There was another incident, at the Hyatt House, when Bonzo and Ricardo grabbed a friend of Rodney Bingenheimer’s and dangled him upside down over the balcony, eleven stories in the air.

  Bonzo seemed determined to live up to a nickname bestowed upon him by Benoit Gautier, Atlantic’s exec in France. La Bête—the Beast—he’d called Bonzo following an episode at a concert in Nantes when, dissatisfied by the catering, he ran amok backstage and demolished three trailers with a mallet. Gautier was already at his wit’s end. On the way to Nantes from Lyon, Bonzo, who was pretty well plastered, had commandeered Gautier’s Volvo sedan and driven recklessly along the A6, barely avoiding oncoming traffic. Later, with police in hot pursuit of the car, Bonzo and the roadies pried off the trunk bonnet, the sunroof, and all four doors before kicking in the dashboard—for which they were eventually arrested.

  It seemed prudent to give John a wide berth on his birthday, when copious amounts of alcohol would be consumed. He was in full party mode from the time he got up. The drinking started early in the day, leading to several well-placed punches thrown at Mick Hinton, Bonzo’s drum tech.

  “He treated Mick badly, in general,” says Benji Le Fevre, “but when alcohol was involved, it was worse than usual.” Drinking and driving? That wasn’t really a concern when it was done inside the Hyatt House. Richard surprised Bonzo with a new Honda motorcycle, and the two men tear-assed up and down the eleventh-floor hallway, shredding the carpet and leaving bumper marks on the walls. When the motorcycle’s novelty wore off, a number of televisions and sundry furniture went flying over of the balcony, wreaking havoc on the street below.

  A law unto themselves.

  Robert couldn’t resist marking the milestone at the Forum show. “He’s twenty-one [sic] today,” he announced, pointing to Bonzo seated behind his kit, “and a bastard all his life.”

  Bonzo took it well. “He was easy to get along with when he was soberish,” says Vanessa Gilbert, who accompanied him to a party in his honor following the show. “He could be a teddy bear, but there were times you needed to run for the hills.”

  The Hollywood Hills were exactly where they ran to celebrate, at the home of the general manager of KROQ, LA’s premier FM rock station. It was a lovely house with kids’ toys scattered in the yard and a VCR—a rather new, novel appliance—playing a continuous loop of Deep Throat. The door was open to a ground-floor playroom, and as guests arrived they could see no less a grandee than George Harrison in there, sitting on a little rocking horse. Mostly, everyone gathered around the pool. Champagne flowed freely, there were platters of shellfish, punch bowls abounded with cocaine. “There was a beautiful birthday cake,” Gilbert recalls, “three tiers.”

  As everyone sang and Bonzo prepared to cut the cake, George Harrison ran over, lifted off the top tier, and crowned the birthday boy with it, which touched off a full-scale food fight. Harrison took the second tier between the shoulder blades. To clean the cake off, Bonzo tossed George into the pool before going on a rampage. Rodney Bingenheimer went in next, furious that his Nikon was still around his neck. Beep Fallon got dunked, despite the expensive velvet suit he was wearing. Vanessa Gilbert was allowed to remove her mink coat before taking a header. One by one, everyone got baptized, except for Jimmy Page. The party line was that Jimmy was spared due to his inability to swim and instead allowed to walk into the shallow end up to his waist, but in actuality he was holding the drugs.

  Not to be outdone, Peter Grant intended to drive a car into the pool. He got behind the wheel of one of the band’s rented Cadillacs but was foiled by nature. “It got wedged between two palm trees,” he explained.

  Watching the debauchery from the top of an overhanging palm tree was Robert Plant, who had shimmied up there for a bird’s-eye view. He was extremely high, both in altitude and in spirit, feeling no pain, and amazed at—well, everything. What a life! He was the lead singer of the most successful rock ’n roll band in the world. He had all the money he’d ever need, a loving family back home, unlimited girls on the road. He was surrounded and acknowledged by admirers of every stripe. Every need, every whim taken care of. Not a care in the world. The city of Los Angeles stretched out before him like a magic carpet.

  In a moment of rapture, he threw his hands out and screamed to the mortals below: “I am the golden god!”

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE LAND OF MONDO BIZARRO

  [1]

  Even golden gods required rest. Robert Plant’s voice was stretched thin from weeks of punishment and Jimmy Page’s injured finger remained slow to mend. As a matter of necessity, Led Zeppelin took off the month of June 1973 for a time-out and a chance to recharge before resuming the summer tour. Jimmy chalked it up to part of a band’s balancing act. “There was the intensity and energy and creativity that was going on,” he explained. “The rest of the time was preparation or recovery.”

  Recovery was vital. It was the difference between normalcy and insanity. Being on the road, passing as rock stars, wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. On the surface, it appeared utterly glamorous. “Everything is done for you,” John Paul said. “All you have to do is turn up in a reasonably fit state to play.” It always seemed that simple at the beginning of a tour. The limos, suites, food, and booze—the royal treatment—were all irresistible perks. There were few professions that offered such a luxurious lifestyle. But as the tour wore on, the grind extracted a toll that was debilitating, physically and mentally. The wear and tear on the body was progressive, intense. Fatigue set in fast, isolation, boredom. It was easy to catch a cold hopping from one air-conditioned chamber to the next. Easy to find fault with your mates. Easy to resent the fans, the routine, even the music. If I have to sing “Stairway to Heaven” one more time . . . Easy to resent the whole damn situation.

  Recovery was vital.

  Led Zeppelin scattered as soon as the last concert at LA’s Forum had ended. It was a disappointing performance, sluggish, and it seemed to many as if the band was going through the motions. The tour had been more demanding than expected, the wages of fame—astonishing fame—particularly steep, exhausting. The guys were spent.

  Robert Plant and John Bonham withdrew to their newly purchased retreats—Plant to a sheep farm in Wales near the coast and Bonham to a spread in Worcestershire where he tended a herd of Hereford cattle. Both men welcomed the interval to reconnect with their families and less glitzy surroundings. John Paul Jones was taken into custody by his wife and daughters, while Jimmy Page returned to Plumpton Place, which he shared, however superficially, with Charlotte Martin and their daughter.

  During this period, Jimmy’s fascination with the occult became a preoccupation. He stepped up his pursuit of Aleister Crowley memorabilia. He already owned the occultist’s robes, hats, canes, annotated manuscripts, diaries, tarot cards, signed folios, anything he could get his hands on. In January 1973, he’d even attempted to acquire what could have become the most precious artifact in his collection.

  Aubrey Powell was on his way to Cairo to photograph the pyramids for the Dark Side of the Moon album cover. “Jimmy called me and said, ‘As long as Pink Floyd is paying your airfare, could you go by the Egyptian Museum and ask them about the Stele of Revelation?’ Po recalls. “ ‘I’d be very interested to get hold of it.’ ”

  The Stele of Revelation? Po had no idea what he was talking about. Digging around, he discovered it was a wood engraving dating to 680 BC, created as an offering for the tomb of a Montu priest. It was covered in hieroglyphics representing text from the Book of the Dead. Crowley had maintained that the stele depicted the three chief gods of Thelema, his so-called spiritual philosophy. Jimmy salivated at the prospect of getting his hands on it.

  Po called the director of the museum, an Egyptian scholar, and was invited to his office. “It was just after the Yom Kippur War, and the place was locked and sandbagged. Nobody had been there in months,” he recalls. He showed the man a picture of the stele that Jimmy had given him. “I have a client who is interested in purchasing it,” he told him. It was as though he had asked to buy the Shroud of Turin. The stele was one of the country’s most precious relics, revered, not for sale, not for anything. He was, however, willing to show it to Po, and the two men set off into one of the museum’s spooky subterranean vaults, an exploit right out of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

  “There was no electricity,” Po said. “We had a couple of torches and we walked for miles. Dark tunnels, cobwebs everywhere, a rather scary experience.” They finally encountered the stele lying in a dust-covered box, thrown in among other, lesser relics. In the end, Jimmy paid $2,000 for a plaster cast of it.

  Money was no object to the members of Led Zeppelin. The summer tour was due to net them $4.5 million, much of it in cash, and God knows how much more from merchandise that went unreported, to say nothing of album sales. Peter Grant bragged to the Financial Times that the band would earn $30 million in 1973, a good portion of it off the books.

  With so much residual income, no indulgence, no creature comfort was deemed too costly to augment the experience of touring. Every facet of being on the road was about to get an upgrade. For starters, the musicians were given more authority over the provisions in their hotel suites. An order came down from high command. From now on, in whatever room they slept, Jimmy was to have flowers, fresh fruit (stipulating grapes and green apples), bottled water, an electric kettle, champagne on ice, fresh orange juice, the curtains pulled and candles lit, and a stereo tuned to the hip local FM station.

  “This time, I’m going to get some Afghani hangings and my rooms are going to look like, well, like mosques,” he told Lisa Robinson. “You get loads of carpets and lay them on top of each other and have everything candlelit.”

  Robert seconded those perks and added Earl Grey tea and limited his fruit selection to grapes and lemons. John Paul added a piano to the growing list, and Bonzo ordered plenty of beer, champagne, and a sheepskin rug. And God help any retainer who failed to meet those conditions.

  Danny Marcus, Atlantic Records’ artist relations rep based in the Midwest, was directed to have a stereo in every room that Led Zeppelin booked at the Ambassador Hotel in Chicago, the band’s first stop. “And no boom boxes—components,” Marcus says. “I also had the best sources for pot and monogrammed [rolling] papers. In those days, the British were smoking hash and tobacco, which was wretched, so I introduced them to the romance of top-notch weed.”

  Marcus called himself “the enabler—the director of health, education, and welfare.” If balloons needed to be filled with water so they could be launched from a high hotel window, he was the guy to handle it. If opium was requested by a rock star, he could find some. If there was a party in the vicinity, he’d score invitations. “My job was to satisfy Led Zeppelin,” he says, “so that Atlantic never got a call from them.”

  If it meant sacrificing his body or personal possessions—so be it. On one of the first legs of the tour, Marcus joined Led Zeppelin on their personal plane and was confronted almost immediately by Bonzo in Beast mode. “I went to shake his hand,” Marcus recalls, “but he found my nipple and pinched it as hard as he could, something he enjoyed doing to people. Then he took off my glasses and stomped on them.” Marcus didn’t flinch; he had a second pair to get him through the trip. But two nights later, when he saw Bonzo homing in on him, Marcus whipped off his glasses, threw them on the floor, and stomped on them himself.

  Security was also enhanced. Rumors always circulated about crazed-fan weirdos, but there was credible evidence that someone was determined to do harm to Jimmy Page. “Actually, it was a lot more serious than I thought,” Jimmy explained. “It was a real Manson situation, and he was sending out waves of this absurd paranoia which a friend of mine got mixed up with.” There were also bags full of cash to worry about. Few precautions were taken where money was concerned.

  Out of necessity, Peter Grant hired Ogden Security, a Boston-based firm that deployed ex-cop Bill Dautrich to coordinate the band’s safety and protection. He flew ahead to each city on the tour to coordinate local police efforts, an army of bodyguards, and security at the various arenas, stadiums, and hotels. In addition, each of the musicians got a personal assistant to shadow him and attend to any need.

  But the pièce de résistance awaited the band in Chicago. Peter Grant had expressed his displeasure with the private plane they’d been using, the nine-seat Fan Jet Falcon that transported them from city to city. The band members loved the luxury it provided, but there was a downside. “On that small plane, you were too in a cocoon,” G said. “They had to sit opposite each other all the time, and of course there were rows. Somebody might get chinned by one of the others, having punch-ups between themselves. Bonzo and Robert were famous for that.”

  There was also a fear factor. The Falcon didn’t do well in turbulence. On its last flight, from San Francisco to Los Angeles, the plane had gotten tossed around in an air pocket and everyone’s hearts had caught in their throats. G in particular went bat shit. “I’ve had it with these little fucking planes!” he cried. “This is the last time we fly them.” He ordered Richard Cole to find something more substantial for the second leg of the tour.

  More substantial was never a problem. Richard heard about a Boeing 720B kitted out for rock ’n roll bands that was co-owned by teen singing star Bobby Sherman and his manager, Ward Sylvester. Steve Weiss and Mark London, Peter’s Stone the Crows partner, checked it out at Newark Airport and arranged to rent it for the remainder of the tour at a cost of $30,000, about $10,000 a week. The plane—christened the Starship—was beyond deluxe. It was a forty-seater, furnished with a thirty-foot couch and revolving armchairs, several closed-circuit TVs, an artificial fireplace, and a bar with a built-in organ. “There was a bedroom in the back that became Peter’s,” says Danny Goldberg, “and he sometimes had sex in there with one woman or another.” An unlimited menu of food was available—steak, shrimp, caviar, anything anyone’s heart desired. Ricardo stocked the hold with several cases each of vintage Dom Pérignon, Jack Daniel’s, and Singha beer. Two flight attendants—eighteen-year-old Susie and twenty-two-year-old Bianca—drew the line at sexual favors but catered to every other whim.

  “The idea was for Zeppelin to base themselves in major cities and just fly out to gigs in nearby towns,” says Phil Carson, a frequent passenger aboard the Starship. “So if we were located at the Ambassador in Chicago, we’d commute to St. Louis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, or Detroit without having to change hotels.” They could do the entire Midwest from Chicago. They’d be picked up at the hotel at 5:30 p.m., arrive at the airport by 6:00, be in the air by 6:45, land by 8:00, play the gig, and be back in their beds in time to sleep. The convenience was undeniable. “Our feet never really touched the ground,” Jimmy said. Upon landing in any city, the band was conveyed directly from the plane to limos that were driven onto the tarmac so that no one had to set foot in an airport lounge. Luggage was transferred on the spot, which ensured that their drugs wouldn’t be compromised.

  On off nights, Jimmy arranged flights to Los Angeles in order to liaise with Lori Mattix, who was forbidden on board the Starship by Peter Grant over concerns about transporting a minor across state lines.

  Otherwise, the Starship allowed for a bona fide entourage to accompany Led Zeppelin, which turned the plane into an airborne party. In addition to the band, Peter, Richard, and Steve Weiss, a flight’s manifest might include Danny Goldberg and any journalist he was wooing, the local Atlantic rep, occasionally Phil Carson or Beep Fallon, a few handpicked women over the age of sixteen (but sometimes younger), and an assortment of friends, colleagues, and freeloaders. Vanessa Gilbert and Gyl Corrigan-Devlin, who had connections to the best drugs, were summoned to Chicago from LA to function as den mothers to the band. And folksinger Roy Harper now traveled everywhere with them as the band’s guest, a tribute to the esteem, deserved or otherwise, in which he was held by Robert and Jimmy.

  This was the outfit that arrived in Chicago on July 6, 1973, for two opening shows at Chicago Stadium. Led Zeppelin was eager to be back in front of an audience, and they wasted no time launching into the meat of their show. The fans couldn’t argue with the unapologetic fury of “Rock and Roll,” “Celebration Day,” “Bring It On Home,” and “Black Dog.” It was an uncompromising reentry but managed to incite a faction of the crowd to overturn chairs, launch firecrackers, and raise all sorts of miscellaneous hell. Robert had to stop the show at several junctures and wait for order to be restored. “What’s with that,” he complained to a reporter from the Chicago Tribune, “people wearing beads and punching each other in the face!”

  But this was Chicago, home of Chess Records and the Chicago blues, both of which contained vital components of Led Zeppelin’s DNA. They loved the Windy City. For some unexplained reason, Chicago had been bypassed on the 1970 and 1972 tours, so they set aside ample time to reacquaint themselves with the city. Jimmy saluted the location by the selection of albums in his room, in particular Otis Spann’s Memorial LP, with Otis Rush on guitar, which spun prominently on his turntable. There were few sounds more identified with the West Side brand of Chicago blues than Spann’s barrelhouse piano. Rush remained one of Jimmy’s favorite stylists, with his version of “I Can’t Quit You Baby” an extraordinary influence.

  Danny Marcus dropped into Robert’s room to discover which records he was listening to. “It was strange, because I didn’t see the stereo,” says Marcus, who could have sworn it had been there at check-in. “Robert marched me into the bathroom, and there it was, under a foot of water in the tub. Apparently, he’d been expecting studio-quality equipment, and this was his way of reviewing the components.”