(1974–1977)
Robert Plant entered the twenty-first century without a record label. Twenty-five years earlier, he’d had two. Atlantic, to which Led Zeppelin was signed, and Swan Song, to which they swore their own allegiance—because it was, indeed, their own.
By 1974, it was no big deal for a band to have their own label. The Beatles, as usual, were the first to demand their own identity away from the typography of their parent company when they launched Apple in 1968. The Rolling Stones’ eponymous setup followed in 1971 as part of their own newly inked deal with Atlantic; the Moody Blues, Deep Purple, T. Rex, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer numbered among those who had followed suit. If Zeppelin really were, as they claimed, the biggest band in the world, then they too needed their own label identity and a stable of genuine stars to accompany them, the latter being the one side of the entire business to have largely evaded the efforts of their label-owning predecessors.
Early signings to the label were impressive: Bad Company, the supergroup formed by Free’s Paul Rodgers and Mott the Hoople’s Mick Ralphs; ’60s veterans the Pretty Things; and one-time Stone the Crows singer Maggie Bell, one of the most impressive female blues singers the UK had ever produced. Indeed, Bad Company immediately repaid Zeppelin’s faith by becoming one of the biggest rock bands of the mid-1970s, at the same time as Ralphs and Plant spent many hours recalling their shared apprenticeship on the Black Country circuit. Originally from Hereford, Ralphs had replaced Kevyn Gammond in the Shakedown Sound when Gammond quit for the Band of Joy. There, he linked up with organist Verden Allen and, shortly before the end of the band, drummer Dale Griffin—who in turn became the roots of Mott the Hoople.
Of all of Led Zeppelin, Plant was Swan Song’s biggest cheerleader. For his bandmates, having a label was simply another piece of business, another way of keeping Led Zeppelin’s name in the public eye. All four band members were credited as executive producers (Peter Grant was president, their US publicist Danny Goldberg and Atlantic Records veteran Abe Hoch were vice presidents), and all four expressed an interest in the label’s signings. For Plant, however, it was personal. He told Rolling Stone in 1974:
A long time ago in England with Bonzo, I was playing a very contemporary form of music and at the time the accepted music to be playing was all the cliché music—the Beatles, the hit parade stuff. Anybody who was a little bit out of the ordinary or trying very hard was always ignored by the record companies, because they wanted to play it safe.
We thought it would be really nice to get a company together where it’s run by the people who really understand. I mean you can’t get any closer to the artist than being a fellow artist.
But there was more to it than that. For Plant, Swan Song filled him with the same kind of joy that he used to feel as a kid, leafing through the vinyl in a local record store and coming across label imprints that he’d never seen or heard of before—imprints that, though they operated from offices on the other side of the world in the hands of media moguls of whom he had never heard, became his labels. Parlo! Instant!! Laurie!!! Names that could still make his heart race. Now he envisioned Swan Song having the same effect on other people.
In fact, Swan Song enjoyed only a modicum of success beyond Led Zeppelin’s marquee attraction. Bad Company blazed brightly but briefly, and Dave Edmunds enjoyed a couple of golden years. But never was Swan Song regarded as anything other than Led Zeppelin’s label, with no less than seven of its twenty-seven LP releases being either Zeppelin or Zeppelin related (Jimmy Page’s Death Wish II soundtrack and Robert Plant’s Pictures at Eleven were both Swan Song releases). And while both Bad Company and the Pretty Things had albums out on the label before its executive producers deigned to stir, they could still be regarded as little more than appetizers in the face of the main attraction’s next offering.
Work on Led Zeppelin’s follow-up to Houses of the Holy kicked off at Headley Grange in the spring of 1974, with Plant still ecstatic over Wolverhampton Wanderers’ latest feat. On March 2, goals from their two latest heroes, Kenny Hibbitt and John Richards, were sufficient to dispose of the much-fancied Manchester City in the final of the League Cup tournament, having already knocked out Norwich, Exeter, and the favorites, Liverpool, en route to the final. It was the club’s first major trophy since 1959, and not only was Plant at Wembley for the game, it also took him three days to get home from there, as he revealed to Record Collector in 2007. He remembered that the Mayor of Wolverhampton officially received the team, and that he himself was there briefly. He also admitted, “It played havoc with my marriage for a while.”
Headley Grange had not changed since the band’s last visit, although this time, they had Ronnie Lane’s mobile studio parked outside. In testament to Jimmy Page’s legendary eye for cost cutting, it was a cheaper option than the Stones’ setup they had hitherto employed, although any savings were probably eaten up by the decision of all but the guitarist to move into a nearby hotel for the duration of the band’s stay. Where, incidentally, their behavior was impeccable.
The notion that this next album would be a double had been floating around for some time, and was confirmed as the band worked through the backlog of material they had accumulated over the years. The overabundance of songs that emerged during the Houses of the Holy sessions was naturally the cornerstone of this trove, but “Custard Pie” dated as far back as the band’s third album, while seven new songs included “Trampled Under Foot,” Plant’s funky tribute to rock’s long tradition of girl-as-car; “Sick Again,” a weary worm’s-eye view of the underage groupies who had haunted the band in Hollywood; and another number drawn from his and Page’s trip to Marrakech in 1972, “Kashmir.”
Another time-honored tradition—of taking an out-of-copyright blues and making it one’s own, both musically and in terms of songwriting credits—arose with the band’s epic take on “In My Time of Dying,” an old Blind Willie Johnson number that Bob Dylan repopularized in the early 1960s and that, quite coincidentally, was a lengthy centerpiece in folk duo John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett’s live set of the day. Coming to Zeppelin’s version after recent exposure to that, and reading the songwriting credits that they claimed for themselves, was an intriguing experience.
What really set the new material aside, however, was the production, and the way it was translated onto vinyl. For all that medium’s (post-digital) reputation for sounding warmer and more alive than compact disc, vinyl nevertheless suffered one major drawback. The more music that was packed into the grooves, the more its ultimate reproduction suffered. Forty-five minutes, spread over two sides of a disc, was generally considered the optimum; exceed that and not only would the sound begin to suffer but the actual size of the physical grooves would narrow too, rendering even the smallest scratch a lengthy succession of annoying clicks or worse.
Page had always born this failing in mind—both in terms of an album’s length and, while mixing the music, the dynamics he wanted to emphasize. Even in full acoustic mode, Led Zeppelin albums sounded loud. Neither was he willing to reveal the tricks of his trade—when 10cc’s 1975 The Original Soundtrack album tried, but failed, to capture that Zeppelin bombast, NME reviewer Charles Shaar Murray simply observed that Jimmy Page’s production secrets “remain a secret.” Physical Graffiti was to be the apogee of Page’s production, fifteen tracks spread across four slabs of wax, released in February 1975 and given further granite-like substance by a sleeve design that slipped both discs into a New York City tenement block.
The band was on the road again, thirty-five dates across the United States that placed them in some of the largest venues in the country and kept them there for two or three nights at a time. It was the biggest tour of the year, in terms not only of ticket sales and logistics, but also the sheer larger-than-life presence of the four musicians onstage. At home in the UK, the band was now so huge that they couldn’t even tour—there were no venues in the country large enough to hold them. Instead, they block-booked the eighteen-thousand capacity Earls Court Arena for five days, knowing that ticket demand could have kept them there for a month. According to the Financial Times newspaper, Zeppelin were on course to earn $40 million in 1975 alone.
The new material, and in particular “Trampled Under Foot” and “Kashmir,” translated as effortlessly as any past classic to the stage but exceeded them too—which itself was a remarkable achievement as the 1970s moved on and too many bands rested content on the laurels they’d laid down on earlier discs. For Led Zeppelin to be six albums into their career and still capable of turning out new material as good as, and even better than, that which made their name was a remarkable achievement. Indeed, with the exception of the inevitable “Whole Lotta Love” and “Stairway to Heaven,” it is unlikely whether any Led Zeppelin song can outrank “Kashmir” in the popularity stakes.
Plant’s lyrics and vocals were as integral to this accomplishment as any other player’s contribution. Yet still he felt as though he were being treated like a junior member of the team, the one who simply got up there and sang while his bandmates did the real work.
He’d long grown accustomed to Peter Grant essentially treating the band as Jimmy Page-plus-three, and reviews often followed a similar track. Audiences focused on Plant because he was the front man, and that in itself was gratifying. But it was so easy for his bandmates to upstage him: Jones, with the ever-more-inventive solos with which he could expand “No Quarter” to close to thirty minutes; Bonham, with the ruthless battery he laid down onstage and the ruthless thuggery with which he behaved off of it; and Page, with his violin-bow guitar solo, and the knowledge that the moment he drew the bow across the strings, he’d be rewarded with one of the loudest roars of the evening.
It was sheer gimmickry, of course—a visual hook no more or less stage-managed than Roger Daltrey swinging his mike above his head or David Bowie going down on one knee to give head to Mick Ronson’s guitar. It didn’t always even sound that good. But of all the images that people associate with Led Zeppelin in their pomp, Page’s violin bow was up there with the best of them. Which, if you’re already feeling a little insecure and a little undervalued in your role within the band, was not something you’d want to be reminded about. Especially when your own parents, as was the case with Plant’s, continued to look askance at their son’s choice of career, regarding it as no better than the time he had wasted as a teenager and still wondering when he would settle down to a responsible job.
Nothing was ever said to deliberately make Plant feel bad—or not much, anyway. Occasionally, he might feel excluded during a rehearsal or soundcheck as his musicianly bandmates lost themselves in an instrumental jam that may or may not have been purposefully designed as an instrumental. But really, what he felt was a general sense of dissatisfaction, a nagging feeling that no matter what he brought to the band, it was never enough to raise him to equal status with his bandmates in the estimation of those whose opinion he valued the most. His bandmates.
He didn’t complain. But observers were aware regardless—through the petty disagreements that Plant and Page, in particular, seemed more prone to than before, through the singer’s increasingly visible distaste for the circus that surrounded the band, through the influx of hard drugs into their circle, and through Page’s unblinking acceptance of his own personal legend. “There was a lot of unspoken rivalry,” Plant admitted in a Rolling Stone interview. In the beginning, Page “employed a very democratic approach to the whole thing. He encouraged me a lot. Then, suddenly, we were side by side, and he didn’t quite like that.” Little put-downs that pecked at petty vulnerabilities, little instances of one-upmanship. “[If] we were both sitting in the same bar, and a woman walked by and we both liked her. Then it was, ‘Oh no, here we go.’”
One clear sign of the divisions that festered within the camp was broadcast when the band arrived in Los Angeles in March. Everybody was accustomed to Jones distancing himself as quickly as possible from whichever hotel the band had deemed Madness Central, which in Hollywood was the Riot House. This time, however, Plant too chose to rent a private house for himself, leaving Page and Bonham alone to hold court. Which, according to multitudinous sources, they proceeded to do with fine abandon.
Plant, on the other hand, stayed in his rental and listened to records.
Lee Brilleaux, the powerhouse vocalist with Dr. Feelgood, ran into the band at the conclusion of their London concerts. Rising fast through Britain’s pub circuit, the Feelgoods were among the most talked about new group in the country at the time, with a repertoire that modeled wholly on the R&B bands of the early-’60s blues boom. They performed at Zeppelin’s after-show party, and Brilleaux recalled, “Plant was the one who asked for us, and he was the one who paid attention while we playing, bopping about in front of the stage, just getting into the music.” He seemed oblivious, Brilleaux marveled, to everything else going on in the room. “He just wanted to listen to us play. Looking back, even though I wasn’t ever impressed by the stars who came to watch us, because I knew most of them were only there because someone said it’d be good if they were seen in the crowd, Plant did impress me. He cared about the music.”
The London shows were Led Zeppelin’s last for the moment. More American dates were scheduled for later in the year, but for now, in May 1975, the band members’ time was their own.
Plant promptly scooped up Maureen and the kids, and two days after the final concert, they flew out to Agadir, a small town on the Moroccan coast. Later in the trip, they would hook up with Page, his girlfriend Charlotte, and their daughter Scarlet for an excursion to Marrakech—a working holiday in a way, as the pair mused again about recording some of the ethnic music that surrounded them.
The travels continued. There was a band meeting to attend in Montreux, Switzerland, and the same town’s annual jazz festival to take in, and then the party moved on to Rhodes, where the numbers were swollen by the arrival of Maureen’s sister Shirley and her husband. Page himself would be staying just a few days; one of Aleister Crowley’s former homes on the island of Sicily had come onto the market, and the guitarist was considering its purchase. But Charlotte and Scarlet remained behind, and the day after Page’s departure, the entire contingent—Plant and Maureen, Carmen and Karac, Charlotte and Scarlet, Shirley and John Bryant—divided themselves across two cars, all three of the kids in the back seat of the Plants’ rented Austin Mini sedan, for a scenic drive across Rhodes.
They never completed the journey. Driving, Maureen lost control of the vehicle. It veered off the road and smashed hard into a tree. All five aboard were injured: Scarlet received cuts and bruises, Carmen’s wrist was fractured, Karac’s leg was broken. Maureen suffered a broken leg, pelvis, and skull; Plant a broken wrist, leg, and ankle.
A passing fruit truck transported them to the nearest hospital, the rest of the party following close behind. There, while Maureen was rushed into surgery, Plant was taken to a room that he would be sharing with another patient, a drunken soldier who had fallen and banged his head. “As he was coming around,” Plant told Melody Maker, “he kept focusing on me, uttering my name. I was lying there in some pain, trying to get cockroaches off the bed, and he started to sing ‘The Ocean.’”
It was not Plant’s first highway accident. Five years earlier, driving home from a Spirit concert in February 1970, he wound up in Kidderminster Hospital with broken teeth and facial lacerations after a collision with another motorist left both cars as total write-offs. On that occasion, he was up and about the next day. This time, he would not be so fortunate.
Maureen was the most seriously injured; indeed, had her sister not been there, she might have died. She had lost a lot of blood, and Shirley was the only person in the hospital, perhaps even on the entire island, who shared her blood group. Back in London, as news of the accident reached headquarters, a Harley Street orthopedist was summoned and flown to the island aboard a private plane, loaded down with medical supplies. Then all five casualties were loaded aboard the same plane and flown back to London.
For all the local doctors’ good intentions and expertise, there was no way they could tend to the full extent of Maureen’s injuries, while everybody was also well aware that once word spread of the hospital’s superstar patient, it wouldn’t be just one concussed soldier who was singing Plant’s music. The entire island would be under siege from journalists and fans alike.
Confined to a wheelchair for the first weeks of recovery and unable to walk unaided for a time after that, Plant turned to soccer for his physical therapy. Wolverhampton Wanderers opened their treatment to him, where he came under the care of club physio Kevin Walters (brother of actress Julie) and manager Sammy Chung. “They helped me walk again,” he revealed.
The injuries he sustained in that accident bother him to this day. He still has difficulty with the damaged arm, and trouble with his back as well—a pain that he would exacerbate when he took to traveling with his bandmates in a van during the Honeydrippers and Priory of Brion excursions.
For now, however, his greatest challenge was that he was unable to remain in the UK. As the incumbent Labour government battled to halt the country’s final decline into the financial abyss that was already consuming it, a new wealth tax had been instituted, a staggering 83 percent levied on the nation’s highest earners. Already, all but the most stubborn musicians, artists, actors, and businessmen had announced their intention to go into tax exile; many already had. At Peter Grant’s insistence, Zeppelin were now following, although Plant would not travel too far. He opted for the Channel Island of Jersey, a part of Britain that handled its own tax arrangements and wanted nothing to do with the supertax.
Settling into a guesthouse belonging to businessman Dick Christian (whose insurance broker godson was a friend of roadie Richard Cole), Plant was close enough to London that Maureen, so slowly recuperating from her injuries, was in reach, but far enough away that the taxman couldn’t touch him. Which was probably not much solace to Maureen herself, particularly after she discovered that John Bonham had decided to just bite the financial bullet and remain at home. In June, he and wife Pat celebrated the birth of their second child, daughter Zoë. For now, at least, they were staying put.
In any case, neither remained still for long. Although Plant’s injuries saw both the next American tour cancelled and a string of European and Far Eastern shows too, there would be no break in the routine. Rather, with at least one eye on the money lost from the concerts, Peter Grant called all four musicians to Los Angeles in September to outline his revised plans for the next twelve months—beginning with the recording of a new album.
Plant did not necessarily follow his doctors’ orders. An intense regime of physiotherapy was the first to fall by the wayside, alongside the recommendation that he not mix his prescription drugs with any recreational compounds. He rented a beach house in Malibu, which swiftly developed a reputation as a nonstop party, described by local scenester Kim Fowley as being decorated with wall-to-wall women.
Another visitor, however, suggests that the extent of Plant’s injuries, and the strength of the drugs he was taking to combat the pain, had a rather unexpected effect on the young man whom Hollywood groupiedom perceived as sex on legs: “The girls were there for company and color. Anybody who was expecting a nonstop orgy was very quickly disappointed.” Indeed, Fowley told biographer Paul Rees that his own attempt to entertain the fallen god with a wild lesbian freak show was dismissed by Plant’s insistence that instead Fowley find him one particular record he wanted, one that he was willing to pay $25,000 for.
He might have been talking about the next Led Zeppelin album. With over a year’s worth of live work lined up in the aftermath of Physical Graffiti, the band had scarcely given even a thought to the album after that, and had certainly not started gathering material. Grant’s insistence that they start recording it a full six months before they even intended writing it placed them in a very sticky position, all the more so since Physical Graffiti had devoured everything they had previously set aside.
To which difficulty could be added Plant’s injuries and—despite the appearances that other sources like to paint—his continued concerns about Maureen. And to that can be added his continued resentment at the way in which he felt he was being treated, and maybe he did have a point there. One cannot help but wonder whether Grant would have hurried Page back into action so soon after an accident.
Then pile on Page’s own apparent disinterest in doing anything beyond drawing tight the curtains of his rented home and apparently sitting in the dark. It is little wonder that work on the new album was more or less at a standstill. Nor that when it did finally get under way, the majority of the material would be substandard by almost any band’s standards. Five songs, one epic (the swirling atmospheres of “Achilles Last Stand”) and one studio jam (the sole band composition, “Royal Orleans”) were somehow pulled together in time for the band’s arrival at SIR Studios in Hollywood, and from there, at the end of October, the sessions moved to Musicland Studios in Munich, where further difficulties arose in the form of the Rolling Stones.
They were due at the same complex just eighteen days after Zeppelin booked in, to commence the marathon sessions that would ultimately emerge as their Black and Blue album. Ultimately, Plant was able to strike some kind of deal with Mick Jagger and postpone Zeppelin’s eviction for another three days. Nevertheless, twenty-one days in which to wrap up an album that had barely got off the creative starting blocks yet was just one more pressure that Led Zeppelin didn’t require. And the album that emerged from it all echoed its desultory birth.
Presence was not the work of a cohesive, or even functioning, rock band. The best melodies sounded forced, the worst were barely present. It was as if Page was still shut away in his house, Plant was still in pain, Jones was off doing whatever he did when he was not onstage, and Bonham was too bound up with his own chemical demons, a recent taste for smack included, to do more than go through the motions. Even that one widescreen epic, “Achilles Last Stand,” was impressive only if one had never wondered what might happen if “Immigrant Song” was grafted onto “Kashmir” and affected not to notice that Plant’s vocal, here and throughout the album, was barely a ghost of its customary wild howl. His injuries and recuperation had taken their toll there as well.
None of which seemed to matter as Presence hit the record stores at the end of March 1976, and its cover art—a nuclear family gazing blankly at an obsidian obelisk of no apparent purpose—became as much of a talking point as any past runes ever had. Simply the fact that there was a new Led Zeppelin album was sufficient to send sales through the roof. But as is so often the case when a superstar disappoints, that only meant that it would stop selling the moment people started hearing it. And this time, Peter Grant himself was too distracted to react. A cocaine habit had spiraled out of control, his marriage was collapsing, Swan Song was turning into a one-trick pony, and Led Zeppelin had already achieved everything Grant had even dreamed might be possible. There simply was nothing left to dream about.
Eight years old—that is, the same age as the classic John-Paul-George-Ringo Beatles were when they finally called it a day—and Led Zeppelin, too, appeared to have reached the end of the line. Unfortunately, nobody was willing to pull the plug on them. So the fates, be they the dark forces that Jimmy Page allegedly gathered around him or the natural energies that Robert Plant drew from the misty myths of Celt and Viking, set about pulling it for them.
Plant’s continued recuperation placed any touring plans on hold for the time being; in lieu of a full-scale Zeppelin flight, the long-gestating The Song Remains the Same movie was finally given a release that fall. And it bombed.
Not necessarily through any fault of its own. True, the fantasy sequences would have been fairly preposterous no matter when the movie was released. But issued at any time within the two years after it was shot, The Song Remains the Same would have offered the world precisely what it intended: the sight and sound of the biggest band in the world as they approached their musical peak. Three years after it was filmed, however, and two albums on from its most recent inclusions, there was a distinct aroma of yesterday’s news to the entire affair; plus, with Presence having both underdelivered and underperformed, there was even a stink of desperation about it. As though the band was admitting, “Yes, our last album was a turkey. But do you remember when we were good?”
One other factor influences memories, and historical recounting, of Led Zeppelin’s first annus horribilis. Late 1976 was also the season that marked the first stirrings of punk rock, a musical force that hindsight insists rose up to purge the rock scene of its sainted dinosaurs and replace them all with purple-haired teenagers with buzz-saw guitars and Mach 3 amphetamine habits.
A modicum of this is true. Certainly no examination of the year 1977 would be complete without reference to the Sex Pistols taking the British imagination by the throat and painting themselves as the ultimate enfant terribles, and 1976 was the year in which the band first started moving on to the establishment and mainstream media’s radar. It is true, too, that the punks quickly learned that the best way to get their names in the papers was to slam the bands that preceded them—to call them tired and irrelevant, and laugh at their jets and pretensions and drum solos. But hindsight, in this case, is as blinkered as the kids who made those remarks—and the journalists who believed them. Firstly, punk was almost wholly a British experience throughout the most potent months of its lifespan, and secondly, even within those excruciatingly narrow parameters, it was never the all-consuming passion that historians like to claim it to have been.
Outside of the pub and club scene where punk flourished, and the singles chart where its best efforts were concentrated, the dinosaurs browsed on as unperturbedly as they ever had in the past. Genesis, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, Yes, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer all released albums during 1977 that proved to be among their biggest British hits yet, and most spun off equally monstrous hit singles too. And why? Because the vast majority of people who bought and listened to their music didn’t care a damn for punk rock. It was a minority pursuit for a minority of kids, and it was only later in the decade that it became apparent just how crucially punk rock had changed the way things were done. Meaning, when fans and critics alike rejected The Song Remains the Same in fall 1976, or Presence six months before, it was not because they were all lining up to stick the first safety pin through their eyeballs. It was because they expected more from Led Zeppelin than either of those.
Led Zeppelin were not immune to punk’s impact, though. Plant and Page’s unscheduled viewing of an early Adverts rehearsal, as Led Zeppelin themselves rehearsed upstairs from the band, was their first introduction to the band responsible for some of the new movement’s most enduring anthems: “Bored Teenagers,” “One Chord Wonders,” and “Gary Gilmore’s Eyes.” And the following month, February 1977, Plant, Page, and Bonham stopped by the Roxy in Covent Garden to catch another of the movement’s pacesetters, the Damned, and professed themselves fans. Well, Plant did, anyway. “I was really impressed by them,” he enthused after their set. “I like to see new bands, see what they’re doing, how good they are.”
Bonham, too, was impressed, and that despite being thrown off the stage by the club’s security, a fat, bearded drunk whom the musicians failed to recognize and whose bandmates were too busy laughing at to intervene. His final words as he tumbled back onto the floor were “This is a fucking great band.”
Unlike Led Zeppelin, who were a fucking tired band.
Nobody in the group welcomed the announcement of a fifty-one-date American tour that was initially scheduled to begin in February 1977. Therefore, nobody shed a tear when Plant made it clear that he had still to recover sufficiently from his injuries and the dates would have to be pushed forward, a point that he reinforced when he then contracted laryngitis. The tour was rescheduled for March, but the portents remained ominous. The show was barely on the road when a gig at the Riverside Coliseum in Cincinnati was scarred by a near riot, as ticketless fans rushed the arena. Sixty were injured, seventy were arrested. Another gig, another riot—when thunderstorms forced the cancellation of the band’s Tampa show, another slew of injuries were laid at Zeppelin’s doorstep.
There would be time for some relaxation, but even that was scarred by paranoia. Arriving in Los Angeles for their shows at the Forum, Plant quickly hooked up with some other English ex-pats, and clad in a gold Wolves shirt and a pair of multicolored striped speedos, delighted passers-by when he joined in with an impromptu game of soccer at a park in Encino. Of course he was spotted and recognized, and photographer Brad Elterman later recalled the star’s reaction on his own website: “He came up to me (with his surly roadies acting as bodyguards) and demanded my business card. ‘I want your business card,’ he screamed and then threatened me that I would never work again in Los Angeles; but hey, it was my town. It is an incredible rush when a major star tells you that you will never work again.”
The arrival in the band’s inner circle of former gangster John Bindon dampened spirits even further, as he set about alienating almost everybody he came in contact with, friend or foe. As a kid, Bindon had been known to one and all as “Biffo” on account of his penchant for what he called “biffing” people—a comical-sounding euphemism for some really rather deadly assaults. Later in life, Bindon won a police award for bravery after leaping from Putney Bridge to save a man from drowning in the Thames. “The funny thing is,” he later told a friend, “I didn’t get anything for throwing the bastard in, in the first place.” Now he was working for Zeppelin, although mercifully his residency would not last long; he was sacked after the violent beating up of a member of Bill Graham’s security team, Jim Matzorkis, landed Bindon, Peter Grant, Richard Cole, and John Bonham in an American court (they were handed suspended sentences).
Not that they were angels, either. The mood around the Zeppelin camp was so dark, so pregnant with paranoia and fear, and so strung out on several pharmacies’ worth of illicit cocktails that simply looking at someone the wrong way was enough to merit a beating—and as the tour rolled on, the violence grew more and more palpable. The band members themselves were largely insulated from all that was being perpetrated in their name. But they were aware of it—and aware, too, that they were helpless to intervene. Conscious that after two less-than-stellar releases, the cachet that was once Led Zeppelin’s by divine right had finally started to slip, their own fears becoming as real as the brutality taking place outside of the bubble.
Their private Bacchanalia had become a very public Babylon, and just to add an even sharper edge to the blade, Peter Grant was already talking about them returning to the studio as soon as the dates were over to begin work on another album. Not because they needed to, but because he couldn’t think of anything else for them to do. And the band members were probably already counting down to this next day of reckoning when they checked in at the Maison Dupuy Hotel in New Orleans, at 6 a.m. on July 26, where Plant was greeted by a frantic call from Maureen. Karac had been taken ill. Thirty minutes later, while Plant was still sitting on his hotel room bed, already half decided that he needed to fly home immediately, another call came through. His son was dead.