Bonzo enjoyed winding him up. There were plenty of Percy taunts and put-downs, like “All you’ve got to do is stand out there and look good. We’ll take care of the music!”

  Chris Welch, who was covering the tour for Melody Maker, recalled, “I quaked in my hotel bedroom as I heard the row blazing.” A few minutes later, there was furious pounding on Grant’s door.

  “Peter, I’ve done something terrible,” Bonzo cried. “I’ve hit Robert!”

  G was an ex-wrestler, not a referee. “Shut up and go to bed,” he roared.

  Bonzo should have taken him up on it. Instead, pretty well looped on scotch, he strode into the hotel kitchen and picked a fight with the chef, who was in no mood for such nonsense. When he came at Bonzo with a carving knife, Richard Cole—now called Ricardo by one and all—decked Bonzo, breaking his nose “for his own safety.”

  The Back to the Clubs tour was off to an auspicious start.

  * * *

  —

  The gigs were designed to bring Led Zeppelin closer to their audiences, but not everyone enjoyed the experience. “Once you’ve played in the big places, these small clubs are murder,” Jimmy complained. The facilities were pretty grim and the sound systems, minuscule by Zep standards, overloaded with feedback during the sets. “In a place like the Marquee, which held three hundred people comfortably, the sound was too loud for anyone too appreciate it,” recalls Chris Charlesworth. Robert couldn’t stalk the stages, which felt as big as a postage stamp. He compared it to being confined in a straitjacket, and audiences felt pretty much the same way.

  On March 24, 1971, the day after the Marquee performance, which officially ended the Back to the Clubs tour, Charlotte Martin gave birth to a daughter, whom she and Jimmy named Scarlet Lilith Eleida Page. There wasn’t much time allotted to parenting before Jimmy barricaded himself in the studio, at Olympic again, in an attempt to salvage the mix. No matter how hard he worked, the album still didn’t live up to his expectations; there were too many technical “hang-ups” for his ear. He remained dissatisfied—dispirited. “We just didn’t have time to sit down and get a balance on things,” he said. “My senses have been battered to a pulp. I’ve lived with it for so long. I can’t hear it anymore.”

  Atlantic Records was losing its patience. The company was pressing for new product, especially with Led Zeppelin on the road, performing. The way it stacked up now, the album would be delayed until the fall of 1971, after the next big American tour.

  In the meantime, the band went back on the road, playing a handful of European arenas to sharpen and integrate the new material. It was important to learn how still-unreleased songs like “Gallows Pole,” “Misty Mountain Hop,” “Four Sticks,” “Black Dog,” and “Stairway” went over in live performances. For the most part, the shows were instructive, the material well received. In Denmark, the audiences were enthusiastic, even ecstatic. But in Italy, everything went to hell.

  On July 5, 1971, Led Zeppelin headlined the government-sponsored Cantagiro Cantamondo Festival in Milan, with nine opening acts, all of them Italian. There was an air of foreboding even before they arrived. Peter Grant recalled a four-month Italian tour he’d done in the fifties with Wee Willie Harris, Britain’s so-called wild man of rock ’n roll, and “knew what a dodgy place it could be.” To allay his fears, he’d “demanded all the money up front and got the air tickets back in advance,” just in case Led Zeppelin had to make a hasty getaway.

  The signs were unpromising as the band’s van approached the Velodromo Vigorelli, an oval-shaped football stadium, where the Beatles had performed in 1965. “We could see the riot police,” Jimmy said. Soldiers, too. There were scores of them, well armed, in full battle dress. It looked like the casting call for one of the Italian gladiator spectacles. “If all concerts were as well-secured as this one,” Ricardo remarked, “I’d feel a lot more comfortable.”

  His reassurance was premature. The crowd grew impatient sitting in the heat through the endless parade of twee Italian bands. They’d come to see Led Zeppelin, and as the collective restlessness rose in pitch, the cops moved in, taking up positions on a catwalk that ringed the stadium.

  The situation intensified when Led Zeppelin finally took the stage. After several numbers, Jimmy noticed “smoke at the far end of the arena.” At the promoter’s request, Robert continually implored fans to stop lighting fires. “Then we suddenly twigged that it wasn’t smoke from fires—it was bloody tear gas that the police were firing into the crowd.”

  The band’s eyes stung, but they continued to play until a beer bottle sailed out of the crowd and struck Bonzo’s drum roadie, Mick Hinton, on the forehead. Almost simultaneously, someone lofted a cannister of tear gas that exploded in front of the stage.

  “Blow this!” Jimmy yelled to his bandmates. “Let’s cut it really short.”

  Before they could scramble to safety, a full-scale storm erupted, with “thirty or forty cannisters of tear gas all going at once.” The crowd charged the stage with the cops close on their heels. It was everyone for himself.

  “Everyone was running,” Robert recalled. “We split and ran down a passage under the cycle arena—and then they tear-gassed the passage.”

  G, whose weight became a factor, was unable to run fast and had Ricardo and the wounded Mick Hinton acting as defensive linebackers, blocking for him as they muscled through the smoke-filled tunnel. But—where to go? No one could see.

  “It was just pandemonium,” Jimmy said, “and nowhere was immune from this blasted tear gas.”

  Eventually, the band and roadies made their way into a dressing room. “I barricaded the door with a medicine cabinet and got everybody to put wet towels around their heads,” Robert explained. Almost futilely, a nurse attended to them with some oxygen. “Then they broke the windows and popped a couple of cannisters [of tear gas] in from the street.”

  It seemed an eternity until police arrived to escort the entourage out of the stadium.

  The plane ride back to London was especially somber. There was very little conversation, but one thing was on everyone’s mind. In a month, Led Zeppelin was due to kick off a lengthy schedule of American concerts, followed by tours of Japan and the English provinces. Forty-three gigs, right up to the end of the year.

  No one was saying it, but everyone was thinking: How long could they keep up this crazy pace?

  [2]

  Touring had become a slog. Due largely to Led Zeppelin’s skyrocketing popularity, disturbances occurred routinely throughout the summer dates they played in America in 1971. Shows sold out quickly, often leaving throngs of disgruntled fans no choice but to try to force their way into arenas. Concerts had to be stopped to avoid riots, and the length of performances, often two and a half to three hours, taxed Robert’s vocal cords as never before.

  Japan offered a welcome respite. On September 23, 1971, Led Zeppelin opened at the Budokan, Tokyo’s hallowed premier martial-arts venue, where music had once been taboo. “It was such a shock to go out there and play to Japanese audiences,” Jimmy said. Instead of passing bottles of Jack Daniel’s and joints or lobbing cherry bombs, standing on their seats and flinging themselves off balconies, the Japanese behaved in a way the band had never been treated before—with respect. No one left their seats, even to stand up, and at the end of each song, polite applause rippled through the arena, but only for a brief, prescribed time. No one screamed “Mooore!” or “We loooove you!” or “Play ‘Whole Lotta Loooove!’ ” What a revelation. “It was so quiet, it was sort of eerie,” Jimmy said.

  Most of the action took place backstage. After finishing their prearranged set, Led Zeppelin regrouped in the wings to decide what they might do for an encore. But Robert, who had been singing for three straight hours, demurred. “I can’t do any more,” he squawked. “I’ve got no voice.”

  Bonzo gave him a spot of Midlands snark. “It never mattered before,” he said. “You’re no good anyway. Just go out there and look good.”

  Robert threw the first punch—and missed. Bonzo’s fist connected, however, forcing Robert to muddle through “Communication Breakdown” with a fat lip.

  “It was just boys having fun,” says Phil Carson, the head of Atlantic’s European affairs, who was along to keep an eye on the label’s cash cow. “There were no drugs yet to speak of. Just a lot of drink, a lot of drink—and a lot of high jinks.”

  “For example, there was a night when one of us got our clothes tossed out the window and that person took advantage of the opportunity to run around on the rooftops of Japan naked,” Jimmy recalled. “Then there was a public phone that disappeared off the streets and was found outside our doorway with all sorts of money in it.”

  Bonzo, especially, was in rare form. He embarrassed his Japanese host in one of Tokyo’s ritziest restaurants by demanding that a waiter bring him a tankard full of sake instead of the traditional thimbles in which it was served. Later that same night, at Byblos, the city’s hot, membership-only disco, an over-refreshed Bonzo urinated from the balcony onto a deejay whose music he disdained. And even later, his display of fall-down-drunkenness on the curb outside of the Tokyo Hilton was eyed with shame by the hotel’s genteel management.

  The tour moved on to Hiroshima, for a charity benefit for victims of the atomic bomb. To Bonzo’s credit, there was a moratorium on childish behavior. But on the overnight train to Osaka, he drank himself silly again, and while Jimmy and his Japanese girlfriend were in the dining car, Bonzo found her handbag and shit in it. His little stunt, along with a food fight, started a chain reaction of bedlam on the crowded passenger train that sprang from Peter Grant to Ricardo, Percy, and Led Zeppelin’s mortified Japanese host.

  Things calmed down a bit once they arrived in Osaka, and their performance, in the city’s renowned concert hall, benefited. One of the band’s trademarks was incorporating classic rock ’n roll hits into their extended medleys. In Osaka, during “Whole Lotta Love,” they dug deep into their song bag to include the Beatles’ “Please Please Me” and “From Me to You,” along with licks from Jimi Hendrix’s “Third Stone from the Sun.” “Communication Breakdown” brought out two Cliff Richards & the Shadows numbers—“D in Love” and “Bachelor Boy”—before segueing into Chuck Berry’s “Down the Road Apiece” and “Maybelline.” For encores, they played “C’mon Everybody” and “Hi-Heel Sneakers,” two standbys from Jimmy’s Neil Christian days.

  It was a joyous affair for the audience and the band, and spilled over into the following night’s show, featuring a thirty-one-minute “Whole Lotta Love” medley that incorporated Elvis’s “I Gotta Know” into the mix, as well as “Twist and Shout” and “Fortune Teller.”

  Both Osaka concerts were resounding successes, and the band celebrated into the early-morning hours. Following an excursion to a nightclub, it was Phil Carson who bore the brunt of the horseplay. “During dessert, they started to relieve me of my clothes,” he recalls, “and I realized that I didn’t want to have to fight four guys, so I took everything off myself except for my shoes, which they let me keep.” As soon as everyone got up to go, Carson snatched the tablecloth and wrapped it around his body in order to get to the waiting taxi without too much embarrassment.

  As they arrived at the Hilton, Robert graciously allowed Carson to enter first through the revolving door. “Except he got hold of one end of the tablecloth,” Phil says, “and I was propelled into the lobby at six in the morning stark naked aside from my shoes.” In Japan at six in the morning, the lobby was filled with businessmen heading to work. Ignoring the pop-eyed stares, Carson sashayed calmly to the front desk, asked for his room key, and walked nonchalantly to the elevator.

  Upstairs, Bonzo and Richard were engaged in another unruly caper. They’d gotten their hands on a couple of samurai swords and were swinging away at each other in what might have been a scene out of Yojimbo. It was a miracle that neither man sustained injury, but they slashed and destroyed everything in the suite.

  Afterward, they had a go at John Paul, who was out cold in an adjoining room. “Jonesy was sleeping on a tatami mat,” Phil Carson recalls. “So they picked him up on the mat and placed it in the elevator, where it went up and down all night long. The Japanese were too polite to wake him up. Instead, the hotel management put a portable screen around him and left him to sleep.”

  “Night after night after night, we had all this stuff going on,” Jimmy said, “and we got away with murder.”

  It wasn’t entirely an acquittal. Richard Cole maintained he was called into the Hilton administrative office, where the manager informed him that Led Zeppelin was barred from ever staying at the hotel again. “But even lectures by hotel managers didn’t have any effect on our behavior,” he claimed.

  It was something darker and more destructive that affected their behavior.

  “At this point, cocaine started to intervene,” said Phil Carson. “It very definitely changed the makeup of the band. And it did everything that cocaine does—it made people paranoid and reclusive and nasty. And that’s how it all started.”

  * * *

  —

  The first sign of trouble came while the band was in Japan. During a layover in Hong Kong between gigs, Richard was charged with scoring some coke, which the guys snorted in a restaurant kitchen—and which turned out to be heroin, much to their alarm. Then, in Perth, Australia, in February 1972, the police ransacked their hotel rooms looking for narcotics, which, as luck would have it, had been stashed elsewhere. But by the time the summer tour got under way, “drugs,” as Jimmy said, “were an integral part of the whole thing, right from the beginning, right to the end.”

  Richard—Ricardo—always made sure there were plenty on hand. “Drugs for the band were often given to me by fans, by friends,” he said, “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.’ ” But if fans or friends were somehow unavailing, Ricardo had his own trusted sources who always delivered.

  Cocaine took the edge off of being on the road—the extreme lows and the supreme highs. “Led Zeppelin was a musician’s dream,” Jimmy explained. “It was euphoric, and you can’t just switch off the adrenalin. For us, the way to wind it down was to go off and party. And before you know where you are, you’ve missed a night’s sleep. Then two weeks later, you’ve missed a few nights sleep, because you’re having such a good time.”

  Instant gratification—it was the doctrine of a band made up of mostly working-class Brits who, practically overnight, had ascended to aristocracy. “There was a new aristocracy called rock ’n roll,” says Michael Des Barres, himself the son of a ruined marquis, “and you got the best table if you were Bill Wyman, but not if you were a lord or prince.”

  Led Zeppelin were more like young gods. The success of launched them into the rock ’n roll pantheon, where their wishes were only commands away. The album had flown off store shelves in record numbers, despite the usual swamp of lukewarm reviews. It became a mainstay of the U.S. Top 40 for the next three years, led by an insatiable craving for “Stairway to Heaven.”

  Atlantic Records pleaded—begged—for permission to edit “Stairway” for a single, despite Jimmy’s avowal that there would be no “messing around with that song.” The label pointed to its success with the Stones’ Sticky Fingers LP, released a few months earlier, which boasted two million-selling singles, “Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses.” But—nothing doing. Jimmy was adamant. “ ‘Stairway’ was never, ever, ever going to be released as a single.” Nothing—neither public pressure nor money—could change his mind. “The whole thing was we wanted people to hear it in the context of the album,” he said.

  Jerry Greenberg, head of Atlantic’s promotion department, was beside himself. “AM radio was insisting on a ‘Stairway’ single,” he recalls. “It was nuts. I reminded Jimmy that I’d done that edit on ‘Whole Lotta Love,’ but he wouldn’t budge. I did my own edit anyway, a five-minute version, but they wouldn’t let me distribute it. Peter told me that if people wanted to hear the song, they had to buy the album.” G used Atlantic’s own argument about the Rolling Stones to make his point. Despite their two hit singles, was outselling Sticky Fingers by two to one.

  No, Led Zeppelin was calling their own shots from now on. Grant had the record company over a barrel, and he was about to do the same thing to the concert business.

  From the beginning, the band’s gigs were booked by Premier Talent Agency in New York. The deals were standard across the board for all top rock ’n roll acts. Led Zeppelin was given a guarantee for each performance—say, $25,000 to play Madison Square Garden—and after the promoter recouped that amount and his expenses, he and the artist split the remaining net income on a sixty-forty percentage basis. It was an equitable deal because the promoter assumed the risk; he put up the money for the band’s guarantee, the cost of renting the arena, and the advertising. But during a chat Peter had with Ahmet Ertegun, the Atlantic Records chief suggested that Led Zeppelin’s drawing power was a force unto itself. If G called a local radio station to announce the dates of Led Zeppelin’s next tour, tickets would sell out instantly.

  Sure, just cut out the middleman, in this case the promoter. Grant had an allergy to promoters that dated to his road-managing days for Don Arden’s acts. He felt the promoters ripped everybody off. “On a tour with, say, Little Richard,” he recalled, “the promoters were making more money than the acts were. That always went against my grain.”