None of the reviews had an effect on album sales. The LP banked advance orders of 700,000 copies and sold briskly throughout the fall and holiday seasons. But Jimmy took it hard. He didn’t take criticism well to begin with, and the hammering from the press seriously annoyed him, especially a reference comparing Led Zeppelin’s sound to that of Crosby, Stills & Nash. “I got really brought down by it,” he said. Unable to put the hard criticism aside, he lashed out, defending the band’s position every chance he got.

  “We were so far ahead that it was very difficult for reviewers to know what the hell we were doing,” he carped in one of several interviews. “They couldn’t relate to it. Very rarely could they get the plot of what was going on.” In other exchanges, he said the album “went totally over their heads.” It was perfectly clear to Jimmy: “The third album was just another evolution.”

  Evolution—survival of the fittest—was essential to the longevity of a rock ’n roll band. Those, like Vanilla Fudge or Blue Cheer, who persisted in beating their brand to death soon bored even their most loyal fans. Jimmy Page liked to point to the Beatles as master craftsmen able to evolve gracefully from one album to the next. How was it possible that a group could record songs like “Yesterday” and “In My Life,” and on the next album dish up head-scratchers like “Taxman” and “Tomorrow Never Knows”—and that was okay with their fans, yet somehow, Led Zeppelin continued to be defined by “Whole Lotta Love”?

  As a matter of record, the Beatles were an anomaly. They no longer performed live in concert, so their fans were compelled to listen—carefully—to each new album, interpreting every word, every nuance, enabling them to contemplate how their beloved band had progressed. Led Zeppelin didn’t enjoy that kind of artistic license. Contemplation wasn’t on the minds of their fans. They craved the visceral experience of Led Zeppelin’s explosive sound. The fans came to their live shows to unwind, looking for release, catharsis, not a cerebral exercise in musical evolution.

  To his credit, Robert considered LZIII “the best album we’ve ever done—possibly we’ll ever do.” He said, “It shows we can change. It means there are endless possibilities and directions for us to go in.” Likewise, Jimmy never backed down from the music on Led Zeppelin III. “I felt a lot better once we started performing it,” he said, “because it was proven to be working for the people who came around to see us.”

  And come they did. In August of 1970, before the album’s official release, Led Zeppelin went back to America—the sixth time in two years—to introduce the fans to the new material. The venues were big and so was the paycheck, with the band now commanding a minimum fee of $25,000 a show, a princely sum. The gigs, for the most part, were splashy and didn’t skimp on old favorites, but it was a little disconcerting when, at a juncture in the arena and coliseum shows, the four musicians would gravitate to the front of the stage, where they perched on stools for a brief acoustic set featuring “That’s the Way” and “Bron-Yr-Aur Stomp.” It was a noble experiment, but audiences who had just been treated to barn burners like “Heartbreaker” and “Dazed and Confused” were noticeably dazed and confused themselves at the sudden shift in tempos. The segment, which lasted about fifteen minutes, never failed to produce “squirming fans and frustrated musicians.” Jimmy felt the temperature change. “Some places, it’s been a bit of a shock,” he allowed. In Detroit, a journalist noted, “Zep had to plug back in to rescue the evening, which they did with a vengeance.” It was easy when Robert ripped into a song like “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” which captured the soulfulness of rhythm and blues so well. The sound of Jimmy’s guitar was astonishing. He bit into his solo with razor-sharp ferocity to bring the heat quotient back up. And the charged thunder of “Moby Dick” delivered another layer of excitement.

  Bonzo performed his percussive tour de force at a stretch lasting anywhere from fifteen minutes to half an hour, depending on his mood. And lately his frame of mind was about as predictable as the weather. Interviews are filled with testimonials to Bonzo’s sweetness, his boyish charm when he was sober, but on the road, he got homesick. “He was not a guy who was cut out for touring,” says Janine Safer, who later traveled extensively with the band. “He was a homebody. He missed Pat and his kids. And when he got homesick, he drank. A lot. And Dr. Jekyll became Mr. Hyde, which did not make for a stable situation.”

  Jimmy understood the behavior, which he referred to as schizophrenia. “I’d go abroad on these tours and become totally flamboyant,” he said. “Then I’d return home and the coin would flip.” He understood it, but he needed Bonzo to keep it together.

  “Bonzo was getting drunk all the time on this tour,” says Henry Smith, who served as the drum tech for most of the shows. In Kansas City, Missouri, on August 19, Mr. Hyde reared his head. Bonzo had brooded about his circumstances on the flight west. Only a week into the tour, he was already pining for home, regretting that he’d be gone from the Midlands for another month, angry at himself, unable to cope. He dredged up the memory of the last time Led Zeppelin played Kansas City, not realizing, perhaps, it was a different Kansas City in a different state. That time, the band had played a twin bill—back-to-back shows on the same night. In between the sets, Bonzo got so drunk on champagne that he couldn’t play. “He was falling over his drums,” Henry Smith recalls. “I was holding his shirt, pulling it up by the scruff of the neck to keep him upright so he could move his arms and hit the drums.”

  Jimmy glanced at the farcical situation and yelled, “Play!” But by that time, Bonzo was out of commission. Instead, Jimmy motioned his head in Smith’s direction. “You play!”

  Smith didn’t have a musical bone in his body, so Richard Cole, who was an experienced drummer, pushed Bonzo aside and sat in just long enough to get through the set so the band could get paid.

  Bonzo, who became unruly after the gig, spent the night sleeping it off in the Kansas City jail.

  That time, he was pretty tanked up in advance but managed to maintain his stamina through the lengthy show. In Tulsa, however, two nights later, Bonzo became enraged when the promoter, nervous about crowd violence, ordered the houselights turned on in the middle of “Heartbreaker,” and he had to be held back from charging blindly into the crowd.

  Things were getting hairy between the band and Bonzo. After the show, Peter Grant delivered an ultimatum. “You do that again, and this’ll be your last tour.”

  For a while, the warning rang loud in Bonzo’s ears, but by the time they rolled into Los Angeles in early September 1970, he’d thrown caution to the wind.

  On September 4, Led Zeppelin played a now-legendary gig at the Forum, the home of the Los Angeles Lakers, the pinnacle West Coast showcase for a rock ’n roll band. Enjoying LA, as always, the band was looser than loose, firing up the audience with the usual set of heavy hitters while weaving country and western, R&B, and rockabilly classics into an extended “Whole Lotta Love” medley. For the encore, a particularly raucous version of “Communication Breakdown” included snatches of “Good Times, Bad Times,” “For What It’s Worth,” and “I Saw Her Standing There.” They came back to end the evening with a stomping send-up of Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill.”

  After the show, still sky-high on adrenaline, the four musicians piled into a limo and headed to the Troubadour in time to catch the late show with Fairport Convention. Once there, Bonzo couldn’t stay in his seat. He squeezed through the labyrinth of tables and took over Dave Mattacks’s drum kit onstage. Once he was situated, Dave Pegg ceded his bass to John Paul and Robert staked his claim to the mic. Jimmy and Richard Thompson shared the spotlight, providing the kind of fleet-fingered guitar tandem that hadn’t been witnessed since the mythic Page-Beck tag team of yore. The new configuration jammed sprightly on half a dozen songs, with extended solos on “Hey Joe” and the Tim Rose standby “Morning Dew.” A couple of Elvis numbers were thrown in for good measure.

  Afterward, an exuberant Bonzo hugged his old Way of Life bandmate Dave Pegg, admiring how their careers had taken them, two consummate Brummies, down such remarkable paths.

  “This bloke has invited us to a new club down the road somewhere,” Bonzo told Pegg. “Its grand opening is tomorrow night, and he’s staking us to a game of pool and drinks.”

  Pool . . . drinks. They were magical words for any English band member. Most of Led Zeppelin and Fairport Convention made a beeline to the place on Sunset Boulevard, where a private party was already in full swing. The club’s opening headliners, Savoy Brown, were mingling with drummer Aynsley Dunbar, who was in town with his latest group, Blue Whale. Rock ’n roll was blasting over a state-of-the-art PA. In unusually high spirits, the musicians were cautioned to play it cool about their drinking, inasmuch as the club’s liquor license didn’t take effect until noon the following day, but by two in the morning, as Dave Pegg points out, “we were all seriously over-refreshed.”

  Bonzo was playing pool with the owner, who decided it was time to close for the night. “I’m worried that all the lights are on,” he said, “and if authorities pass by, I’ll be fined a fortune before the place even opens.”

  Bonzo said, “All right. We’ll have another game. If I win, we drink for another hour.”

  Unbeknownst to the owner, Bonzo was a scratch pool player, so of course he won and drank for another hour. Then another hour.

  At 4:00 a.m., the owner announced, “Everybody out! A police car has just rolled by. It’ll turn around and come back. Everybody out—now!”

  Someone killed the lights, and a back door flung open for a speedy getaway. Bonzo grabbed Dave Pegg by the sleeve and herded him into a dark corner, behind Savoy Brown’s four-by-twelve Marshall stacks. “Just get behind there with me and keep still,” he instructed.

  The next thing both men knew, they were awakened by sunlight streaming in through the windows. It was ten o’clock in the morning. The club was deserted, and the only thing more appreciable than the eerie silence was their massive hangovers. It took some doing to stagger out of there without setting off any alarms. Fortunately, Bonzo’s limo driver had waited at the curb all night, standard operating procedure where John Bonham was concerned.

  “I’ve got to catch a flight at seven thirty to Hawaii,” he told Pegg. Led Zeppelin was appearing on the Big Island for two sold-out concerts, and a rehearsal was scheduled for early the following morning. “I’ll have time to kill before heading to the airport, so let’s meet for a drink or three at lunchtime.”

  As promised, Bonzo called Pegg around three thirty and arranged to meet him at Barney’s Beanery, an old Hollywood actors’ dive, now surrendered to the likes of Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin. Sure enough, after a few rounds of beer and tequila, Janis showed up and spotted John Bonham. “She was all over Bonzo,” Pegg recalls. “We all got over-refreshed, and by five thirty it was clear that Bonzo had missed his ride to the airport.”

  Instead, Fairport Convention’s road manager appeared and frog-marched Pegg out of the diner, advising him, “You’ve got to go. You’re on at eight o’clock for the first show at the Troubadour.”

  Bonzo hitched a ride to their hotel, the Tropicana, a rather grotty establishment a short walk from the Troubadour. As they passed the main building on the way to their rooms, Bonzo pushed Pegg into the swimming pool in front of a group of sunbathers that included Andy Warhol and a flock of groupies. Then Bonzo stripped to his underpants and joined Pegg in the deep end. As they climbed out, two young Texan women appeared with towels and accompanied the men to Pegg’s room, where they opened a traveling bag full of grass.

  “Do you fellas fancy a smoke?”

  Sometime before eight, Dave Pegg chugged a gallon of coffee and made his way to the Troubadour in time to join Fairport for the first of three sets. Halfway through the second set, around eleven fifteen, the sound technician leaned over the stage and said, “Mr. Pegg, there’s a call for you from Mr. Bonham.”

  Apparently, Bonzo was still at the Tropicana, and he sounded quite frantic. “I don’t know what happened,” he said, “but my clothes are gone, along with my wallet and my ticket to Hawaii. I’ve missed the plane, and I’m in deep shit.”

  The next morning, dressed in Pegg’s spare clothes, he made his way to LAX, where Fairport Convention’s road manager presented him with a ticket to Hawaii that her band had paid for.

  The flight got him to Hawaii in time for the shows, but Bonzo was right: he was in deep shit. Peter Grant had had enough of Bonzo’s nonsense and was perusing a list of drummers to see who might be available to replace him. If it had been up to G, Led Zeppelin might have gone forward with Carmine Appice, Aynsley Dunbar, or Cozy Powell. But Jimmy stepped in to give Bonzo another chance. Another another chance.

  With only a week of shows left on the schedule, including the band’s debut appearance at Madison Square Garden in New York City on September 19, Jimmy was laser focused on finishing the tour without distractions or conflict. He wanted to head home after New York with a clear head.

  He was ready once again for a breather, a pause, a time out. A new set of songs was looming on the horizon.

  Chapter Ten

  INVOKING AND BEING INVOCATIVE

  [1]

  LZIII, while failing to measure up to their fans’ expectations, pushed the band’s album sales into prime Beatles territory. An initial shipment of 700,000 units was nothing to sneeze at, and by November 1, 1970, the album had lodged at the number-one spot on Billboard’s Top LPs chart. The cool critical reception seemed irrelevant. The controversy about the material and the conflicting reviews only drew more attention to Led Zeppelin.

  Once the initial hubbub died down, fans probed the album for its less apparent treasures. “It was a pretty extreme change from our other two [albums],” Jimmy Page acknowledged, “and people needed at least six months to analyze what the hell had gone on.” They pondered the effects—the echo tape feedback on “Immigrant Song” and the incandescent sound mix on “Out on the Tiles.” They analyzed the lyrics like etymologists trying to make sense of Sanskrit. How to interpret passages like “You hear her cries of mercy / As the winners toll the bell and See my rider right by my side / It’s a total disgrace, they set the pace”? Using headphones, one could make out the muffled studio chat that led into “Friends” or bore into Robert’s double-tracked vocal on “Tangerine” or discern Bonzo’s squeaky drum pedal on “Since I’ve Been Loving You.”

  But the most perplexing discovery was a few cryptic words etched into the album’s plastic run-out between the grooves of the last song on each side and the label, where the catalogue number usually resides. Side 1 featured the inscription “So mote be it”; side 2’s maxim read “Do what thou wilt.” That gave the conspiracy theorists a mouthful to chew on.

  Longtime Jimmy Page disciples already had an inkling. They knew he was a devoted student of the occultist Aleister Crowley, whom Jimmy regarded as “the great misunderstood genius of the twentieth century,” and that “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”—or the Law of Thelema, as it was known to its followers—was the foundation of Crowley’s idiosyncratic philosophy. Whether Crowley was a genius or, as many considered, a dangerous crackpot—in any case, not exactly in the Carl Jung department—his influence on Jimmy Page was earnest and profound.

  Page had come upon Crowley while still an adolescent. “I read Magick in Theory and Practice when I was about eleven,” he claimed. The book was a series of essays on alleged magical acts, rituals, and talismans that Crowley, “the prince-priest of the Beast,” was commanded to write by a voice claiming to be that of Horus, the Egyptian god of force and fire. It took a few years for Jimmy to process the mumbo jumbo until he could formulate his own worldview from it. He was particularly taken with Crowley’s theory of self-liberation. “The thing is to come to terms with one’s free will, discover one’s place and what one is,” Jimmy said, “and from that you can go ahead and do it and not spend your whole life suppressed and frustrated. It’s very basically coming to terms with yourself.”

  Crowley believed there were no restrictions in life, that experimentation of any kind was not only valid but encouraged, no limits should be placed on one’s behavior, one should do exactly as one pleased—“there would be nothing which the human imagination can conceive that could not be realized in practice.” Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. It was a liberating message to an aspiring rock star.

  But it was a mixed message. Crowley’s fringe writings detailed his experiments with trance states and drugs—hashish, peyote, heroin—the study of the tarot, and omnisexuality. His loopy fascination with human sacrifice, which he articulated in Magick in Theory and Practice, described his ideal victim as “a male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence.”

  Stripped of some of the more outrageous trappings, the main message seemed to be: whatever your desire, whatever your urges, whatever your will—act on it, do what’s best for yourself. What was an impressionable adolescent, an only child, to make of this? It was certainly a justification for self-indulgence. Jimmy picked and chose among the menu of Crowley’s teachings (forgoing human sacrifice, one assumes). Crowley created the concept of magick, and what is rock ’n roll but magic—transcending the norm? It provided the perfect vehicle for acting out, onstage or offstage. Performances were ripe for androgyny—not just the mannerisms but the clothes, the sequins, and the little antique tops. Getting high never interfered with writing lyrics or executing a fantastic solo. Sexual experimentation was particularly attractive.