By the time the ’73 tour reached Los Angeles in late May, Houses of the Holy had become the Number 1-selling album in the U.S. That left the entire band feeling almost giddy with excitement. Virtually everything was going our way in the tour thus far. We felt invincible.
But literally minutes after our chartered fan-jet landed at Los Angeles International, and we moved onto the airport tarmac, the mood changed. Fans had lined the fence as our plane landed, and Jimmy walked over to shake hands and sign autographs. “Give me ten minutes and then we’ll be on our way,” he told me. Pagey reached over and through the fence, making contact with the fans. But as he did, he caught a finger on a protruding wire and quickly pulled away. In the process, he somehow sprained the finger.
“Oh, shit!” he shouted, as much in anger as in pain. He turned and walked to the limo with his left hand in a contorted position. “I think I’m in trouble,” he said as he slid into the car. He slumped down in the seat, with an exasperated look on his face.
Within an hour, Jimmy was being examined by a doctor. They concluded that he just couldn’t effectively maneuver that finger on the neck of the guitar. “The best medicine for this kind of injury is rest,” the doctor recommended.
Jimmy was incapacitated, at least for the next day or two. We really had no choice but to do some quick rescheduling. One of our dates at the L.A. Forum was pushed ahead four days.
We were all upset by Jimmy’s accident. However, by May 31—John Bonham’s twenty-fifth birthday—Jimmy insisted that we not let his injury interfere with some celebrating. That was the night of the first Forum show, and after the concert the general manager of an FM radio station in L.A. hosted a party for Bonzo at his house in the hills above Hollywood with the help of Tony Mandich of Atlantic Records and New York FM jock J. J. Jackson. Bonzo showed up wearing swimming trunks and a T-shirt. George Harrison and his wife, Patti, were there, too.
George had seen the Forum show and seemed intrigued with Led Zeppelin. He had once talked to me about coming to see the band perform at Madison Square Garden and suggested that he “pop in during intermission.”
“Well,” I told him, “Zeppelin doesn’t take an intermission.”
George was puzzled. “How long do they play?”
“Most shows run close to three hours. Never less than two and a half.”
“Holy shit!” he said, letting those numbers sink in for a moment. “With the Beatles, we were contracted to play thirty minutes max! Usually, we were off the stage and gone within fifteen!”
Harrison felt there was something special about Led Zeppelin. So when Bonham wanted his picture taken with George, the former Beatle was flattered—but he was also a little hesitant. After all, he knew about Zeppelin’s reputation for practical jokes and was wary that Bonham might have something else planned besides a photograph. So George decided to strike the first blow. He walked over to the birthday cake, picked up its top tier, raised it over Bonzo’s head, and dumped it on the drummer.
There were gasps from the party-goers. And then laughter. John chased after George, caught him within a few steps, and then lifted Harrison up and tossed him into the pool. Almost instantly, full-fledged pandemonium broke out. Bonzo was pushed into the water, and most of the other party guests followed close behind.
Jimmy, meanwhile, rather than risk being pushed into the pool, gracefully walked down the steps into the water, wearing an elegant white suit. “Hell, I don’t know how to swim,” he said. “I’m going to stake out a place in the shallow water before someone pushes me in the deep end.”
On June 2, 49,000 fans squeezed into Kezar Stadium in the southeastern corner of Golden Gate Park for a Zeppelin spectacle. By this point, Jimmy’s finger was still in some pain, but he was becoming more mobile each day. He had toughed it out during the L.A. Forum concerts; he knew he could do the same in San Francisco.
Bill Graham, the promoter for the Kezar Stadium gig, was amazed by the ticket sales. “We could have sold three times as many tickets, maybe more, if we had the room,” he told me. Scalpers were out in force, initially determined to market their tickets for $25, but soon finding themselves offered much more…$50, $100, even $200 a ticket.
Graham opened the gates at Kezar at five-thirty in the morning, and more than 3,000 fans who had camped out in the park for two nights stormed through the gates like someone was giving away free money rather than the Frisbees and the balloons that Bill Graham had distributed. Zeppelin didn’t take the stage until midafternoon, preceded by a trio of opening acts (Roy Harper, the Tubes, Lee Michaels) who only seemed to make the audience more restless, more impatient for the band they had really come to see.
Finally, beginning at three-thirty, and continuing for two and a half hours, Zeppelin shook the city that was already much too familiar with earthquakes. They began with “Rock and Roll,” and from that point on it was a foot-stomping feast of Zeppelin at their best. The crowd seemed to react most enthusiastically to “Dazed and Confused,” “The Song Remains the Same,” and “Whole Lotta Love.” But the band could have played “Chopsticks” and brought down the house.
Blocks away on Parnassus Avenue, patients trying to rest at the University of California Medical Center grumbled that the noise from the concert kept jarring them awake. At the Presidio, more than a mile away, soldiers on guard duty swore they could feel the vibrations. Maybe only 49,000 could squeeze into Kezar, but the whole city knew Zeppelin was in town.
When I added up Kezar’s box-office receipts, the gross totaled $325,000. “That’s better than we did in Tampa by nearly sixteen thousand dollars,” I told the band on the limo ride to San Francisco International.
“We gotta get Danny Goldberg on this story,” Bonzo exclaimed, waving his right fist triumphantly in the air. “I want the fuckin’ Stones to hear about the kinds of crowds we’re drawing. They can’t come close to us. Not even close!”
On the flight back to L.A., however, Zeppelin forgot all about ticket sales and crowd bedlam, at least for the moment. The fan-jet had just taken off when it got caught in some turbulence created by the takeoff of a jumbo jet just seconds earlier. Our plane bounced, dipped, and shook, creating high anxiety within the cabin.
No one said very much, except for an occasional expletive that you’d even forgive Mother Teresa for under the circumstances. We gripped shoulder rests, felt queasiness in our stomachs, and began to perspire.
At one time or another over the years, all of us had experienced some frazzled nerves while flying. Bonham went through a period of such crippling fear that he wouldn’t get on a plane until he had a drink. Jimmy never liked flying, either, sometimes looking as though he were about to faint during turbulent flights.
On that day above San Francisco, as soon as the pilot had stabilized the fan-jet, Peter became enraged. “I’ve had it with these fucking little planes! This is the last time we fly them. The last time!”
Before we had touched down in L.A., Peter had given me my orders:
“We’ve got a month’s hiatus coming up in the middle of this tour. By the time the tour resumes, I want us to have a bigger plane. I don’t care what it costs. Get us something so big that it won’t seem like flying at all.”