER 14 Aware of the Energies
• CHAPTER 15 The Magus of Franklin Street
• CHAPTER 16 Drones and Cones of White Noise
• CHAPTER 17 A Spiritual Quest
• CHAPTER 18 In Our Glory
• CHAPTER 19 Little Red Corvette
• CHAPTER 20 The Smiling Dog Saloon
• CHAPTER 21 Letter from a Fan
• CHAPTER 22 Abrupt Change of Weather
• CHAPTER 23 The Pipes of Pan in L.A.
• CHAPTER 24 The Loud Drummer
• CHAPTER 25 A Spiraling Vortex
• CHAPTER 26 Dionysus in San Diego
• CHAPTER 27 The Prairie Princess
• CHAPTER 28 The Golden God
• CHAPTER 29 Access All Areas
• CHAPTER 30 The Application of Attitude
• CHAPTER 31 Tomorrow Will Be Too Late
• CHAPTER 32 Little Sister
• CHAPTER 33 Cherry Bombs and Toilet Paper
• CHAPTER 34 A Town of Great Fishermen
• CHAPTER 35 Transmitter of the Gods
• CHAPTER 36 Hardest Core Rock
• CHAPTER 37 The Exiles Return
• CHAPTER 38 The Hard Road to Presence
• CHAPTER 39 Clean and Purifying Riffs
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright
• About the Publisher