His first order of business was the label’s UK launch party, which coincided with the release of the Pretty Things album Silk Torpedo. The marching orders were clear: this shindig had to be outrageous and irreverent, something the music crowd would never forget. Even the location required a certain cachet.

  “We decided to do it at Chislehurst Caves,” says Phil Carson, “not far from the part of southeast London where Peter Grant and I come from.” The caves, a labyrinth of crusty tunnels, dated from the midthirteenth century and were created from the mining of flint and chalk. During World War II, they were used as an air-raid shelter, accommodating as many as fifteen thousand people. “But in the sixties, it was a gig—you’d go play Chislehurst Caves.”

  It had the perfect ambience—it was a curiosity, offbeat, a bit spooky—and landed on a perfect day: Halloween, All Hallows’ Eve. Jimmy loved its nod to witchcraft and the occult. “Do what thou wilt,” the invitation warned, “but know by this summons that on the night of the full moon, 31 October 1974, Led Zeppelin requests your presence . . .” Dress was optional—undress preferred—but it was recommended that guests arrive in costume.

  A display set the tone at the mouth of the torch-lit caves: a naked woman lay in a casket covered in cherry Jell-O. Ian Knight and Benji Le Fevre had used a cobweb-making machine to dress the interior. Roaming about were male and female wrestlers, strippers dressed in nuns’ habits with cutaway backsides, and naked “virgins” sacrificed at makeshift altars. “It was like being at a medieval orgy,” one of the guests observed. “In all it was a strange and disturbing night.” A troupe of fire-eaters, body sculptors, and escape artists entertained at selected stations. Several local bands performed. Models and villains intermingled at the bar. It was perhaps the only party at which Led Zeppelin, Bad Company, and the Pretty Things were not the main attraction.

  By rights, the affair should have kicked off a Pretty Things renaissance, but as usual, they were their own worst enemy. Infighting marred a smooth transition to touring, and their attempt to please a broad spectrum of listeners resulted in their alienating their diehard fans. The album, Silk Torpedo, was good, if unexciting—solid, which in music-industry parlance was code for uncommercial. The knock had always been that outside the UK, the Pretty Things were an unknown entity, and this album wouldn’t break new ground. Even British critics weren’t particularly enthused.

  New Musical Express, one of the band’s longtime cheerleaders, reached the conclusion that the new album “lacks the inspired vision of Parachute,” its predecessor, but gave the band “top marks for perseverance,” a nod to their status as mainstays, if nothing else. “Next time, if they can match the excellence of the album cover, the world will cease as we know it.” A review in Phonograph Record echoed the “next time” critique. Rolling Stone called the Pretty Things “a marvelous rock ’n roll band,” but by that time half a year had passed, and the record had more or less played itself out.

  * * *

  • • •

  In November 1974, the launch party behind him, Abe Hoch tried to make a go of Swan Song. With Peter out of the country on a Bad Company tour and Led Zeppelin sequestered in a London theater, rehearsing, he seized the opportunity to make some inroads. A label manager was hired—Unity MacLean, a young woman who had paid her dues in the Artist Relations Department of CBS Records, where she looked after the UK careers of Paul Simon, Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, Patti LaBelle, and Dr. Hook.

  “When I came to Swan Song, I expected it to be run like a record company,” she says, “but there was no office procedure, no decision making, no plans whatsoever.”

  Abe Hoch attempted to expand the artist roster. “I knew a guy in Seattle who sent me a tape of Ann and Nancy Wilson—Heart,” he recalls. “With it came a note that said, ‘Ann sings like Robert Plant, but with more balls.’ She killed the fuck out of the demo. I gave a tape copy to Robert and said, ‘You’ve got to listen to this. This chick really sings rock ’n roll.’ ”

  Robert wasn’t having any of it. Ann? Sings like Robert Plant? The note about the Wilson sisters had sunk it for him. “He took it and the tape and threw them in the wastebasket,” Hoch says. “So I had to pass on Heart.”

  Abe also passed up another opportunity that came his way through a lawyer acquaintance. “He urged me to listen to a cassette of a band that he insisted on playing in the tape deck of his car. The tape was so awful that you couldn’t hear what the fuck they were doing. I told him I couldn’t make heads nor tails of it, but I sure wished I had signed Dire Straits.”

  Hoch realized the A&R aspect of his job was a figment of the imagination. He was never going to sign any act, because neither Led Zeppelin nor Peter Grant would allow it if they weren’t involved. And they weren’t involved. Every once in a while, one of the guys would pop into the office, but only to request that a personal chore be done—or to score drugs. One could always put in an expense for coke, so long as it was disguised as something else. Joan Hudson, the label’s stern accountant, “never questioned anything or ran it by Peter,” according to Phil Carlo. Her marching orders were to pay whatever voucher came across her desk. “I’d give her a paper that said ‘£2,000 for supplies’—for ‘bits and pieces’—and she’d say, ‘Right, Phil, no problem.’ ” Legend has it that Richard Cole once put in an expense of $50,000 for a farm tractor and got reimbursed in full. Benji Le Fevre had a similar experience. “I once turned in a receipt to Joan for £7,000 for fish-and-chips that Robert cosigned,” he said.

  “Joan always wired Jimmy lots of money,” says Unity MacLean.

  One night, when Jimmy needed an immediate infusion of cash, he was unable to raise Joan Hudson by phone. Instead, he went into a check-cashing shop and asked them to charge the amount against his American Express card.

  “This is Jimmy Page’s card,” the owl-eyed desk clerk said.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Jimmy replied.

  The man laughed and said, “So you’re Jimmy Page, are you?”

  Jimmy grinned back and said, “Well, yeah, I am.”

  The man picked up the phone and said, “We’ll let the police sort this out.”

  Even the cops refused to accept that he was Jimmy Page and kept him confined to a chair until someone from Swan Song appeared to identify him.

  Peter Grant wasn’t around to intervene. He was on the road with Bad Company, giving the band and its manager, Clive Coulson, the benefit of his experience. G’s presence paid dividends with promoters, but sometimes he stepped on his own guile.

  He’d prevailed on Bill Curbishley, The Who’s manager and an old friend, to add Bad Company to a Who gig at The Valley, Charlton Athletic’s football ground in South London. It was a massive stadium, holding 83,000 people, a bonanza to introduce the relatively unknown Swan Song band. “As a favor to Peter, I agreed to put Bad Company on between the second band and Lindisfarne, who were pretty big at the time,” Curbishley says. “It was a good showcase for them.”

  The promoter had his hands full from the start. The crowd was overliquored and unruly; they ripped the gates out of the concrete stanchions, which prompted a flurry of fistfights that spread through the stadium. “The next thing I know is: no Bad Company,” recalls Curbishley. The band hadn’t arrived on time. “I had no choice but to put Lindisfarne on. When Grant and the band showed up a few minutes later, I realized they’d done it deliberately so that Bad Company would come on immediately before The Who. Which is when I informed them they weren’t going on.”

  Curbishley knew trouble lay ahead. He signaled his brother, Alfie, a titled heavyweight boxer, to join him in the office. A minute later, Grant, Richard Cole, and Phil Carson burst through the door.

  “What do you mean Bad Company ain’t going on?” G demanded.

  “I did you a favor,” Curbishley said, moving toe to toe with Peter. The two men were equals in the tough-guy department, each with a history of protecting his turf. “You deliberately turned up late to jump the bill. They’re not going on.”

  Grant narrowed his eyes. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

  Curbishley lowered his voice to a near whisper. “Close that door and we’ll see who walks out of this fucking room,” he said.

  G and his henchmen backed right off.

  In the end, Paul Rodgers appealed directly to Curbishley and an equitable solution was reached. Bad Company would perform but play a shorter set—and no encores.

  Grant was satisfied, but he realized the upshot. He didn’t have the leverage with other acts that he had with Led Zeppelin. Hard-knuckle tactics only worked only with an act at the top of the world. He needed to leave Bad Company’s day-to-day management to others and devote his energies to the band that paid the bills.

  * * *

  • • •

  During the layoff, Jimmy had kept up a fairly rigorous routine. He continued to haunt the control booth at Olympic Sound, distilling Led Zeppelin’s prodigious output into the fifteen tracks that would form the basis of a double album. Somewhere along the way, he’d come up with a title—Physical Graffiti—and approved the concept for the cover based on José Feliciano’s 1973 album, Compartments, which featured a tenement building whose windows were stamped on a pull-out card. For Physical Graffiti, the designers constructed a die-cut window whose illustrations could be interchanged to reveal the building’s iconic inhabitants: King Kong, Elizabeth Taylor, Charles Atlas, the Virgin Mary, Jerry Lee Lewis, Laurel and Hardy, Neil Armstrong, Flash Gordon, the cast of The Wizard of Oz, Marlene Dietrich, and Peter Grant, as well as a photo of Robert and Richard in drag taken at the Hyatt House in Los Angeles. It wasn’t original, but it was eye-catching.

  Naturally, the cover was difficult to produce. There were so many moving parts to it; the printing process was complicated, problematic. The album was supposed be released in time to coincide with Led Zeppelin’s next tour, beginning in mid-January 1975, but the cover’s production would delay it. The best-case scenario was mid-to-late February. That meant that yet again Led Zeppelin would be performing for a month without records in the stores, a tremendous financial setback.

  Nevertheless, the show would go on as scheduled. The dates were booked, the arenas sold out months in advance. Besides, the long eighteen-month layoff had made the band antsy. They’d appreciated the downtime, but they were musicians who needed to play and entertainers who needed to perform. Jimmy and Robert had appeared sporadically onstage with Bad Company during their American tour, but it wasn’t the same as playing a Led Zeppelin gig. “The time comes,” Robert said, “when we know it’s time to go out on the road again.”

  A few days’ rehearsal served to take the rust off the rails. On November 24, 1974, the band reconvened at the Liveware Theatre in Ealing to see where they stood and to determine how best to map a new show. “Obviously, we had to rehearse the stuff from the new album to get it into some viable shape,” Robert explained. “Kashmir,” in particular, was a bitch to play live. So were “When the Levee Breaks,” “Custard Pie,” “Sick Again,” “Trampled Underfoot,” and “In My Time of Dying,” which they ran through until the arrangements clicked. The sheer amount of new material meant some of the old standbys had to be sacrificed. “Celebration Day,” “Misty Mountain Hop,” “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” and “The Ocean” were dropped from the standard set list. Even “Dazed and Confused” was retired for the time being.

  No expense was spared to make the upcoming tour more spectacular than the previous one. The production included a twenty-foot-high backdrop consisting of several hundred bulbs that spelled out L-E-D Z-E-P-P-E-L-I-N, just in case an unsuspecting ticketholder had stumbled into the wrong arena.

  In December, Peter Grant summoned Jack Calmes, the owner of Showco, to the Swan Song office to give him and the band a preview of the production design. Before Calmes made his presentation, G suggested they have some blow first.

  “He pulled out a big bowie knife—about a foot long with a three-inch blade on it—and dipped it into this kind of grocery sack of blow,” Calmes recalled. “They had to give me five minutes to recover from that.”

  A powerful stimulant was necessary for what he had in store. The model Jack unveiled was complex and elaborate. Five lighting towers with laser effects were mounted on a truss that required six or seven trucks and a sizable crew to assemble it. The stage looked like something out of a Jules Verne fantasy.

  Bonzo threw the production designer a fearsome stare. “How much fucking money is this going to cost us?” he asked.

  When Calmes replied, “$15,785 per show,” it became so quiet you could hear a penny drop. The band began cutting looks at each other. Even to millionaires like Led Zeppelin, it was an enormous expenditure. Bonzo strode menacingly to the window and threw it open in a swift, dramatic flourish. Calmes braced himself to be launched like a projectile onto King’s Road.

  Instead, Bonzo grinned and laughed wickedly. “Yeah, go for it,” he said. “We’re in.” The others agreed. They weren’t about to let money be a factor. Fifteen grand was a drop in the bucket compared to what they’d net from each show—and in cash.

  But in part, that was the cocaine talking. The drug had become so prevalent, so much a part of who Led Zeppelin was, that it took the brakes off any caution. They felt invincible; nothing was too big, too grand, too fast. Over-the-top seemed just right.

  Everything was now go-go-go-go! It set the tempo for the entire tour.

  Chapter Sixteen

  HOME AWAY FROM HOME

  [1]

  The tour got off to a rocky start.

  On his way into London, in preparation to leave the country, Jimmy Page disembarked at Victoria Station and jammed the third finger of his left hand in one of the train’s automatic doors. He knew right away he was in trouble. The pain was excruciating; he suspected he’d broken the finger.

  “I was just totally numb—numb with shock,” Jimmy recalled. X-rays revealed only a severe sprain, but the damage was done. “It’s the most important finger for any guitarist, the one that does all the leverage and most of the work,” he said. “I can’t play blues at all, can’t bend notes either.”

  They considered postponing the tour. What was the point if Jimmy Page couldn’t play the blues? But rescheduling wasn’t the answer. “A postponement would have meant chaos,” he acknowledged. They’d sold out thirty-six shows in twenty-four cities—“expected to be the largest grossing undertaking in rock history.” Arrangements were already set in stone, promoters on the hook.

  There had already been riots in several cities when Led Zeppelin seats went on sale. “In Boston, fans lined up three days early for tickets,” The Village Voice reported. “The hall’s beer supply was seized, bottles thrown, furniture destroyed, and an estimated $50,000 in damages resulted.” Needless to say, the city canceled the gig. In Chicago, fans camped out all night in near-zero temperatures, only to have scalpers scarf up vast numbers of tickets, depriving the stalwarts. And in New York, fistfights broke out at a department-store Ticketron outlet.

  There was too much at stake to postpone the tour—advance ticket sales totaled roughly $5 million—but the incentives for doing so were attractive. The tune-ups hadn’t gone well. As always before a tour, Led Zeppelin played a few warm-up gigs in out-of-the-way places to test new material and work out bugs. An unannounced show on January 11, 1975, at a club in Rotterdam was a clear indication that the band wasn’t at anywhere near its peak. They sounded ragged, and Robert, clearly rattled, flubbed the lyrics to “Stairway to Heaven.” The next night’s gig in Brussels was confused and chaotic. Bonzo, who had been drinking heavily in Holland, was hung over and inconsistent. Jimmy looked wasted. They muddled through, but it was clear to all that the layoff had left its mark. Everyone had to pull it together before they got to the States.

  The Fates weren’t finished. By the time Led Zeppelin arrived in Minneapolis on January 18, Robert was ill. He’d arrived there in the dead of winter dressed in an open-fronted girl’s blouse and no coat. “I’m catching flu and can’t sing properly,” he complained. By Chicago, two nights later, his cold was full-blown. The second song, “Sick Again,” was no joke. “[Plant’s flu] had given him an inability to come to grips with most of the high notes he usually takes with ease,” noted a review of the show in the Chicago Tribune, “and at times he had difficulty getting his voice over Jimmy Page’s guitar.” Part of the blame could be laid on the sound mix and a wonky PA. But Jimmy was also wonky. His hand hurt. “Codeine tablets and Jack Daniel’s deadened the pain,” but Jimmy was obviously struggling. Certain songs were too physically demanding. “ ‘Dazed and Confused’ and ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’ were indefinitely retired.” Jimmy was unable to execute either of them with finesse. The band substituted “When the Levee Breaks” and “How Many More Times,” neither a fan favorite.

  Bonzo suffered in his own inimitable way. The entire trip from New York to Chicago, he’d been “swigging from a quart bottle of blue-label Smirnoff and muttering disconsolately to himself.” Only a day away from England, he was already homesick and rueful of his circumstances. “What the fuck am I doing here?” he grumbled. “I want to be back home.” He was obviously wasted as they took the stage.

  Even the band’s attire left something to be desired. Robert was decked out in “a cherry adorned wrap-around number” and “a sort of Sino-Afro print vest that seems six sizes too small,” as one observer noted. “He wears tight blue jeans and clearly no underwear.” John Paul Jones was in a ludicrous silver lamé waistcoat. He appreciated showmanship but admitted, “it’s just that I was never very good at it.” Bonzo went completely in another direction. He and his roadie, Mick Hinton, dressed identically in sinister-looking white boiler suits and black derby hats, mimicking the hooligan droogs in A Clockwork Orange.