“When we recorded that it was in L.A.,” Robert said, “and it was a time when there was a lot of looning going on—and it was one of those states of mind you get into when everything’s rosy and shining. And so a lyric like that comes zooming in.” Nevertheless, he acknowledged his role in appropriating key phrases. “It’s borrowed admittedly, but why not?” he said. “But ‘squeeze my lemon’—I wish I could think of something like that myself.”

  They also began work on an instrumental, “Pat’s Delight,” named after Bonzo’s wife and featuring an extended drum solo that, during shows, often dragged on—and on and on—for fifteen or twenty minutes. The rhythm track was a direct cop of Bobby Parker’s “Watch Your Step,” which John Lennon marginally rearranged for the Beatles’ “I Feel Fine” and had enthralled Jimmy as a teenager in Epsom. He would eventually retitle it “Moby Dick.” They worked for hours, trying to get a satisfactory take for Jimmy’s solo. Frustration was setting in when the engineer, Chris Huston, finally pulled the plug. “It’s not happening,” he announced, to some grumbling from the troops. He knew it was futile to indulge accomplished musicians who would arrive at the same conclusion sooner or later. It was better to be up front with them, not waste any more time.

  Los Angeles was too distracting for a demanding recording session. The groupie scene at the Chateau Marmont was in full swing when Led Zeppelin arrived, with an eager coterie circling the band. There were always obliging women on the fringes of the music scene who were attracted to the fame and the rock ’n roll energy, but the groupies in Los Angeles were shockingly young. “They were thirteen, fourteen, maybe fifteen tops,” says Rodney Bingenheimer, who’d been a publicist at Capitol Records and later a self-styled LA scene maker. “Girls just showed up, they came out of nowhere.” To snooty Angelenos, nowhere meant the San Fernando Valley, Palos Verdes, or Orange County, suburbs whose starry-eyed denizens were drawn to the city lights. “They were mostly latchkey kids,” says Michael Des Barres. “Their fathers were away and their mothers could give a shit.” Too young to get into rock ’n roll hangouts like the Whisky a Go Go, the girls prowled the hotels where rock stars congregated, often in bungalows with open doors and easy access.

  Led Zeppelin was no strangers to the feast. The guys were a long way from home, and from their wives, whom most of them had married in their teens. Maureen Plant and Pat Bonham were tucked away in the Midlands, Mo Baldwin tended house in Sussex. The guys were in their twenties now. It was open season in LA as far as the band was concerned.

  “They all had girlfriends here, temporary girlfriends,” says Vanessa Gilbert, who joined the band’s entourage when she was “a naive eighteen.” Richard Cole made sure the guys always had options. Robert and Bonzo needed no prompting. They indulged in the debauchery from the moment they arrived. Jimmy, who had a longtime American girlfriend named Catherine James, nevertheless allowed Bonzo to dress as a waiter and wheel him, splayed on a room-service cart, into a suite of sybaritic girls.

  Once, during Led Zeppelin’s stay at the Chateau Marmont, Peter Grant wandered into one of the empty bungalows they’d rented and found a naked young woman tied to the bed by her wrists and ankles. “I said, ‘Hello, what are you doing here?’ She said, ‘I don’t know, but guys keep coming in and fucking me.’ I said, ‘Oh okay, well, have a nice day.’ ”

  No one gave a thought to whether these girls were well below the age of consent. Some were eighteen, some were sixteen, some were fourteen, occasionally younger—mostly no one bothered to ask. “Maybe it was a sign of our immaturity, but after all, we were only twenty or twenty-one ourselves,” said Richard Cole, by way of justification, “so a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old wasn’t total madness.” In any case, he maintained, “they made themselves available to us. We never forced them into doing anything they didn’t want to. They were looking for some fun—and so were we.”

  There was no oversight, no accountability, no inclination to put the brakes on the pursuit. It was a pursuit that would continue to mark Led Zeppelin throughout their career.

  Led Zeppelin’s music already set a certain lusty tone. What they played and how they worked their audience into a joyous, unrestrained, head-banging mass made them a magnet for kids who wanted to break out and party. Lyrics like “I’m gonna give you every inch of my love” and “Squeeze me, babe, until the juice runs down my leg” served as come-ons to young, impressionable girls—and boys—who heard messages in the songs that stroked their fantasies. “Sex, in heavy metal’s discourse, is sweaty, fun, and without commitments,” according to Deena Weinstein, a popular-culture professor at DePaul University in Chicago. The loud, convulsive rhythms uncork the most primal expressions of sexual arousal and empowerment.

  For a teenager blasting out of adolescence, Led Zeppelin was the magic elixir, a rampaging hormonal highball of music and acting out.

  * * *

  • • •

  Acting out had become a highlight of the shows. Robert and Jimmy had mastered the gift of rock ’n roll dell’arte in the way they communicated with the audience and with each other under the spotlight. Their kinetic stage presence—the spectacle they created—was often as compelling as the music they made. They used their bodies to great effect to emphasize the feel of the music—striking poses, assertive physical gestures, the lip pouting and pelvis thrusting and hip shaking, the stage prowling and pacing in circles and duck-walking, all of it creating excitement that was liberating, a physical release. It was impossible to attend a Led Zeppelin show without getting lifted out of your seat, feeling the need to move, getting emotionally involved. The band knew how to pace a show in order to build tension and momentum in unsettling ways.

  As they toured the mixed bag of halls and arenas from Los Angeles to New York, the energy at their shows grew more feverish and intense. When they jackknifed briefly into Canada for a few pickup dates, a journalist covering one of the shows noted that Led Zeppelin “let loose an earthquake of sound and fury” and that they “blast out with raw, jagged power, enough to bust a new door in your brain.” Two sisters at the gig in Seattle—Ann and Nancy Wilson, who were nineteen and fifteen respectively and would materialize later as the hard rockers Heart—“ended up leaving,” Ann later said, “because we were so shocked.” The music—and everything that went with it—overpowered their senses.

  The audiences were in thrall. Sometimes, however, no matter how hard the band worked, the equipment conspired to thwart their best efforts. They were still just traveling catch-as-catch-can with an assortment of rented amplifiers, putting themselves at the mercy of a sorry range of PA systems provided at each of the gigs. Thirty years later, Robert Plant could recall in excruciating detail a show Led Zeppelin played at the University of Ohio opening for José Feliciano in May 1969.

  “The PA was [nothing more than] a cluster of speakers right up in the apex of the room,” he said. “It was a circular building with the statutory [sic] sixties students sitting around looking suitably astonished and vacant.” It was impossible to squeeze volume out of the creaky system. There was no way for him to project his voice or to create the sparks necessary to get a rise out of the crowd. José Feliciano walked off with the night’s biggest hand.

  For the most part, though, they were able to swing. The reviews of their shows were mostly glowing. Every once in a while they hit a sourpuss who wasn’t willing to give them the time of day, no matter how hard they played or worked the crowd. Such was the case at the Rose Palace in Pasadena on a bill with Julie Driscoll and Brian Auger & the Trinity on May 3, 1969. The Los Angeles Times hired Led Zeppelin’s nemesis, John Mendelssohn, to review the show, and he didn’t back off his Rolling Stone slam. The overall affair he called “an exhibition of incredible self-indulgence” and the music “dull, pretentious versions of blues standards and vapid original material.” For good measure, he zeroed in on Jimmy’s “inability to play imaginatively or even tastefully” and “incoherent howling by lead singer Robert Plant.”

  Incredibly, John Bonham was spared. He had guzzled a third of a jeroboam of champagne between the two sets, even cradling the enormous bottle under an arm when the band returned to the stage, drinking liberally from it between songs. Twice during the set, he toppled off his stool.

  Bonzo they could deal with, but the band couldn’t make heads or tails of the review. What was it with this guy Mendelssohn? they wondered. He seemed to be out to get them, a personal vendetta. The review overshadowed the profusion of praise and made the press, in general, personae non gratae. By the time Led Zeppelin returned to London in early June, their attitude had hardened. The press wouldn’t be tolerated, and if they persisted in tormenting the band, they’d have an irate Peter Grant to deal with.

  “I saw Peter get very, very tough with journalists,” says Bill Harry, the founder of Mersey Beat and an intimate of the Beatles, who was hired as Led Zeppelin’s press officer. “He’d roar at them like a ferocious bear and threaten bodily harm if they wrote negative stuff.” Harry’s job, in fact, was to shadow the band and to keep the press away. “We did very few interviews. They didn’t trust the press at all. They’d been dismissed as second-rate too many times.”

  Only friendly press got access from now on; journalists had to prove their loyalty. And from here on in, no more TV appearances. “They never knew how to get the sound right in a TV studio,” Grant declared, “and I realized it wasn’t worth the effort.”

  The resistance in England had started to thaw. Word had filtered back from the States that Led Zeppelin was the real McCoy, that they were taking music in a new, exciting direction, and the media, as well as British fans, jumped on the bandwagon. Melody Maker and New Musical Express, the two most important music magazines, began following and writing about the group as they went about reintroducing themselves in front of friendlier homeland audiences.

  Nothing could have seemed more like an old-home night than their return to Birmingham Town Hall on June 13, 1969. For Robert and Bonzo, especially, it had been the scene of so many boyhood thrills, a place to see their favorite rock ’n roll stars and to dream about one day playing under those lights. Now they’d returned, top of the bill, just as they’d dreamed it. A full house had turned out to cheer them on. Along one wall at the side sat a pair of familiar faces—a couple of guys they used to see regularly in a Hearst Street music shop. Bands would congregate there on Saturday nights, and if you were short a musician to play with, you’d see if anyone local was available to sit in. “Do you know anybody who plays the drums?” “Do you know ‘Jeff’s Boogie’?” “Can you come and gig with us?” There were always two guys in there who never seemed to have a gig, always the last two left in the music shop, two losers, and now, blimey, here they were—Tony and Ozzy—fresh from a new band they were forming called Black Sabbath.

  Led Zeppelin pulled out all the stops, just as they would do in Newcastle and Bath. They made converts out of those kids who had been slow to the party. The highlight of the mini UK tour was a gig on June 29, 1969, at the hallowed Royal Albert Hall. The Promenade Concerts, as the concert series was called, had been a staple of London’s musical life since 1965, featuring classical or avant-garde performances from some of the most revered cultural icons. The year 1969 broke from tradition, launching the Pop Proms, a seven-day lineup that included not only Led Zeppelin but also Fleetwood Mac, The Who, Chuck Berry, and sundry lesser acts.

  The Albert Hall had never experienced anything like Led Zeppelin. When the Beatles appeared there at the BBC’s Swinging Sound event in 1963, the volume was modulated to suit the facility, the audience polite to a fault. “When Led Zeppelin came on and played at a good ten times the volume of everyone else,” wrote a reviewer, “the audience very nearly freaked completely.” All hell broke loose. Kids “stormed the stage, danced in the aisles and the boxes, and were screaming so hard the band did three encores.” Flowers poured out of the stalls onto the stage, initiating a final jam with Blodwyn Pig, a British blues band that had opened the show.

  “You didn’t notice that there wasn’t a set,” John Paul recalled of the evening, “because the music drew you in. And there wasn’t much leaping about the stage, because everybody was working hard and concentrating.”

  Even so, Robert was overcome by the place. He managed to work himself up into a lather and admitted, “I was hanging on for dear life.”

  NME noted that Led Zeppelin scored “a massive personal triumph,” not fully realizing how personal the triumph was for some.

  “Jimmy was elated,” says Carole Brown, who was Peter Grant’s assistant. They shared a taxi to their respective homes that Jimmy hailed outside at the curb after the show. “He was flush with pleasure. From what he said, he felt this was a turning point for Led Zeppelin, when they finally earned the respect they’d been denied in London.”

  He had little time to savor it. Five days later, the band was back in the United States, where they would remain throughout the summer of 1969.

  [2]

  There was a Jekyll-Hyde aspect to Led Zeppelin’s transatlantic nature. “When we did shows in England, they were always the shows that the press would come to and your family would come to,” Jimmy recalled in a reflective moment. At home, the band was on its best behavior. “But when we went out to the States, we didn’t give a fuck and became total showoffs.”

  They would need to pull out all the stops. The summer of ’69 was the “festivals summer” in America, with outdoor extravaganzas scheduled in almost every major city. These were generally multiday, mostly open-air events that featured as many as ten to twenty acts and drew crowds of anywhere from 12,000 to 125,000 fans. There were even rumors that the Woodstock Music Festival, in upstate New York in mid-August, would dwarf those numbers with its array of superstars.

  Led Zeppelin wasted no time hitting the festival circuit. In just over one week after landing in the States, they played five of these events with the crème de la crème of international rock acts. In Atlanta, they shared the bill with Ten Years After, Joe Cocker, Chicago Transit Authority, Janis Joplin, Blood Sweat & Tears, Spirit, Canned Heat, and Johnny Winter, among others. In Laurel, Maryland, they jammed with Jethro Tull, Jeff Beck, Sly & the Family Stone, the Guess Who, and the Mothers of Invention. Similar casts appeared with them in Newport, Rhode Island, and Philadelphia. By the time they got to New York City, on July 13, a planned day off turned into a busman’s holiday with a backstage visit to the Singer Bowl Music Festival in Queens, overlooking the Grand Central Parkway.

  Ostensibly, the guys were there to cheer on Vanilla Fudge and Jeff Beck, who were headlining with a number of interesting supporting acts, including Ten Years After. It was a punishingly hot inner-city night, like the inside of a convection oven, and the crowd out front—as well as the one backstage—was feeling inner-city close. As Jeff Beck later noted, “Three English groups at the same place has to add up to trouble.” Bonzo was warming up to it, working his way through gallons of beer that he’d been knocking back since early afternoon. “John was a good guy,” says Carmine Appice, “but when he got drunk, he turned evil.”

  Halfway through Ten Years After’s set, his dark side emerged. From the side of the stage, he chucked a carton of orange juice at Alvin Lee, the band’s lead guitarist, landing it, splat, on his trademark Gibson ES-335. This didn’t sit well with the churlish Lee, who glared murderously at Bonzo hooting in the wings.

  Jimmy Page wasn’t happy. “Bonzo’s got to get a grip on things,” he warned Richard Cole.

  But Cole knew better than to cross Bonzo when he was tanked up. One wrong word could set off a rampage. Besides, Cole didn’t mind egging him on a bit. The outcome, if handled well, was always good for a few laughs.

  Bonzo, more than a few sheets to the wind, behaved while Robert, Jonesy, and Jimmy joined the Jeff Beck Group’s set and tore through a rip-roaring rendition of “Jailhouse Rock.” When vocalist Rod Stewart pivoted into the band’s encore, “Rice Pudding,” Bonzo turned to roadie Henry “the Horse” Smith, and said, “Horsey, I’m gonna play the drums.” Before Smith could grab him, Bonzo made his move to the stage.

  He talked Beck’s drummer, Tony Newman, into relinquishing his stool and took his place, interrupting the song with a classic burlesque bump-and-grind drum roll. Slowly, the other musicians left the stage. There were two spotlights, one in each corner of the front of the house, and they were both trained on Bonzo. Goaded on by the crowd, he began to strip—shirt, pants, finally his underpants—wiggling comically in the buff.

  According to Smith, who was Bonzo’s tech and stationed directly behind him, “Peter Grant and Steve Weiss, at the side of the stage, were yelling ‘Get him off the fucking stage!’ ” But—how? “He was a rock-solid guy and a dead weight,” Smith said. “Lifting him was like trying to carry a barrelful of sandbags.” Eventually, he locked Bonzo in a full nelson and started walking him backward. Weiss ran over and grabbed the drummer’s arms, and the two men dragged him to the bottom of the stage stairs, where a cluster of New York City policemen awaited.

  The order had been given to arrest Bonzo for public indecency. Smith, who still had him pinned in his clutches, watched as Grant thrust his hand in his pocket for a wad of cash that was three inches thick. “He licked his thumb and began peeling off hundred-dollar bills until the pile was enough to satisfy the police.”