On New Year’s Day, 1962, when the Beatles walked into Decca’s West Hampstead Studio Number Three on Broadhurst Gardens, rock music was forever changed. By the time they had finished recording an audition tape—with Paul McCartney crooning “Till There Was You” and John Lennon warbling “To Know Him Is to Love Him”—the Beatles had climbed aboard a musical fast track that literally revolutionized the cultural and social fabric stretching from Abbey Road to Hollywood and Vine.
Hundreds of British bands followed in the Beatles’ wake. The Dave Clark Five. Herman’s Hermits. The Rolling Stones. Finally, by the end of the sixties, the raw, back-breaking music of Led Zeppelin elevated the rock revolution to an absolutely manic pitch.
Before the dawning of the Zeppelin era, I had worked as tour manager with nearly a dozen other rock bands, helping to cultivate their talents, attend to their eccentricities, and nurse their egos. It was hard, often stressful work, but never boring. At times, I became exhausted; more often, I felt exhilarated. From the Who to Unit 4 + 2…from the New Vaudeville Band to the Yardbirds…they were my boot camp that prepared me for my twelve-year tour of duty with Zeppelin.
I had grown up in Kensal Rise, a working-class neighborhood light years removed from Zeppelin’s recording sessions at Headley Grange or the prestigious stage of Royal Albert Hall. My father was a metal architect who, just before World War II, helped build the elaborate doors on the Bank of England. He then went to work for Rolls-Royce making cars, and when the war began, he moved to the assembly line that manufactured aircraft. He could work miracles with his hands, but he was also much more of a scholar than I ever was, reading history just for the joy of it. While he reveled in stories about Gladstone and Disraeli, I was more interested in Presley and the Everlys. While I wanted to spend time in record stores, he took me to the British Museum and to the halls of Parliament.
My parents finally accepted where my real interests lay, and they bought me a record player when I was thirteen. Immediately, I began building a library of 45s by artists like Elvis, Ricky Nelson, Buddy Holly, and Chuck Berry. A few British singers captured my interest, too—Lonnie Donegan had several contagious tunes like “Rock Island Line”—but no one in England was quite as daring or provoked quite as much youthful hysteria as Little Richard when he sang “Good Golly, Miss Molly (She Sure Likes to Ball).”
Although I did reasonably well in school—particularly in subjects that I liked—education had never been a passport to success in my neighborhood. In fact, at age fifteen, as the new school term started, the headmaster suggested I might be better off going to work. As I soon discovered, however, the real world was hardly glamorous, at least not for a teenager with minimal skills. My first job was welding milk churns at a dairy supply company in Acton in Northwest London. It was hard, often dreary work, and it wasn’t making me rich: For a forty-six-hour week, I earned just a little over three pounds, or about ten dollars.
All the while, however, my interest in rock music flourished. Songs like Roy Orbison’s “Cryin’” and the Tokens’ “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” got my adrenaline flowing and, for a time, even made me think that perhaps I could make a living as a musician. I finally bought myself an old drum set, hoping that I could unearth some latent musical talents.
Like millions of other teenagers, I developed a rich fantasy life. I could picture myself sprinting onto a stage, perching myself behind a kit of drums, and performing to the cheers of thousands of screaming fans, returning to the stage for encore after encore. It was a vision I replayed in my mind, again and again. Unfortunately, my talent was no match for those dreams. Much to my chagrin, after just a few hours of banging skins and crashing cymbals, I realized that Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich had no need to worry. Years later, neither would John Bonham.
With some apprehension, I began looking for a job with a future, which was a challenge for a kid from the wrong side of London. I jumped from one occupation to another, first delivering groceries, then working as an apprentice sheet-metal worker, and finally a carpenter. By age eighteen, I had gotten a job on the scaffold seven days a week—hard, dirty work that often involved the demolition of old buildings, mostly in Wembley and West End of London. The pay: Thirty pounds a week.
Eventually, it was my lust for club life that opened the doors to the music business. Beginning in 1962, I started hanging out at dance clubs in the West End, which were a crowded Mardi Gras of music and delicious-looking girls. Six nights a week, I binged and boozed from the State Ballroom to Saint Mary’s Hall, from the 100 Club to the Marquee. It was wonderful just to be part of the action.
The early sixties were an exciting time when hundreds of rock and roll bands were descending upon London from throughout England, when the Rolling Stones and the Who still traveled in minivans and often played almost unnoticed for a handful of pound notes a night, and when Led Zeppelin was not even a figment of someone’s imagination. In those days, from the outside looking in, I thought the rock music world looked incredibly glamorous, and I felt a bit of jealousy from my vantage point on the periphery. The young, aspiring musicians who would eventually evolve into bands like Zeppelin would crowd into the London clubs in those days, looking for a piece of the action, salivating at the chance to realize their own dreams, and aching to make connections that might turn them into the next Rock Superstars.
I routinely overdosed on this nightlife, never growing weary of the partying, the alcohol and drugs, the loud music, the easy girls. I also became absorbed in the youthful trends of the style-conscious young men of the times—some called Mods, others Rockers—who became as much a part of the London scene as Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey. We were kids from poor neighborhoods, most from the East End, others from South London. When the media were in a kind mood, they called us “trendsetters”; more often, we were “hoodlums” or “troublemakers,” “malcontents” or “provocateurs.” No matter what was written, the emotions running through this movement were universal: We were bursting with anger, furious about our economic circumstances. If you were to gather together a group of Mods or a group of Rockers, the energy created by their rage could have blown the Clock Tower off the Houses of Parliament.
As a way of setting ourselves apart from mainstream society, we conformed to particular types of fashions and aggressive, renegade attitudes and behavior. The Rockers were an outgrowth of the teddy boy hoods of the fifties. They were jeans and leather jackets and saw themselves as Brando-like nomads on their motorcycles. Their rivals, the Mods, had shorter hair and were impeccably dressed, with clothes custom-made at Carnaby Street shops, where a mass-produced, tailor-made pair of flared trousers cost about four pounds, and Fred Perry knit shirts became the “only” brand to wear.
I embraced the Mod look and lifestyle, one of thousands of Mods saturating the English landscape. We felt as if we were on the cutting edge of a social revolution, like we were Somebody. In Britain’s class system, we may have been “have-nots,” the forgotten generation, even outcasts, but together, we believed we were VIPs. We’d flex our rebellious muscles, sometimes impressing, sometimes intimidating others. We’d live for the moment, spending whatever money we had and ridiculing our parents’ warnings to “save for a rainy day.” And when my friends would say, “All I want to do is get drunk and have fun,” I couldn’t think of any better way to spend the night.
Neither the Mods nor the Rockers ever shied away from violence. The worst of it erupted at seaside resorts like Clacton, often on bank holidays or during Easter weekends. There really weren’t any good reasons for those ugly confrontations; the violence was an end in itself, a chance to vent our frustrations and let off some steam. On one July night, we arrived in Clacton knowing the Rockers would be waiting for us, and we were equipped to fight with more than our fists. Our arsenal of weapons, in fact, might have made General Montgomery envious, with armor ranging from knives to pickaxes. The Rockers and the Mods congregated on opposite sides of the street, shouting epithets and then finally approaching one another. There were a few isolated confrontations here and there, and then a full-fledged brawl exploded in the middle of the street over the length of a block. For twenty minutes, it was absolute chaos. Brass knuckles connected with chins. Knives cut into skin. Blood splattered on the pavement. There were wails of anger and screams of pain.
Those kinds of riots made national and even international headlines (“The war of the teenage misfits”). One newspaper columnist warned, “The social fabric of England itself is disintegrating.” But the more attention the Mods and the Rockers got, the more committed we became to a life-style—and to the rock music—that millions in Britain found repugnant.
About this same time, while the musicians who would eventually become Led Zeppelin were finding their niches in the music industry, I was finally getting my own initiation into the business. In 1964, I had just returned from a summer-long vacation in Spain—my first real exposure to what life was like beyond working-class London. And I came back feeling restless and hungry to find an escape from the hard, dirty life on the scaffold.
That opportunity finally presented itself at a club called the Flamingo in Soho, which was actually quite out of step with the times. While other clubs were preoccupied with the latest rock and pop music trends, the Flamingo was addicted to a soul and jazz sound. While its competitors were partial to the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five, the Flamingo embraced the music of Ray Charles and Marvin Gaye.
One of the Flamingo’s regular bands was Ronnie Jones and the Nighttimers. The Nighttimers played a host of Otis Redding and Bobby “Blue” Bland tunes—“Respect,” “Mr. Pitiful,” “That’s the Way Love Is,” “Call on Me”—and other songs that reflected a rhythm and blues influence. I enjoyed their music, would hang around them before and after their gigs, and occasionally would talk to their road manager. I never really understood everything that he did, but his life seemed glamorous—certainly more exciting than my seven days a week on the scaffold.
One evening, I noticed that the Nighttimers themselves were packing their equipment into their van, a task that had always been taken care of by their road manager. I walked over to Mick Eve, a tall, thin saxophonist who was the Nighttimers’ leader. Mick had once played with Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, but just about the time Georgie started making big money—400 pounds a night as a headliner—Mick decided that the music had become too pop-oriented for his taste, and he broke away to start his own band.
“What happened to your roadie?” I asked.
“He’s gone on to something else,” Mick said.
“I’m looking for a job as a road manager,” I told him.
“Do you know anything about it?”
Of course, I knew almost nothing. But I was desperate not to let this opportunity slip away. “Well, I can drive the van,” I said, groping for some way to peak his interest. “I’ve traveled and I certainly know how to get around.”
Then I remembered that for four weeks, I had once worked at a job soldering transistors. “And I know a lot about electronics, too,” I added.
Mick gave me one of those looks that said, “Can’t you do any better than that?” Then he said, “Well, I really don’t feel that we need a road manager any longer.”
“But you must need someone,” I pleaded. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have had a road manager in the first place.”
“But we never could pay him very much, Richard. He got one pound a night, and two pounds on the nights we did two shows. He averaged about seven pounds a week. The guy was always broke.”
It wasn’t a very appealing picture, particularly for someone like me who was already making thirty pounds a week on the scaffold. Even so, I had this seductive image of a road manager’s life brimming with travel, heavy drinking, and lots of beautiful girls. And at the time, I couldn’t think of a more perfect way to live.
“I’ll take the job, Mick,” I exclaimed, reaching to shake his hand before he could say a word. He nodded, although I’m not sure he was certain what he was agreeing to. But I couldn’t have been more excited; I was finally in the music business.
The first show I did with the Nighttimers was on Boxing Day 1964, at the Carlton Ballroom on Kilburn High Road. We were one of the few rock bands that had ever been booked there, since the facilities were usually rented for Jamaican weddings or bar mitzvahs. In that initial gig, I told Mick, “I don’t know whether we should be wearing dreadlocks or yarmulkes!” I don’t think he ever got the joke.
Within those first few days, I discovered that the job as the Nighttimers’ road manager wasn’t that difficult for someone with a good head on his shoulders. There were hundreds of little clubs throughout England, and in my six months with the Nighttimers, we played a lot of them. I drove the band to and from their gigs in a small van, then set up their equipment and collected their box-office receipts, which were enough to pay expenses and not much more. Nevertheless, the job seemed to have much more potential for glamour than the scaffold.
After just two weeks with the Nighttimers, I was thoroughly won over by the music business—but I also knew that I wanted something more than to work for a small band. A friend of mine played with a group called the Chevelles, and one Sunday night, I went to see them open at the London Palladium for the Rolling Stones. That was the first time I had seen the Stones live, my first exposure to the fury, the frenzy, and the power of truly great performers. Girls in the audience were absolutely hysterical—screaming, crying, moaning, lunging toward the stage. Some even peed in their knickers, actually creating streams of water that, like the tributaries to the Mississippi, converged into a single river where the sloping seats joined the front of the stage. I had heard about bands making a splash, but this was unbelievable.
As I walked out of the Palladium that night, I muttered to myself, over and over, “Shit, that is some fucking band.” I promised myself to reach higher than the Nighttimers. Even the Beatles need road managers, I reasoned, so I set my goals at the top.
Before long, I had moved on to other bands, first Unit 4 + 2, a bunch of middle-class kids who had turned a recording contract into a number one record, “Concrete and Clay,” in 1965, followed by another hit, “I’ve Never Been in Love Like This Before,” that reached number eight. They weren’t the Stones, but it was definitely a move up for me.
During my tenure with Unit 4 + 2, I continued to keep in contact with the Nighttimers, who had acquired a new keyboard player named John Paul Jones. John Paul was the first future Zeppelin member who I got to know, although at the time our relationship consisted of little more than “hellos” and small talk. Even back then, Jonesy was quiet, never had much to say, never wasted words. But his talent and intuitive skills on the Hammond organ were impressive. “You’re too good for this band,” I told him. “One of these days, you’re going to hook up with a group where you can really show off your talents.” At the time, neither of us realized how prophetic that statement would be.
On my nights off, I went back to club-hopping in the West End. One night at the Scene, I caught a band called the High Numbers. The drummer, Keith Moon, attacked his drums like a madman. The guitarist, Peter Townshend, had arms as animated as a windmill, whipping, wheeling, and then leaning into C chords with the energy of a hurricane. He would strike the guitar strings so forcefully and wildly that his fingertips were worn ragged, occasionally even oozing with blood. It was a hemophiliac’s nightmare.
Before long, the High Numbers became the rage among the Mods. Later, they would change their name to the Who and help write an important chapter in rock history. When I began working for them in 1965 and 1966, it was like going from junk food to caviar.
I never really got tired of watching the Who perform. In the course of a ninety-minute performance, they could electrify crowds with their music and shock audiences with their antics, while sending critics scouring their thesauruses looking for just the right adjective, just the right verb to describe what was taking place. Just when you thought the Who was the most disciplined, masterful band you had ever seen and heard, the musicians had a chameleon’s gift for instantly transforming themselves into raving, deranged lunatics. All in a night’s work.
At times, the anarchy that accompanied the music often became frightening. Consider the night in 1965 when the Who was performing at a London club called the Railway Tavern, not far from the tube station at Harrow & Wealdstone. As a couple hundred fans jammed into the tiny hall, tempers in the audience flared and there was pushing and shoving throughout the show. Since I was responsible for the safety of the band, the unrest in the crowd had me pacing backstage, nervous that a full-blown riot might erupt.
Near the end of the performance, Peter whirled his guitar and accidentally struck its neck on a very low ceiling above the stage. It happened with such force that the neck fractured. Peter stood stunned for just a moment, surveying the damage. Then he shouted, “Goddamn it!,” gritted his teeth, and erupted in wild anger, suddenly flailing the guitar furiously and recklessly. Like a ballplayer armed with a Louisville Slugger, he swung it first in one direction, then in another, striking it on the ground, then smashing it on the amplifiers, banging the floor once more, then using the guitar as a battering ram against the amps, pummeling them again and again, progressively obliterating both the guitar and the sound system. As the demolition continued, the crowd—already on the brink of hysteria—roared its approval.
After that initial outburst, Townshend never looked back. In the closing number of subsequent shows—as the final chords of “My Generation” or “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” were reverberating—audiences began to expect Peter to decimate his high-voltage, high-priced guitars, hammering them into the amplifiers, splintering them onto the floor, pulverizing them with the subtlety of a 747 slamming into the Empire State Building. Peter came to get a real kick out of it, amused that he could incite the crowd, work them up, and push them over the edge, just for the price of a guitar or two.
On occasion, Moonie would escalate the frenzy for the fun of it. He’d heave his drums across the stage, kick holes in the skins, snap drumsticks, stomp on cymbals, and annihilate what was left into toothpicks. It was a scene more appropriate for an insane asylum than a rock club.
Although audiences relished these frenzied episodes of destruction, they weren’t something the Who could really afford to do every night. Perhaps a band like Led Zeppelin, or even the Who after it had achieved more fame, could absorb the costs of those kinds of outbursts. But in 1965 and 1966, when I was on the road with the band, these hurricanes of destruction ran up enormous debts. It wasn’t like replacing a few guitar strings a week; Townshend and Moonie were mutilating expensive instruments and, in the process, the band’s balance sheet, too. In those days, the Who was earning about 300 to 500 pounds a night, but that could be eaten up quickly by the replacement of a guitar (200 pounds), a kit of drums (100 pounds), and new amps (350 to 400 pounds). At one point, the Who was nearly 60,000 pounds in debt. You don’t have to be Einstein to figure out that the band was committing fiscal suicide. And it created enormous tension within the band.
Particularly in the beginning, John Entwistle and Roger Daltrey were horrified at the destructive onslaughts and what they were costing the band. “This is absolutely ridiculous,” John shouted at Peter one evening. “We lose money every night we play! We’d come out ahead just by not showing up!”
Peter couldn’t be bothered with that kind of logic. “Fuck off!” he yelled back at Entwistle. “This is something we do! It’s part of the show. The fans love it. So accept it!”
I stayed out of those battles. I knew Entwistle was right, but I was in no position to intervene. The dissension within the band, however, concerned me. How long can a band last, I asked myself, when everyone is at each other’s throat?
Eventually, Entwistle stopped complaining, figuring that he was wasting his energy and that he’d never be able to control Townshend anyway. Fortunately, as the band began to earn more money, the destruction became a more tolerable business expense and little stood in the way of the Who’s success.
In the early months of 1966, drugs and alcohol were becoming as important as anything else in my life. As exhilarating as the Who’s music was, it was taking a backseat to the next handful of pills, which were an easy source of pleasure. In the process, however, the drugs were starting to seriously affect Moonie and me in particular, with both of us experiencing frequent and frightening blackouts. At that point, I began to feel that my days with the Who were numbered.
In August 1966, I was driving through London at high speeds, swerving past everyone else on the road—except for a policeman whose siren and flashing red light convinced me to pull over to the curb. It was my third speeding ticket, and two days later in court, my driver’s license was revoked. Because so much of my job with the Who consisted of driving the van and transporting the band from one gig to another, they had to find someone to replace me. I was furious about losing the job, but if anyone was to blame, it was me.
In my last few days with the Who, they performed at a charity event at the 10,000-seat Wembley Empire Pool, sharing the bill with the biggest acts in rock music: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, the Animals, the Walker Brothers, and Lulu. The Who performed just before the Stones, and they were magnificent—from “La La La Lies” to “The Good’s Gone,” from “Much Too Much” to “My Generation.” Even so, when the Stones and the Beatles closed out the show, performing back-to-back, almost everyone forgot that the other bands had shown up at all. As Mick Jagger pranced across the stage, unleashing his high-energy Lucifer of Rock spectacle, I thought to myself, “How can anyone top this?”
Thirty minutes later, the Beatles did. John, Paul, George, and Ringo came onstage, and the roof nearly lifted off the hall. “I Feel Fine”…“Ticket to Ride”…“We Can Work It Out”…“She Loves You”…“A Hard Day’s Night.” Fortunately, they played only a twenty-minute set; if it were any longer, the crowd of 10,000 might have experienced a communal cardiac arrest. It was an exciting, exhilarating, and thoroughly exhausting evening.
Once again, my appetite was whetted for something bigger. I knew I wanted to stay in this business, and felt I was ready for more than the Who. Led Zeppelin was still two years away, and until then, I worked with a number of other artists and bands, including the Yardbirds, the Jeff Beck Group, Vanilla Fudge, the Young Rascals, the Searchers, the New Vaudeville Band, and Terry Reid. But they were all just stepping-stones to Zeppelin. For me—and for millions of fans—Led Zeppelin would ultimately evolve into the best that rock music had to offer.