Only Jimmy looked resplendent. He had a suit hand made at great expense by a woman named Coco in Los Angeles. He called it his “dragon outfit” because of the highly stylized pair of colorful Lung dragons, symbolizing benevolent powers, embroidered along each side. “I asked her to personalize the pants with astrological symbols—Capricorn, Scorpio rising, Cancer,” he said. They were the most dominant signs in his horoscope, his sun sign, rising sign, and moon sign. His glyph from Led Zeppelin’s fourth album—ZoSo—appeared front and center, as did “666,” which according to the Book of Revelation was the mark of the beast with seven heads. The trousers were finished with long silver cuffs. When the lights hit Jimmy, he was an eyeful.

  “I thought about what I wanted on my stage clothes carefully,” he said. Image had always figured prominently in Jimmy Page’s priorities. “He was a pretty dapper guy, even way back when,” John Spicer recalls. “He loved the outfits, the fancy suits we wore with Neil Christian, always checking himself out in the mirror before we went on.” Chris Dreja remembered a more aggressive mode of attire during Jimmy’s Yardbirds days. “The Confederate hat and Nazi regalia pinned on the same costume didn’t go down too well,” he recalled. In the States, it occasionally drew a violent response.

  The dragon suit, however, was the ultimate rock ’n roll garb—loud, bold, and over-the-top. He wore it when the spirit moved him, which on the 1975 tour was just about always. But there were nights when his Dr. Jeykll persona warranted something more debonair, more tasteful. “After Coco made the dragon outfit, I had her make my white suit with the poppy on it,” he said. The clothes tipped the others off to which Jimmy Page was showing up on a given night.

  In Chicago, showing up was about all that went well. No one in the band was at his best. The music was lethargic. Robert kept apologizing from the stage—for the sloppiness, for the sound, for his voice. Jimmy could tell it was an off night, and his playing reflected it.

  “This is so damn futile,” he grumbled after the show. “I can’t fucking play the way I should.”

  “There was a minute there when I thought we’d lost it after that first Chicago show,” Robert said.

  After the show, Peter Grant huddled with the band and Richard Cole at the Ambassador Hotel to review the situation. Robert was told in no uncertain terms to stop mentioning from the stage that he had the flu, that it upset the fans who’d waited years to hear Led Zeppelin play. Otherwise, G wasn’t overly concerned. An off night was an off night; the kids didn’t know any better. The audience reaction was ecstatic. No one had an inkling that Jimmy’s hand injury kept him from dazzling on solos. Even the critics were merciful. An indifferent review in Sounds noted that, despite the shaky health concerns, Led Zeppelin “still reach heaven.”

  “The second night in Chicago turned it all around,” said Danny Goldberg.

  The band hit its stride. Jimmy played with efficiency, especially on some nifty slide-guitar passages, and Robert reined in his vocals on new songs like “Trampled Under Foot” and “Kashmir,” which required fewer flights into the high altitudes.

  But two nights later, at the Richfield Coliseum near Cleveland, the concert’s first hour, according to a newspaper report, was “soggy and spiritless.” Jimmy swigged from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s between numbers, contributing to the malaise. Robert’s singing “demonstrated his vocal pipes are almost shot.” The band picked up the pace in the second half of the show, but everyone was happy to get out of town. The weather was lousy; it was cold and snowing, and there was an hour of travel ahead before they could put the night behind them.

  The strategy had been to stay at the Ambassador in Chicago and commute to nearby gigs in Cleveland and Indianapolis. It was relatively easy with the Starship. However, by the time they reached the airport in Cleveland for their return flight, a full-blown blizzard was in progress. All commercial air traffic was shut down. Fortunately, private planes had the right to fly if they so chose, but conditions were dreadful.

  “We’ve got to go,” Peter insisted. The pilot was dubious. He’d been listening to radio reports and knew flying was hazardous. Peter was adamant. They had a gig the next night in Indianapolis that couldn’t be postponed. “We’re going to Chicago!”

  Joe Jammer, a musician, who had joined them in the cockpit, recalls, “Peter pulled out a mirror, took a gram of cocaine, laid it down in one line, and stuck it under the pilot’s nose. The pilot snorted the whole fucking line.”

  “Okay, we’re ready to go to Chicago!” he announced.

  Jammer, whose real name was Joe Wright, sat in the navigator’s seat behind the pilot throughout the flight across the lake. “It was a massive blizzard,” he said, “you saw nothing. The pilot flew entirely on instruments. It’s a wonder we got there safe and sound.”

  Mercifully, there was a three-night layoff after the Indianapolis show. Three nights for the band to recharge. But no one wanted to stay in frozen Chicago. They had a plane that was costing them $2,500 a day—they could go anywhere they wished. Led Zeppelin prided itself on being a democracy; the destination would be a group decision, with Robert remaining in Chicago to recuperate. John Paul Jones voted for the Bahamas, but the plane was licensed to fly only within the continental United States. That also negated Bonzo’s desire to fly home to see his family. But, in fact, the vote was a sham. Jimmy always held the deciding vote, and he wanted to spend time with a girl in Los Angeles. Quicker than anyone could say “Hollywood,” the Starship was routed to LAX.

  The flight west started out like a full-blown party in the sky. The plane was licensed to carry forty-two people, but the manifest, which included the band, Ricardo and G, a few security guys, and three journalists, gave the affair a pleasing intimacy. Champagne flowed throughout the two-thousand-mile trip, along with a full larder: canapés, hors d’oeuvres, steak, lobster, anything the heart desired. Videos of Deep Throat and Don’t Knock the Rock alternated in loops on TV screens suspended from the ceiling. So much cocaine was snorted en route that the passengers could have flown to LA under their own power.

  For an hour or so, everybody gathered round the bar getting pleasantly pissed. John Paul sat perched behind the electric organ, playing a medley of fossilized pub songs—“Bye-Bye Blackbird,” “Any Old Iron,” and “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts”—to the delight of Peter Grant, who led a group sing-along. Even Susie and Bianca, the two flight attendants, joined in. Only Bonzo was missing, out cold. He’d downed an entire bottle of vodka in the limo on the way to the airport and collapsed as soon as he’d boarded the plane. He was a mess.

  “Bonzo drank for reasons,” John Paul volunteered. “He hated being away from home, and between gigs he found it hard to cope. And he was terrified of flying.”

  He snorted cocaine for reasons, too. “Taking cocaine just enabled Bonham to drink more,” said Nick Kent, who covered Led Zeppelin for New Musical Express and was an avid drug taker himself.

  Danny Goldberg knew to be on his guard. “The chance for violence was high when John got loaded and drunk.” It was important to keep him away from journalists and other civilians.

  About an hour out of LA, Bonzo staggered out of the bedroom in full Beast mode, wearing nothing but a red hooded robe, unbelted at the waist. According to Chris Charlesworth, the Melody Maker columnist covering the tour, “he grabbed one of the stewardesses from behind, put her in a chokehold, and pulled up her skirt, with every intention of mounting her.” Terrified, she was no match for him and began to “scream her bloody head off.”

  Grant put one of his old wrestling holds on Bonzo about the same time the pilot emerged from the cockpit.

  “What the fuck’s going on here?” he demanded.

  “It’s all right, everything’s under control,” Peter assured him. “Go back to the cockpit.”

  Grant and Ricardo dragged Bonzo into the bedroom, which effectively broke up the party. Jimmy was delegated to calm the flight attendant, who continued to tremble and cry as a result of the attempted rape.

  A few minutes later, Ricardo emerged and leaned forebodingly over Chris Charlesworth’s seat. “I don’t want a fucking word of this getting into your fucking newspaper,” he said.

  Charlesworth exchanged glances with Cameron Crowe, the young Rolling Stone reporter seated opposite him. “We both recognized the threat,” Charlesworth recalls. “Our silence, otherwise we were off the tour.”

  Playing good cop to Ricardo’s bad cop, G invited Charlesworth into the cockpit to enjoy a front-row seat for the flight over the desert. The pilots were enjoying a coffee break, with the plane operating on instruments. “I chat with them and they ask me if I’d like to have a go,” he recalled, meaning: take over the controls. In a moment of madness, they disengaged the autopilot and allowed Charlesworth to operate the joystick, lifting the nose of the plane, then dipping it.

  “I could envision the headline,” he says all these years later. “ ‘Zeppelin’s Plane Crashes—Journalist at the Controls.’ ”

  “Enjoy that?” Grant asked him afterward. Charlesworth assured him of the thrill. “That’s nothing. Bonzo flew us all the fucking way from Los Angeles to New York on one tour.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Los Angeles reenergized the party spirit, lifting it back into high gear. The entourage made a beeline straight from the airport to the Rainbow Grill, the scene of some of Led Zeppelin’s most unsavory encounters. Peter Grant had called ahead from Chicago to make sure the band’s favorite table was waiting and champagne was on ice. The groupies were ready; the marquee welcoming the band outside the Continental Hyatt House was like a summons to report for duty. Even G’s “concubine,” as he referred to her, was present and accounted for, a young woman named Alice who called herself Raven and turned up everywhere in America.

  The groupies who showed up weren’t in the same league as Miss Pamela or Lori Mattix. They didn’t aspire to be girlfriends; they were more transactional: sex for access. Which was fine with the band. That’s what certain bands went to the Rainbow for. It wasn’t an upscale scene. It was a place to cavort, to act out, to parade as rock stars. And sometimes the scene got ugly.

  That night, one of the customers, who was clearly overstimulated, zeroed in on Jimmy Page. “You can’t fucking play guitar! Fuck you!” he howled, jabbing a finger in the guitarist’s direction.

  Jimmy, who was a lover, not a fighter, leaped toward the heckler in an uncharacteristic response. Not uncharacteristically, Peter Grant stepped between them, then hauled the guy outside behind the club and administered a few well-placed kicks.

  Jimmy wasn’t having the R&R he expected. “Some of the guys had started a rumor that Jimmy liked to put a fishbowl on girls’ heads and then shit on it,” says Abe Hoch. “It wasn’t true, of course, but it was funny. So they went out and bought the biggest fish bowl they could find and put it next to Jimmy wherever he sat at the Rainbow. He had no idea what was going on, but nobody would come near him all night. He kept looking around, saying, ‘What the fuck is going on here?’ ”

  It was almost a relief to head back east. There was no partying on the plane this time. Thankfully, the trip was uneventful; everyone kept his own counsel. Robert was waiting in a limo on the airport tarmac in Greensboro, North Carolina, for a show at the Coliseum on January 29, 1975. There were five limos, in fact, one for each of the guys, including a lead car for Peter Grant; the convoy sped off to the arena with no time to spare.

  The Coliseum was a horrible facility for music, cavernous and cold, with terrible acoustics. The band was tired, the sound awful, Robert’s voice shaggy. “It was a rotten show,” Chris Charlesworth recalls, “one of the worst I ever saw.” The audience, for its part, couldn’t have cared less. This was Led Zeppelin. “Their 17,500 fans were still cheering,” according to the critic for the Greensboro Daily News, “happy to get their money’s worth from a group that puts on a really entertaining show.”

  The five hundred fans who showed up without tickets didn’t feel the same way. They stormed the arena in an attempt to get inside, “throwing broken bottles, stones, and pieces of scaffolding.” In the melee, three of the band’s five limos were vandalized. The drivers of the remaining two cars approached Peter Grant midway through the concert to advise him they were removing their vehicles rather than risk further damage to them.

  G was livid. No limos meant that Led Zeppelin would be stranded. There was no plan B for leaving the arena. “You can’t take your fucking cars away,” he shouted. “We need ’em. You’ll be fucking sorry, you cunts.”

  The drivers apologized but said they were responsible for the cars.

  “All right,” G relented, “then I’ll buy them. How much do you want for your fucking cars? What are they worth—twenty grand each? Thirty? I’ll fucking buy them from you right now.” He opened his holdall, which was stuffed with cash.

  “Sir, we can’t sell them. They don’t belong to us.”

  “In that case, you fucking cunt, I’m going to take your cars.”

  “Sir, you can’t.”

  “Don’t be fucking stupid,” G scoffed. “Of course I can fucking do that. I can do what I fucking want. Can’t I? I’ve got twenty fucking men working for me. There’s only two of you. You can’t fucking stop me, you fucking cunts.”

  At the end of the show, after “Stairway to Heaven,” the band usually came offstage, had a drink, and then returned for an encore—“Whole Lotta Love” and whatever else suited their fancy. This time, Peter instructed Jimmy, “Do ‘Whole Lotta Love,’ and don’t make it a long one.” He’d already taken control of the two limos.

  While the fans in the arena were still on their feet, applauding, Ricardo hustled the band, draped in red hooded robes, out the back door and into one of the limousines. Grant was behind the wheel, grinning at his temerity. A roadie was driving the second limo with the rest of the retinue and two ex-cops who handled security. The grim-faced limo drivers stood helplessly on the curb.

  G rolled down his window. “We don’t have any fucking use for you, you cunts,” he said, then gunned the car through the angry crowd, leaning on the horn. “Get out of the way, you fucking cunts! Out of the way!”

  A police escort parked in front of the lead limo had stalled, so G began bumping the back of it until it moved out of the way.

  The ride to the airport was more exciting than the show. Grant drove like a madman. The car reached a speed of seventy on city streets, often driven on the wrong side of the road, running all red lights. “I’d never seen driving like it,” said Neal Preston, the band’s tour photographer. Carloads of fans in hot rods pulled alongside, keeping pace, trying to get a look at the band. It was like a chase scene out of Smokey and the Bandit, but wilder and more reckless.

  The Starship was idling, ready for takeoff, as the two cars zoomed onto the runway. But Grant wasn’t done demonstrating his Grand Prix skills. Instead of pulling up to the plane, he drove around it four times, each time faster than the last, skidding on two wheels, tires screeching, with smoke coming off the car. He was using the hand brake to keep it from overturning. Finally, it buckled to a stop at the foot of the plane’s gangplank and Led Zeppelin tumbled out, laughing their heads off.

  According to a passenger, “They were placing bets whether he’d crash that limo deliberately into the other one, just for the hell of it, so he could leave both cars smashed.”

  Next stop was New York, from where they could fly to gigs in Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Boston, and as the Starship headed up the East Coast everyone’s spirits picked up. Bonzo played bartender, and the drinks never stopped, nor did the cocaine, which G dispensed like Johnny Appleseed. No one gave much thought to the mediocre show. This wasn’t simply rock ’n roll anymore. It was crazy excess. The drugs and violence had taken over.

  [2]

  And sometimes you reap what you sow. The review of the January 31 show in the Detroit Free Press began to put it in perspective. “The landing of the Led Zeppelin is inevitably accompanied by the best hard blues rock in the business and the most violent, unruly crowds ever to inflict themselves upon a concert hall.” The two extremes seemed to be inseparable.

  Once again, an outbreak of violence raked the arena, “including shoving, punching, shattering bottles on the ground, and rushing the hall.” It didn’t help that the band seemed uninspired, deflated. A “fairly credible performance” was inexcusable for one of the world’s top rock ’n roll bands. “Plant was flat on the opening numbers, not even trying for the high notes,” the review noted, “and Page’s guitar runs careened way off-track.” They appeared tired, and Robert’s sad story, delivered between numbers—that his throat was sore and Jimmy had hurt his hand—came off as lame alibis. “Led Zeppelin made nearly $50,000 for two hours of ‘work,’ ” wrote a critic for the Ann Arbor Sun. “I mean, it was obvious: to them this was only a job. It could have been a celebration.”

  There was violence in Pittsburgh the next night as well, and again in Philadelphia on February 8. Security, presided over by a collection of bloodthirsty ex-cops, wasn’t helping matters. They seemed to enjoy mixing it up with the fans. One recruit offered Richard Cole advice in Pittsburgh. “Let me loan you a blackjack in case you need to bash in a skull or two tonight,” he said, providing a metal baton. He also showed Ricardo how to conceal small weights in gloves, the better to deliver a message to an overzealous fan.

  The violence in Philadelphia was beyond the pale.

  “I saw this incident happen, and I was almost physically sick,” Jimmy explained to Beat writer William S. Burroughs, who interviewed him for an article in Crawdaddy a few nights later over dinner in New York. “Somebody came to the front of the stage to take a picture or something and obviously somebody said, ‘Be off with you,’ and he wouldn’t go. And then one chap went over the barrier, and then another and then another, and they all piled on top. You could see the fists coming out . . . on this one solitary person. And they dragged him by his hair, and they were kicking him. It was just sickening.”