Burroughs commiserated with Jimmy about the unpredictability of large audiences. “You have to be careful,” he said. “It’s rather like driving a load of nitroglycerine.”

  Jimmy would have really been ill had he gotten a look at Richard Cole, who contributed his own method of crowd control. “When dozens of fans began congregating near the front of the auditorium,” Ricardo recalled, “I positioned myself underneath the stage and frantically began smashing them on the kneecaps with a hammer.”

  Punishment was dispensed without regard for safety or consequences. “The undercurrent of unpleasantness was so unnecessary,” said Chris Charlesworth. “They were the biggest band in the world. There was nothing like that around The Who, the bad vibes and that hint of menace around Zeppelin. They behaved as if they were a law unto themselves.”

  A law unto themselves.

  When confronted about it by a journalist in New York, Robert went on the defensive. “There’s no violent energy here,” he insisted. “Because we’ve got a sizeable audience, people may think we’ll bring out violence, but it doesn’t happen.”

  The shows were suffering, nevertheless. At times, Jimmy seemed disengaged, in his own world onstage. Guitar solos unspooled one after another, their execution often “sloppy, careless, and unimaginative.” “After a while,” wrote a reviewer in The Washington Post, “Page’s solos seemed to sound alike.” Pacing was lugubrious. “In My Time of Dying” and “Since I’ve Been Loving You” put a drag on what should have been a high-spirited set. John Paul’s meandering, self-indulgent etude during “No Quarter” seemed to go on forever. It drained all the excitement out of the show. The audiences felt the lack of effort, and reviews called it out.

  “In the end there is still something missing,” The New York Times concluded. “And what is missing is creative significance. They simply didn’t reach down deep inside their audiences.” Newsday complained about Jimmy’s and John Paul’s “stock riffs” and surveyed the fans, who “seemed disgruntled by the performance” and “felt Led Zeppelin was just having a bad night of it.” Robert could tell that he’d lost the audience. “Despite our depleted physical conditions,” he announced, “we fully intend to shake this building.” In Montreal they were criticized for “not hitting on all cylinders.” Philadelphia-based papers used words like “lifeless . . . lackluster . . . unimpressive . . . over-produced” and said “there was something missing. Maybe it’s the group, which is getting older and running out of gas.” Almost every review took issue with Robert’s “half a voice,” his inability to hit the high notes and subsequent dive into lower registers.

  Led Zeppelin needed a breather. There was a ten-day break after the February 16 show in St. Louis, and it couldn’t come soon enough. The band wanted to reclaim its mojo. With a day off between the New York and St. Louis gigs, the Starship transported everyone to a new base in New Orleans—geographically unsuitable, but a city where the music, food, and nightlife captivated the musicians and their managers.

  They loved the hotel there, the Maison Dupuy, located in a quiet residential section of the French Quarter. A profusion of used record stores along Bourbon Street provided treasures—stacks of vintage 45s and obscure local R&B singles. Fabulous food and great quantities of alcohol were consumed.

  The getaway satisfied but didn’t adjust the band’s attitude. “For the St. Louis show, we left the hotel in New Orleans ten minutes before they were supposed to be onstage,” recalls Phil Carson. “It was thirty minutes to the airport and almost a two-hour flight. And of course, the audience rioted and damage was done. It was a low point for me. Jimmy was a mess, but somehow he got away with it, playing-wise.”

  As soon as the show was over, Bonzo and John Paul jumped on flights home to the UK. Jimmy and Robert decided to forgo the seven-hour trip and puddle-jumped to the Caribbean island of Dominica instead. A few days together away from the hustle and the background noise of others would benefit their relationship immensely. They had never been friends, per se. “They had no connection to each other socially,” according to Abe Hoch. They never hung out together except for work, there was little intimacy between them. And their roles had shifted since the early days of Led Zeppelin.

  When Robert initially joined the band, Jimmy had called every shot. “He dominated Robert completely,” says Danny Goldberg. Jimmy had been playing professionally for nearly ten years, while Robert had desperately attempted—and failed—to crack the big time. Still only nineteen, he’d begun to wonder if rock ’n roll wasn’t in the cards. Jimmy gave Robert the break he’d been lusting after, and for two years or so Robert deferred to the older, more experienced musician in all things Led Zeppelin. Jimmy taught him the ropes, and he gave Robert the opportunity to come into his own as a performer—and to grow up—while fronting the band and establishing his career. There was a lot of confidence building in the interim. Robert developed poise onstage and in the spotlight in general. His personality blossomed. And he discovered that he could write damn good lyrics. In fact, songwriting put him on equal footing with Jimmy as far as new material went. Jimmy depended on him. That did a lot for Robert’s self-assurance.

  “But Led Zeppelin was Jimmy’s band,” says Janine Safer, one of Swan Song’s young press officers, “and Jimmy never let Robert forget it.” They never really pursued friendship. It was strictly professional between them.

  They were different animals. A deep-rooted, only child, Jimmy kept to himself; he rarely socialized. He was leery of people, especially fans, not inclined to engage. “A loner,” was the way he described himself. “Isolation doesn’t bother me at all. It gives me a sense of security.” He practiced the occult. He enjoyed unusual sexual proclivities, and he more than dabbled in drugs. Heroin had reared its head on the tour, and Jimmy became an enthusiastic user.

  Phil Carson blamed the heroin for an incident at the recent gig in St. Louis. Jimmy had worked out an effect with his roadie that involved putting the guitar down and turning a dial in order to produce a weird declining sound. “Robert and I stood at the side of the stage, rolling our eyes, while Jimmy did that for ten minutes, entranced, oblivious to the audience,” Carson says.

  Robert had tried heroin but usually avoided anything heavier than a line or two of recreational cocaine. And he was upbeat, always. “He wasn’t a brooding personality,” says Abe Hoch. “He was outgoing. He had a smile and charm that were irresistible.” Robert courted outsiders, fans, even the press. He was fundamentally optimistic and positive.

  Benji Le Fevre puts the relationship in another perspective. “Robert was the Leo extrovert, fantastic front man, and Jimmy was the fucked-up great, great guitar player, neither of whom associated with each other. It was a carbon copy of the Rolling Stones.”

  The vacation in Dominica gave them a chance to reconnect. They checked out a lot of island music together, intermingling with the local Rastafarians, smoking ganja, and “eating hallucinatory boiled jellyfruit.” More important, they discussed taking time off after the tour to travel, to broaden their musical horizons. They’d gone to India together in 1971 and returned the next year to record with the Bombay Symphony Orchestra, but there was so much more to learn about international music. William Burroughs had intrigued Jimmy with his knowledge of the relationship between music and magic. He felt the “hypnotic power” created by Led Zeppelin in concert had “quite a lot in common with Moroccan trance music.”

  “He then encouraged me to go to Morocco and investigate the music firsthand,” Jimmy explained. Burroughs was especially eager for him to tap into the Gnaoua and Joujouka musicians, who “think of music entirely in magical terms.”

  “I think it’s time to travel,” Jimmy said, “to start gathering some real right-in-there experiences with street musicians around the world.”

  Robert was all ears. He had his heart set on Morocco as well, and they made plans to head there—together—right after the tour ended, later that summer.

  * * *

  • • •

  After eighteen months of continuous work, Physical Graffiti finally got its release on February 24, 1975, three days before Led Zeppelin reconvened in Texas for the next leg of the tour. To call the album a sensation would be an understatement. There were advance orders totaling $15 million, deejays played it endlessly, the buzz was enormous. “I never saw an album sell as much as Graffiti,” Danny Marcus said. “You’d go to stores, and there were lines, and everybody was waiting to buy the same record. A double album—it was worth the long wait.

  Reviews were somewhat mixed. The British rock press dispensed with critical objectivity. Melody Maker described the album as “pure genius” and NME’s resident fanboy called the music “absolutely the toughest, most downright brutal I’ve heard on record in well over a year.” The besotted Let It Rock compared Physical Graffiti to the magnificence of Blonde on Blonde, Beggars Banquet, and Revolver. American critics were somewhat more reserved. Creem considered the album “better than the other five offerings . . . more confident, more arrogant, and more consistent,” but felt songs like “Kashmir” could be “trimmed,” while “Trampled Under Foot” was “rescued from mediocrity by the elaborate punctuation of Page’s guitar.” And, of course, Jim Miller’s Rolling Stone review got in a few trademark punches. “Taken as a whole, [Physical Graffiti] offers an astonishing variety of music,” it conceded, and while “it contains no startling breakthroughs, it does afford an impressive overview of the band’s skill.” That said, Robert was dismissed as “a singer of limited range and feeling” who succumbed to Jimmy’s “preoccupation with sound.”

  Stone was cautiously straddling the fence. The magazine had persisted in bad-mouthing Led Zeppelin since their formation. No reviewers were as contemptuous or disapproving. But Jann Wenner, Stone’s demanding publisher, had been chasing the band for a cover story, which Jimmy, up until now, had vehemently opposed. He couldn’t forgive the magazine’s litany of demeaning comments directed at him and his bandmates over the years. Given the opportunity, he could probably recite the bad reviews verbatim.

  Wenner refused to take no for an answer and had finally found an antidote to Jimmy’s resistance. Stone proposed assigning the article to a seventeen-year-old writer who had caught Led Zeppelin’s gimlet eye. Cameron Crowe was talented, and he was a fan. He wrote favorably and incisively about the hard-rock bands the magazine’s older editors detested. Jimmy had read some of Crowe’s pieces in Creem and Circus and had agreed to let him dog the band on tour. As it turned out, “he really smoothed out the relationship between Rolling Stone and Led Zeppelin,” according to Tony Mandich, Atlantic’s West Coast artist relations exec. But Jimmy refused to go quietly into Rolling Stone’s poison pages. For the cover’s photo shoot at New York’s Plaza Hotel, he turned up two hours late, clutching several dozen dead roses. The gesture, indicative of Jimmy Page, bore its own magic. When the photographer’s negatives were developed, Led Zeppelin’s dark, ghostly images were unusable.

  The band may have come back rested from the ten-day layoff, but the performances continued to be uneven and to mystify. The headline in the Houston Chronicle, long a champion of Led Zeppelin, asked: who would have thought? zeppelin show was boring. “After a couple of songs,” the article reported, “the band fell into a tired rut just when it should have been hitting the groove.” They fared no better in Baton Rouge the following night. Both the local paper and the university press used the same word to describe the show: “uninspiring.”

  The shows in Dallas, on March 4 and 5, were also flat, by which time the audience sent the band a message. Only a smattering of applause rippled through the arena. Robert seemed disturbed by the crowd’s listless reaction.

  “Dallas? Come in? Are you receiving us?” he chided.

  It usually fell to Jimmy to regain the momentum. An extended guitar solo by a true master of the art had the potential to wire the house for electricity. His playing was usually a show in itself. But Jimmy couldn’t get a rise out of the crowd. “Come on!” Robert pleaded. “Why don’t you all . . . wake up!”

  Even John Bonham’s half-hour “Moby Dick” solo, a regular crowd-pleaser, failed to do the trick. Bonzo was veering off the rails. His prodigious drinking competed for honors with his drug taking, which had increased. During performances, he positioned a baggie of cocaine between his legs, “reaching in and rubbing handfuls of the drug into his mouth and nostrils as he played.” Danny Marcus, Atlantic’s artist relations man who was traveling with the band, says, “How he played was how they played. If he was off, they were off.”

  Bonzo’s excess wasn’t limited to stimulants. He collected cars the way people collected stamps, from Model Ts to Rolls-Royces, whatever struck his fancy. By Richard Cole’s count, he’d purchased twenty-eight cars in the first year and a half after joining Led Zeppelin. Between the shows in Dallas, he had spotted a 1959 red Corvette parked just outside the hotel. As classic cars go, the ’Vette was a beauty, and Bonzo couldn’t get it out of his head. He had been assigned a babysitter during the day to keep him out of trouble—Jack Kelly, one of the security detail, an ex–FBI agent who, during the sixties, had “spied on radicals from the Bureau’s Boston office.” Together they cruised around the city taking in the sights, but talk always came back to the ’59 ’Vette. Bonzo had to have it, and he instructed Kelly to find the owner and detain him, even having the person arrested if that’s what it took.

  Bonzo knew the security guys routinely flashed their credentials in extralegal situations. Often, ex-cops who worked the concerts for the band took weed away from kids in the audience and split it up among the musicians and crew. In this case, Jack Kelly used his influence to run the plates on the Corvette so he could track down the owner for Bonzo.

  The Corvette wasn’t for sale. But when Bonzo offered $18,000 in cash for a car worth about half the price, it was a done deal. Never mind that Bonzo’s British license had been revoked and he wasn’t permitted to drive in the States. The car was his. He hired someone willing to drive it to Los Angeles, where it was garaged at the Riot House, awaiting his arrival five days later.

  [3]

  Everyone was looking forward to Los Angeles, their home away from home, where Led Zeppelin blended into the quotidian circus. The bustling club scene was their milieu. No one batted an eye at the outrageous behavior. Drugs were plentiful and easily obtained, music flowed in the collective bloodstream, and the border between fantasy and reality was semipermeable.

  On March 9, 1975, Led Zeppelin and an entourage of handlers, functionaries, groupies, journalists, drug dealers, and assorted hangers-on moved into their maximum-security lair, the eighth, ninth, and eleventh floors of the Continental Hyatt House, all except for Robert Plant, who opted for more discreet accommodations with a girlfriend in Malibu Canyon. Jimmy Page and Peter Grant claimed two suites apiece—one for which they officially registered, the other a hideaway where they slept to avoid Bonzo’s nocturnal rampages. A number of other suites remained empty and available, according to Richard Cole, in order to swap out “girls we had rounded up on any given night.”

  Jimmy’s situation resembled a door-slamming bedroom farce. He entertained Krissy Wood, Ronnie Wood’s footloose wife, in one suite; Lori Mattix was stashed in a room on a lower floor, with Bebe Buell likely to arrive at any time. Jim Osterberg—Iggy Pop—was another frequent visitor, owing to his access to heroin.

  As far as drugs went, the tour now traveled with its own resident doctor, a character named Larry Badgley, who wrote scrips as requested. Danny Marcus, the self-described “enabler,” never failed to produce excellent dope. And at Jimmy’s behest, Grant invited a neighbor of his, Dave Northover, to pose as John Paul’s assistant. “I had once been a physicist,” Northover explained, but when G introduced him to the guys in the band, they heard pharmacist instead of physicist. “Jimmy’s ears pricked up, and he said, ‘Bring him along!’ ”

  “The amount of drugs was just insane,” says Benji Le Fevre. “Because of it, the tour was like the beginning of a nightmare. Everyone was involved in it—the band, G, Ricardo. No one was in control. It was its own entity, slowly going off the rails.”

  Even simple travel plans flirted with catastrophe. For Led Zeppelin’s first West Coast gig, on March 10 in San Diego, the trip took on a nightmarish subplot. Richard Cole organized a convoy of six limos leaving from in front of the Hyatt, with a beggarly cast of groupies competing for precious seats. Instead of driving two hours south on Interstate 5, a sensible choice, Ricardo decided to put the Starship into service, despite the threat of a severe weather pattern circling the Southland. Sure enough, a thunderstorm struck as soon as they were in the air. Lightning flashed along the wings, and turbulence bucked the plane around the sky during the entire trip. Pleas to the deity were not uncommon. The twenty-minute white-knuckle flight dragged on like an eternity. Even the landing produced a few errant shrieks.

  The last thing Led Zeppelin felt like doing after that was playing music. There were too many frayed nerves. It fell to Peter Grant to lift their spirits. Before the lights went down in the San diego Sports Arena, he marched the band into a washroom for a few lines of blow. As soon as the first chords of “Rock and Roll” were struck, they fell right into the groove.

  Jimmy attempted to describe the transformation. “It’s like a trance state, you don’t think,” he explained. “It’s just like, you almost have to cleanse yourself of all thought and everything, and then you start playing and it starts to jell with everybody else.” There was nothing magical about the process. It was comparable with how jazz combos performed, with loose arrangements that depended on synchronicity and intuition. But it happened only with a group operating on the same wavelength. “There’s so much improvisation that goes on and so many times where you’ll be playing something and the staccato rhythms will just fit, in total synchronization. . . . You’d look at each other and wink and know that it was never going to come again, but there it was.”