It got to be painfully monotonous. No matter where Led Zeppelin performed, no matter how much advance planning we had done, it seemed like security became an overriding, nerve-racking concern. In the later months of 1972 and into 1973, the band made swings through Britain and Europe, performing at sites like Oxford’s New Theatre and the Liverpool Empire and venues in Sweden, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Austria, and France. In France in particular, I began to wonder whether I’d ever have peace of mind again at a concert.
We had our worst experience in Lyon, where the security was simply atrocious. The concert was at a basketball stadium that seated 12,000. But hours before the performance, dozens of kids had already broken into the arena and were roaming through the stands. Peter warned me, “If it’s necessary, you and the roadies are going to have to take matters into your own hands.”
Shortly after the show began, that’s exactly what happened. Some fans began throwing debris, including empty bottles, from the highest deck of seats. One of the bottles sailed directly toward the band and shattered on the stage. Slivers of glass exploded onto Bonzo and his drums.
That was all I needed to see. I looked up toward the stands, located the culprits, and then sprinted up to the top deck. A couple of our crew members followed me. We grabbed the thugs, dragged them into the aisle, and roughed them up. I think those fellas bore the brunt of years of anxiety and frustration that I had felt about the band’s safety. As we tossed them out of the stadium, one of them bleeding from a cut on his forehead, I realized that force seemed to be the only option that got the message across to fans who were intent on causing trouble. Touring was stressful enough without the added concerns of whether we were going to get through each concert without any harm to the band members.
After a show in Nantes, we decided to unwind by doing some serious drinking. The band, the roadies, and a few other hangers-on—sixteen of us in all—crammed into a rented Volvo. We were literally hanging out the windows and the sunroof, with Benoit Gautier, who worked for Atlantic Records in Paris, at the wheel much of the time. It was a death-defying ride to the watering hole, and as all of us continued to shift postures, trying to find a reasonably comfortable position, we kicked in the dashboard and shredded the upholstery. Bonham and I were standing up in the trunk, leaning forward and literally pulling the sunroof off its hinges.
Before we reached the bar, a cop spotted our car, with bodies extending out of every opening, and he pulled us over. He shook his head in disbelief and finally said in French, “I’m going to arrest all of you. You all have alcohol on your breath.”
“Alcohol!” Bonzo shouted. “We haven’t even started partying yet. If you really want a good reason to arrest us, let us get in a few hours of drinking.”
We were put into cells, and at my request, we began singing British drinking songs, doing our best to drive the cops nuts. In the meantime, realizing that there really weren’t any charges that could be pressed against us, the police captain called our hotel and asked the desk clerk if we were registered there.
“They sure are,” the clerk said. “But we don’t want them back. The doors on their floors are all messed up, and someone threw a TV out the window!”
The cop acted as though he hadn’t heard a word. “Well, we’ve had enough of them here. We’re sending them back to your hotel. Good luck!”
A few minutes later, we were released and driven in police cars to the hotel. Once the cops were out of sight, we walked to a bar down the street and spent the rest of the night there.
In March 1973, Led Zeppelin’s fifth album was finally released. It had been long delayed by endless problems with the cover artwork. Zeppelin kept looking at the prototypes coming out of the print shop and repeatedly rejected and sent them back, usually because of unacceptable, untrue, overly bright colors. Jimmy worried that the lavish colors on the album jacket would make it look like a cosmetics advertisement in a fashion magazine.
The album was called Houses of the Holy, an apparent reference to the spiritual aura that the band romanticized as hovering over its concert halls and audiences. Again, Zeppelin’s name did not appear on the album cover. The jacket instead featured young, blond, naked children climbing up a boulder-filled mountainside. Ironically, the title song was saved for the band’s next album, Physical Graffiti, which was not released until 1975.
The band was quite proud of Houses of the Holy. Five albums and more than four years down the road, they had a strong enough belief in themselves as artists to go in whatever new directions their musical instincts drew them. Firmly entrenched at the top of the rock music world, the band was expected by many fans to dig in and keep giving the public more of the same. But in Houses of the Holy, Led Zeppelin showed that they were willing to explore new ideas in their evolution as musicians, even if they were risky.
In “The Rain Song,” John Paul single-handedly created a lush orchestration on his Mellotron that sounded as though it came from an entire symphony orchestra. “No Quarter” showed their flare for the mysterious and the dramatic. And John Bonham the songwriter was showcased on “The Ocean”; he received credit as a primary writer on the tune.
Maybe the band felt they were growing as musicians, but the critics hadn’t evolved at all. Shortly after Houses of the Holy reached the record stores, Rolling Stone unleashed a savage attack upon it. Gordon Fletcher called it “one of the dullest and most confusing albums I’ve heard this year.”
With a big American tour set to begin in May, Zeppelin didn’t want to be crushed by a hostile press at every stop in the U.S. Beep Fallon was no longer working for the band, and Peter contemplated hiring a top-flight U.S. public relations firm with major media contacts to try to turn things around with the press. “The Stones are going to be touring in America at the same time as us,” Peter told me. “If we don’t actively go after some high visibility, the Stones will annihilate us in terms of publicity, even though we’ll outdraw them at the box office.”
The Stones consistently got much more—and much better—publicity than Led Zeppelin, and that grated on the egos of the band. Of course, the Stones hung out with a different crowd than us, drawn to celebrities like Truman Capote, Andy Warhol, and Lee Radziwill. Jagger & Company were the darlings of the social register, and even though Mick had a devilish image, he seemed like a choirboy next to the way the media had portrayed Led Zeppelin.
We were perfectly content to camp out relatively anonymously at local bars and strip joints, but those weren’t the kinds of social activities that got the publicity we felt we needed. For the most part, the press still treated us as though we were plotting World War III.
So Peter made the initial contacts with Solters, Roskin, and Sabinson, one of the most prestigious, high-powered, and expensive PR companies in the U.S. Peter talked to Lee Solters, a straitlaced, middle-aged man who made a very nice living representing some of Hollywood’s biggest stars. “We’re on the final leg of a tour through France,” Peter explained. “I’d like you to fly over to meet the band. Despite their image, I think you’ll find them to be quite civil, quite bright young men.”
Solters boarded a plane for that initial meeting with Peter and the band at the George V Hotel in Paris. He brought with him Danny Goldberg, who was in charge of the firm’s rock ’n’ roll division and who would be handling the Zeppelin account.
Goldberg was twenty-two years old, a tall, congenial, articulate fellow with his long hair usually tied in a ponytail. He wore his shirttails untucked over a pair of stylish, neatly pressed blue jeans. As an adolescent, he had attended a prestigious New York City prep school and then had dropped out of the University of California, Berkeley. Ironically, he had once written reviews for Rolling Stone, one of Zeppelin’s biggest nemeses.
At that first meeting with the band, Solters suggested that Led Zeppelin needed a media face-lift. “Your music is taking a backseat to a lot of negative publicity about your offstage life, and that offstage image will require some rehabilitation,” Solters pontificated. “Because you’ve shied away from most interviews for so long, all the press has to go on are the rumors about your maniacal behavior. We’ve got to mainstream you and change that outlaw image. We also have to let the population at large know that you’re accomplished musicians, not savages.”
They discussed nurturing a different relationship with the press. They talked about doing more interviews, although only carefully selected ones. They kicked around the idea of some benefit concerts. By the end of the meeting, Zeppelin made a handshake agreement to bring the PR firm on board, beginning with the American tour.
The band took an immediate liking to Danny Goldberg. “Everything just feels right with him,” John Paul said. When Danny’s hair wasn’t bound in a ponytail, it was longer than any of ours. So within days, the band had nicknamed him “Goldilocks.” He was a vegetarian, which won points with Jimmy, although he got some curious stares when he told us that he also stayed away from drugs and even cigarettes.
Zeppelin quickly developed a trust of Danny’s media instincts and press prowess. When he arranged an interview, the band did it, no questions asked. When he recommended a press reception before or after certain concerts, they almost never said no.
As Peter and Danny ironed out a final strategy for the upcoming American invasion, Zeppelin themselves congregated in Shepperton Studios for rehearsals, mostly working on bringing songs from Houses of the Holy to the stage. Shepperton was owned by the Who, and it had facilities so the band could work out its lighting for the concert tour while also refining its music. I had arranged for Showco in Dallas to fly its two best technicians to London to review the final lighting and sound arrangements with the band and test them out at Shepperton. For this tour, the band was not going to leave much to chance.
Before we departed for the States, Danny Goldberg had planted a story in Rolling Stone calling the upcoming tour the “biggest and most profitable rock and roll tour in the history of the United States.” The tour was projected to gross more than $5 million, which exceeded the claims made by Alice Cooper that he would take in $4.5 million for his current tour.
“By the end of this tour, everyone’s going to say that Zeppelin is second to none,” Danny promised.
We took him at his word.