14

Trampled under Foot

It's a bit like amyl nitrate. It's like a rush that you're not ready for. I didn't know how many people were going to be there. I had no idea what it would look like. There was nobody else but Led Zeppelin, four of us, and all those people as far as the eye could see.

—Robert Plant on Zeppelin's record-breaking show at Tampa Stadium, May 5, 1973

JACK CALMES (cofounder of Showco sound and lighting company) At Showco, we decided that lighting would really end up being the bigger business of the two. I hired Iggy Knight, who was the designer for a lot of things. Iggy knew Jimmy from the Zeppelin parties he'd done, and he was kind of a crazy gnome, a designer with the Royal Shakespeare Theatre who'd kind of morphed into the psychedelic world and done the light show at the Roundhouse. I always give Zeppelin the credit for everything that modernized touring. We did our first big staging and lighting production with them.

BENJI LeFEVRE (Zeppelin sound technician from 1973 to 1980) At the end of 1972, Iggy got the job to design Zeppelin's 1973 tour, and Robert asked if he knew anyone who was good with sound effects. I got a call from Robert asking me to come and meet him, so I jumped on the train up to Kidderminster and met him in this pub where they had a stripper.

I liked him a lot because of his humor—Leo, extrovert, outgoing. He had a Jaguar that had been customized into a station wagon, and he drove up what's known locally as Sandy Track at about fifty miles an hour. We got on very well and he said, “Come and work for me.” He had all this extraordinary Binson echo equipment that I pretended to know about. I got the nod at the end of '72, and at the beginning of '73, we rehearsed at Shepperton Studios.

I thought to myself, “I'll work for them for six months and make a pile of money, then I'll go back to the jazz and blues I love.” Of course, not only did I not make a pile of money—because they were tight as hell—but I carried on working for them.

JACK CALMES At Tampa Stadium, I brought along this crazy artist from L.A. who was so in awe of Zeppelin that he couldn't talk at all. This guy had turned me on to lasers at the Planetarium in San Francisco. So I said, “Come out, and let's explain this to the band.” I took him into the trailer, and he couldn't talk. He was a bit of a drinker and a crazy hippie artist who had shoes that were duct-taped, but they trusted me enough to bring in a character like this. I said, “The bottom line is that lasers would be cool for your show,” and Bonzo was always the one who was like, “Fuck it. Let's have it. Right now.”

Robert never liked any of this and was always kind of disdainful of any of the production things. It was like, “They're here to see me, and why do we need all this shit?” We got that laser shortly thereafter and carried it all the way through Earl's Court in 1975.

JOHN PAUL JONES We'd done the stripped-down thing, and it got bigger. There were more lights, so you had to wear things that reflected them a bit more. If you'd wandered onto a well-lit stage in jeans and T-shirts, it wouldn't have looked very good. It was part of Zeppelin tradition never to discuss what you were wearing before you actually got onstage. So sometimes you'd have three blokes in jeans and one in a white suit. Sparkly clothes became available. I got that silly jacket with the pom-poms because the people who'd made Page's dragon suit came by with a van-load of clothes, and we all just went, “Oh, that looks fun.”

BENJI LeFEVRE The first gig blew my balls, fifty thousand people going bananas. Very quickly, I realized it was blues-based, and because of the way they approached their music, it was constantly changing. That unit was quite extraordinary. They just had telepathy and could take the music anywhere they wanted to go.

JOHN PAUL JONES Sometimes you'd walk out on those stages and think, “Bloody hell! Where'd all this lot come from?” But usually, once the gig started, you'd forget it, because you had other things to think about. There was nobody in the band who was throwing up in the dressing room, but you got nervous before you went on, and that kick-started the adrenaline. You have to remember that it wasn't suddenly sixty thousand people. It was a thousand, five, ten, twenty et cetera. I can remember going back to Madison Square Garden after playing to sixty thousand and thinking, “Hmm, this is cozy.”

BENJI LeFEVRE My enduring image of the band onstage is of Robert and Jimmy doing their thing, performing together. When there was no singing, it was almost like Jimmy wouldn't let Jonesy near Bonzo because it was about him and Bonzo—he stood in front of the drums the whole time. He would direct Bonzo and suggest where to go. Jonesy would just be standing there and following along because he was such a fucking brilliant musician, he could handle anything.

The energy of the thing was Jimmy and Bonzo. If you watch some of the Zeppelin footage, you'll see Jimmy in front of the bass drum making physical signs to Bonzo. And Bonzo's timekeeping was so impeccable that it allowed Jimmy to really go for shit but be reined in, time-wise. I think the telepathy between Jimmy and Bonzo as musicians almost extended to the drug-taking: it was like, “I wonder how fucked up we can get and still play.”

Zeppelin limos waiting outside the Riot House, July 1973. (Richard Cole Collection)

EDDIE KRAMER (engineer on Led Zeppelin II and Houses of the Holy) There was always a tremendous feeling of power—that they could do anything they wanted—and sometimes they took advantage of that. You were in this floating bubble of protection around them because they were so adored.

BP FALLON (Zeppelin's U.K. press officer, 1973–1976) They were the kings of the castle, and one felt untouchable being part of this family. I remember once I went and sat in a park in Boston, and I suddenly realized I was outside the bubble. It was really odd.

BENJI LeFEVRE There was an undisputed loyalty among the four of them because of the amount of money they were making and the amount of fun they were having. There was camaraderie and a sense of invincibility. You get in a gang, and you think you're untouchable. I think we all felt like that. Even though we got treated like shit by the band, to anybody else we were Zeppelin's crew.

JACK CALMES It was English rock star royalty. You know England—the class system kind of repeats itself at different levels. Based on the money and the fame, they had their slaves and serfs and all that.

MARK LONDON (comanager with Peter Grant of Stone the Crows and Maggie Bell) For the 1973 tour, they rented a plane called the Starship. I was the first one to see the plane with Steve Weiss. We drove over to Newark Airport to check it out. We gave it our blessing.

PAUL RODGERS (lead singer with Free and Bad Company) The Starship was an amazing airplane. It was huge, with bedrooms complete with beds and huge seatbelts. It had video games and all the rock star stuff.

PETER GRANT The Starship was only $14,000 more [than the Falcon nine-seater], because [Boeing] wanted the publicity and that kind of thing—and we thought, “Well, why not? We'll have a 720!” The first day, in Chicago, they'd parked it next to Hugh Hefner's plane, hadn't they? All the press were there, and somebody said to me, “Well, how do you think it compares to Mr. Hefner's plane?” I said, “It makes his look like a Dinky toy.” Boomph! Press everywhere!

GYL CORRIGAN-DEVLIN (Zeppelin friend who traveled on 1973 U.S. tour) At this point, they were what Richard called “Zeppelin'd off.” They were stuck in the Hyatt House, and they missed home. American groupies could be great fun and very fascinating, but sometimes Bonzo just wanted to talk about his bulls, and no girl wanted to sit and listen to that. It was never a plan that I would go with them. They just said, “We'll send the plane if you'll come to Chicago … just go to the gig!” I think I was a bit of a grounding force. I used to be called “Mum” once in a while. I was the one who sewed the crotch of Robert's jeans when he split them every night.

MORGANA WELCH (L.A. groupie and Zeppelin friend) There was nobody quite as flamboyant as Page and Plant, though Hendrix came close. While there were a lot of things going on, one of them was the sexual freedom movement. But from a fashion standpoint, it was just fun rummaging through thrift stores and your granny's closet and coming out with these things that felt good. And don't the Brits have a history of cross-dressing or something?

GYL CORRIGAN-DEVLIN It's funny how Robert's famous little blue blouse came about. It was just lying around, and this girl showed me how to put rhinestones on it; Beep went off to some factory and bought thousands of them. We'd sit on the plane and put them on everything. And then this girl Corrie came to the Drake in Chicago and brought the suit for Jimmy with all the planets on it and John Paul's jacket with the pom-poms.

MAGGIE BELL (Swan Song artist) Robert used to hate me because there were a couple of lovely antique shops on the King's Road, and I used to wear all the '30s and '40s gear, little silk blouses. He used to say to the guys, “You don't sell that to Maggie Bell if she comes in. Tell her that's for me.”

VANESSA GILBERT (L.A. scenester and Zeppelin friend on the 1973 U.S. tour) The Hyatt House used to say, like, “Welcome, Small Faces” or whoever it was on the marquee. When I learned that Zeppelin was in town, Gyl said, “Call Richard Cole, and tell him I'm going to be back in town tomorrow.” Somehow I got through to Richard. The next day, off we went to visit him.

One by one, the guys started walking past, and slowly they came in—like, “Who's Richard got in his room?” What I really saw was a bunch of tired dudes. They would tour for a month, go home for a month, and come back and tour for a month. They would just beat the crap out of themselves and then go home and lick their wounds. So this was the tail end of the first pass.

Before you knew it, Gyl and I had keys to our own room on the ninth floor, and we just became part of the family. It was so comfortable, and nobody wanted anything, and there was no hanky-panky. We went to the Forum every night and sat there and came back to the hotel and had some cocktails and a bit of this and that and then went to bed.

GYL CORRIGAN-DEVLIN I first met Vanessa on the Starship. She was very un-groupie-looking, where all the other girls were five foot two and wearing next to nothing. Peter Grant fell madly in love with her. She was my right-hand man on these trips. From a distance, people thought she was Robert because she had the same hair. Robert was actually jealous of her.

VANESSA GILBERT I remember tackling Robert's hair one time. It was right after the month that they'd spent at home, and I don't think he'd brushed it once. I was trying to get the tangles out of it. What a scene! We had a very brotherly-sisterly relationship, and our hair looked a lot alike, so people constantly confused us, even though he was five inches taller than me.

LORI MATTIX (groupie and L.A. girlfriend of Page's) Vanessa was a part of the team. Gyl and Vanessa went on the road with them. During that whole phase, I couldn't go because I was underage, but Vanessa and Gyl would fly out with them.

VANESSA GILBERT We get to Seattle, and we're all in our rooms at the Edgewater Inn. The record company was holding a party for them on another floor, and the guys never went; they just sent Gyl and I to get shrimp to use as bait. One of the bodyguards gave John Paul and me a joint, and we sat there looking at the ocean, getting higher and higher and higher. Like, “Do I have fingers anymore?”

Next thing we hear this laughter, and it's Bonzo hanging over the balcony: “You guys gotta come and see this!” So we hobble along the hallway and open his door. And he's so proud. He opens the shower curtain, and there are at least eight mud sharks swimming around on top of each other. Peter is lying on the bed like the Jolly Green Giant, with a bottle of ouzo in his hand.

And then the girls started coming in. One of them had fingernails that were probably five inches long, painted green—she scared the shit out of me—and another one was wearing a leotard. And it was like, “Don't let Vanessa see this, don't let Vanessa see this!” Because I was the baby. Which only made me more curious, of course.

They were taking a mud shark and rubbing it on one of these girls. Everything was screwed down—even the ashtrays—and I remember John Paul had a briefcase with all these screwdrivers in it. After that, everything started going out the window. After a couple hours of this, Bonzo realizes it's his room, and he turns into a big fucking baby. He wants to go to sleep, and now he doesn't have a bed to sleep in because it's floating in the ocean.

The next morning as we're checking out, the hotel manager comes out and sort of unscrolls the bill for everything that's been damaged. And he says, “I'm a little disappointed. This band threw out three rooms … that band threw out four rooms … and when the Mormon Church was here, they threw out six rooms.”

GYL CORRIGAN-DEVLIN We had a friend in Seattle named Freddie Lightning or something, and we went into his shop one evening, and everyone got dressed up in drag because we were going on to L.A. and giving a party for Ahmet Ertegun at the Hyatt House. Robert wore a Chanel dress with Vanessa's high heels. Jimmy ended up wearing this amazing dress that had belonged to Vanessa's mother. He looked really good because he was a bit more girly than the others. There was nothing feminine about Bonzo. He came as a fishwife.

LORI MATTIX We put the boys in drag, and it was like this big party because George Harrison was down there. Stevie Wonder was visiting, and they wanted to play a joke on him. The guys come down in drag, and Stevie goes, “What's going on, man?” Everybody is cracking up, laughing, and nobody has the heart to tell Stevie what's going on.

CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY (from NME, June 16, 1973) It is John Bonham's birthday, and the Forum audience had given him a hero's tribute for his drum marathon on “Moby Dick” earlier in the evening. “Twenty-one today,” as Plant had announced from the stage. “This party is probably going to get very silly,” he announces. Why else would a man turn up to his birthday party wearing a T-shirt, plimsouls, and a pair of swimming trunks? As things turn out, he was the most appropriately clad person present….

Having flown in from Louisiana that morning, your reporter disgraces himself by falling asleep in his chair at around 4:30 a.m. A little later, he is awakened by the very considerate Phil Carson from Atlantic, and returned, more or less in one piece, to his hotel. The following day he learns that virtually everyone present ended up in the pool after George Harrison clobbered Bonzo with his own birthday cake. Mr. Fallon's exquisite antique velvet costume was totalled by his immersion, as was Rodney Bingenheimer's camera and a mink coat belonging to a lady named Vanessa. Over the rest of the proceedings we will draw a slightly damp veil.

RODNEY BINGENHEIMER (L.A. DJ and club owner) Bonzo wanted me to take a picture of him and George and Patti [Boyd]with my little camera. I'm looking at the camera, trying to take the picture, but it was jammed, and Bonzo got all mad and threw me, Patti, and George in the pool.

VANESSA GILBERT When we got to London, Roy Harper said, “You made it into the paper,” and he handed me the Sun. It described everybody getting thrown in the pool, “followed by a screaming girl in a mink coat.” Which was me. Jimmy didn't go in because he was holding the drugs. Rodney was the first one to go in, because he always got picked on.

ROY HARPER (maverick British folkie and friend of Zeppelin's) There were two people who never ended up in the swimming pool; who you'd never, ever think of throwing in the pool—Jimmy and Peter. Oh, and the woman who was carrying for the band and had something or other in her bra.

ROBERT PLANT ”I am the golden god.” I proclaimed this with a smile—and I wasn't standing on the roof of a house; I was at the top of a palm tree on the night of Bonzo's birthday. It was an unfortunate moment, because someone drove across the garden in a Cadillac and wedged it between two palm trees. And I was busy making sure everyone knew exactly who and what I was. I wanted to get it in perspective before the party really started.

BILL HARRY (Zeppelin's first U.K. press officer) I heard that BP was going about in this beautiful green suit he'd bought, and they picked him up and threw him into a swimming pool. And I thought, “That is why I'm not there.”

• • •

ROBERT CHRISTGAU (music editor of the Village Voice, 1974–2006) [Led Zeppelin] redefined the '60s in the image of all teenagers for whom hippiedom was a cultural given, rather than a historical inevitability—all the kids forced by economic reality and personal limitation to escape from, rather than into, to settle for the representation of power because the real power their older siblings pretended to was so obviously a hallucination.

ROSS HALFIN (photographer and friend of Page's) In America, the Rolling Stones were like the Kings of Leon are now: they were cool. Whereas Zeppelin were completely for the working classes. Which is why, when you went to Zeppelin shows, there were people passed out, throwing cherry bombs, all of that. Zeppelin appealed to the masses. And because Zeppelin were so accessible to the working classes, that's why the critics hated them so much.

JAAN UHELSZKI (writer for Creem magazine) At Creem, we always loved Zeppelin, but then we were the anti–Rolling Stone. We were supposedly the anti-intellectual magazine, we were of the fans. Zeppelin really fit into what appealed to Midwesterners: it was big and it was bombastic.

BILL GRAHAM (San Francisco concert promoter) Led Zeppelin always drew a difficult element. A lot of male aggression came along with their shows. This was during the warp of the '70s, which was a very strange era. It was anarchy without a cause. And there were a lot of rebels without causes out there in the audience whenever Led Zeppelin performed.

MICHAEL DES BARRES (singer with Silverhead and Swan Song band Detective) The legions of disenfranchised young American warriors had no outlet whatsoever. They're the same kids who grew up worshipping Trent Reznor, they're always there. Their lives became three chords and a stadium parking lot. Zeppelin came along and gave them a hard-on like they'd never had before. There was no TMZ, there was no Internet. There was just this incantation, this wailing to the gods.

TONY MANDICH (artist relations manager in Atlantic's L.A. office, 1972–1997) When they shut down those house lights, for three or four minutes I thought the roof would blow off from the expectation. It was something you really cannot explain or compare to other bands.

BRAD TOLINSKI (editor, Guitar World magazine) In 1973, I saw Zeppelin at Cobo Hall in Detroit, which was a huge rock city and a big Zeppelin town. I grew up in a suburb that was probably much like a lot of Midwestern suburbs. You'd go down Telegraph Road, and it was just filled with fast food outlets and KMarts, and it was pretty fucking boring. And Zeppelin had this exotic otherworldly appeal. The Stones were ultimately sort of juvenile delinquents, so they didn't take us out of our environment. Zeppelin painted pictures of something otherworldly. But as opposed to prog rock, it had some real balls to it. “Dazed and Confused” turned the sexual act into something very Cecil B. DeMille: orgasm as mystical experience. It sounded super-dangerous. A Led Zeppelin orgasm wasn't pulling a girl's pants down in some alley.

ROBERT PLANT In the beginning, at the tail end of the Haight-Ashbury phenomenon in the late '60s, playing San Francisco and stuff was a very mellow experience—far out. But then it got [to be] a bit of a rant with cherry bombs and firecrackers and bloodcurdling whoops. I was quite uncomfortable at times. It was just too big, and nobody knew how big it would be. It was too intense. This was a bit weird, we thought; we were playing the YMCA in Kirkcaldy four years ago!

HENRY SMITH Robert was more of an American type of peacenik than maybe the others were. He was more of a caring soul. I remember times that we would sit down in the '70s and go, “Whatever happened to the peace-and-love generation?”

AUBREY POWELL (designer of Zeppelin album covers) Robert still believes that we come as one tribe from those heady '60s days. He's much more a peace-and-love man than he is interested in any of the aspects that Jimmy was interested in. But just because Jimmy was interested in the occult and the dark side doesn't mean to say he was a dark person. He could be very cutting, and sometimes it could hurt you, but I never experienced him as being a dark force or a messenger of Crowley or anything like that.

I think Jimmy and Robert's relationship was exactly the same as any other creative relationship—Keith and Mick, John and Paul, Waters and Gilmour, Storm and me at Hipgnosis. In rock 'n' roll, you have these fractious relationships where there's a good cop and a bad cop, and somehow they gel to create interesting music.

LORI MATTIX They were such a good combination, Robert and Jimmy, because they were such polar opposites. Jimmy would slither into a room, whereas Robert would strut. You had to have seen the two of them together. It was always like oil and water. Jimmy was the water, and Robert was the oil. It was like rubbing those two egos together.

DANNY GOLDBERG (Zeppelin's U.S. press officer) I talked to Jimmy many, many times, but I always felt that he had a big wall up in front of him. Whereas Robert was very accessible emotionally. He was twenty-five when I met him, but he'd already been famous for five years. And he loved being famous. I've never met anyone who enjoyed being famous more than Robert Plant. He wanted to spread it around. He made people feel good. He was the happy warrior.

BP FALLON To me, Jimmy was a lovely man. Once you had his heart, you had it for always. Not everyone would say that, but not everyone has a fucking clue, do they? They prefer to have Jimmy eating virgins at the stroke of midnight. The image of him being this magus of dark uncertainty is wonderful. One day maybe we'll know if it's true.

BRAD TOLINSKI I never really got the evil thing, for all the myths and stories about Page making a deal with the devil. To me, it was always more transcendent and Olympian.

BP FALLON To me, he's the kid in It Might Get Loud, playing air guitar along to “Rumble.” We had so many moments like that together. I bought all these Sun singles at Ted Carroll's Rock On stall in Soho and went down to Plumpton Place with them. Jimmy would stand there playing air guitar along to the Roland Janes solos on Billy Lee Riley singles. The guy loves his music.

Page onstage with roadie Ray Thomas at Kezar Stadium, San Francisco, June 2, 1973. (James Fortune/Rex Features)

PERRY PRESS (London estate agent to the stars) I'd already taken George Harrison to Plumpton. The original owner was a stuck-up Tory who'd sold it to a local solicitor who didn't really have the means to live there. So Jimmy bought it from him. The house was thought to date from the sixteenth/seventeenth century, and then [Edwin] Lutyens had come along and restored it for Edward Hudson, the founder of Country Life. The combination of it being a Lutyens house and in that setting meant we all fell in love with it.

Like mine, Jimmy's taste was always Gothic revival and the Arts and Crafts period. He has the most refined architectural taste and interest in houses of any of my clients, without exception.

• • •

Plumpton Place in the mid-' 70s.

GYL CORRIGAN-DEVLIN As soon as the Hollywood scene came around, Bonzo would be like, “I can't be doing with this.” He was never one with the girls, except once he was drunk—then he was in party mode, and that was different. He'd always be the one who'd say, “I'm gonna see what's on television.” And then the roadies would get him out and get him into trouble, and the next day the headlines would be all about him.

VANESSA GILBERT Bonzo made enough ruckus for everybody. So much so that one hardly noticed John Paul, and Jimmy was sort of quiet, too. It seemed to me they would get rooms away from Robert and Bonzo.

ROY CARR I was up in Bonzo's room in L.A., and we were going out that evening to the Rainbow or the Roxy. He says, “Pagey's in town, I'll get hold of him.” So he rings Page up, trying to persuade him to come out. Page doesn't want to, so Bonzo says, “What the fuckin' 'ell do you do—hang upside down in a loft all day?”

BP FALLON Bonzo was a very warmhearted man. He wasn't necessarily at all times best equipped for being regarded as a deity. But if you freak out every now and then and misbehave, does that mean you're a monster? Not necessarily. It just means you're a bit out of sync with how you should be behaving.

Bonzo was the guy who drove that train, night after night, not for a few minutes but sometimes for four hours. If he'd painted or sculpted, everyone would have said, “How great.” But he didn't: he drummed, like nobody in the world. Sometimes I'd be standing at the side of the stage, and during “Whole Lotta Love” he'd give me this almost imperceptible nod that meant I had to go and play the tom-toms beside him. To feel the power of that was fucking incredible. It was like being strapped to a rocket.

TONY IOMMI (guitarist with Black Sabbath) John was never a snob. We'd go out, and there was never any bragging about anything. He'd have liked to be a farmer, and he even started dressing like one. He really got into going the local pub and dressing like a farmer with the cap and everything. He certainly didn't dress like a rock star.

RICHARD COLE (Zeppelin's road manager) The band was flying somewhere from England, and Bill Wyman was there with his girlfriend Astrid. She was talking to Bonzo. We were getting off the plane, and she pulled me to one side and said, “Richard, why do they bring a farmer on the road with them?”

JOHN BONHAM (speaking in 1975) I was never into farming at all. I wasn't even looking for a farm, just a house with some land. But when I saw this place, something clicked, and I bought it…. [It] used to be just a three-bedroomed house. My father did all the wood paneling, and I did a lot of the work with my brother and subcontractors.

PAUL RODGERS (lead singer with Free and Bad Company) There are pictures of him covered in cement and laying bricks. He was a really down-to-earth guy like that, who really got stuck in.

MAGGIE BELL I loved Bonzo and his wife and kids. Just like a farmer's family, lovely and cuddly. I knew his brother and his little sister. Sweet nice family. Pat was just fab. Kitchen table, everybody sitting round there.

MARILYN COLE (wife of Richard Cole) Richard and I would go up to the Old Hyde for the weekend, and there was a lot of drinking. I saw Bonzo falling over, and I saw him shouting and hollering, but I never saw him nasty or abusive. Pat was one of those salt-of-the-earth women, warm and sweet and nice. She adored John. And he adored her.

The Bonhams in the south of France, August 1972: John, Jason, and Pat. (Richard Cole Collection)

BENJI LeFEVRE On his own, out of the limelight, Bonzo was alright—a loving family man. But it really was Jekyll and Hyde: the minute he left the Old Hyde, he resumed his other life.

LULU (Scottish pop singer and friend of the Bonhams') John and I had a lot in common. It was not about being a star or about doing it to become rich and famous; it was doing it because it's in every fiber of your body, and that's why I think it's kind of sweet that I am able to say I knew him.

John was very generous and incredibly passionate, which allowed him to play the way he did. John and Pat and Maurice [Gibb] and myself used to hang out a lot together. When John was in London, he was always at our house. Being on the road, it does drive you a bit stir-crazy. You can't go out of your hotel rooms because people want a piece of you. So I think that encourages the excess. It has an effect, this business, of giving you a high adrenaline rush, but at some point you have to come down from that, and it's not easy. And that's why drugs and alcohol numb you out a little bit.

TONY IOMMI John and I spent many nights doing coke, and it got to a point where he'd tip a pile onto a plate and just throw it at his face. You'd think about saying something, but John was hard to talk to when he was like that. You might say, “You gonna cool it a bit tonight?” And he'd say, “Ah, fuck it, I don't care!” How Pat dealt with it, I don't know. It must have been very hard for her. He and Matthew [Stanislowski] were driving down to London in the Roller once, and John said, “Stop, stop!” So Matthew stopped the car, and John just started beating him up. He was like a wild animal.

LORI MATTIX If Bonzo got out of control, he was insane. We went to this opening in some theater in L.A., and afterward he was so fucking drunk, he took a picture off the wall and slammed it over Richard Creamer's head.

Lori Mattix on the town with Bonzo and (lurking behind them) Richard Cole, L.A., June 1973. (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

HOWARD MYLETT (Zeppelin collector and expert) I'd seen them at Wembley in 1971, but I came away thinking a more intimate gig like Brighton would be great. On the 22nd of December, 1972, I went down in the afternoon to the Dome, and there were people around like roadies and riggers, and I bumped into Mick Hinton. I said, “Any chance I could get backstage afterward?” I had these Zeppelin scrapbooks that I'd brought, and they loved looking through them.

Then I heard Bonzo trashing a dressing room—you could literally hear these chairs being thrown around and grunting noises being made, no words being formed. It was like a bear in a cage. I didn't go and pursue it.

JANE AYER (publicist in Atlantic's West Coast office in the '70s) Mick Hinton was devoted to Bonzo and took such great care of him. He did everything for him. It was like Bonzo was his child.

SALLY WILLIAMS (girlfriend of Mick Hinton) Mick was Bonzo's roadie-cum-dogsbody. His main job was to set up the drum kit. The running-around part, the picking up of John's laundry, was mainly back home in England. They were two of a kind. John was a really nice guy, but he was probably drinking long before Zeppelin came along. There were times when he would floor Mick in some kind of rage—it was the alcohol speaking. If he hadn't been a musician, he would have been very happy on his farm with his toys.

JEFF OCHELTREE (drum tech who assisted Bonham on the 1977 U.S. tour) Mick made £45 a week working for Zeppelin at the beginning. He just kept doing the same things, taking drugs and never really developing as a drum tech. That's why they treated him as a class clown and dressed him up as a butler.

BENJI LeFEVRE Bonzo and Hinton had a love-hate relationship. Being a drum tech is not the most demanding job in the world, and I don't think Mick could really have done anything else. Bonzo regularly used to beat him up. Seeing him getting biffed for no apparent reason put a really bad taste in your mouth.