Even so, they were keen to clear out of Munich. Everyone was chilled to the bone. The weather in Jersey wouldn’t be much of an improvement, but their accommodations there were a giant step up.

  The band and their associates cleared out quickly, all except for Abe Hoch. “Peter had called and said, ‘We want you to take the tapes back to London for us,’ ” Hoch recalls. The responsibility intimidated him, but he figured: two sixteen-track magnetic tapes—he’d just put them under his arm and get on the plane. Peter assured him they’d have everything all wrapped up for travel. The next morning, there were seventy kilos of tapes in a footlocker waiting for departure.

  On Hoch’s way back to London, somewhere over Bonn, the pilot announced a minor complication with the plane’s mechanics. “Everything is okay, but we’re going to land,” he said.

  This unnerved Abe, a concentration-camp kid. “I was afraid to be in the country in the first place. As far as I was concerned, nothing good ever happened in Germany.”

  Trouble came a-courting when the plane landed in Bonn and taxied toward the terminal. The pilot announced: “There’s another flight to London waiting to take off. We’ll just move the luggage to the other aircraft.”

  Move the luggage!

  Abe practically tackled the flight attendant coming down the aisle. “I need to see my luggage moved,” he stated emphatically.

  “No, that’s impossible,” he was told. “We’ll move the luggage.”

  “I’m sorry, but I have to physically see it put on the other plane. I have valuables on board.”

  “Sir,” the male attendant said, with mounting impatience, “everybody’s luggage is valuable.”

  “Not like mine, it isn’t,” Abe said. “Mine is very valuable. It’s worth millions of dollars.”

  That caught the flight attendant’s attention. “Oh, go on! What kind of luggage do you have worth millions of dollars?”

  “It’s the new Led Zeppelin record.”

  “Led Zeppelin! I love Led Zeppelin!” The man’s eyes lit up. “Can I have one?”

  “Not the album,” Abe said. “It’s the tapes. I have the tapes of the new Led Zeppelin album. So let’s go and watch them move the luggage. Okay?”

  As Hoch recalls, “Here is this blond, Aryan German guy walking me onto the tarmac in Bonn. I have no identification, an earring in my ear, a ratty jean jacket on, and I look a mess. A Jewish mess. All of a sudden, lights go on and machine guns are trained at me and Germans are screaming ‘Halt!’ My hands are in the air. It was my worst possible nightmare.”

  Without batting an eye, the flight attendant screamed, “It’s okay! He has the new Led Zeppelin album!”

  “He’d said the fucking password,” Abe recalls. “They dropped their guns and came running over, because they couldn’t believe I had the new Led Zeppelin album. And that’s how the album got from Germany to London.”

  [2]

  Recording was a satisfying experience, but Led Zeppelin sorely missed the stage. It was frustrating being a band and not doing what a band does best. Performing was another kind of drug, and a powerful one. On a good night, the high one got from connecting with mates and making music—the surge of sound, the chemistry, and the audience response—delivered an enormous rush.

  Jonesy and Bonzo needed that kind of fix. They’d located a club in St. Helier on the island of Jersey where Norman Hale, a local rock ’n roll pianist of some ability, jammed with a pickup band on Wednesday nights. Behan’s West Park wasn’t much to look at. It was a sleepy little joint in the best English dance-hall tradition, with a makeshift stage, but it gave Jonesy and Bonzo the opportunity to stretch out. An honest-to-goodness gig: forty-five minutes playing rock ’n roll classics. It was liberating! They were invited to return the next week and mentioned they’d be bringing along a few friends.

  Robert wasn’t so sure he would make it. “Look,” he told Bonzo, “I can’t even walk for God’s sake. Don’t embarrass me. I can’t hobble across the dance hall and go on to the stage.”

  Bonzo assured him the logistics would make things effortless. They could enter through a side door and then up the back steps. “Come on, man,” he said encouragingly. “Let’s plan on going.”

  Robert was dubious, but he felt the old tingle. “You see the possibility of performing and who can avoid it,” he said.

  On December 10, 1975, Led Zeppelin appeared in front of an audience for the first time since the Earls Court shows the previous May. It was a minuscule crowd by the band’s standards, about 350 people, not one of whom had to clamor for a ticket. “No one really knew who we were,” Robert said. As far as anyone knew, the band was another ragtag ensemble of Norman Hale’s, perhaps a little on the longhair side, but nothing that would attract undue attention.

  Unable to stand, Robert plunked down on a stool wedged inconspicuously between the piano and the drums, with Jimmy out front, a pale-blue Strat slung across his hips in typical rock-god fashion. Even so, no one batted an eye through the warm-up—fifteen minutes of Eddie Cochran and Little Richard songs. Things were nice and loose, everyone hanging together.

  “I felt myself edge forward a little bit,” Robert recalled. “Then, after the third number, and this is no lie, I found myself sort of wiggling the stool past the drums and further on out. And once we got going, we didn’t want to stop.” Especially when they eased into a long blues number, with each man stepping out for an overdue solo. “Suddenly, all the stops and dynamics we subconsciously activate on stage came out.” They were content to play—all night if allowed, but after the club’s standard forty-five minute set, the manager flashed the lights on and off. “Get them offstage now—they’ve done enough!”

  Afterward, they celebrated like an untested band that had just pulled off its first big gig. Playing together had felt great. Better than great. The circumstances were ideal—a little out-of-the-way club, an unsuspecting audience, no promoter, no demands, no groupies, no hairy getaway. No “Whole Lotta Love” or “Stairway to Heaven.” What a throwback to the days when they could relate to an audience and just groove on each other and the music they made. It produced an extraordinary high, but nothing they could get used to.

  It would be another eighteen months before Led Zeppelin appeared together on a stage again.

  * * *

  —

  The band celebrated the New Year in Paris, at the posh George V, where Robert endeavored to walk for the first time. “It was one small step for man,” he mused, “and one giant leap for six nights at Madison Square Garden.”

  That was getting ahead of himself. Robert was in no condition to endure a tour, much less walk from here to there. As a precaution, so as not to tempt him, nothing was scheduled through 1976. Paris was a distraction—the first of many—to take the band’s minds off performing. The first night there, their indefatigable host, Benoit “Frenchy” Gautier—the record exec who had nicknamed Bonzo “the Beast”—took everyone to a show at the Casino de Paris: Señor Wences, the Spanish ventriloquist, headlined, along with a chorus line of stark-naked female dancers.

  Peter Grant wrested the hosting duties from Gautier, dispensing foot-long lines of cocaine in the bathroom stall between acts. Motioning to Abe Hoch, who had joined the festivities, he said, “Do me a favor. We’re expecting an important call. Go back to the hotel and handle it for me.”

  No sooner was Hoch settled back at the George V than a visitor appeared at the door to his suite—a stunning redhead who announced, “I’m a gift from Mr. Grant. And my girlfriend is on her way up.”

  Girlfriend! Abe was beside himself with pleasure. “The girls and I were just about to get things under way,” he recalled, “when the door to the suite burst open—Robert, Peter, Richard, and a cop from Zeppelin’s security detail, all wearing gendarme hats and flashing badges, rushed in and surrounded us.” Abe futilely tried explaining to the naked women who these men really were, but they were having none of it. They got dressed and stormed out, only to return a few minutes later.

  “You forgot to pay me,” the redhead said. Abe reminded her that she was a gift from Mr. Grant. “Yes, but he did not pay me.”

  From Paris, the road show moved to New York, where the entourage moved into suites at the Park Lane Hotel on Central Park South. It was an opportunity to reconnect with old friends and new. Bad Company was in town, as was Maggie Bell, who was encamped next door in the Essex House. Her career was in a tailspin, and Peter had flown in to offer encouragement.

  “Rudolf Nureyev was in the room next to me, and Dorothy Tutin, a great English actress, just across the hall,” Maggie recalled. “There was a storm, and I had them over for a late New Year’s dinner. We were all snorting and watching it snow.”

  Jimmy, staying alone in a suite, had his own distinct problem with snowfall. Around three in the morning, he picked up the phone and dialed a room downstairs, which was shared by Dave Northover and Benji Le Fevre.

  “You’ve got to get up here right away!” Jimmy insisted. “I’ve had a disaster!”

  A few minutes later, the two men arrived to find Jimmy “quite agitated.” He was seated at a desk, holding a Parker fountain pen over a bottle of Quink ink, next to a big bottle of cocaine streaked with lines of blue.

  “Honestly, I was trying to refill my pen and emptied it into the wrong bottle. Please—you’ve got to be able to do something to save this.” He gazed beseechingly at Northover. “You’re a physicist! Can’t you separate the ink from the cocaine?”

  “We’ll take this away and see if we can do anything with it,” Benji said. “But we’ll just get you some more, man.”

  Instead, they left him with an ample supply of Quaalude and an invitation to go ice-skating in Central Park as soon as the Wollman Rink opened.

  “That’s exactly what we did,” Benji says. “We took ’ludes and the Charlie and went skating in the park. And for the next three days we all had blue snot running out of our noses.”

  Meanwhile, Bonzo was skating on thin ice at Radio City Music Hall, where he had gone to catch a Deep Purple concert. True to form, Bonzo was drunk and pushed his way onto the stage while the band was performing. Grabbing the mic, he announced, “Hi, I’m John Bonham from Led Zeppelin, and we’ve got a new album coming out soon—and it’s fucking great!” It took some effort to steer him into the wings, but not before he gave Deep Purple’s guitarist a shout-out: “And as far as Tommy Bolin is concerned, he can’t play for shit!”

  Bonzo, who consistently grappled with demons, had entered a new phase of dysfunction. “It was clear that he and Jimmy had gone on their own set of rails together,” says Benji Le Fevre. “Henry had taken them both away from who they had been and who they really were.”

  Jimmy’s embrace of the drug had turned him inward. Not self-reflective. He’d crawled inside himself, become even more distant than usual. But with Bonzo it had the opposite effect. He became even more unruly. There was another incident when he, Robert, Benji, and Aubrey Powell went to see Mott the Hoople. Bonzo stumbled onstage and insisted on playing the drums with Dale “Buffin” Griffin. “Buffin wanted no part of it and pushed him away,” Po recalled, “and a fistfight broke out. It was embarrassing.”

  Po was in New York on Led Zeppelin’s dime, working on the new album cover and artwork for the band’s film. Neither had a name as of yet, but they were getting close.

  The brain trust at Hipgnosis had put their heads together for an album cover concept while Led Zeppelin was still in Munich. They intended to create an image influenced by their infatuation with Dadaism. A noncover, they called it, reminiscent of the one they had done for Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, in which two businessmen shake hands, one of them on fire.

  “We began by asking the question: What is something that everybody needs, something they cannot do without?” Po recalled. “That led to a discussion about something that had to be held, like a talisman. Someone suggested a cat. ‘How about a party where everyone walks around stroking a black cat?’ Cats often act as placebos in terms of helping people emotionally, but they’re also a symbol of black magic, bad luck, and all those things that relate to blues, like the black-cat bone.”

  Storm Thorgerson said, “Not a cat, but a black object. A black obsessional object. Perhaps a battery charger, without which you couldn’t exist.”

  The original object was made out of black felt, and it was square. “It was quite sinister,” Po says. “We imagined everybody having to have one, and if you didn’t have one you would die.”

  Storm tied its mysterious quality directly to Led Zeppelin. “The band are a very powerful band, musically and socially,” he argued, “and the black object is a definite thing of power.”

  Po flew to Germany with a mock-up and presented it to Jimmy and Peter Grant. Jimmy took one look at it and said, “That’s it! That’s it! But . . . what is it?”

  “It’s a symbol of power,” Po said. “That’s all I can tell you.”

  Jimmy was sold. “I get it,” he said. “But it’s too formal. I’d like to put a twist on it.”

  Incorporating Jimmy’s suggestions, Hipgnosis redesigned the object, making it more phallic. An obelisk—Po suggested to Jimmy they title the album Obelisk. But Jimmy recalled an earlier conversation in which the album-cover designers explained how four people—four musicians—create an effect, a presence. That was it, as far as Jimmy cared. “I held out for Presence,” he said. “You think about more than just a symbol that way.”

  Robert agreed. He liked the ambiguity of the title and the mysterious black object. “I’m glad people are wondering what it means,” he said. “Everybody should work it out for themselves.”

  The cover photo featured a 1950s-era family staring at the object, with a photograph from the boat show at Earls Court stripped in behind them. The back cover featured a schoolgirl—Samantha Gates, an older version of the naked child on the cover of Houses of the Holy—with the object on the blackboard behind her.

  The album was slated for release in February 1976, but problems with printing the sleeve delayed it until the last day in March. Timing would be everything. Swan Song had big promotional plans that coupled split-second timing with enormous hype. Danny Goldberg and Abe Hoch had collaborated on a scheme to release the album at the exact same time worldwide, regardless of time zones or pleas by industry insiders. “Nobody would get it a minute earlier,” Hoch recalled. “The idea was to create so much excitement that it would appear at the number-one spot on the charts the week of its release. No album had done that before, except for Elton John’s Captain Fantastic LP, and the guys were upset that it had never happened for them.”

  Rock ’n roll’s key tastemakers had already been fired up with anticipation. A thousand plastic copies of the black object had been manufactured and sent to journalists and media dignitaries with no explanation provided. Originally, Peter Grant had planned to have them placed outside 10 Downing Street, Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, and the White House as a publicity stunt, but an incident involving Po and Hipgnosis forced him to cancel that approach.

  “I picked up the phone toward the end of March,” Po recalls, “and Peter was screaming furiously, ‘Fuck you, you fucking cunt! You fucking let the fucking picture of the fucking cover out. It was supposed to be a secret.’ ” He assured Grant he’d done nothing of the kind and that the cover image was under lock and key. “Yeah, well Melody Maker has a fucking picture of it.”

  That night, at three o’clock in the morning, Po was awakened by banging on his door. “In came Richard Cole and a gangster named John Bindon, and both were coked out of their minds,” Po says. There were more choruses of “You fucking cunt!” amid accusations that he’d leaked a photo of the object to the press. They roughed Po up pretty well, Bindon holding him against the wall while Ricardo tossed the apartment, oblivious to the fact that Po’s wife and child were asleep. Po showed them that the cover was locked securely in his safe, and it wasn’t until late the next day that they discovered that the culprit who had leaked it was an assistant at Atlantic Records. But by then, the black-object stunt had lost its allure and was scrapped.

  The sideshow antics were unnecessary. Presence was a new Led Zeppelin album, which was all the event the fans needed. The record, on the day of its release, was awarded gold status in the UK and platinum in the U.S. None of their previous albums had sold as fast or as well. The reviews in general were encouraging but reserved. Stephen Davis, writing in Rolling Stone, said the album “confirms the quartet’s status as heavy-metal champions of the known universe.” Still, he acknowledged “the results are mixed” but that “there is some fine rock on Presence.” Robert Christgau, in The Village Voice, graded Presence a B in his regular “Consumer Guide,” saying, “This is one of their better albums, but that’s only because it avoids the silly and offers at least one commanding cut, ‘Hots On for Nowhere.’ ”

  The British music papers were much more complimentary. Jonh Ingham experienced a divine revelation in Sounds. “This album is unadulterated rock ’n roll. It’s fantabulous,” he gushed, comparing it to Led Zeppelin’s first album for its musical diversity. “In terms of urgency and aggression and an all-out attack on rock ’n roll, this is Zeppelin’s best album yet.” New Musical Express called the album “solid, non-stop, copper-bottomed, guitar-bass-and-drums Led Zep rock ’n roll. No mellotrons, no acoustic guitars, no boogies-with-Stu, no hats-off-to-Harper, no funk or reggae piss-takes, just mercilessly methodical two-fisted pounding Led Zep for the entire duration.” And Chris Welch carried the band’s flag through fields of flattery in Melody Maker, as though his words would ward off a much-feared phone call from Peter Grant.