The ’73 tours have consequences, immediate and long term, that change the lives and careers of the Who, Alice Cooper, and Led Zeppelin in ways mundane and profound. Having spent six months of every year since 1969 on the road, Led Zeppelin commences an unprecedented eighteen-month hiatus from live performance. John Paul Jones—who always holds himself at a remove from band camaraderie—seriously considers quitting the group during the sabbatical. He drolly tells Grant on the eve of recording Zeppelin’s next album, Physical Graffiti, that he is considering applying for the job of choirmaster at Winchester Cathedral. The fact that Jones invokes a job so comically opposite his rock star existence is telling. The sessions are postponed before Jones reconsiders and joins the group at Headley Grange, where Ron Nevison cuts eight tracks for the album. The delay caused by Jones’s cri de coeur forces Nevison to depart the sessions due to a prior commitment to record the soundtrack for the Who’s Tommy movie. “They weren’t happy about that,” says Nevison. “No one had ever quit Led Zeppelin before.”
As Robert Plant’s hit-or-miss vocals throughout the ’73 tour make plain, singing full throttle night after night for the past four years has ravaged his voice. During the tour Plant finesses the punishing falsetto portions of “Stairway to Heaven” by dropping an octave, and several songs are reconfigured in lower keys so that he can manage them live. Much later Plant reveals he underwent throat surgery during the band’s hiatus; Zeppelin scholars detect a noticeable attenuation in his voice upon the release of 1975’s Physical Graffiti and subsequent albums and tours. The band’s first double album is a mixed bag of new material and leftovers from the Stargroves sessions for Houses of the Holy and introduces the last great Zeppelin anthem, “Kashmir,” a swaying Middle Eastern epic anchored by one of Bonham’s greatest drum figures. A winter and spring tour of North America, the band’s first since ’73, is hampered when Page injures his hand in a train door just before the premiere and Plant battles the flu during the early dates. But overall the tour and album—which soars straight to number one and sells eight million copies in the United States—are well received, and Zeppelin finally attain the unqualified renown and critical acceptance that had eluded them since 1969.
The rest of the seventies are an unfolding nightmare for Led Zeppelin. Plant and his family are severely injured in a car accident in Greece, forcing the cancellation of an American tour and delaying their seventh album, Presence. Released in March 1976, the album’s jarring, flinty, ultra-hard-rock repertoire receives a cool reception from critics and fans. Presence has the misfortune of being released into the thick of Britain’s punk movement, which casts Zeppelin as its chief object of ridicule and explicitly rejects the ponderous rock star excesses the band personifies. In lieu of touring, the band releases The Song Remains the Same, shot mostly at the 1973 Madison Square Garden concerts and shelved after the rushes are viewed as unsalvageable; it is savaged by critics but does respectable box office. Most ominous, in the U.S. Zeppelin’s now college-age core audience has shifted its enthusiasms and money to the softer melodic rock practiced by the likes of Fleetwood Mac, reconstituted with a sleek L.A. sound. Peter Frampton replaces Page as the cohort’s guitar hero as Frampton’s freakishly successful 1976 live album blasts from dorm rooms across the land while Presence languishes in cutout bins. For the first time, Led Zeppelin is no longer hip with its chief constituency.
Zeppelin nevertheless remains a potent concert attraction; with no new album to promote and only their legacy as a draw, the band sells out a lucrative spring and summer U.S. tour in 1977, playing before a record-setting audience of 76,229 at the Pontiac Silverdome. While the tour comprises some of their best performances, it is plagued by unruly fans, injuries, and arrests. The mood within the entourage is increasingly dire and paranoid; the motorcade to and from the arenas now numbers six limos, one for each band member and Grant plus one for groupies. (According to Markus, for the Madison Square Garden shows the band deploys a staggering thirty-two limousines—“I think the first one arrived at Madison Square Garden just as the last one was leaving the Plaza.”) On the third show of a four-night stand in Chicago, Page takes the stage obviously indisposed. “He looked weird and the vibe was weird—something was wrong,” says Neal Preston. “All of a sudden [Grant] comes out from the wings waving his hands, like, ‘Stop, stop.’ I run backstage just as Richard is dragging what looked to me to be almost a lifeless Jimmy Page right in front of me. He shot me a look like ‘Don’t even think of photographing this.’ ” The official explanation for Page’s collapse is food poisoning. The following evening Page performs dressed as a Nazi storm trooper, with leather boots and an SS officer’s cap cocked jauntily atop his curls. By now so spectrally thin that he appears malnourished, Page cuts the repellent figure of a decadent wastrel. He is photographed on Caesar’s Chariot, successor to the Starship in Zeppelin’s private air force, wearing the SS cap while a Texas groupie favored by Robert Plant nuzzles his scrawny neck.
The Waterloo for the tour and the band comes at two Bill Graham–promoted Day on the Green concerts at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum. Tensions run high throughout the first show as Zeppelin’s crew randomly assault Graham’s personnel, knocking out a stagehand. When a misunderstanding arises over the removal of a dressing room sign involving a Graham employee and Grant’s young son, Bonham kicks the man in the crotch; he is later lured to a trailer, where—as Richard Cole menaces Graham’s security with an aluminum pole—Grant and John Bindon, a notorious Zeppelin security thug, beat the man so severely he believes he will be killed. Following the concert, Zeppelin’s attorney implies the band will not perform the next day’s sold-out show unless a document is signed absolving Grant, Bonham, Cole, and the rest for the incident. Graham finally signs, fearful of a riot if the concert is canceled, and meanwhile quietly arranges for the perpetrators to be arrested after the show. Graham’s own security spoil for a fight. “Bill,” one of them informs him, “we’re tellin’ you up front. Before the show tomorrow. After the show tomorrow. We’re gonna do somethin’ about it. We’re gonna do these guys.” They agree to hold off when Graham tells them about the impending bust.
When Zeppelin takes the stage the next day an hour and twenty minutes late, “they were totally behind enemy lines,” Graham recalled. “No one spoke. No one smiled. The only thing moving were people’s eyes.” The next morning Grant, Cole, Bonham, and Bindon are arrested at the San Francisco Hilton and transported to Oakland, where they are handcuffed, booked, and briefly jailed before posting bond. They later plead nolo contendere and receive modest fines and suspended sentences; a $2 million civil lawsuit is settled out of court. As Graham’s stage manager later recalled, “When we started looking into it, there were incidents like that across the country on that tour. Trashed hotel rooms. Trashed restaurants. Literally like twenty thousand dollars’ worth of damages at some restaurant in Pennsylvania. Really outrageous stuff. Like where they physically abused waiters and people in the restaurant and then just bought them off. The accountant would open up the valise as the guys were zooming off in their limousines and say, ‘Okay. How much?’ ”
After Oakland, Zeppelin is scheduled to appear before eighty thousand at the New Orleans Superdome. The show never goes on. After checking in to the band’s hotel, Plant receives the news that his son, Karac, has died suddenly of a viral infection. The rest of the tour is canceled and Plant, accompanied by Bonham and Cole, flies home to England. In San Francisco, Bill Graham receives a phone call from Peter Grant. “I hope you’re happy,” Grant tells him, perfectly serious. “Thanks to you, Robert Plant’s kid died today.” After eleven tours and 337 shows, the Oakland fiasco becomes the band’s legacy in the country that delivered them to superstardom. Led Zeppelin never again plays America.
Two years pass before Zeppelin performs again. During the hiatus Plant mourns his son and in 1979 a new album is released, In Through the Out Door, a partial return to form after Presence. The band plays two shows before a combined 350,000 Britain’s Knebworth Festival, reassuring them that their audience is still there. In Through the Out Door debuts at number one in the U.S. and revives the fortunes of a record industry in a prolonged slump following the collapse of disco. In the summer of 1980 Zeppelin embarks on a no-frills tour of Europe and lays plans for a monthlong return to America in October. Rusty Brutsche, as ever, mixes sound. “They had been through the wringer and did Europe with a lot of trepidation,” he says. “They actually sounded good and kind of came back together again.” Following a rehearsal for the American tour at which Bonham is almost too drunk to play, the band stays at Page’s house in Windsor for the night. The next morning, Brutsche waits at a London soundstage for the band to arrive for rehearsals; instead, there is a phone call from Benji Lefevre, Plant’s vocal tech. “He said, ‘The rehearsal’s not gonna happen today,’ and I could just tell from the way he said it that it was something really, really bad.” Showco’s Dallas office calls with the news that John Bonham is dead. The drummer has been discovered in bed at Page’s home by Lefevre, having choked to death on his vomit after consuming, it is later determined, more than a liter of vodka. He was thirty-two years old. After rumors circulate that the band will carry on with a replacement drummer, Zeppelin issues a statement on December 8, 1980: “We wish it to be known that the loss of our dear friend [has] led us to decide we could not continue as we were.”
In the ensuing years Page and Plant perform together and separately, most visibly on MTV’s Unledded in 1994, playing acoustic versions of the Zeppelin canon without inviting or even informing John Paul Jones. With Bonham’s son Jason on drums, Plant, Page, and Jones play the Atlantic Records Fortieth Anniversary concert and at Zeppelin’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995. The four reunite under the Led Zeppelin name in 2007 for a concert honoring Ahmet Ertegun at London’s O2 Arena that draws more than twenty million requests for tickets. The show is so well played there is speculation a reconstituted Zeppelin will tour, but Plant refuses. In 2012, the surviving members receive the Kennedy Center Honor; thirty-nine years after the band started agitating for mainstream credibility and respect in the summer of ’73, Page, Jones, and Plant, in black tie and wearing medals presented earlier at the White House, are seated not far from Barack and Michelle Obama.
Peter Grant, meanwhile, retreats to his moated Sussex estate, where he mourns the loss of Bonham and succumbs to his cocaine addiction while battling diabetes. Already divorced from his wife, he now loses touch with the surviving members of Led Zeppelin. Plant makes it known he will seek new management when he launches his solo career. In the late eighties, Markus invites Grant to tea at the Mayfair Hotel in London and is shocked by his decline. “He looked awful. He looked like an old man. He was living alone, his clothes were soiled, and he just didn’t smell good.” Grant eventually cleans up, loses weight, and reenters society. Taking stock of his legacy, he is moved to tears when Bill Graham’s damning account of the Oakland beatings is published and confides to an associate, “I don’t want to be thought of as a bad person.” Though no longer managing them, he reconnects with Page and Plant informally. He is scarcely recognizable to those who know him from his buccaneering Zeppelin days.
Tony Mandich, head of artist relations for Atlantic Records, spots Grant backstage at a concert in L.A. and invites him to dinner after the show. “My God, he’d probably lost a hundred and fifty pounds,” Mandich says. Before dinner, Mandich orders a glass of champagne. “I said, ‘Peter, have a drink.’ ” Grant orders a fifth of Stolichnaya. “I was shocked because in the car he was complaining that his doctor told him he was going to die if he didn’t stop drinking.” Mandich orders a bottle of champagne for himself and he and Grant spend hours reminiscing. Grant thanks Mandich for looking after Zeppelin over the years—including niceties like making sure the band’s preferred booths at the Rainbow were always available when they were in town—and tells him that this will be his last visit to America. As they leave three hours after the restaurant closes, there is perhaps a finger of vodka left in the bottle Grant ordered. He gathers around his shrunken frame the scarves and enormous woolen trench coat that for years had been his manager’s mufti. Mandich never sees him again. Peter Grant dies of a heart attack on November 21, 1995, while driving home with his son Warren. He was sixty years old.
Alice Cooper has scarcely unpacked from the Billion Dollar Babies tour before they are back at work recording Muscle of Love, the follow-up to Billion Dollar Babies. After the tour wraps, Alice would recall, “I couldn’t get out of bed for a week, even to go to the bathroom, ’cause I was shaking. It was like when you turn your car off and it keeps going. That’s exactly what happened. I was at home, in my apartment, and I was calling room service. And Cindy, my girlfriend, would say, ‘What’re you doing?’ I had to catch myself. It started getting serious. You can’t keep on that level, going that fast all the time.”
Nevertheless, by October, Alice is in daily attendance at New York’s Record Plant, laying down lead vocals for Muscle of Love. Producing the album is Jack Richardson, subbing for his former assistant Bob Ezrin, who declined the project after deeming the songs insufficient. Exhausted from the tour, the band presents the new material to the producers at Richardson’s Nimbus Nine studio in Toronto. “Bob, at the time, was going through a divorce,” says Michael Bruce. “He comes in while we are doing ‘Big Apple Dreaming’ ”—a song later to appear on Muscle of Love—“and the first thing out of his mouth is not, ‘Hi, how are you guys?’ It’s like, ‘No, no, no, that’s not what it is. Stop. Stop. Stop. That’s not how you play that.’ And we all turned and looked at one another and we’re like, ‘Oh, God, it’s happening again.’ ” Dennis Dunaway recalled, “We started playing it and we didn’t even get past the intro and Bob stopped us and wanted to change it. We were laughing but Michael Bruce took offense and said, ‘We don’t want to change it.’ ” It escalated rather quickly and Bob said, ‘Well I guess you guys don’t need me, then.’ Michael replied, ‘I guess we don’t.’ We were standing there looking like, ‘Wait, we do need Bob.’ ” Says Alice, “It was getting to the point where Mike wouldn’t listen to Bob. Neal didn’t want to really listen to Bob. Whereas before, whatever Bob said was gospel. All of a sudden, everybody got a little bit arrogant: ‘Well, we’re the big rock stars and we know what we are doing.’ And we didn’t.”
With the droll and easygoing Richardson at the helm, the Muscle of Love sessions proceed apace. Meant to be a return to the band’s garage rock roots after the gothic complexity of Ezrin’s productions, the album nevertheless ends up bejeweled with stunt guest stars—Liza Minnelli and the Pointer Sisters sing backup—and ultimately suffers from a lack of the thematic continuity that propels School’s Out and Billion Dollar Babies. “The songs were all good individually, but they sounded like they all belonged to other albums,” says Alice. Even the album’s packaging—a cardboard box printed with a faux grease stain—seems to not know what it wants to be. Despite his differences with Ezrin, Bruce comes to understand that “as diverse as Muscle of Love was, and Jack Richardson did a really good job, Bob wasn’t there and we were all missing him. I would have taken the stress to have him there because I could know that it would be done right. I knew he wouldn’t let anything out that wasn’t just extraordinary.” Muscle of Love ships one million copies when it is released in November and generates a modest hit single, “Teenage Lament ’74,” but books two hundred thousand returns, some of them from retailers believing the stain on the cover is real and that the album is damaged goods. Compared to Billion Dollar Babies, perhaps it is.
Alice Cooper embarks on a monthlong U.S. tour in support of Muscle of Love in December. Aside from changing the band’s costumes to sailor suits—to coincide with the album’s inner sleeve depicting the band on a rampaging shore leave—the tour is essentially the Billion Dollar Babies show, right down to the snake and guillotine. Glen Buxton, who does not play at all on Muscle of Love, is in no better condition than on the last tour, and Mick Mashbir once again is tapped to cover his parts. The concerts sell out despite the gas shortage gripping the U.S., and the band plays solidly at every date. “We were really up to speed and playing much better than we had on the Billion Dollar Babies tour,” says Mashbir. But the overall mood is dour. Bob Greene notices that Alice pulls back from the most vicious elements of the show, no longer taunting the audience and only going through the motions of chopping the doll and serenading the snake. “I feel as if I’ve done this before,” Alice observes on opening night in Nashville. “Do we really have to go out there tonight?” Just before stepping onstage, he turns to Greene, yawns, and says, “As you can see, I’m a bundle of nerves.”
Alice’s isolation from the band, apparent on the Billion Dollar Babies tour, is now exacerbated by an aggressive bodyguard who shadows him everywhere, even when he practice-putts in the safety of his locked suite. Alice is, incongruously, now an avid golfer and arranges side trips from the tour to play without the others. Bruce finally asks Alice “why he was drinking all this beer, playing golf, doing this whole Dean Martin trip. And he said he’s been doing what we’re doing for the past nine years, and he’s sick of it. He said he’s ready to do something else.” Says Alice, “I was slowly drifting away from the band.” After the tour Alice said, “Up to Billion Dollar Babies it was fun but then it got grueling and everyone lost their sense of humor.”
Shep Gordon is already working behind the scenes to broaden Alice’s celebrity beyond the confines of a five-man rock band and, ultimately, to remove him from it. Bob Brown finds that dealing with the band makes him uncomfortable “because I knew what was happening. I knew that this”—the Muscle of Love tour—“was kinda gonna be it.” Alice is photographed mingling with mainstream celebrities, which during the buildup of his vicious image would never have been allowed but is now orchestrated just as minutely. “Playing golf with Johnny Mathis was not done by accident,” says Brown. “Hooking up with Groucho Marx was not done by accident. Hollywood Squares”—Alice appears on the game show with tired, toupeed “stars” like Paul Lynde—“was not done by accident. It was all part of the transition of Alice the band to Alice the individual, the solo artist.”
The Muscle of Love tour wraps New Year’s Eve, 1973, in Buffalo, followed in March and April by a five-date cash-grab tour of Brazil—an uproarious gig in São Paulo is attended by 150,000. After the tour, the tensions that had been steadily building throughout the past year surface. “The guys called a band meeting and said they wanted to do solo projects,” says Gordon. “They weren’t happy with the way things were going. They felt that people weren’t appreciating them for their musicality and they didn’t want to do the theatrics anymore. Alice was the only one who really was willing to play the character; they were almost embarrassed by it. It created tension every single night because they didn’t want to go on in the costumes or do the guillotine. And I can understand their point of view. They were musicians and wanted to be appreciated and loved for their music. But our guitar solos didn’t get a lot of standing ovations, and the hanging did every night.” Neal Smith counters that “the band didn’t break up because we didn’t like the theatrics or we didn’t like the clothes. There’s nobody more theatrical than me. I’m as much as Alice if not more. I would have the most outrageous drum set in the world, and an even bigger one on the next tour.”
At the meeting, Gordon says, he reminds the band that “we all made a commitment that [Alice] was going to take on the burden of doing all the press and he gets the exact same amount you guys do. But if you break this bond, I want you to understand that he’s got the name Alice Cooper, so he is Alice Cooper. That’s the way we created it, and that’s why we made our deal that nobody would break from the other guy because we were giving him a very big advantage. So if you call this off, you have to understand what you’re letting loose. And I want you to know that as far as I’m concerned, I’m gonna be going with him because I’m not interested in the musicality. I’m interested in the theatrics.” Alice says that “the thing that really drove the stake through the heart of it was when Billion Dollar Babies was done and everybody was fairly exhausted, I was already thinking, ‘I’ve got an idea for a show that’s gonna be bigger and take two years of solid touring. The moment we stop, Bowie or somebody else is going to step up and take over. We cannot stop right now.’ ”
In the end, the band takes a year off, during which Michael Bruce can record a solo album. “We were just going to take it easy and then a year later, we were going to get back together and record the next album,” says Smith. They never do. In 1974 Alice records Welcome to My Nightmare, produced by Ezrin, that is also the soundtrack to a TV special, Alice Cooper: The Nightmare. “The minute I heard about Alice doing a solo album, I said, ‘Well, that’s it,’ ” says Smith. “If he has any kind of success, he has all the momentum of the name behind him.”
Released in 1975, Welcome to My Nightmare is a sizable hit and spawns a top-ten single, “Only Women Bleed.” After that, there is no more talk of the original band regrouping. Bruce says calls to Gordon go unreturned. “Then the phone rings and it’s Shep,” says Bruce. “And Shep says, ‘Alice says you will no longer be working together.’ ” David Libert cites Bob Greene’s unsparing insider account of the Muscle of Love tour, published in 1974, as the decisive factor in the breakup. “The book came out and that changed everything. Alice read the book and said, ‘I don’t want to work with these guys anymore.’ ” Alice legally changes his name from Vincent Furnier to Alice Cooper. “Now what do you got?” says Brown. “You got a person named Alice Cooper and a band named Alice Cooper. And you can’t copyright a personal name that’s been changed.”
Outmaneuvered at every turn, the remaining band members consider their options. “We [jointly] owned the name,” says Smith, “and we had to work something out legally because of that.” Says Bruce: “We would have to sue and none of us wanted to do that. I mean, we got close. I wasn’t going for it. Glen had nothing to lose. Dennis didn’t want to and Neal was on the fence because it would change the relationship forever. And it will be long-drawn-out and the lawyers are going to make the money. So we figured, let’s just go on with our lives and just let them run with it.” Says Smith, “There was never going to be a lawsuit because a lawsuit would never really fix anything. It just makes everybody hate each other more.”
The remaining members of Alice Cooper change their name to Billion Dollar Babies and, with Mick Mashbir, record the album Battle Axe, a commercial flop, before disbanding in 1975. Alice tours successfully behind Welcome to My Nightmare with a band that includes Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter, who played on Billion Dollar Babies in lieu of Buxton; the tour’s support personnel—Joe Gannon, Libert, Brown, and the rest—are essentially unchanged. (Bruce is bitterly amused when he hears that the new band are disgruntled because they aren’t in the spotlight enough.) Alice’s drinking meanwhile progresses to full-blown alcoholism—footage from the Nightmare tour depicts him barely able to stand, and he badly injures himself after a fall headfirst off the stage in Vancouver. After the tour, Brown is dispatched to L.A. to live with Alice at his new home on Lookout Mountain in Laurel Canyon—the neighbors include Harry Nilsson and Micky Dolenz of the Monkees, who along with Keith Moon and Ringo Starr comprise a drinking club, the Hollywood Vampires, who congregate at the Rainbow nightly. “Bob had to babysit him,” says Linda Bischoff, hired as Brown’s aide-de-camp. “You couldn’t leave the guy alone.” Says Brown, “He needed someone to drive him more than anything because at that point he had never driven. That was my job when we weren’t on tour—that and take him to the Rainbow.”
Alice struggles with alcohol throughout the seventies and early eighties. “I was costume mistress on the tours,” says Bischoff. “He would come offstage and I would have to take his two-piece leotard off and put on another. And I couldn’t have done it if it wasn’t for [two Cooper roadies] holding him up. I don’t think he really wanted to do it anymore, and that was the way he coped.” Alice goes through rehab twice before finally cleaning up for good in the mid-eighties. (He later becomes a devout Christian.) For the next thirty years he releases a string of solo albums and tours regularly but never entirely eclipses his work with the original Alice Cooper band, which features prominently in his shows. When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame finally inducts Alice Cooper in 2011, it is the original five-member band that is honored. At the ceremony, Alice, Michael Bruce, Dennis Dunaway, and Neal Smith—with Steve Hunter substituting for Glen Buxton, who had died of pneumonia in 1997—perform “I’m Eighteen,” “Under My Wheels,” and “School’s Out.” It is the first time all the surviving members have played together since the breakup in 1974. “One thing I do know,” Neal Smith says a year after the induction, “is that sooner or later, except maybe for the Rolling Stones, every band breaks up. And breaking up at the top of your career is not the worst thing in the world. I’d rather do that than be dragging a guillotine into a bar somewhere in Indiana and getting five hundred bucks a night doing a whole Alice Cooper set, you know?”
Chiseled into a black granite gravestone in Clarion, Iowa’s Evergreen Cemetery are two bars in the key of E minor:
In a fitting memorial to Glen Buxton, his epitaph in the obscure Midwestern town where he spent the last years of his life commemorates the eternal contribution he makes to Alice Cooper and to rock and roll: the bouncing, belligerent opening riff to “School’s Out.”
The Who play out the seventies after Quadrophenia amid personal upheaval and public and private tragedy. Townshend wrestles with drink and drugs while trying to answer once and for all whether it is possible for the band to remain relevant. The Who by Numbers, the band’s first new material since Quadrophenia, is released in 1975 to indifferent reviews and sales. The album is dominated by Townshend’s soul-searching over his addictions (“However Much I Booze”) and fields a minor hit in “Squeeze Box,” a near novelty record with naughty punning lyrics and a banjo solo from Townshend.
After a three-year hiatus during which the band members work on solo projects, the Who regroup and record Who Are You. Released in 1978 with the English music scene dominated by punk, the album features stronger material and yields the band’s last major hit in the title track, the opening verse of which recounts Townshend’s being rousted by a policeman after passing out drunk in a Soho doorway. Within a month of the album’s release, Keith Moon dies suddenly after ingesting an overdose of the drug meant to wean him from alcohol. Moon had been in decline throughout the decade as he ramped up his booze and drug intake to lethal levels; unlike Townshend, the definition of a functioning alcoholic, Moon’s playing deteriorated to the point that his drum part had to be wiped from one of Who Are You’s tracks. His stomach is so distended from brandy that he sits for the album’s cover photo in a chair labeled, in brutal coincidence, NOT TO BE TAKEN AWAY. Kenney Jones, the affable former drummer of the Faces, replaces Moon in the band. “Keith was a very positive musician, a very positive performer, but a very negative animal,” Townshend said a year after Moon’s death. “He needed you for his act, on and off stage. Kenney fits in very well as a person with the other guys in the band.” Nevertheless, part of the Who dies along with Moon and is never recaptured.
Tragedy continues to stalk the band when, at a sold-out concert in Cincinnati in December 1979, eleven audience members die of asphyxiation before the concert in a crush outside the arena doors. A contributing factor is festival seating, the profit-maximizing strategy launched when rock concerts were upscaled from ballrooms to arenas in the early seventies. With the entire main floor of the arena given over to standing room, a sizable crowd had gathered outside Riverfront Coliseum prior to the concert in order to secure good spots. When the band performs a sound check, some in the crowd mistakenly assume the concert has started and surge toward the entrances; however, the doors are still closed. Before they finally open, eleven fans are dead and several dozen more injured in the melee to reach the stage front.
When the concert starts, few in the eighteen-thousand-strong audience—along with the Who—realize the incident has occurred. Cy Langston is backstage when word finally reaches the entourage about the deaths. “The count was getting higher and higher. We had to make a decision. Well, what do we do? We can’t pull the band offstage, because it could cause a riot. So in the end Bill Curbishley, the tour manager, and myself decided we can’t tell [the band] until after they’ve done the show. It wasn’t until they came off the encore that we sat them down to tell them.” The band are stunned but elect to continue the tour. As Townshend recalled, “I watched Roger Daltrey cry his eyes out after that show. I didn’t but he did … It was, fuck it! We’re not gonna let a little thing like this stop us. That was the way we had to think. We had to reduce it. We had to reduce it, because if we’d actually admitted to ourselves the true significance of the event, the true tragedy of the event—not just in terms of ‘rock,’ but the fact that it happened at one of our concerts—the tragedy to us, in particular, if we’d admitted to that, we could not have gone on and worked.”
By the early eighties, Townshend seems destined to follow Moon as his depravity reaches heroic levels even as he releases a well-received solo album, Empty Glass, with its top-ten single “Let My Love Open the Door,” and the Who issue Face Dances, the first album recorded with Jones. Townshend’s inebriation finally bleeds into his performances—he famously nods off at an Amnesty International benefit; infuriates Daltrey, Entwistle, and Jones by launching desultory improvisations during a London concert; and nearly expires after collapsing at a club after an injection of heroin. Townshend later credits his dissipation in part to his “inability to deal with the [Who]. I felt that the band wasn’t facing up to reality. I should have said to the band, ‘I’m leaving. I’ve had enough of rock and roll. Good-bye.’ But I didn’t. I couldn’t deal with that emotionally at the time.” Although Face Dances yields the hit “You Better You Bet,” Townshend decrees the album subpar. The follow-up, 1982’s It’s Hard, is hailed by Rolling Stone as the band’s “most vital and coherent album since Who’s Next.” But between Townshend’s addictions and contracting sales—the albums sells a fraction of Who Are You—the Who, confirming Townshend’s obsession since Quadrophenia, no longer seems of its time.
Townshend finally cleans up and the Who embark on a successful “farewell tour” in 1982 that later becomes farce as the band, without Jones and including a host of sidemen including Townshend’s brother on guitar, tours in 1989, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009, in addition to numerous one-off shows, including the Concert for New York City, a benefit for first responders to the 9/11 attacks that the Who dominate with a powerful performance. Eight months later, on the eve of a U.S. tour, John Entwistle dies of a cocaine-induced heart attack while in the company of a middle-aged groupie at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas. He is fifty-seven. As with the tragedy in Cincinnati, the band elects to continue the tour, and Entwistle is replaced with the session bassist Pino Palladino. Townshend later reveals he only agreed to the tour to help Entwistle—deeply in debt—and afterward plans to no longer perform as a member of the band. Entwistle’s death instead breathes life into Townshend’s fraught relationship with Daltrey and encourages him to carry on with what is left of the Who. “I felt it was like a gracious gift from John … though his passing was really tragic. Roger and I were thrown together. We had been respectful and friendly to each other, but we had never been great friends. We had never managed to find a way to live with how different we are, and how differently we think and work. With John gone we were on our own, no distractions, no excuses.”
And so Townshend, who ties himself in knots over the Who’s place in the rock and roll continuum, finally is content to let the band’s legacy define his own. In 2010 the Who play a rapturously received performance of Quadrophenia in its entirety at the Royal Albert Hall that serves both to gentrify the opera for new generations—Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder makes a cameo as the Godfather—and to give it, finally, the proper staging that eluded the band so tragicomically during the ’73 tour. Reviewing the concert, the Guardian observed, “They really don’t make albums like this anymore, and while there’s undoubtedly a reason for that, you can’t help being glad someone once did.” In 2011 Townshend presents the lovingly curated “director’s cut” boxed set of Quadrophenia that leaves no doubt of his devotion to the opera that no one seemed to love except him when it escaped at the tail end of 1973, itself a year of cultural schizophrenia that teetered between the sixties and seventies, steeped in both and resolving neither.
It doesn’t take long for the last of the sixties atmospherics to evaporate from the music industry once 1973 is past. Cocaine ceases being a fey and fashionable pick-me-up and devolves into a full-scale scourge, destroying bands and corrupting relationships professional and personal at every level of the music business. “The excesses of that time were directly tied to senior management’s ability to identify with the artist,” says Chip Rachlin. Which means what, exactly? “Who did drugs with whom.” After the Quadrophenia tour, Will Yaryan, having adopted the vices of his rock star charges, endures one more year of soulless toil on behalf of music that increasingly reflects the cynical turn of the industry—albums and drugs are now interchangeably referred to as “product”—before he can take no more. “My marriage didn’t survive the nights at the Troubadour, Roxy, and Whisky, and by the end of 1974 I quit by locking myself in my office and listening to music until the gold-chain-wearing head of the office fired me. It took me a year to get the speed and coke out of my system.” Yaryan moves to Santa Cruz and later to Thailand and rarely looks back.
Marsa Hightower logs untold hours in the Starship and in backstages in every major metropolitan market on the map throughout the seventies. “One could encapsulate the entire era into a single motif—the circus,” she says. “The ladies flying through the air enticing all around, the tightrope walkers trying to maintain balance, the daredevil trapeze artists. Then, of course, there was the aroma of elephant dung in the background, lending a certain decadence to the experience. And the audience, enraptured, wanting to be part of the circus but also waiting for the spectacular falls and missteps.” The industry’s total capitulation to the drug culture in the mid-seventies, coinciding with spectacularly successful albums like Frampton Comes Alive! and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, begets a fall-of-Rome decadence that disquiets Hightower even as she maneuvers through the business in L.A.
“There was a dealer named Howard, who first was the coke guy. Then he was the freebase guy. Then he was the heroin guy,” she says. “You’d go to parties and you always knew when the drug dealer came in because everybody would be following him or her.” As the decade grinds on, the nights when Hightower hosts dinner parties at her house on Shoreham Road above the Sunset Strip—when her friend Keith Moon is still capable of being charming and the drugs are mostly kept at bay—become a memory as the scene turns irreducibly hostile. “The thrill was gone, as were many friends and acquaintances. There are a lot of them I can’t believe lived through it, Jimmy [Page] being one of them. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed it. But I knew there was a possibility that if I stayed in it much longer, it was going to happen to me, too. And it was like, I’m getting out of here. I’m done.”
On a street lined with sycamores in Los Angeles’s Mid-Wilshire district is a whimsical mock Tudor cottage of the sort that Charlie Chaplin stashed his mistresses in during the twenties. Inside, the shelves are crowded with miniature Spanish galleons, the walls hung with coats of arms and neatly framed gold albums. In the backyard above a koi pond covered with plywood to foil a persistent peregrine falcon, a pirate’s skull and crossbones flutters atop a flagpole in the afternoon breeze.
Ron Volz, Alice Cooper’s first full-time roadie, opens the front door and leads the way to a table in the dining room piled high with hundreds of hotel keys that Volz pocketed as keepsakes on his voyages around the world with Cooper in the seventies. The battered leather briefcase he carried on tour is open nearby, overflowing with backstage passes, long-lost itineraries, and his original laminated crew pass from the Billion Dollar Babies tour, with its purple image of Alice in his stage makeup. Volz stirs the keys and selects one embossed CONTINENTAL HYATT HOUSE—Led Zeppelin’s fabled Riot House, the mother of rock and roll hotels. He stirs some more. Here are keys from the Intercontinental Hotel in Berlin, from Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Lund, Essen, Frankfurt, Vienna, Munich, Paris, Antwerp, London, Liverpool, Perth, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Auckland. Running through the pile are dozens of the peculiar oblong fobs once the trademark of Holiday Inn, “The Nation’s Innkeeper” and Keith Moon’s, too, until he drove a Lincoln (or maybe it was a Cadillac) into one of their swimming pools.
Volz became a roadie after he hitchhiked from Cincinnati to the Woodstock Festival at nineteen and somehow insinuated himself backstage. Alice Cooper hired him when they passed through Cincinnati during one of their first, primitive tours. Filling in for an absent Dennis Dunaway, he played bass the night Michael Bruce fashioned the first crude version of “I’m Eighteen” in an empty club in Ohio. Two years, four gold albums, and eight tours later, Volz was on hand as Alice Cooper gathered their Rolls-Royces and Jaguars and moved out of the Galesi mansion into mansions of their own. Not long after, the mansion burned to the ground. Volz, by then living in an apartment above the garage, watched as firefighters futilely tried to save the house that launched Alice Cooper on their final adventure.
Forty years later, Volz stirs the keys in front of him as if they are embers from a life that warm him still. After his days with Cooper, he became a successful art director for music videos with stars as big as the band that first opened the door to a world he could scarcely imagine when he was growing up in Ohio. But he never forgets his first brush with the rock and roll American dream, when the music stepped out of its hand-sewn sixties hippie vestments and into limos and arenas and Starships, during the twelve barnstorming months in 1973 when he, too, was a Billion Dollar Baby.
“Wherever they were, wherever things were going on,” Volz says, “I was there.”