Cole, I need your help! You need to get over here quick!”
I had just pulled my Jaguar up in front of a pub near my house and answered the ringing car phone. It was Peter Grant on the other end of the line. He seemed terribly upset.
“I’ve got some real problems here,” he said. “Gloria has come back for some of her things, and there’s a guy downstairs with her.”
“What can I do?” I asked.
“Please come over. There might be a problem.”
Frankly, I was in no mood to drive over to Peter’s house. I had just returned from the latest of several summer ’76 trips to New York and Los Angeles, where I had tried to resolve the ongoing problems with The Song Remains the Same, most of which centered around its sound and artwork. Peter would have normally handled these responsibilities, but he was despondent about his wife, Gloria, leaving him, and preferred to stay close to home. Fortunately, Frank Wells, head of Warner Brothers Pictures, was overseeing the Zeppelin film, and understood fully what the band wanted to do and say in the picture.
After getting Peter’s phone call, I drove first to my home. I went to an upstairs bedroom, collected two guns, put them in the trunk of my car, and drove to Peter’s house. When I arrived, he was out front, talking in a raised voice to Gloria and her male friend. They didn’t seem on the verge of blows, however, and I decided not to interfere. My presence, I felt, might make things worse.
I drove around to the back of the house. Peter’s property had a moat around it, and you could only gain access to the house by walking or driving over a drawbridge. From the back of the property, I was hoping I could somehow jump across the moat and sneak in a rear door. Perhaps I had seen too many Tarzan movies for my own good, but I decided to climb up a tree near one of the narrowest parts of the moat and maneuver out onto one of the branches. “If I can just get far enough out to leap to the other side of the water…,” I thought to myself.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t noticed that the tree was rotting. As I hovered over the moat, the branch snapped and I belly flopped into the water. To make matters worse, Peter’s cesspool was malfunctioning and draining directly into the water. I was suddenly swimming in a sea of shit!
As quickly as I could, I groped my way out of the moat. I was not a pretty sight—or smell. By the time I got cleaned up, Gloria and her friend had left.
Peter was quite distraught that afternoon. He still couldn’t accept the fact that his marriage to Gloria was crumbling. Maybe he was overreacting, but I found it easy to be sympathetic. Marilyn and I were having difficulties again, and this time our marriage appeared terminal. She and I had had a terrible fight about the same things we had been arguing over on and off since almost the beginning—drugs, communication, faithfulness. Before long, we each had a lawyer working on dissolving our marriage.
I hoped that with the release of The Song Remains the Same, we’d finally get some good news. The world premiere was scheduled for October at Cinema I in New York City, and it was a nerve-racking event for me. I had checked out the sound system at Cinema I, felt it was substandard, and knew the band would be furious with it. This was a movie that needed proper amplification to communicate the power of Zeppelin’s music. There were enough other problems with the film itself—occasional out-of-focus and grainy camera work, uneven pacing, a length of more than two hours. I wasn’t going to let poor sound quality cause any more difficulties.
“If we can’t get a better system in there, I’m going to pull the film,” I warned a couple distribution executives at Warner Brothers. “Peter and the band are on a plane to New York right now. If this problem isn’t rectified in the next few hours, I will personally cancel the premiere.”
The Warner Brothers execs were unhappy, but they took my threat seriously. They finally gave me the go-ahead to contact Showco in Dallas, which flew in one of its sophisticated quadriphonic sound systems. That was exactly what was needed. With that equipment in place, the classic Zeppelin songs—“Stairway to Heaven,” “Whole Lotta Love,” “Moby Dick”—sounded almost as good as being at a live concert. A few years later, an Atlantic executive told me, “By putting in that big system, you guys did LucasSound years before George Lucas.”
However, when the West Coast premieres were held the following week in Los Angeles and San Francisco, the sound was absolutely abysmal. Jimmy was so embarrassed he almost cowered under his seat. “Why are you putting me through this?” he seethed.
The publicity material for the movie promoted the film as the band’s “special way of giving their millions of friends what they have been clamoring for—a personal and private tour of Led Zeppelin.” It promised that the film would “reveal them as they really are and for the first time the world has a front row seat on Led Zeppelin.”
Pagey, however, was never particularly enamored with the film. Even with Showco’s sound system, he didn’t feel that the Madison Square Garden concerts lived up to the band’s capabilities. After a while, he just didn’t like looking at the film at all. Bonzo had his complaints, too, and wondered why there wasn’t more humor in the film. Peter continued to call it “an expensive home movie.” Nevertheless, a soundtrack album from the film was released, and in just a few days it turned platinum.
At the end of the year, Peter bought me an Austin-Healy 3000 as a Christmas present. It was a sign of just how far the band had come. In 1970, my Christmas present from the band was a 750 Triumph Chopper motorcycle. Now they could afford to give me the kind of classic cars that make the covers of magazines.
During December, the band started planning its first live concerts since the Earl’s Court performances. Although this new American tour would not begin until the following April at Dallas Memorial Auditorium, rehearsals started four months before that in a refurbished theater in Fulham loaned to us by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.
From the beginning, everything in those rehearsals jelled. Even months before the American tour, the band was starting to feel the kind of self-confidence it usually reserved for midway through a tour, once everything has fallen into place. Although young bands like the Clash and the Sex Pistols had been trying to steal Zeppelin’s thunder, Zeppelin didn’t seem worried. They still felt they could create another youth-quake in America. Time would tell.