“Phyllis,” Peter sniggered in his consumptive way, employing his nickname for Carson, “I understand you do quite a good impersonation of me. You call Harvey pretending to be me, and I’ll sit here and tell you what to say.”

  Carson rolled his eyes. It seemed like such a childish stunt to pull at this point. But they placed the call, with Carson standing in for Peter Grant, and spent a half hour wrapping up the tour. “I couldn’t resist,” Carson says, “I even managed to say, ‘Harvey, don’t give me any more of your fucking lip!’ ”

  * * *

  • • •

  A new tour in a new decade—a new beginning, so to speak—required a new look. When Over Europe 1980 opened in Dortmund, West Germany, on June 17, 1980, Led Zeppelin had undergone a significant makeover. The dragon suits, spangles, and gauzy shirts were gone. To update their image, the clothes were more tailored, trendy. Jimmy wore a plain white suit and skinny tie, Jonesy a white dress shirt and blue jeans (although his red shoes raised a few eyebrows). And everyone, even Robert, had haircuts. “Punk kind of woke us up again,” Jonesy offered, a concession, if a small one.

  The staging was minimalist, with only a black backdrop, no razzle-dazzle. The opening number was “Train Kept a-Rollin’,” a throwback to New Yardbirds days. Jimmy was so loose he even announced a song or two. If the audience had brought coffee and come in pajamas to endure the interminable three-and-a-half-hour concert, they’d miscalculated; the 8:00 p.m. show (which began on time) was over before the clock struck ten. “It’s just like 1968!” Robert exclaimed during an encore. The security detail, usually twenty strong, was limited to ex–Special Forces commando Dave Moulder and a few colleagues. An unsuspecting concertgoer might have mistaken the act for a Led Zeppelin tribute band.

  At the outset, everyone was in a playful mood. “The first night, I was fast asleep when suddenly my door crashed in, a cherry bomb went off, and two buckets of ice water were thrown on me,” Phil Carlo, the new road manager, recalls. Through the billowing smoke, he was able to make out Bonzo, who was convulsed in laughter and shouted, “Welcome to the tour!” Before the drummer ran for cover, he told Phil, “By the way, Robert wants to go swimming for his physical therapy at six o’clock in the morning when nobody’s in the pool. Sort it out.”

  The next morning, dutifully at half past five, Carlo, dressed in a Speedo with goggles and a pair of flippers, knocked on Robert Plant’s hotel door. “Robert—time to go!” he called. A few minutes later, Robert appeared in an overcoat with a scarf, a woolly cap, and dark glasses. He took one look at Phil and said, “What the fuck are you up to?”

  “I’ve come to take you swimming,” he said.

  Robert shook his head. “At six o’clock in the morning? Are you mad? Fuck me, Phil, Bonzo’s done you up. We’ll have to figure out how to get back at him.”

  It was that kind of frivolity—at the beginning. “Everybody was happy, functioning, even Peter was in great spirits,” recalls Shelley Kaye, Steve Weiss’s assistant, who had joined the tour in Brussels. In Amsterdam, during a lazy preconcert afternoon, Robert and John Paul rented a boat with her and sailed the canals. The mood was blithe, relaxed. Eventually, however, drugs intervened.

  “Jimmy and Bonzo were doing heroin,” Carlo recalls. “That changed the mood and the music—the music wasn’t as good as before.”

  Songs were occasionally rushed and sloppy. They weren’t fooling anyone. In Rotterdam, at the Ahoy, the audience sat on its hands. After the fourth number, before launching into “The Rain Song,” Robert, who’d had trouble rousing the crowd, got snarky. “The main group will be on shortly,” he announced. “This song is not guaranteed to wake you up any more than you are now—but there’s always a chance.” In Hanover, West Germany, three nights later, he lashed out at the acoustics. “Nice echo in here,” he said sarcastically. “Many people play here today, or is this just part of the torture? Fucking horrible place.” The next night, in Vienna, the audience was rowdy, repeatedly calling out for “Rock and Roll.” Jimmy eventually lost his patience. “We haven’t been sitting around on our asses for seven years,” he carped. “We’ve got a lot of new songs to play, too.” In the middle of “White Summer,” he was hit with a firecracker in the midst of a solo, and he bolted from the stage. Emotions were beginning to run high.

  Nuremberg, on June 27, brought no relief. Bonzo wasn’t well. His drinking had been excessive early in the day, and by showtime he was complaining of stomach pain. Jimmy was also under the weather. “There’s two of us tonight that aren’t feeling at all well,” he blurted into the mic onstage before launching into “In the Evening,” the band’s fourth number. But before counting off, Bonzo collapsed and was rushed to the hospital.

  There was no tour doctor, like in America. “You see, the only reason that we ever had a doctor around in Led Zeppelin was to get some Quaaludes,” Robert admitted.

  Bonzo’s issues were deeper. He was still compensating for his hatred of being away from home by combining alcohol and drugs to excess. Tony Iommi, Black Sabbath’s guitarist and a mate from the Midlands said, “I saw John a few times when he’d throw up and then do a line and have another drink.” Mick Hinton reported that he’d counted the number of drinks Bonzo put away one night in Germany—“thirty-two vodkas.” Benji Le Fevre, who helped road-manage the European tour, says, “Bonzo was drunk almost all the time, and it just caught up with him.”

  The official explanation was “physical exhaustion,” but folks couldn’t keep their lame excuses straight. “As he’d eaten something like twenty-seven bananas before the gig, it’s not surprising,” Grant suggested to an observer, while Robert indicated the drummer lacked sufficient potassium and “had to eat fifty bananas immediately.” The truth was closer to Phil Carson’s recall: as he drove back to the hotel with Bonzo and G, “John was right out of it, and Peter was furious with him.”

  Bonzo was more distressed and confrontational than ever, his logic greatly impaired. In Hamburg, during a rare day off, the entourage arrived back at the hotel too late to order room service. “Bonzo sometimes got a little too aggressive, and you had to try and calm him down,” said Dennis Sheehan, whose job was to keep John out of trouble. “So I went out in my station wagon and found him some burgers and fries.” Bonzo couldn’t wait to unwrap the food; he just bit straight through the greasy paper. When Sheehan pointed this out, Bonzo swallowed and said, “Tastes just as good!”

  Drug use was now more rampant than ever. There may not have been a tour doctor, as Robert had noted, but G made sure Jimmy and Bonzo had access to whatever they needed. In the midst of the dates, a courier, a cousin of Princess Diana’s, was flown in from England in time to replenish their stash. Phil Carlo was sent to pick her up at the airport.

  “She was one of those aristocratic people who like hanging about with bands,” Carlo says—a tall, slender, very attractive woman who got off the plane wearing gloves up to her elbows and a floppy hat with a veil obscuring her face. “Fucking hell, they’ve sent the beekeeper!” Carlo chortled, and from that moment on, the nickname stuck. “She and Jimmy used to sit next to each other in the hotel bars, swaying about, barely able to stay sitting up. It was hard to watch.”

  On the evening of July 3, Jimmy was nowhere to be seen at the Mannheim Hof, where the band was staying. “Everyone was down in the hotel bar, and it was time to leave for the gig,” Carlo recalls. “We looked all over for him. It was getting late, when all of a sudden, from the sill of a window placed overhead, there was a rustling of curtains and Jimmy fell out onto the table. He’d somehow gotten up there and nodded off, as he was prone to do. That’s how bad things were getting.”

  Later, at the airport, Jimmy was out of it. He sat on the concourse floor, his expression grave but somewhat vacant, and made little piles of six currencies, humming to himself, while passengers walked by staring at the bizarre scene. A group of onlookers began to gather. “For fuck’s sake, get him up and hidden,” Carlo admonished Rick Hobbs, Jimmy’s minder, but Hobbs knew how to handle the behavior. “Leave him be,” he said. “He’ll get up in a minute. Better not to make a scene.”

  They had played perhaps their best show in Frankfurt on June 30. It was largely an effusive American crowd, owing to the Rhein-Main Air Base, located just outside the city, where Elvis Presley had done his tour of duty. U.S. servicemen managed to get ahold of large blocks of tickets and raised a good deal of hell clapping and stomping to the songs, especially during a rocking version of Elvis Presley’s “Frankfurt Special” laced seamlessly into the middle of “Whole Lotta Love.” Ahmet Ertegun had flown in to celebrate the success and gain some insight into the future of the band. He must have liked what he’d seen and heard. Afterward, he cornered Peter Grant and broached the possibility of signing a new five-year, five-album deal.

  Five years. That was wishful thinking. It was all they could do to get from one gig to the next. And the band’s objectives weren’t aligned. Too many heads were in too many different places. Nobody could agree on what the character of the band should be, not in five months’ time or five minutes earlier, let alone five years from now.

  Two concerts had been scheduled in Berlin, the last city on the tour, but the band decided to play only one night, on July 7. Everyone was exhausted, ready to head home. Uncharacteristically, the show was long and ragged, the arrangements to several songs “tired and obsolete.” As far as short solos went, all promises were off. “Stairway” rambled on for over fourteen minutes, while “Whole Lotta Love,” loaded with effects and midsection jams, weighed in at a seemingly endless seventeen minutes. “Munich was the nearest feeling to that of the big American shows,” Jimmy said. “There was a lot of energy, and it was really exciting.” At the conclusion, the four musicians stepped to the front of the stage, wrapped their arms around each other’s shoulders, and bowed to the crowd.

  Robert grabbed the mic and said, “Thank you very much, everyone who’s worked for us and put up with us and all those sorts of things. And, er . . . good night.”

  They hugged again and walked off the stage, waving. It was the last show Led Zeppelin ever played.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  CODA

  [1]

  The future of Led Zeppelin rested with Robert Plant. His refusal to participate in an American tour threw a wrench into the band’s prospects.

  “I was developing my own independence, and I didn’t feel tied to them anymore,” he said. “But I wanted to be there because there was still a lot of love. I just didn’t want to do anything a minute longer than was necessary if I didn’t like it.”

  The European tour had given Robert incentive to at least consider another trip through the States. As long as things were kept lean and mean, he was game to carry on and indicated as much to his bandmates.

  “We were battling on,” John Paul said. For him, playing live with this group of musicians was what he looked forward to most; even touring suited him. As far as he cared, making albums was only the starting point for live performances. “Nobody ever wanted to say it was over. We certainly didn’t want to throw that away.” He felt they “still had a lot to offer” and just needed to get back on the road.

  The recipe was simple: a U.S. tour and a new album. That had worked like a charm for ten years; there was no reason to tinker with the tried and true.

  Even so, Peter Grant had avoided raising the issue with Robert. The strategy was to give him a wide berth—let him enjoy performing again—so that he warmed to the idea on his own. Grant had played his cards perfectly. While in Germany, Robert asked Bonzo, “How come Grant hasn’t said anything to me about America yet?” Finally, as the band landed at Gatwick and walked across the tarmac to the terminal, Robert sidled up to Peter and gave it his blessing. “Okay, I’ll do it,” he said, “but only for four weeks.”

  Four weeks—it was a start. G would book four weeks and then another four weeks behind it, just in case. They’d call the tour “Led Zeppelin, the 1980s: Part One,” with every expectation there’d be a Part Two, even a Part Three once Robert got comfortable. Grant immediately put Phil Carlo on call. “I’ve gotten the go-ahead from Jim and Robert,” he said. “We’re going to America. You’re their man on the road.”

  Richard Cole wasn’t simply out of the picture: he was in jail. He’d gone to Italy, as G instructed, with every intention of cleaning himself up. Before he left, Herb Atkin asked Richard to make contact with an associate at the Excelsior Hotel in Rome, where they both happened to be staying, to discuss Led Zeppelin business. Richard checked in, but for some strange reason Atkin’s colleague wasn’t registered at the hotel. The next morning, an Italian SWAT team showed up at Richard’s room. The day he’d arrived in Italy, the Bologna train station had been blown up. He was arrested on suspicion of terrorism. It didn’t help that the police discovered a bag of cocaine as well.

  Clearly, he’d been set up by Herb Atkin. The trumped-up terrorism accusations were eventually dropped, but a drug-dealing charge stuck. “After Cole was convicted and sentenced and appeals were gone, I got a call from Steve Weiss: ‘You’ve got to do something,’ ” recalls Jeff Hoffman, the New York fixer. At the time, Hoffman was the lead counsel for mob boss John Gotti, who was dodging a number of racketeering cases. Hoffman flew to Rome and arranged to see Richard, who was serving time in Rebibbia prison on the outskirts of the city. “It was a real serious situation, but through a series of machinations we got Richard released in six months.”

  While this drama was playing out, all systems were go for Led Zeppelin, the 1980s: Part One. The bones of a North American tour were falling into place—nineteen dates had been booked, beginning in Montreal on October 17, 1980. It was a solid schedule, with days off built in, all arenas in major East Coast cities, winding up in Chicago on November 15.

  “Everything was getting organized,” says Shelley Kaye, who was coordinating details out of the Swan Song offices in New York. “The itinerary was in place, we were booking hotels, working on a plane, tour jackets were ordered. All parts of the machinery were functioning. Everyone knew what their job was. Communication even started flowing again.”

  A new album was also discussed. Jimmy was most eager to get something under way. Presence, in his opinion, was “not an easy album to listen to” and In Through the Out Door “a little soft,” certainly not his best effort. “Bonzo and I had already started discussing plans for a hard-driving rock album after that,” he said. “I wanted to get back to that sort of urgent intensity we managed to evoke.” Back to the basics: austere, percussive, and Big Bertha chords, “some really intense riffing” Led Zeppelin style. It sounded like a plan.

  The band booked Bray Studios in Windsor to rehearse for the tour. Robert and Bonzo drove down together from the Midlands on September 22, 1980. Bonzo was on edge. “The guy was miserable,” according to Deep Purple’s Glenn Hughes, who had run into the drummer while they both were at home. “There was something eating him so badly.” Bonzo, as usual, was dreading the tour and being away from home. He found going to America daunting.

  “It’s so much easier to play in England,” he said. “You get the motor out of the garage and toddle off, and you’re so at ease all the time. Whereas if you’re in America, you’re all day in a hotel somewhere, having arguments with bloody rednecks and everything, and then you’ve got to go to the gig.”

  He was agitated during the drive. He ripped off the car’s sun visor and threw it out the window. “I don’t want to do this,” he told Robert. “You play the drums and I’ll sing.” It was an old song to which Robert knew the words; Bonzo sang it every time they planned to be away. Not giving it more than a passing thought, he dropped Bonzo off to stay with Jimmy at his Old Mill House along the Thames in Windsor and drove on to Blakes Hotel in London, where he and Jonesy were staying.

  Only Robert and Jonesy showed up the first day of rehearsal, and they spent a few minutes checking out a model of the tour stage and lighting rig, “a basic design without a lot of special effects,” according to the Showco team. “Well, [Jimmy and Bonzo] aren’t here, let’s fuck off,” the other two said and returned to Blakes. The next day, Bonzo arrived at Bray fairly loaded. On the way to the studio, he’d stopped off at a pub and downed a couple vodka–orange juices. “Breakfast,” he called it. At rehearsal, he continued drinking vodka straight from the bottle. “He got on the drum stool, fell off it two or three times,” Mick Hinton reported. Mercifully, Robert said, “Let’s call it a day and sort it out tomorrow.”

  They rescheduled rehearsal for the next afternoon, September 24, 1980, at two o’clock. On the way to Windsor from Blake’s that afternoon, Benji Le Fevre, who was driving Robert and Jonesy, suggested making a detour. “I think we should stop at Jim’s,” he said, turning off and heading toward the Old Mill House. “There is no point going back to the studio to sit and wait for them. Let’s make sure Jimmy and Bonzo are up.”

  At the house, Jimmy wasn’t anywhere to be found. Benji asked Rick Hobbs, Jimmy’s guy Friday, where Bonzo was. “Oh, man, he was really out of it last night,” Hobbs responded, relating details of an impressive drinking binge—forty shots of vodka. “I put him to sleep a little after midnight. He’s upstairs in the guest suite.”