Steve Weiss had Jeff Hoffman waiting for them. Hoffman, “the charismatic, well-connected young fixer,” had negotiated Grant’s release from jail following the Drake Hotel robbery and disentangled Jimmy from the drug shakedown in LA. This was right up his alley. He arranged for bail. “My instructions were: ‘Get rid of the case. We’re never coming back to court.’ ”

  Hoffman had to explain that in criminal cases, unlike civil cases, one was required to appear in person in court; otherwise it was considered bail jumping, which in itself was a crime. In the meantime, they were free to go.

  Led Zeppelin and Peter Grant went in opposite directions. G, his son Warren, and John Bindon traveled to Long Island, where they met Phil Carson for a day’s sharking aboard Jerry Greenberg’s sport-fishing boat that was anchored in Montauk. John Paul Jones rented an RV and took his family on a brief holiday to Oregon. The rest of the band and crew flew to New Orleans in preparation for a July 30, 1977 show at the Superdome, practically a city unto itself. Everybody was stressed. Five days in New Orleans was the perfect place to recharge. It was a low-key place where you could get lost in a crowd. They arrived early, around six thirty in the morning, and checked into the Maison Dupuy, a favorite local hotel.

  It was still feasible, time-wise, to call London, so Robert checked in with his wife, Maureen. His son, Karac, was sick, he learned, “a mild stomach bug.” Then another call: the boy had contracted pneumonia, and Maureen was taking him to the doctor. A short time later, Robert learned Karac’s condition was worsening. His temperature had risen.

  On Long Island the next day, G’s fishing party enjoyed a deep-sea outing, pulling in an impressive share of small sharks. “We got back into the marina and were in high spirits,” recalls Jerry Greenberg. “There was an emergency phone call for Peter Grant.”

  Robert’s son was dead. He was five years old.

  “If you ever want a quick reminder of what’s going on in the real world,” Robert realized when the news had sunk in, “one minute you’re in New Orleans and the toast of the new world, and you get a phone call without any warning. He’d gone.”

  The car crash had already challenged Robert’s sense of his own invincibility. Karac’s death dealt Robert a blow against which he had no defenses.

  He had to get home to his family immediately. It was difficult arranging passage out of New Orleans. Caesars Chariot couldn’t fly; the plane was grounded, a mandatory rest period after its long haul from Oakland. Instead, a chartered flight was arranged to Newark with a British Airways connection overseas. Robert, Bonzo, Richard Cole, and Janine Safer made the trip.

  “Robert and I sat across from each other from New Orleans to Newark,” Safer recalls. “I had never witnessed human grief like that. Robert just stared into his hands. I don’t think he exchanged a word with anyone throughout the entire flight.”

  Only Bonzo accompanied Robert home to Jennings Farm in Kidderminster and stood by his side throughout a heartrending funeral. Neither John Paul, Jimmy, nor Peter Grant bothered to attend. Colonel Tom Parker sent a wreath in Elvis’s name.

  G claimed he was busy “trying to sort out the cancellations” for the rest of the tour—and every date for the foreseeable future. It was a vague sort of indeterminable task, not knowing when, or even if, Robert Plant would perform again. For the time being, the future of Led Zeppelin was in limbo. When Grant finished, he picked up the phone and placed a final call—to Bill Graham, of all people.

  “I hope you’re happy,” he snarled into the receiver. “Thanks to you, Robert Plant’s kid died today.”

  For Robert, the tragedy put into perspective his connection to his life’s work, his family, his mortality. As months passed, secluded at home with Maureen and their surviving child, eight-year-old Carmen, he would reflect on the shambles that Led Zeppelin had become, the cruelty, the heedlessness, the decline.

  “The 1977 tour ended because I lost my boy,” he acknowledged, “but it had also ended before [that]. It was just a mess. . . . Everybody was insular, developing their own worlds.”

  He questioned whether he would even again want a place in them.

  [2]

  The Led Zeppelin apparatus, formerly a beast of a machine, ground to a halt. For the rest of 1977 and 1978 the band was effectively disbanded. “Robert phoned me,” G recalled, “and I just said, ‘Let me know the situation when you’re ready.’ He obviously needed a break.”

  More than that. He wanted to be left alone. Steve Weiss felt compelled to put a spy in the house of Plant. He called Benji Le Fevre and said, “You’d better get on a plane. Robert needs you.”

  Benji found a man grappling with anger and guilt. “Mostly, Robert was angry at himself,” Le Fevre recalled. “Angry that he wasn’t there for his family. Angry that he’d gone on tour when everything with the band—and especially Jimmy—was so fucked up. Angry at his comrades-in-arms, who seemed to have deserted him. Angry at the doctor who had tragically misinterpreted Karac’s symptoms. Angry at life in general. He was full of self-recrimination. The whole nightmare that started in the Zeppelin machine had started to tip over and had become his own personal nightmare.”

  They spent many nights in the Queen’s Head pub in nearby Wolverley, downing pint after pint of beer, rehashing the tour, Karac’s death. It was all Benji could do to console Robert.

  Bonzo and Pat came often. They understood Robert’s pain, his Midlands psyche, and were able to put him at ease in their company. No matter how Robert had matured, no matter how worldly he’d become, he and Bonzo spoke the same language, inhabited the same skin. They’d known each other since they were sixteen. There was a lot of mileage on their friendship. Bonzo was a mensch in this time of need. “He was the only guy that actually hugged me, that helped me at all,” Robert said.

  But Bonzo had his own difficulties. In September 1977, while he was driving home from the Chequers pub in Cutnall Green in his Jensen Interceptor, speeding as usual, shitfaced as usual, his car spun off the road into a ditch and flung him sideways. He managed to disengage from the wreck and get himself home but discovered soon enough that he’d broken two ribs. His drinking continued to dominate him—and the drugs.

  “After Karac died, the drugs were in force,” says Sally Williams, Mick Hinton’s girlfriend at the time. Hinton, Bonzo’s factotum, was of little help when it came to cleaning up his act. “Mick was an alcoholic who spent everything he made in the pubs,” Williams says. “He and John were two birds of a feather.” Hinton was on call to Bonzo twenty-four hours a day. If Bonzo needed something from a store near his farm, something as trivial as a broom or a bar of soap—Mick would have to drive from London to Worcestershire—a two-and-a-half-hour trip—and pick it up for him. “Mick was always having to drive to Bonzo’s to take him cocaine. But after the ’77 tour, it was all about heroin.”

  Despite the drugs, Bonzo attempted to carry off a normal day-to-day existence, immersing himself in a family construction business, renovating old farmhouses near his home with a crew of friends. John Paul Jones chose a country-squire existence. “I had just got a farm in Sussex so I did a bit of farming and generally caught up with my family life,” he said. The grind and all that came with it had caught up with Jonesy. He felt the need to step off the Led Zeppelin treadmill. “We needed some breathing space.”

  Jimmy was of a similar mind. Mostly he remained incommunicado, listening to material in the vault for an unrealized live album. He fended off rumors that the band was breaking up or that he’d replace Keith Richards in the Rolling Stones following Keith’s arrest for heroin possession and trafficking in Canada. Apart from routine business matters, Jimmy felt little incentive to engage with his bandmates. He took Charlotte Martin and their daughter to Guadeloupe, as far off the beaten track as was humanly possible, in an effort to clean himself up.

  “It means about two weeks without heroin, but with plenty of white rum,” Jimmy told Richard Cole, who was invited to accompany them. Richard was in similar shape to Jimmy, nursing a habit that had all but devoured him. Going cold turkey was no easy proposition. Heroin, as a veteran user like Keith Richards knew, was “far more seductive than you think, because you can take it or leave it for a while, but every time you leave it, it gets a little harder.” Richards turned to booze as a reliable antidote. In Guadeloupe, Jimmy and Richard went on a two-week bender, with little regard for Charlotte, who had her own drinking problem. They managed to get clean—but only until returning home to England, where access to heroin was plentiful and uncomplicated.

  Richard spent his homecoming drinking at Horselunges with Peter Grant. For days on end, Grant had shut himself away in a bedroom, where he plotted strategy in his divorce case with Glo that would give him custody of the children, as well as the continuing legal fallout from the assault arrest in Oakland, California. To fortify himself, of course, G relied on cocaine. A cache of it was never far from reach.

  “Peter was in bad shape at that time,” recalls Bill Curbishley, who would later manage Robert Plant and Jimmy Page individually. “One of the consequences of cocaine addiction is that it creates fear—fear of running out of money.” In the throes of this anxiety, G and Steve Weiss made a deal with Ahmet Ertegun to sell Led Zeppelin’s record royalties and ownership of the masters to Atlantic and music publishing rights to Warner Chappell. “For their royalties,” Curbishley says, “they got a twenty-five-year annuity—£25,000 each per annum—which by today’s standards was a pittance.” It also meant that, for twenty-five years—a time during which they sold more albums than the Beatles—Led Zeppelin’s sales figures were unaccounted for to the band.

  “Peter was nonfunctioning,” says Shelley Kaye, who was administering Swan Song’s New York office for Steve Weiss. “Communication dried up between Steve and Peter. It was impossible to get in touch with him. No key business decisions were being made, so there wasn’t a way forward with anything. Steve worried about Led Zeppelin’s future a lot. They owed records. Would they live up to their contractual commitments? No one knew.”

  No one was minding the shop at Swan Song, as usual. Alan Callan, like Abe Hoch before him, had no authority to do anything. Maggie Bell was at the top of his list, but Steve Weiss told him, “Alan, we just can’t go there right now.”

  Maggie attempted to take things into her own hands. She went to Horselunges to discuss with Peter what to do next. “He was upstairs in his bed,” she recalls. “I sat there for four hours waiting for him. Joan Hudson, his accountant, was also there; she’d been sitting on a couch, waiting all night to see him.” Eventually, Maggie was ushered into the bedroom, where G was watching several movies simultaneously on a bank of overhead televisions. “He was not in good shape,” she recalls. “Peter’s PA asked me what I’d like for lunch. When the food arrived, Peter picked up one of the TV remote controls and bit into it, thinking it was a sandwich—and broke two of his front teeth. That’s when I started thinking, ‘I do not want to be involved in this anymore. I deserve better.’ ”

  So did Dave Edmunds, who was struggling to restart his career. “Jake Riviera, Dave’s manager, couldn’t get anywhere with Peter,” recalls Unity MacLean, who bore the brunt of Riviera’s venom. “Jake was a vicious guy, but it was understandable. Dave was being completely ignored by Peter. It would get so exasperating you’d want to scream.”

  “Get It, Dave’s album, wasn’t an expensive record to make,” Janine Safer says, “but we went in there and fought for it.” Ultimately, the powers that be decided Dave Edmunds wasn’t a priority. The same went for the Pretty Things and Detective. Silk Torpedo, the Pretty Things’ first Swan Song album, made a little money, but their follow-up, Savage Eye, flat-out bombed. And Detective was a total disaster. “Detective sucked!” Safer says. “They made a terrible record and they were a terrible band. They also had a big drug problem.”

  “That’s true,” Michael Des Barres agrees, “but we made a big, fat, bluesy, Faces-like album. We were rockin’, tight, and had great songs. We just got no feedback at all from Swan Song. In the end, I couldn’t get hold of Jimmy or Peter. There was nowhere to play, no promotion, nothing being done. The whole thing was so damn frustrating.”

  As long as Led Zeppelin remained vital, Atlantic considered the vanity label a necessary evil, even if it meant supporting its ancillary acts. Bad Company was an unexpected windfall—and something of a nightmare for Atlantic, which would have preferred to concentrate on its own roster of acts. A vanity label with two multiplatinum acts was a force to be reckoned with.

  It was in everyone’s interest to reunite Led Zeppelin. “I’ll admit it,” Phil Carson conceded, “nobody wanted to kill the golden goose.” But Robert Plant was of no mind to participate. “My mojo for life, for music, for everything just vanished,” he said.

  Peter Grant entertained a scheme to draw Robert out of his lethargy that might have worked, had fate not intervened. G had heard through the grapevine that Elvis Presley was mulling the prospect of his first-ever European tour. Led Zeppelin’s and Elvis’s shows were both promoted by Concerts West, and G used this connection to arrange a meeting with Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker. The idea was for Peter to produce the European gigs so that Elvis could be assured of access to painkillers—and knowing full well that Robert idolized Elvis. There was a chance Robert would have turned up to pay homage, maybe even reconnected with his mates, had Elvis not died suddenly on August 16, 1977, the victim of a drug overdose.

  Benji Le Fevre felt strongly at the time that Robert might never perform with Led Zeppelin again. “It was such a shocking period,” Benji recalls. “Robert still wasn’t thirty, and he was questioning the relevance of the band in his life.” Considering all that had transpired, there was no incentive to perpetuate the golden-god image, or “the god-head shit,” as Robert now referred to it.

  “I tried to pick myself up, and as I did so slowly, I realized my family was more important than the luxurious life I’d been living in Zeppelin,” he acknowledged. “I’d already lost my boy, and then you think, I really have to decide what to do. I applied to become a teacher in the Rudolf Steiner education system. I was accepted to go to teacher training college. I was really quite keen to just walk.’ ” Music remained an essential part of his life, but relegated to a back burner. “I tinkered on the village piano and grew so obese drinking beer that nobody knew who I was.”

  Eventually, he tired of carrying so much extra weight and began training at Molineux, the Wolverhampton Wolves’ football ground, running the stadium stairs to get his wind back. And on weekends, Robert and Benji played for the Queen’s Head Football Club, Robert a winger with a bum ankle and Benji in goal. In an effort to “re-focus the whole deal,” Robert also swore off drugs. “Addiction to powders was the worst way to see yourself,” he said, “a waste of your time and everybody’s time.” It was a baby step toward reclaiming some normalcy. A larger step would require confronting the future of Led Zeppelin, which he was reluctant to do anytime soon.

  The first time the band assembled under the same roof was for two days of business meetings at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington, beginning on March 14, 1978. In a room overlooking the park, Peter Grant, various lawyers, and the Swan Song accountants gathered to review outstanding issues relevant to the band’s financial empire. When the suits cleared out, the discussion turned to Swan Song and upcoming sessions for Bad Company and Maggie Bell.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” G bellowed, interrupting. “You should worry about your own careers.”

  He’d been urging them to put their heads together and play some music, if only to gauge where things stood, to rediscover themselves, so to speak. G recommended a secluded rehearsal retreat at Clearwell Castle, in Gloucestershire, on the border with Wales. Bad Company had recently used it and gave it top-notch reviews. There was an opening in early May when they could move in for a while. Jimmy, Jonesy, and Bonzo were game, but Robert remained on the fence. “My joy of life had been cudgeled and bashed so hard,” he said. Playing with Led Zeppelin, even informally, seemed unimportant, frivolous.

  “Robert kept saying he’d do it and then back down,” Grant recalled.

  Benji tried talking to him about it but was told to mind his own business. “When it came to the band’s affairs, there was still a strong divide—band/crew—and I would always be ‘crew,’ ” he said. “The same went for staff. Even Abe Hoch and Alan Callan had no influence.”

  It was left to Bonzo to convince Robert. “He encouraged rather than coaxed me back,” Robert said. “He was very gentle. I really didn’t want to go back.” Leaving his family seemed unwise, pointless. In the long run, he didn’t know if it was worth it. Up until then, Robert revealed, he had been parading around his property with “a shotgun and a bottle of Johnnie Walker,” warding off paparazzi. Bonzo “nuanced all the reasons why it was a good idea.” There was a good deal of gin involved in the encouragement. “He said, ‘Come on, we’re all going down to Clearwell Castle to try and do some writing.’ ”

  On May 2, 1978, Led Zeppelin finally plugged in, after nearly a year off from playing together. The castle, a Gothic revival structure located deep in the Forest of Dean, was better set up for rock ’n roll than anyone had realized. There was a state-of-the-art recording studio tucked into a corner of the tower basement where Deep Purple had laid down the tracks for Burn and Black Sabbath recorded Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. Led Zeppelin had no such substantive agenda. In fact, no one involved really knew where to begin. Jimmy saw it as a chance to limber up, “a period of saying hello to each other musically.” But what do you say after hello?