Before Peter left for London, he needed one more piece of the management team: an agent to book concerts. Weiss set up a meeting for him with Frank Barsalona, whose Premier Talent Agency not only represented the top bands but had established a network of young, aggressive promoters whose venues catered specifically to rock ’n roll. Barsalona had begun the agency booking clients who appeared on Dick Clark’s package tours—acts like Little Anthony & the Imperials and Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels. In 1966, while he was out of town, one of his co-agents got “suckered” into signing an unknown act called The Who. “And to get them,” Barsalona was told, “I had to sign another shit group no one ever heard of called the Cream.” Those acts had turned Premier Talent into a powerhouse, and now Led Zeppelin fit nicely into its roster.

  Peter was convinced the band would find more acceptance in America than at home in the UK. His extensive experience there, with Chuck Berry, the Animals, Herman’s Hermits, the Yardbirds, and Jeff Beck, gave him a solid understanding of the types of cities and venues where a new band could thrive. Seeing was believing, especially a band like Led Zeppelin, who was a great live act. The Yardbirds name still meant something in the States, and Jimmy’s growing prestige was a critical factor. Back home it would be more challenging. Audiences in England had been tepid at best where Led Zeppelin was concerned. Local promoters continued to drag their feet when it came to booking the band. “They just wouldn’t accept anything new,” Jimmy complained. Getting airplay in Britain was next to impossible. The BBC was loath to embrace anything other than mainstream pop music; unconventional or progressive bands were anathema to the old guard that controlled its banal playlists. In the States, John Paul Jones recalled, “FM radio was just beginning to have a huge influence—they weren’t afraid to play longer tracks or even whole albums.”

  Grant came to believe a combination of U.S. exposure and word of mouth might be enough to jump-start the Led Zeppelin express. It became crystal clear to him on December 10, 1968, when the band returned to the Marquee for a final tune-up before regrouping prior to their album’s release. He’d been working the phones all afternoon, inviting promoters and the BBC2 to attend the gig, without any luck. Frustrated, Grant left the office and walked the few blocks to Wardour Street, passing just in front of the club. “Fuck me, what’s this queue?” he wondered in his inimitable way. “There were about two hundred [people] already lined up. That’s when I knew we wouldn’t need the media. It was going to be about the fans.” And the fans, he sensed, were in the United States.

  At Peter’s behest, Frank Barsalona booked a U.S. tour for Led Zeppelin, opening for loud-ass bands like Vanilla Fudge and Iron Butterfly—thirty-three shows beginning December 26, 1968, two and a half weeks before their album was slated for release. It’d be a grind, spanning the country from one end to the other, at fees of $1,500, often less, barely subsistence considering the expenses involved. Grant would travel with them in order to handle the business end, but it required an experienced road manager to keep everything—and everyone—on schedule and in line. Peter knew someone up to the task: Richard Cole.

  There are few characters in the Led Zeppelin story as colorful as Richard Cole. At the age of twenty-two in 1968, he was already a force of nature. An East London yob, who’d honed his biceps apprenticing as a scaffolder, Cole was as physically striking as Peter Grant. Though not corpulent, he was equally ominous, standing at a solidly built six foot two, with a gold earring and knee-length black leather coat. “We used to call him Mort, because he looked like a mortician,” says Carmine Appice, who traveled with Cole on a Vanilla Fudge tour in 1967. And like Grant, he wasn’t reluctant to get in someone’s face or to throw the first punch. Or the second. “Richard was a tough dude,” Appice says, “but a wild guy, a real hell-raiser. Bands loved him.”

  He’d been around them long enough to stake his claim. In three short years, he’d handled road-managing jobs for The Who, the Searchers, Terry Reid, Jeff Beck, Vanilla Fudge, and Peter Grant’s ersatz New Vaudeville Band. Jimmy Page first encountered Richard on a Yardbirds tour of the States, and John Paul Jones had met him during a short-lived stint in the Night Timers, a band he’d played in with guitarist John McLaughlin. Richard’s job wasn’t limited to getting bands to gigs. “He was a man’s man,” says Jim McCarty, “our source for dope and girls wherever we went.” It was rumored that no matter where you played, “he knew every groupie in town.”

  “Richard was an act of his own,” says Terry Reid. “During a Cream tour of the States I did with him, he disappeared when we got to LA.” Freaked out, Reid called Grant, who told him that Richard had gotten sidetracked in San Antonio, where he was presently detained—as in: detained in jail.

  “He was disturbing the peace,” Peter informed Reid. “You’ve got to go there and bail him out. They’re going to need two thousand U.S. dollars.”

  “For disturbing the peace?” Reid was astonished.

  “No,” Peter said, “it’s only two hundred dollars for disturbing the peace. But he’s already won eighteen hundred dollars playing poker with cops at the jail, and they’re not going to release him until they’ve had a chance to win their money back.”

  Another night, during a gig in Sausalito, Cole got into an egg-throwing fight at one of the city’s most exclusive hotels. “That room looked like the inside of an egg,” Reid recalls. “It was destroyed and cost us quite a bit of money. When I heard he was going out with Led Zeppelin, I thought, ‘Who else would they take?’ If you want to get into trouble—take Richard.”

  Cole wasn’t opposed to having a little fun on the road, but with a couple heavyweights like Peter Grant and Steve Weiss in charge, he opted to cool his jets, to play by the rules at first, until he could get the lay of the land.

  “Richard,” Grant had instructed him by phone the day before Cole was to liaise with the band, “don’t let them get into any trouble.”

  Grant had enough stress worrying how to break it to the band that they’d be leaving for America two days before Christmas, thereby abandoning their families for the holidays. Surprisingly, the backlash was negligible, even from Robert, who only a few weeks earlier had married his girlfriend, Maureen, in a small ceremony that included their families and a few close friends. A Christmas bonus had certainly helped to soothe separation anxieties. Peter awarded each member of Led Zeppelin $3,000 off the top of the Atlantic advance. It was a windfall particularly for the Midlands contingent; John and Robert had never been handed such a lavish amount, and Bonzo immediately blew his share on a Jaguar XK150 roadster.

  It was the first time the two twenty-year-olds had ever been out of England. Admittedly there were butterflies—for the veterans as well. A lot was riding on the next few months. Loose ends were tied up, goodbyes were said. Everyone was eager to get the show on the road. The album was finished, the label deal was signed, a capable support staff and road crew were in place. All the boxes had been checked and rechecked. It was time to show the Americans what Led Zeppelin was made of.

  Chapter Seven

  BREAKING THROUGH THE SOUND BARRIER

  [1]

  Los Angeles looked exactly as the Beach Boys had promised it would: glorious sunshine from dawn to dusk, palm trees galore, two-tone convertibles cruising the freeways, and California girls-girls-girls who might have stepped out of a Gidget movie. Led Zeppelin—minus John Paul and his wife, Mo, who were spending Christmas with friends in the East—enjoyed a three-day furlough at the fashionably seedy Chateau Marmont, nestled above Sunset Boulevard, to acclimate themselves to the New World before heading out on the road. Jimmy Page had seen it all before, but Robert Plant and John Bonham, both new to the surroundings, could barely keep their eyes in their heads.

  “There was all this stuff going on day and night,” Robert recalled. The GTOs—Girls Together Outrageously—an early groupie sect of lithe young women who prowled Sunset Strip and slept with rock stars—were holed up in a room down the corridor. Rodney Bingenheimer, a self-styled scene maker who owned a disco on Hollywood Boulevard, prowled the grounds. Famous movie actors lazed by the pool. For lads who’d left gloomy, rainy Great Britain only to land in Los Angeles where anything seemed to go—well, this was what every English boy dreamed about.

  On December 25, 1968, the three band members celebrated Christmas together, gathering for dinner—sad little TV dinners—in one of the hotel bungalows they shared. It was a low-key affair. They suffered serious jet lag. Separation from home and family dampened the holiday spirit, plus there was residual anxiety about playing their first U.S. gig. No one knew how they’d be received. A few shows would give them the lay of the land.

  Their debut took place on December 26 at Denver’s Auditorium Arena, opening for Spirit and Vanilla Fudge, two bands that were drawing respectable crowds. Led Zeppelin had been a late addition to the bill. Barry Fey, the promoter, was dead set against adding a third band—a complete unknown, for that matter—to a show that was already sold out. Vanilla Fudge’s manager, at Steve Weiss’s bidding, offered to chip in $750 to cover half of Zeppelin’s fee, which ultimately sealed the deal. Fudge’s musicians, to their credit, didn’t object.

  “We knew Jimmy from gigs we’d played with the Yardbirds,” says Carmine Appice, the drummer. “We shared the same record label, and in those days, friends helped friends by touring together.” They’d also listened to a test pressing of Led Zeppelin’s first album and were blown away by what they heard. “We always figured someone would come along who was heavier than us,” Appice says, “and Led Zeppelin seemed like they were going to be that band.”

  Heavier—and louder. The earsplitting roar that Led Zeppelin put out in Denver announced to an unsuspecting audience that rock ’n roll was about to break through the sound barrier. British bands no longer showed up with their trusty Watkins TruVoices or Vox 100 Super Beatles, whose guts were assembled from World War II army surplus. Those amps were as synonymous with early rock ’n roll as Kleenex is with tissue. They were loud enough, but unable to produce heavy, sustained notes, nor were they made to distort. The new sheriff in town was the Marshall JTM-45, and Led Zeppelin had a truckload of them.

  Jim Marshall was a relative newcomer to the rock scene. Ostensibly, he was a mechanical engineer who taught drums in a music shop in the Hanwell section of London. Occasionally, in the early 1960s, Pete Townshend had stopped in to complain that the Vox amps Jim sold wouldn’t supply the kind of output they desired. Marshall began to experiment and realized that if you overdrove an amplifier to give it more gain, it would produce the sustain and distortion necessary to make these musicians happy. He took a Fender Bassman and cannibalized it—stripping out the amp’s American tubes, altering the gain, and replacing its nice, clean sound with a tone that simulated thunder. With a quartet of four-by-twelve speakers in the cabinet, you could play a chord that was heard on the moon. Around 1965, musicians began stacking JTM-45s, daisy-chaining them to raise the stakes exponentially. Terry Reid, recalling one of his earliest encounters, says, “It was so friggin’ powerful, it scared the shit out of me.”

  One can imagine the response of the crowd in Denver. Onstage, Led Zeppelin was surrounded by a phalanx of Marshall stacks, ominous black beasts with blinking red eyes that resembled Darth Vader and sounded like the Titan space missile blasting off overhead. As they launched into their opening number, “Good Times, Bad Times,” kids in the front rows literally ducked for cover.

  Inexperienced reviewers wrote it off as noise, but Jimmy wasn’t about to let them ignore its artistic ingredient. “It’s not just noise,” he explained. “It’s the shape of the noise, the length, breadth, and depth of the noise.” He saw loudness as being integral to Led Zeppelin’s take on rock ’n roll. But even Jimmy acknowledged that the jolt of power had a residual shock value. “Led Zeppelin was frightening stuff,” he said. “There was a real urgency about how we played. Everyone would be getting laid-back, and we’d come on and hit ’em like an express train.”

  The band’s performance was still a work in progress, but with a lot going for it. Robert was a little spooked by the audience, repeatedly introducing the band, stalking around erratically. “I was very uncomfortable on stage and didn’t know what to do with myself,” he recalled. His arms, especially, felt like foreign objects. Should he wave them, put them on his hips, or fling them out spastically like Joe Cocker? He wasn’t sure. Two or three numbers in, he began to unwind, to find a nice groove. The songs and the topflight musicians behind him provided all the confidence building he needed. They tore through “Dazed and Confused” and “Communication Breakdown”—most of the first album, with a sprinkling of Yardbirds hits and rave-up covers to keep things light and loose. Jimmy had plenty of practice in winding up crowds. He unleashed wave upon wave of soaring guitar solos, providing John Paul and Bonzo with the incentive to contribute to the excitement. “Right from the very first live performances there were these stretched-out improvisations,” he noted. “There was always that energy, which just seemed to grow and grow.”

  With no album out and little advance publicity, nobody in the seats knew what to expect. “After the first few gigs, they started to pick up steam,” says Carmine Appice, who shared the stage with Led Zeppelin—or “Len Zefflin” as they were billed in Spokane, Washington—on their first five dates. “There were nights I watched them with total awe. You could just tell they were going to break things wide open.”

  In the meantime, Peter Grant instructed Atlantic’s promo department to dispatch test pressings of the Led Zeppelin album to progressive FM stations in the cities where they’d be appearing. He’d always believed that radio was the key to breaking the band. Kids in the States took their cues from a network of hip “underground” deejays who were plugged into the scene. Airplay created buzz in advance of an album’s release. Why would they play an unknown band? “Because it was Jimmy Page’s new group,” says Jerry Greenberg, Atlantic’s promotion chief.

  The album was all over KMET-FM the first week in January 1969 as the band staggered back into Los Angeles following a terrifying swing through the Pacific Northwest. An unforeseen blizzard had pummeled Washington State, making Led Zeppelin’s trip between its cities feel like the cliffhanger in an Arctic disaster movie. Richard Cole, behind the wheel of a Ford LTD, defied a travel ban that had shut down icy Interstate 90, skirting police roadblocks and nearly killing the four musicians in his charge as the car skidded toward the edge of a precipice. The band was so rattled, they could barely pass around the bottle of whiskey intended to calm their nerves. The episode was fraught with significance. It gave them an early indication of Richard’s reckless behavior and his determination to keep to the schedule at any cost.

  Even sunny Los Angeles wasn’t risk-free. Jimmy had come down with a serious case of the flu, and Robert showed enough symptoms to warrant concern. Nevertheless, Led Zeppelin soldiered through—playing half of a four-day stand at the Whisky a Go Go, a converted bank building on the Sunset Strip, where the scene was as important as the music on its small stage. Record companies and critics religiously scouted the club’s unheralded acts. Musicians stopped in regularly to check each other out, and a stable of eager young groupies cruised the tables. For a new band, the Whisky was a critical gig—if you played there and created enough heat, word spread through the media-savvy city, practically guaranteeing a breakout. Buffalo Springfield, the Doors, and the Byrds had benefited handsomely from their Whisky debuts. Both bands that played during the first week in January 1969 were virtual unknowns—Led Zeppelin and a group from Arizona fronted by a ghoulish character called Alice Cooper—and when both left Los Angeles, they were not.

  In San Francisco, Tom Donahue, generally considered to be the father of free-form radio, had been playing Led Zeppelin’s first album endlessly on KMPX before the group hit town on January 9, 1969, Jimmy Page’s twenty-fifth birthday.

  San Francisco was considered a make-it-or-break-it gig. The Bay Area was one of the world’s great rock ’n roll capitals, having launched Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Moby Grape, Janis Joplin, the Steve Miller Band, Blue Cheer, Sly & the Family Stone, and the Beau Brummels, with Santana and Credence Clearwater Revival waiting in the wings. Rolling Stone published from a building on Third Street. And a date playing the Fillmore West, the rock ’n roll shrine run by the famously despotic promoter Bill Graham, was comparable to a prodigy’s recital at Carnegie Hall. Led Zeppelin had four dates at the Fillmore opening for Country Joe & the Fish and Taj Mahal. As Robert Plant recalled, “Peter told us if we didn’t crack San Francisco, we’d have to go home.”

  Competition there was fierce; the city was saturated with great bands. “The audiences were getting [music] three nights a week,” Robert acknowledged, “everyone from the Steve Miller Band to the Rascals and Roland Kirk. There was enormous flexibility and choice, and you really had to stand up and be counted for what you were.” Even in early 1969, fans were becoming more discriminating, even jaded. John Paul could feel indifference radiating from the crowd at the Fillmore. “When we started the show,” he recalled, “there were just a lot of people standing there, thinking, ‘Who the hell are you?’ ” There were also technical problems at the outset. Jimmy had switched from his dependable Telecaster, the guitar Jeff Beck had given him, to a newly acquired Les Paul, and the pickups were glitchy.

  Never mind: by the time the first song—“Train Kept a-Rollin’ ”—had concluded, Led Zeppelin had made believers out of the San Francisco skeptics. The reception was unexpected, delirious. Arrangements came unhinged and gave way to long, drawn-out improvisational riffs, incorporating snatches of “Mockingbird” or “Shake” or even Spirit’s “Fresh Garbage” into the set pieces. Each song brought on another rapturous response. The level of play approached Jimmy’s vision for it. “There was a real urgency about how we played,” he said. The components all seemed to click into place, as a boisterous intimacy with the audience developed.