Jimmy acknowledged the divergent opinions. “It’s not an easy album for a lot of people to access,” he said, reflecting on it some time later. He was convinced, however, “the urgency of it is there if you listen.”

  In any case, there would be no tour to support Presence. Live performances were pushed back to 1977 at the earliest.

  Travel might have been severely curtailed, but there was optimism for heading back to England. The tax exile was due to expire in May, at which time life could return to normal, with opportunity for the members of the Led Zeppelin entourage to reconnect with their families. It was long overdue.

  [3]

  Peter Grant especially needed to repair his relationship at home. He not only had been exiled for tax reasons but was completely off the grid, holing up in a house in the Hamptons on Long Island with a rotating cast of nefarious characters and an endless stash of cocaine. He could have brought his family along but chose not to. For years, G had called home every night to touch base with his wife, Glo, and their two kids. But the calls had stopped. He’d made himself unreachable.

  “Glo called the office day and night trying to reach him,” says Unity MacLean. “She had things to discuss about Helen and Warren, but Peter had forgotten all about his family. He was living the high life in America and had more or less written them off.”

  Gloria Grant wasn’t naive. She’d been a rock ’n roll wife for nearly twenty years; she been through the wars with Don Arden and Mickie Most. Led Zeppelin, as far as she cared, was just another theater of battle. She’d gone along to get along, but she’d never had to cope with drugs before. Cocaine had a firm grip on her husband, and its power was devastating the family.

  Maggie Bell recalled a holiday Peter and Gloria had planned, taking the kids away for some time in the country. “Gloria and the kids sat at the Hilton at the airport for two weeks,” she said. “Peter never showed up.”

  Gloria was isolated at Horselunges, raising the kids on her own. They’d worked through long separations before, but the radio silence was inexcusable. She suspected—knew—it was more than drugs. There was another woman, she was sure of it. Mickie Most’s wife, Chris, recalls a conversation with Gloria after Led Zeppelin’s last tour in the United States. “She used to do all of Peter’s mail and opened a letter from Peter’s girlfriend. It was all right there on the page.” Drugs was one thing, and yes, Glo suspected there were other women on the road, but it had never been put in her face like that. “She was heartbroken,” Chris Most says, “and indignant.” Gloria Grant had had it.

  Peter got wind of the situation and attempted to deal with the consequences, but it was difficult from three thousand miles away. He was also up to his eyeballs in arrangements concerning the Led Zeppelin movie. After two years, two directors, and several hundred thousand dollars invested into the scheme, an end was finally in sight.

  The last few months of production had hit a number of snags. Cocaine paranoia led G to suspect that the director, Peter Clifton, had a hidden agenda—that perhaps he was working on another film at their expense. Or that he’d stolen the negatives and was bootlegging them. As a precaution, Peter sent Richard Cole and a security thug to search Clifton’s hotel room, which led to an ugly scene. A month later, Richard Cole and Joan Hudson showed up at Clifton’s home in London while he was away on holiday, armed with a court order allowing them to search for and remove anything with Led Zeppelin’s name on it.

  “It was absolute drug paranoia,” Clifton said. “I felt humiliated. I felt they had betrayed my trust.”

  Despite the shenanigans, he delivered a work print of the movie while Jimmy and Peter were in New York. The intention was to sell it to Warner Bros. for distribution, but before that could happen Ahmet Ertegun had to sign off on the deal. Clifton arranged a midnight screening at the MGM Screening Room on West Fifty-fifth Street. Ahmet arrived straight from a party—and fell asleep several times during the movie. It was long, almost two and a half hours long. He woke up at the end, blinked a few times, and asked Peter, “Who was that guy on the horse?” G was so insulted, he got up and, without another word, stormed out of the theater.

  Ahmet, bewildered, appealed to Clifton for an explanation. “What have I said?” he wondered.

  “Ahmet, that was Robert on the horse,” he was told.

  “Oh, gee, well I nodded off.”

  Ahmet and Clifton tried to catch up with Peter, but he was a few blocks ahead of them, on his way to the Plaza Hotel. It was three o’clock in the morning, and the city streets were empty. All three men scuttled along the pavement with a convoy of limousines and their chauffeurs following comically behind.

  They eventually caught up with Peter at the hotel, and he was in tears. “How could you say that?” he whimpered to Ahmet. “We worked so hard on this thing.”

  His emotions were fragile; he was losing his grip, his professional composure.

  Nevertheless, Ertegun promptly signed off on the film. All that remained to get it released and recoup expenses—money borrowed from National Westminster Bank on personal guarantees by the band—was negotiating a deal with Warner Bros. It was a foregone conclusion they’d distribute the movie, which was now entitled The Song Remains the Same. Led Zeppelin had a huge impact on the parent company’s bottom line; structuring a deal was merely a formality.

  In early February 1976, a meeting with Warner Bros. executives was arranged at the studio in Los Angeles with Frank Wells, the company president, his éminence grise David Geffen, and the entire senior management. It was a daylong event to iron out the terms of the deal, refine technicalities like twenty-four-track quadraphonic sound and color correction of the prints, and plot an advertising strategy for the movie’s eventual release. At eleven o’clock in the morning, the scheduled hour to begin, there was no sign of Peter Grant.

  “Where is he?” Wells demanded.

  Peter Clifton was beside himself. He called the Swan Song office and was told Grant was still in London, sorting out a problem with his wife. In his place, they were sending Richard Cole and Benji Le Fevre.

  Wells and Geffen were furious. Grant’s input was central to the deal. It didn’t help matters when Ricardo barreled in—“coked out . . . completely off his face,” according to Clifton—juggling several bottles of liquor. No one was amused by his foul mouth and a litany of uninformed suggestions on how Warner Bros. should handle the release. Were it not for Led Zeppelin’s stature, any self-respecting movie executive would have scuttled the deal there and then.

  This was the kind of meeting that Peter Grant normally relished. He enjoyed taking on the suits, knowing how his swagger unsettled them. It never failed to turn things to his advantage. But a few days before he was due in LA, G had gotten a taste of his own medicine. Gloria had caught him flat-footed, announcing that she was leaving him. There was more to it than that. She was going to live with their estate manager, Jim Thompsett, with whom she’d been having an affair.

  Peter became incensed, erratic. He had no template for how to deal with this situation. It lay outside his mighty authority, which was being challenged and muddied by drugs. Well, he still had his crew. A team of no-nonsense sidekicks was called in to commiserate at Horselunges, where G had repaired with a stockpile of cocaine. He kept a hard crew around him at all times, men who were fearless and radiated menace. A dolorous character named Ray Washburn became G’s right-hand man, and five people interviewed for this book used the same exact phrase to describe him: “He was quiet, but you didn’t fuck with Ray.” Don Murfet, who handled security, was described as “polite, always a gentleman, but,” as Unity MacLean recalls, “I was told he could snap your neck with one hand.” There was plenty of tough talk, drug-fueled tirades about payback and revenge. “There were all these bad vibes,” recalled Dave Northover, another member of G’s inner circle, “people talking about how Peter was going to get this bloke, Jim.”

  Richard Cole admitted to driving to Horselunges with “a shotgun and a few other guns locked in the trunk of the car, while [Peter] decided what he wanted me to do with this guy.”

  Johnny Bindon was frequently on the scene with G, which was a sign to others that things had gone off the rails.

  “Now, he was a very scary person to be around,” Jimmy Page said. Bindon’s presence, he knew, “was a recipe for disaster.”

  To polite company, John Bindon was known as a part-time actor who’d appeared in minor TV and film supporting roles, usually typecast as a thug. But his main line of trade was muscle—threatening people, intimidation, meting out physical punishment. “He was a dangerous character, part of a family that terrorized people in Fulham,” says Carole Brown, “a nasty piece of work.” He’d done jobs for the Krays and other East End villains. “We all knew to keep our distance,” Maggie Bell says. “He was scary, always showing his cock.”

  His cock—it was an object of intense fascination. “Johnny Bindon had the biggest cock in rock ’n roll,” says Michael Des Barres. “He would wave it around and slap people with it.” Princess Margaret, with whom he’d reportedly had an affair, told friends that Bindon was “able to balance three big ale glasses on his cock.” Cynthia Sach, who worked as a receptionist at Swan Song, recalled, “He’d wave it around and hang beer mugs off it.”

  People extolled John Bindon’s sense of humor, his gift of gab, his apparent charm in quieter, offhand moments, but he was a psychopath—“beyond scary,” Abe Hoch notes. “You watched your Ps and Qs around the guy because there was a level of insanity about him. Ricardo was as nuts as you could get, but Johnny made him look positively stable.”

  His girlfriend, model Vicki Hodge, became part of the office decor, faithfully perched on Bindon’s lap, the way Edgar Bergen perched Charlie McCarthy on his lap. Hodge was a familiar face in London’s society circles, the former girlfriend of Prince Andrew and daughter of Sir John Rowland Hodge, the Second Baronet of Chipstead, Kent. People recalled her penchant for wearing leather miniskirts with no underwear. “She and Johnny spent a lot of time getting pissed at the Water Rat, the pub up the street from the office,” says Phil Carlo. “Occasionally, to entertain Bindon, she would step into the middle of King’s Road, lift her skirt up, and moon people.” On other occasions, Bindon would rip away the snaps on her skirt and she would twist about and coo, mock-modestly, like Betty Boop.

  Bindon became a fixture at the Swan Song office in London. He never left Peter Grant’s side, and Richard tended to them with a steady stream of drugs. “There were now a ton of drugs in the office,” says Unity MacLean. “Peter was snorting an awful lot of cocaine. He kept it in a sandwich baggie. He’d take his door key and shove it in the bag. All the rocks would fall out as he brought it up to his nose. When he left, you could get yourself a good gram of cocaine off the desk or carpet.”

  From time to time, Bindon brought a girl back to the office from the pub so that Peter could watch their activity through the keyhole.

  Not much music business was being done. “It wasn’t an office where anybody went in at ten a.m.,” said Phil Carlo. “It was waifs and strays and heroin dealers and odd people, a bit like the American tours but a scaled-down version.”

  Other than Bad Company, which had an independent management team looking after them, the other Swan Song acts were basically ignored. “Jimmy never got off his ass to do anything for the Pretty Things,” says Unity MacLean. “And when they came into the office to plan their next move, Peter went down the back stairs, making himself scarce.”

  Maggie Bell had a single, “For Hazel,” being released but couldn’t get Peter to pay attention. “He had absolutely no time for me,” she says. “I took a back seat right about then because I could see the wheels coming off the bus.”

  As far as Detective cared, the bus had already departed—without them. “One year later, we had nothing going on,” says Michael Des Barres. “We hadn’t played, we didn’t gig, we didn’t do shit. We waited.” Jimmy had lost interest in producing Detective’s album. “Then it was, ‘Okay, we’ll have Steve Marriott produce you.’ Another six months went by waiting for him. We couldn’t get hold of Jimmy, or anybody at Swan Song for that matter. We’d been handcuffed. The only thing that happened in that year and a half while we waited was heroin. So we waited and waited, getting more fucked up.”

  A producer, Jimmy Robinson, was finally dredged up for Detective. “We went into the Record Plant to record and spent more time in the fucking Jacuzzi,” says Des Barres. “It took us three months to get a snare-drum sound. It was so indulgent. The sessions cost a million dollars. Then we scrapped what we’d done and did it again. Because we could.”

  Dave Edmunds fared only somewhat better. He made a good album that got nary a whiff of label support but was given the go-ahead to return to the studio for a follow-up. According to his manager, Jake Riviera, “Dave knew he was trapped in that thing, but he loved Robert Plant telling him how fantastic he was.”

  “There was nobody really running the record company at all,” says Unity MacLean. “Jimmy used to come into the office regularly when we started up, but since they returned [from tax exile], he didn’t want anything to do with running Swan Song—and frankly he was too out of it.”

  Danny Goldberg was a capable administrator, but he got sidetracked promoting a singer-songwriter discovery named Mirabai who, like Danny, was an advocate of Eastern religions and vegetarianism. “I was besotted with her spiritual songs,” he admitted. Shelley Kaye, who worked for Swan Song in New York, says, “She was terrible. Nobody thought she was talented.” But Danny sweet-talked Peter Grant into signing Mirabai and put out an album that was DOA. Finally an ultimatum was delivered. Danny could manage Mirabai or work for Swan Song, but not both. To everyone’s amazement, he quit his job.

  Around the same time, Abe Hoch sent word to Peter that he intended to resign. “I’m not happy,” he said. “I’m not doing anything, not signing any act, not having any fun. Nothing’s going on. It’s time for me to go.” Before accepting Hoch’s resignation, Peter asked him to meet and discuss it.

  A few days later, Abe was ushered into Peter’s office on the second floor of the King’s Road building. “So you want to resign?” G asked, smirking. He reached into his briefcase and took out a pound of cocaine, made a slit in the little bag, and said, “Let’s talk.”

  “That was on a Tuesday,” Abe recalls. “Thursday, when we finished talking, I was completely out of my head. We talked, we cried. He told me all about his life; I told him about mine. It was cocaine talk, fucking ridiculous—and I agreed to stay on the job.”

  But not long afterward, when Hoch acknowledges he was “a basket case, having done too much coke and run through my money,” G announced that he’d decided to accept Abe’s resignation. There’d be no grace period to get his house in order, no severance package. They cut him loose the same day.

  It was a rocky period for Swan Song—and Led Zeppelin. Presence had sold decently—three million albums was nothing to sneeze at—but not as well as the band’s previous six albums. It was regarded by fans as an unsatisfying record, difficult to embrace, as Jimmy had pointed out. And the movie, while nearing release, was hardly anyone’s idea of first-rate cinema. As a documentary, it was far from representative of the band. There was so little music, the concert footage barely adequate.

  In the interim, Led Zeppelin had gone their separate ways. There was little communication between the musicians. “There was no hanging out. They weren’t really friends,” says Abe Hoch, a sentiment joined by at least a half dozen others. Jimmy was mixed up in an ugly and very public war of words with Kenneth Anger over the soundtrack for Lucifer Rising. Robert continued to nurse his wounds with faint progress toward total recovery. Bonzo and his family returned to France, where he pulled a gas blowback gun on his roadie, Mick Hinton, at a Monte Carlo nightclub and spent a night in police custody. And Jonesy disappeared into the refuge of his family, putting the trail of chaos and mayhem behind him.

  There was no Led Zeppelin for the time being.

  Chapter Nineteen

  THEIR OWN PRIVATE SODOM AND GOMORRAH

  [1]

  While Led Zeppelin veered off the radar in mid-1976, a new wave of young British musicians seized the opportunity to claim their piece of the rock. Just as the Yardbirds, The Who, and the Stones had apprenticed in makeshift clubs tucked away in places like Epsom, Richmond, and Ealing, the new scene shifted to provincial pubs, where ragged, garage-type bands lacking finesse—in fact, scoffing at finesse—showcased their songs out of the glare of music-business slicks.

  Pubs had long been a wellspring of local up-and-coming bands. “It was the social meeting point of every town in England and offered good paying gigs,” says Terry Reid, who began his career years earlier working the UK pub circuit. “They had enormous rooms called saloons that held two to three hundred people. You could develop quite a reputation playing those joints.”

  Reid maintains that playing pubs gave a band discipline, but discipline was the last thing on the minds of these new groups. They were ungovernable, unrestrained—punks. Their music wasn’t Top 40 bound. It was loud and aggressive in the best rock ’n roll tradition, down-and-dirty but also anarchic, confrontational, not superannuated hippie idealism, certainly not heavy metal, with its “endless solos that went nowhere” and reverence for virtuosity.

  Dr. Feelgood, the Stranglers, the Vibrators, and the 101ers, led by Joe Strummer, were among the bands on the pub-rock circuit making a name for themselves in 1976. They took their cues from stripped-down forebears like the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, and the New York Dolls, but also the pandemonium ignited onstage by The Who, reducing the music to its lowest common denominator. Consider “You Really Got Me,” the Kinks’ blowtorch of a single, sped up a few rpm, and you hear the bones of the punk-rock movement. Primal, hardcore, no-bullshit rock ’n roll: a couple chords at most, no more than a whiff of an arrangement, lightning-fast tempos, and attitude, plenty of attitude. Punks, they often provoked their audiences into physical confrontations. They traded in shock and outrage. Mainstream rock had become too tame. The punks had only contempt for their elders: Billy Joel, Simon & Garfunkel, Elton John, Chicago—nothing but slick lounge acts. Metal bands like Led Zeppelin—dinosaurs, a joke.