15

When I Look to the West

Their popularity lay in myriad reasons: their indisputable talent, their sex appeal, and their sheer power. The nasty '70s fit them like an iron glove.

—Peter Clifton, in Chris Welch's The Man Who Led Zeppelin (2002)

TONY MANDICH (artist relations manager at Atlantic's West Coast office, 1972–1997) They really weren't that demanding. Big parties and hoopla and this and that? No, they were really happy going late at night to the Rainbow, where I would set them up with a section blocked off. Most of the time, they took care of their own tab, and it was no big deal. Bonzo was always the first to come and the last to leave.

LORI MATTIX (groupie and L.A. girlfriend of Page's) They liked to rule at the Rainbow. It was easy because it was the Strip. That was our domain. They liked to get loud in there and make it loud and crazy. Mario Maglieri let them get away with murder.

Former Atlantic Records general manager Jerry Greenberg (left) at the Rainbow Bar & Grill in L.A. with Mikael Maglieri, the son of Rainbow founder Mario, June 2010. (Art Sperl)

SALLY WILLIAMS (girlfriend of Bonham's roadie Mick Hinton) Everybody was at the Rainbow one night in the big booth, and people were prowling around trying to get autographs. Robert stood up and shouted, “Where's the fucking security? Get these people away from us!” So I shouted over the table, “Well, if you sat down and shut up, that would be a start!” Mick told me that Robert later said to him, “Your old lady's got a lot of spunk.”

JOHN PAUL JONES L.A. is so boring most of the time, so as soon as any life arrives, suddenly you rule the town. I'm probably more ashamed of the reputation than of anything we actually did. Plus, people seem to have forgotten every other band that stayed at the Hyatt House, because everyone was behaving in a similar way. A lot of people have put this really evil slant on it, and when I read that sort of stuff, I think, “Do they mean us?” We seemed to take the heat for everybody.

LORI MATTIX L.A. was the Mecca of rock 'n' roll in the '70s. New York was way more urban, but in L.A. you could have one scene right here, and it was all within a small radius of the Strip. It will never happen again: the girls, the decadence, the throwing champagne bottles out the window. We used to try and hit the billboards across the street.

MIKE APPLETON (producer of BBC2's Old Grey Whistle Test) There was so much money sloshing around the record business in those days that people referred to Dom Pérignon as “rock 'n' roll mouthwash.”

NICK KENT (writer for New Musical Express) People go to Hollywood to attain celebrity. Everyone who goes there has a fame-seeking agenda, which makes it a spiritually bankrupt place. The '70s was the end of Hollywood as a wild frontier town, and Led Zeppelin were the most famous group in the world. When news of them being in Hollywood hit the grapevine, all these nutcases came out of the woodwork.

PAMELA DES BARRES (groupie and L.A. girlfriend of Page's) Something about Zeppelin's energy really altered the joie de vivre of the L.A. rock scene. They thought they could get away with anything—and they could, because everyone wanted to get near them. They were very debauched, and the girls got younger and younger and more willing to do anything. It got to be incredibly sick. I mean, it's weird to see Richard Cole today, because I have images of him kicking people's teeth out.

MORGANA WELCH (L.A. groupie and Zeppelin friend) Around 1972 is when the Hyatt House became notorious. Prior to that, it was only a small handful of groupies. We knew what was going on. You could walk into the little coffee shop and hang out with a lot of people. And there were always bands staying there.

The word got out that this was a cool place to hang. The coffee shop was open twenty-four hours, so you'd go there after the clubs closed and when all the bands were coming in. And it just turned into a huge party place. It was very intimate, and it was very real in a lot of ways. There weren't bodyguards, and there weren't cops. There was nothing except Richard Cole. And the hotel itself pretty much turned the other cheek.

The Hyatt House, aka the Continental Hyatt, aka “the Riot House,” shortly before it became the Andaz West Hollywood in January 2009. (Art Sperl)

RICHARD COLE (Zeppelin's road manager) The second-generation L.A. groupies were younger and more hysterical. Each year there'd be a few of the old ones and a whole slew of new ones. Really, what I think they were doing was trying to live up to what they'd read or heard about.

MORGANA WELCH There was a buzz among all the young girls that these were the guys you needed to go meet. There was something very charismatic about Zeppelin that just drew you. Jimmy was the mysterious dark one, while Robert was just out front center, projecting this love of life. So there was this darkness and light that was also very curious and something to explore. In a way, they were a more sophisticated Beatles. It was more serious than the British Invasion groups, going within oneself with music as the catalyst.

NICK KENT The really famous groupies were extremely tough and unpleasant. Jimmy told me that one of his Hollywood girlfriends bit into a sandwich that had razor blades in it. I mean, seeing these conniving, loveless little girls really affected my whole concept of femininity for a while. Talk to the bass player from Sweet, and he would probably say those were the best months of his life, but to someone with a bit of taste—who wasn't just hopelessly addicted to pussy—it was pretty sordid. It was a period of time when, if you were skinny and English and dressed like some horrible Biba girl, you could have anything you wanted.

MICK FARREN (singer with the Deviants and writer for New Musical Express) I'd be on the road with Hawkwind or whoever, writing for the NME, and we'd check into the Hyatt, and Zeppelin would be there. And the whole place was full of the stinkiest fucking groupies. There was something very unclean about the whole deal. Rod and the Faces sort of kicked it off, but it went to some kind of zenith with Zeppelin. Moon actually blew up hotel rooms, but with Zeppelin it just seemed to be running in semen and beer and unpleasantness and old Tampaxes. They were number one on the groupie-target roster, and Rodney Bingenheimer was pandering to them as they sat in the back of his cupboard-sized discotheque getting their dicks sucked by thirteen-year-olds under the table.

RODNEY BINGENHEIMER (L.A. DJ and club owner) Nothing could beat L.A., especially with the music scene and the girls. Led Zeppelin would land at LAX and load up the limousines with all their luggage, and before they'd even checked into their hotel, they would swing by my club, with all the luggage still in the limo. I'd be DJ'ing, playing Gary Glitter, David Bowie, Suzi Quatro, Mud. I did manage to play “Trampled under Foot” in the club, but that was the only Zeppelin track. They wrote a song about the place called “Sick Again.”

DANNY GOLDBERG (Zeppelin's U.S. press officer and president of Swan Song) I got a very angry call about a picture at Rodney's, and my response was, “Don't be in the fucking picture!” I mean, what am I supposed to do if someone takes a picture? There was an illusion that you could control the press. I mean, I wish.

Rodney Bingenheimer with vintage wheels and vintage Zep T-shirt, West Hollywood, June 2010. (Art Sperl)

RODNEY BINGENHEIMER The girls would scratch your eyes out if you crossed their path. There were a lot of other girls that were in love with Led Zeppelin, but these girls kept them away. I had a girlfriend at the time who was in love with Jimmy, but she couldn't get near Jimmy because of Lori Mattix.

BP FALLON (Zeppelin's U.K. press officer, 1972–1976) I got to photograph Lori because she was in my room. Why would I not photograph her? The thing about groupies that's misunderstood is that it was all consensual. The girls were the predators, not the bands. Lori and Sable were very funny, very bright; they wouldn't take any shit from anybody.

CAMERON CROWE (writer for the L.A. Times, Circus, and Rolling Stone) What I was trying to capture [in Almost Famous] was the elaborate denial that the girls buy into. They talk about themselves as muses … but when you get the rock stars, you realize [the girls] of course are the trinkets themselves. When I ran into rock stars at airports, they would ask me, “Have you seen Lori or … ?” and I'd say no … and they'd get a wistful look, where you realize later the power of those trinkets. They missed those girls…. It's funny how they remembered [them] as a great symbol of their years of popularity. Looking back, those girls had shared many of the most private, reckless, golden moments … they had become, over time, as memorable to those musicians as the music itself.

IGGY POP (lead singer of the Stooges) When I was living in L.A. in very reduced circumstances during that period, I would meet these horrible little girls there who were fifteen and were fearing becoming nineteen. And that's not healthy, that's sick.

SABLE STARR (L.A. groupie, speaking in 1973) I never want to be anything over fourteen years old. I'm just going to ignore the years from here on.

Plant with Iggy Pop at the Riot House, summer 1973. (James Fortune/Rex Features)

LORI MATTIX Sable and I were best friends, like two peas in a pod. We were the young Paris Hiltons of our decade. She was the one who brought underwear and garter belts and all that to Hollywood, way before the Runaways were around.

Michael Des Barres was staying at the Hyatt House, and Sable and I went to visit him. Michael and Jimmy were best friends, so he went back to England and showed Jimmy these photos, and Jimmy said, “Oh, my God, I have to meet this girl.” At the time, we sort of looked alike. I was skinny and had really long curly hair.

Sable and I were up in Iggy Pop's house, which was the Mainman house, and Sable was like, “Zeppelin are coming to town. Let's go down to the Hyatt House. If you go near Jimmy, you're dead.” So I was terrified and was not going to go anywhere near him until we got to the Hyatt. And everybody's up at the pool, and Jimmy beelines directly over to me. I'm like, “Oh my God, don't come near me. You're going to get me in trouble.” I said, “Sable is going to beat me up. You have to go away.”

MORGANA WELCH I didn't like those Rodney's girls. When you're young, it's all about territory, so anybody that came from the Valley was looked down on. I was sixteen when I started out, but these girls were thirteen and very immature. I don't think we were troubled, we were just annoyed. We thought they were ridiculous. And look, Roman Polanski got caught, but there were all these forty-year-old men who were seeing young girls on the Strip.

It went both ways: there was a notch in your belt as a girl if you went with a famous guy. And it was going on all the time. There would be parties after the Rainbow closed, just big sex parties. People got loaded, put good music on, and everybody was with everybody. And most of the guys were much older.

LORI MATTIX My biggest fear was Richard and Peter, obviously, because Richard said, “If you don't fucking do what I say, I'll 'ave your fucking head.”

RODNEY BINGENHEIMER I went to a party at the Hyatt, and they had the whole floor. A friend of mine, Ronny Romano, came with me, and they got all weird about it. Bonzo or Richard ended up picking him up by his heels and holding him over the balcony. Nine floors up. They were all laughing.

LORI MATTIX When they came down, Richard told me to get in this limousine. It was a bit scary. I was a frail little thing, I didn't know what the fuck was going on. He was like, “Just sit there and don't move.” Jimmy had left a long time ago, and I didn't know where he was. They drove me back to the Hyatt House, and all of a sudden I'm being escorted down the hallway by three bodyguards. A door opens, and Jimmy is sitting there in a hat, waiting for me, and he says, “See, I told you I'd have you.”

GYL CORRIGAN-DEVLIN (Zeppelin friend, traveled on 1973 U.S. tour) Jimmy and Lori really were so beautiful together. The longer the relationship went on, the more they looked alike. I don't think I ever thought, “Oh my god, Jimmy could get arrested.” The way I saw it then, it was just very Hollywood: like, “You're not in Seaham Harbour anymore.” I found those little girls rather annoying, and we'd swat them away.

LORI MATTIX Jimmy stationed himself in L.A. and would fly in every night just to see me. He would play Chicago and then get a flight out that night so that we could be together. We'd be sitting on the floor, and then we'd be crying because we were so happy to see each other. We really kept to ourselves and were very private. He was my first love, and I didn't know any better. I feel lucky to have had that time with him, because I don't think he'll ever have that innocence again. I didn't love him for his money because I didn't know what that was.

He was always very conventional and conservative. He wanted me to be such a lady. He used to make me wear long dresses and look gypsylike. He caught me smoking a cigarette one night and went crazy and bought three packs, and he made me sit there and smoke all of them so I was gagging and then made me promise I'd never smoke again. If you look at any photos in the early '70s, you'll never see him with a cigarette in his hand. He wasn't even a big drinker. He'd have his gin and orange or vodka or champagne, and he loved the blow, but that was that.

BP FALLON You never knew what people were capable of. They'd want me to get a message to Jimmy, and you didn't know whether they were going to pull out a knife or what. So instead I introduced Zeppo to people like Les Petits Bon Bons, who were these wonderful raving young queens from California who'd give Bonzo pictures of their cocks with glitter on them. We went to gay clubs because it was more fun, and simply brought the girls with us.

CONNIE HAMZY (Arkansas-based groupie of wide renown) The first time I met Led Zeppelin was in Dallas. I was about the only real woman around them because they'd brought all these drag queens with them on the plane from New Orleans. Bonham stayed because when he was at the hotel, he looked over the balcony and there was a Corvette on the parking lot that he wanted. I would like to have been with Robert, but seeing as they'd left, I said to Bonham, “I'm very glad that you and I got to know each other.” He said, “Well, if you like, I'll put on a blond wig for you.” He gave me the impression he didn't fool around very often.

JACK CALMES (cofounder of Showco sound and lighting company) I always wondered how Connie could do what she did. She was amazingly good-looking for somebody who would just line guys up like that.

MORGANA WELCH I don't know why Roy Harper was on that tour. Probably just to have a good time. When I think that I was sixteen, and he must have been thirty, it's kind of like, “Wow!” We met at this pool party at the Hyatt House where me, Tyla, and Dewey Martin had gone. The Zep crew comes up, and Richard Cole starts throwing people in the pool. And apparently me, Tyla, and Dewey threw Robert and Jimmy in, because we were just so tired of watching them laugh at everyone else.

That night I was in Roy's room, and about a half hour later, Richard, Bonzo, Plant, and I think Lori and Sable broke down the door. Robert took a picture of me and Roy in bed, which I was really furious about. It was like bored eight-year-old boys, saying, “What we can we do next?”

GYL CORRIGAN-DEVLIN Roy was a complete nutcase on the tour. Somebody lent him a monkey for a while, and he would walk onstage with him. It became huge in the press.

VANESSA GILBERT (L.A. scenester and Zeppelin friend on the 1973 U.S. tour) Roy carried this stuffed monkey around with him, and he would sort of flutter it at Jimmy when the band was onstage. I liked Roy. We stayed at his house in England; he showed us his bird-watching slides, narrating as the slides went by.

ROY HARPER (folk singer and Zeppelin pal, speaking in 1974) By the end of a tour, everybody is getting pretty much blown out. I mean, you have no idea, you have absolutely no idea, of what the pressures are like. Peter Grant jestfully referred to me as the social worker on the last trip. There's a limit to what human beings can take, and on a cross-country American tour, you can watch the gradual disintegration. And when you run into the average hotel jobsworth, you don't actually want to play around with him too much.

You're going gray, so life gets into a pattern of activity that's inescapable. You reach the ultimate, which is, “What can we do next to keep ourselves together?” I've seen cars driven into swimming pools and walls blown out of hotels with dynamite. But that only happens when you've reached the point of total stress, when you've gone beyond all endurance.

RICHARD COLE At the Drake Hotel in New York, Jimmy phoned me in the middle of the night because he wanted $600 for a guitar. I went down to the safe, and everything was there. When I went down the next afternoon to get some money to pay off the film crew, everything was gone. The key opened, and there were just the passports in there. They'd even nicked some money that Jimmy had brought over from England for a Yardbirds tour.

VANESSA GILBERT Everybody had their own theory—like, Richard took the money and went to Switzerland and got back before everybody woke up. We were all questioned more than once. It was very serious.

UNITY MacLEAN (manager of Swan Song's London office) The strange thing about the Drake robbery was that Peter wasn't that unhappy about it. And usually if Peter had lost a couple of quid, he'd be miserable. You'd have expected him to turn America upside down to find that money, and he didn't.

LORI MATTIX Jimmy was like, “Don't worry about it, darlin', it's all under control.”

PETER CLIFTON (film director who completed The Song Remains the Same) In The Song Remains the Same, I decided to re-create the robbery, and I got away with it.

RICHARD COLE We were playing Boston, staying at the Sheraton, and I was brought in to meet Joe Massot. That was the first time I knew we were making a film. And it was all rushed together to do the sequences in Pittsburgh and all that business. I remember Joe in England, saying he wanted us to rent him a Range Rover, and I said, “Tell him to rent a fucking Ford Fairlane!”

JOE MASSOT (original director of The Song Remains the Same) Right from the start, Jimmy was against a straight concert movie, though obviously for the band it's the safest way of doing it. Anyway, I don't film that way—a camera here, a camera there. It's just too mathematical. The way I filmed, I eliminated that possibility, and I felt that one concert movie within the medium of film wasn't enough visually. The music is the power that drives the imagery, and just the performance is not enough.

PETER GRANT We got Massot and Ernie Day over and started filming. It turned out to be traumatic, to say the least…. They filmed three dates and never got one complete take of “Whole Lotta Love.”

PETER CLIFTON I saw glimpses of brilliance in what Joe had done—you hold a mirror up to Led Zeppelin, and you're going to get extraordinary things—but again, it was that haphazard thing. There was a scene missing here and a scene missing there, and when you're dealing with rock 'n' roll stars, the only thing they look at is the mistakes. If something's not perfect, they jump all over it. Joe didn't have the savoir faire to deal with people like that, so, of course, they walked all over him.

JOE MASSOT I became a psychiatrist, a doctor. I don't know—it was weird. I'd go to each one's home, he'd show me round, we'd talk about the film, and two days later we'd be making it. If you've made films, you know difficult it is—just bringing down lights, finding costumes. With forty or so people involved, the whole psychiatrist thing came to a head, and the band eventually realized they'd had enough. It was a coup d'état, really, but that's showbiz. What I did find out about Led Zeppelin was that, as individual human beings, they were extremely sensitive and considerate, but as a group they were bloody difficult, if not impossible.

JOHN PAUL JONES When we first had the idea, it was a relatively simple one—to film some shows and then release it as a film. Little did we know how difficult it would all become. I would ask if we were filming tonight but be told that nothing was going to be filmed, so I'd think, “Not to worry, I'll save the shirt I wore the previous night for the next filming.” Then I'd get onstage and see the cameras all ready to roll. Nobody seemed to know what was going on.

PETER CLIFTON Joe had been to Boston, he'd been to Pittsburgh, he'd been to various concerts, and they'd had a couple of 16 mm cameras in and out of this place. Even when he wasn't there, there were cameramen roaming around—it was a cameraman who picked up the sequence where Peter Grant is ranting backstage.

When they got to Madison Square Garden, they started shooting in 35 mm film but on four-hundred-foot rolls, which only gave you about three and a half minutes. During the reel changes, the cameramen were missing so much material, so Joe was trying to fill it with documentary footage, but it was out of sync and it didn't match. It was a very difficult thing to film live concerts in those days.

JOE MASSOT They finally came to a preview theater to see the “Stairway to Heaven” segment, and they started to fight and yell when the film began. They thought it was my fault that Robert Plant had such a big cock.

PETER CLIFTON I'd decided to go back to Australia for a while and make a film about reggae. I was just packing up the house when the phone rang and it was Peter, who said, “Come and see me in Oxford Street.” I walked into the office, and there were the four of them, just sitting waiting for me. They even had Foster's beer in the fridge.

I pitched a film to them, not knowing at that point that they'd been working with Massot. They eventually told me and said, “It's not working out, it's not what we wanted.” When I saw the mess it was in, I said, “There's some great 16 mm documentary material there, but there's nothing that holds together as a film.” I thought that if you could make a 35 mm film, then you could re-create the concert experience. I said, “I don't want interviews—I find rock stars have a lot of difficulty articulating themselves—but let's come up with ideas as to how we can reveal your personalities.”

The meeting went on and on and on, and the next day I heard from Peter. He said, “Look, Jimmy loves your editing, so we'd like you to make the film.” I already had people moving into my house, so I moved to the Churchill Hotel for three weeks and wrote a script—I just winged it.

I took the script down to Horselunges and showed it to Peter. Jimmy was hiding in the back room, apparently. The next thing I know, Peter comes out and says, “Okay, we agree.” I said, “Can I have a contract?” and he just signed every page of my script. There wouldn't be any fee, but I was to be made a sixth member of Led Zeppelin and would get an equal share of the whole thing.

I went to see Joe. He was eccentric, long-haired, and ill-disciplined but quite serious. He was a bit of a hippie. I had to play the George Clooney role in Up in the Air and sack him.

• • •

DANNY GOLDBERG They were all into cocaine. That was part of the culture then, when a lot of people on Wall Street and all different kinds of people were doing cocaine. The damages of it were not clear to people, and certainly in the rock 'n' roll world it seemed like it was everywhere. So cocaine was not something they wanted distance from, and that was the main drama.

BP FALLON How do you not sleep for six days and keep going? Pretty easily, actually. Part of the fuel is the lunacy, the being unhinged. A lot of great art isn't made by people who go jogging in the morning. It wasn't all a blur. It was all in high definition. Sensory overload. Driving down the highway with the police escort. Having drugs and sex in the limo. Very vibey.

GYL CORRIGAN-DEVLIN What started out as a little joint and a few bottles of Dom Pérignon got to be a case of champagne, and eventually they got into the really bad drugs. At the beginning we would all be together—or the guys would be together—and then it was Peter and Jimmy off in another room by themselves.

Toward the end of '73 is when Jimmy was starting to be a little bit naughty. I think he had already started to mix heroin and coke. I can still remember in Milwaukee, someone had left a line of coke on the dresser, and we thought, “Oh, we can't leave it there.” It turned out someone had put heroin in with the coke, and we were all absolutely ill. Jimmy was really the only one who wasn't, and it was obvious to me that that line had been left as a gift for him.

SAM AIZER (artist relations, Swan Song U.S. office) I think it started coming apart in 1973. Before then, you look at all the shows they did from '68 to '71, and this was an animal group. You could never play at that level and be out of it: you had to be hungry and seeing something unfolding and Peter driving a whip. By the time they got to their own jet, the wheels started falling off the cart. Because now they've become what they wanted to be.