Stairway To Heaven

Richard Cole

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780743489850
• eBook ISBN: 9781471138157
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The most powerful, popular and enduring rock band of all time, the excitement of Led Zeppelin's music was matched only by the fever pitch of their off-stage antics. In hotel rooms and stadiums, in a customized private Boeing 707 jet and country estates, tour manager Richard Cole saw it all - and here tells it all in this close-up, down-and-dirty, no-holds-barred account. This revised edition brings readers up to date on the lives and careers of the band members, whose wild excesses, bizarre lifestyles and ground-breaking music are now the stuff of legend.

CRASH LANDING

Richard, something bad has happened to one of your Led Zeppelin boys.”

Julio Gradaloni had a grim expression on his face as he nervously shuffled through his briefcase, finally pulling out a newspaper and placing it on the table in front of us.

“What do you mean?” I asked him, feeling some anxiety starting to chill my body. “What’s happened?”

Julio was my attorney, a stocky, no-nonsense lawyer in his middle fifties. He was sitting across from me in the visiting room at Rebibia Prison near Rome. I had been imprisoned there for nearly two months—on suspicion of terrorism, of all things. During those weeks behind bars, I was bewildered and frustrated, desperately and futilely trying to convince the police and prosecutors that my arrest had been some kind of blunder, that I was no more likely to blow up buildings in Italy than would the Pope himself. But on this particular morning in late September 1980, Julio took my mind off my own problems.

“One of your musicians has died,” Julio said, trying to remain as composed as possible.

“Died!” I froze. After nearly twelve years as tour manager of Led Zeppelin, the four members of the band—Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham—had become like brothers to me.

Neither Julio nor I said anything for a few seconds. Then I stammered, “Was it—was it Pagey?” Jimmy is so frail, I thought, so weak. Maybe the cocaine, the heroin had finally taken their toll. Jimmy’s body must have just given out.

Julio wasn’t making eye contact, perusing the Italian newspaper, preparing to translate the article about Led Zeppelin for me.

“No,” he said in a steady tone of voice. “Not Jimmy Page. Here’s what the article says. ‘John Bonham, drummer of Led Zeppelin, was found dead yesterday in the home of another member of the world-famous rock band. . . .’ ”

Julio continued to read. But after that first sentence, I stopped hearing his words. I became numb, braced my hands against the table, and bowed my head. I swallowed hard, and could feel my heart palpitating.

“Bonham is dead,” I began repeating silently to myself. “Shit, I just can’t believe it. Not Bonzo. Why Bonzo?”

I leaned back in my chair. There must be some mistake, I thought. It doesn’t make sense. He’s so strong. What could possibly kill him?

I interrupted Julio in midsentence. “Does the newspaper say what he died of? Was it drugs?”

“Well,” Julio said, “they don’t know yet. But they say he had used a lot of alcohol that day. It sounds like he drank himself to death.”

Julio tried to change the subject. He wanted to talk with me about my own case. But I just couldn’t. “Let’s do it another day, Julio,” I mumbled. “I’m not thinking too clearly right now.”

I barely remember walking back to my cell. I crawled onto my bunk and stared silently at the sixteen-foot-high ceilings. I had this queasy feeling in my gut while pondering life without Bonham . . . without those high-voltage drum solos, his contagious laugh, and the sense of adventure that propelled us through many long nights of revelry.

“Are you all right?” one of my cell mates, Pietro, finally asked over the din of a nearby transistor radio.

“I’m not sure,” I told him. “One of my friends has died.”

My cell mates tried to be comforting, but I wasn’t particularly receptive to their words. Finally, with an onslaught of emotions rushing through me, I snapped. Throwing a pillow against one of the walls, I shouted, “Damn it! Here I am rotting in this fucking jail for something I didn’t do! I wasn’t even with my friend when he died!”

I began pacing the cell. “Maybe I could have done something to help him. Maybe I could have kept him from self-destructing.”

It had already been a difficult two months in that prison cell. I had been put through a forced withdrawal from a heroin addiction, enduring many uncomfortable days and nights of nausea, muscle cramps, body aches, and diarrhea, while trying to figure out how I was going to extricate myself from the bum rap that had put me behind bars. One minute, I had been relaxing at the Excelsior, one of Rome’s most elegant hotels; the next, policemen with their guns drawn had burst into my room, accusing me of a terrorist attack that had occurred 150 miles away. Since then, my day-to-day existence had become difficult—even before the stunning news about John Bonham.

In the days and weeks after Bonzo’s death, I received several letters from Unity MacLaine, my secretary in Zeppelin’s office. “The coroner’s report,” she wrote, “says that Bonzo suffocated on his own vomit. It says he had downed 40 shots of vodka that night. They call it an ‘accidental death.’ ”

Bonham had died at Jimmy’s home, the Old Mill House, in Windsor—a home Pagey had purchased earlier in the year from actor Michael Caine. The band had congregated there on September 24 to begin rehearsals for an upcoming American tour, scheduled to start in mid-October 1980. Beginning early that afternoon, John had started drinking vodkas and orange juices at a nearby pub before overindulging in double vodkas at Jimmy’s home. His behavior became erratic, loud, and abrasive. He bitched about being away from home during the nineteen-date American tour.

When John finally passed out well past midnight, Rick Hobbs, Jimmy’s valet and chauffeur, helped him into bed. Rick positioned the Zeppelin drummer on his side, placed a blanket over him, and quietly closed the bedroom door.

The next afternoon, John Paul Jones and Benji Le Fevre, one of the band’s roadies, tiptoed into the bedroom where Bonham was sleeping. Benji shook Bonzo, first gently, then more vigorously, but was unable to arouse him. Panicking, Benji feverishly checked Bonham’s vital signs. But there were none. He wasn’t breathing. He didn’t have a pulse. His body was cold.

When the ambulance arrived, the attendants repeatedly tried to resuscitate Bonham as his fellow musicians looked on in horror. Nothing worked. He may have been dead for hours.

After a lengthy voyage that began in 1968, Led Zeppelin had crash-landed. This was the band that had redefined success in rock music, whose record sales and concert receipts turned them into overnight millionaires and the biggest drawing card in rock music. This was the band that played such high-spirited, dynamic, wall-to-wall music—and performed with such confidence and such charisma—that concert tours were sold out just hours after tickets went on sale. Standing ovations and endless encores became ordinary. Harems of excited young girls—whose adrenaline would surge at the mere mention of Led Zeppelin—fought for the chance to fulfill the band’s every sexual fantasy and fly with them on their private jet, the Starship, where a bedroom provided privacy, and drugs and booze helped heighten their senses.

I had been Led Zeppelin’s tour manager from the beginning, since their first American concert at the Denver Coliseum in 1968, where they opened for Vanilla Fudge. Over the course of the next twelve years, I had been with them on every tour and at every concert until almost the end—scheduling flights and hotel accommodations, helping to choose concert sites, planning details from the size of the stage to the height of the crash barriers, providing show-no-mercy, paramilitarylike security, escorting girls to the rooms of the band members, and keeping Zeppelin nourished with drugs. In the process, I had seen them evolve into a powerhouse force in the music industry.

But John Bonham’s death proved that there was nothing omnipotent about Led Zeppelin. Their music might live forever, but they had paid a terrible price.

THE DOWNFALL

I saw John Bonham for the last time just days before I had left for Italy in summer 1980. We met at a pub called the Water Rat on the King’s Road, after an evening rehearsal in which the band was preparing for a summer European tour. While John and I drank Brandy Alexanders, I grumbled about Peter Grant, the band’s manager, sending me to Italy to kick my heroin habit rather than accompanying the band on their upcoming tour.

“Don’t worry,” John said, “you’ll get off that shit and be back with us before the summer’s over.”

When we left the pub, John took me for a ride in a Ferrari Daytona Spider convertible he had bought two days before. As he dropped me off in front of the pub, I turned to Bonzo.

“Do you realize that this European tour will be the first Zeppelin gigs I’ve ever missed?” I told John. “I hope you bastards miss me.”

Bonzo smiled. “Very unlikely, Cole,” he quipped. “Don’t count on it.” Then he asked, “How pissed off are you at Peter?”

“Very pissed off. But I also know that I need to get off smack once and for all. And so do you, Bonzo.”

Bonham laughed. “It’s not a problem for me,” he said with exuberance. “If it becomes a problem, I’ll just quit!”

Even though I wanted to go on the European tour, I also recognized that I was losing interest. As good as Led Zeppelin’s music continued to be, I could see the organization beginning to suffocate in its own personal turmoil. For me, the hassles were starting to outweigh the joys.

In the early years of Zeppelin, we had been a close, six-man unit, with Peter and me providing the support for the four musicians. There was real joy in seeing the fame of the band mushroom so quickly, which translated into enormous financial rewards and the chance to live an incredible fantasy lifestyle that a bunch of musicians from mostly working-class backgrounds found irresistible and intoxicating.

But from the inside, the signs of Led Zeppelin’s disintegration began to surface in the late 1970s. Jimmy, Bonzo, and I were becoming increasingly caught up in the quagmire of drugs, enough to really anger Robert and John Paul. “You’re one of the people in charge of this operation,” Robert once told me. “And it makes us nervous to see what’s going on. Can’t you see what’s happening?”

I thought Robert was crazy. From the earliest years, Zeppelin’s concert tours had always been drenched in alcohol . . . champagne, beer, wine, Scotch, Jack Daniels, gin . . . and brimming with drugs, even though we rarely paid for any of the illegal substances. Drugs for the band were often given to me by fans, by friends, who would knock on my hotel room door, hand me a bagful of cocaine or marijuana, and say something like, “We have a present for you.” The band rarely turned anything down.

When Bonzo, Jimmy, and I began using smack, no one aggressively intervened, even when it started having a noticeable impact. Jimmy became so caught up in his drug habit that he sometimes showed up an hour or two late for rehearsals. Bonzo’s behavior, already unpredictable, became more volatile. As for me, I was buying heroin from dealers within a few hundred feet of Peter’s office in London and was becoming less attentive to my day-to-day responsibilities in the Zeppelin organization. I still felt I was in control, but I wasn’t; I’m sure Bonham and Pagey were deteriorating, too.

By 1980, Peter and I were constantly at each other’s throats. Peter never fired me, but we weren’t getting along at all. He was fed up with my heroin habit and gave me an ultimatum.

“Pick where you want to go to clean yourself up, and I’ll pay for it,” Peter said. “But you’re not going to bring down this organization with you.”

At times, the thought of getting away actually sounded appealing. Particularly while we were on tour, Peter wanted to know where I was and what I was doing at every moment of every day. I felt I was on the spot all the time, and I didn’t like it. “Why are you bugging me?” I would scream at him. My drug use was making me paranoid.

I even thought of quitting. But at the same time, I was unwilling to give up the glamorous life-style of limousines, luxurious hotel suites, drugs, and groupies.

Peter was an intimidating presence, a mammoth man, overweight, with an unkempt beard and a fast-receding hairline. More important, he was a hands-on, loyal manager who knew every twist and turn of the music industry. He deserved nearly as much credit for the band’s international success as the musicians themselves.

As for Bonham, I began seeing a very nasty side of him at times—an anger built on frustration—that grew out of his own mixed feelings about Led Zeppelin itself. He loved playing with the world’s number one band, and he glowed when critics called him the top drummer in the business. But with increasing frequency, he resented having to go out on the road or showing up for a particular concert when he just wasn’t in the mood. Like the rest of the band, Bonham no longer needed to play for the money. So when his state of mind just wasn’t in sync with catching a plane to the next gig—when his big heart and his loneliness for his family would make him ache to be back home—he would say to me, “It’s becoming harder to be somewhere where I don’t want to be. I’ll follow through because people are depending on me. But someday soon, I’m going to give it all up. I have to.”

Bonham’s thirty-minute drum solos—which sometimes left the drumskins torn and his hands bloodied—were a way of getting out all that anger and all that pain.

Jimmy Page was just as complex, although his commitment to the band never wavered. Because Zeppelin was his baby, his creation, his enthusiasm remained strong. But his health was a constant worry to those of us around him, thanks to a vegetarian diet that sometimes bordered on malnutrition. He appeared frail and was more prone to colds than the rest of us. Still, his passion never ebbed onstage.

Jimmy and I were very close during the early days of Zeppelin, although we spent much less time together in the later years. Offstage, we had once shared an excitement for art collecting, but as I began spending more of my money on drugs, I could no longer afford to indulge my own artistic interests, and so Jimmy and I drifted apart. He never seemed particularly impressed with his own wealth, perceiving it as a means of buying him seclusion—and maintaining his cocaine and heroin habits. But more than anything, music and Led Zeppelin were his real loves.

Through all the band’s travails, John Paul Jones somehow emerged unscathed. When he dabbled in drugs, it seemed to be more out of curiosity than anything else, and never to excess. He was almost always level-headed and in control. He was also reclusive, even on the road, often content to be by himself, away from the chaos and the excesses that he may have seen bringing Led Zeppelin down. He avoided much of the band’s craziness, and his marriage survi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: THE ROCK REVOLUTION
• 1 CRASH LANDING
• 2 THE DOWNFALL
• 3 ROBERT
• 4 BONZO
• 5 JOHN PAUL
• 6 JIMMY
• 7 PRESIDING OVER A ROCK FUNERAL
• 8 A NEW START
• 9 WELCOME TO AMERICA
• 10 LIFE ON THE ROAD
• 11 BACK TO REALITY
• 12 LED WALLET
• 13 A TASTE OF DECADENCE
• 14 FAST TRACK
• 15 FISH STORIES
• 16 GREAT DANE
• 17 PHANTOM PERFORMANCE
• 18 “NAME YOUR PRICE”
• 19 “THOSE ZEPPELIN BASTARDS”
• 20 HANDCUFFS
• 21 FRIENDS
• 22 THE WATER BUG
• 23 BACKSLIDING
• 24 “STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN”
• 25 NOSE JOB
• 26 SMALL TIME
• 27 “DICK SHOTS”
• 28 EASTERN ANTICS
• 29 GOING DOWN UNDER
• 30 BEDROOM PLAY-BY-PLAY
• 31 RISKY BUSINESS
• 32 HEROIN
• 33 HOUSES OF THE HOLY
• 34 “IT DOESN’T GET ANY BETTER”
• 35 GAY BARS AND DUDE RANCHES
• 36 CALIFORNIA BOUND
• 37 THE STARSHIP
• 38 THE ROBBERY
• 39 PUT ’EM IN THE MOVIES
• 40 “HORS D’OEUVRES, ANYONE?”
• 41 THE KING
• 42 CLAPTON
• 43 ZEPPELIN REVISITED
• 44 DANCING DAYS
• 45 THE LEGENDS
• 46 TAXED OUT OF ENGLAND
• 47 THE NIGHTMARE ON RHODES
• 48 THE LONG ROAD HOME
• 49 THE JINX
• 50 DESPONDENCY
• 51 THE BEGINNING OF THE END
• 52 THE SÉANCE
• 53 LAST LEG
• 54 MOURNING
• 55 COMING BACK
• 56 BONZO
• 57 GOOD TIMES, BAD TIMES
• AFTERWORD
• LED ZEPPELIN DISCOGRAPHY
• INDEX
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS