Jimmy sat in his darkened suite as Neal Preston, the tour photographer, clicked through tray after tray of Zeppelin concert slides. Jimmy was looking for a certain picture of himself, but every time a new slide of him came up, Jimmy would be dissatisfied, pointing out some flaw in his physique—“Belly! Crow’s feet!”—that the camera had captured. Finally Jimmy was asked what exactly he wanted. Without missing a beat, Jimmy Page answered what he was looking for: “Power, mystery, and the hammer of the Gods.”
—From Stephen Davis’ 1985 history of Led Zeppelin, and the source of its title.
Watching the Balloon Go Up
In 1968, life was changing rapidly for former top London session guitarist Jimmy Page, who was just 24. Just two years prior, he became burned out from the mechanical repetition of session work and took a flyer to join his buddy Jeff Beck in the Yardbirds when their bassist quit. Page first subbed on the bass, then had a brief stint with Beck on dueling lead guitars for a few months. Frustrated by the nightly onstage competition with Page, Beck eventually quit the group to pursue a solo career. The Yardbirds would soldier on as a four-piece, but in the summer of 1968, the group, whose original members were burned out by the years of endless road work, somewhat unexpectedly broke up.
Deciding to pursue a solo career as a guitar hero like Beck before him, Page assembled a group of backing musicians and went into London’s Olympic studio to record an album. He asked his friend Glynn Johns, Britain’s top recording engineer, who had recorded The Rolling Stones, The Who, and was soon to start work with the Beatles, to engineer it. On bass guitar and Hammond organ was their mutual friend John Paul Jones, who was London’s top session bassist and pop arranger. On vocals was a powerhouse young unknown named Robert Plant. On drums was another unknown, Plant’s friend John Bonham, who was quickly emerging as one of the best drummers in England.
Bonham’s fury was perfectly captured by Glyn Johns, whose namesake drum recording techniques were honed during these sessions, and by Page, the album’s producer, who made arguably the first rock album with a drum kit recorded in stereo and mixed as virtually the lead instrument on almost every song. Living up to the reputation of an earlier John Henry, John Henry Bonham was the man who would swing the hammer of the gods for the next 12 years.
In no small part because of Bonham’s drumming, the album this team recorded, called "Led Zeppelin," after the name suggested for the group by The Who’s John Entwistle (some sources credit fellow Who member Keith Moon), was so powerful that Page and his burly manager Peter Grant flew to New York with the master tapes, and were immediately signed to a huge contract by Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records.
Upon its release, the first album by this heretofore unknown hard rock group soared to number 10 on the Billboard Top LPs chart thanks to massive airplay by the DJs on the new underground FM radio format in America. The Zeppelin was quickly ascending.
But there was a problem. The burgeoning rock press, by and large, hated the album. Jann Wenner's Rolling Stone magazine published a scathing review by John Mendelsohn, claiming in the review’s lede:
The latest of the British blues groups so conceived offers little that its twin, the Jeff Beck Group, didn’t say as well or better three months ago, and the excesses of the Beck group’s Truth album (most notably its self-indulgence and restrictedness), are fully in evidence on Led Zeppelin’s debut album.
The review concluded:
In their willingness to waste their considerable talent on unworthy material the Zeppelin has produced an album which is sadly reminiscent of Truth. Like the Beck group they are also perfectly willing to make themselves a two- (or, more accurately, one-a-half) man show. It would seem that, if they’re to help fill the void created by the demise of Cream, they will have to find a producer (and editor) and some material worthy of their collective attention.
Zeppelin at the Apogee
Page responded with a fury, circling the wagons and limiting coverage to his group, which would only cause their reputation to grow among fans fascinated by the group’s sense of drama and mystery. Despite their rejection by the press, Zeppelin was quickly selling out American basketball arenas and eventually football stadiums. By the time of their massive 1977 tour, the group’s management was handing out cards to the journalists that Zeppelin deigned to allow on their private jet with the following instructions:
- Never talk to anyone in the band unless they first talk to you.
- Do not make any sort of eye contact with John Bonham. This is for your own safety.
- Do not talk to [group manager] Peter Grant or [road manager] Richard Cole – for any reason.
- Keep your cassette player turned off at all times unless conducting an interview.
- Never ask questions about anything other than music.
- Most importantly, understand this – the band will read what is written about them. The band does not like the press nor do they trust them.
Three years later, it would all be over, with the group splitting up a few months after Bonham died on September 25, 1980, choking on his own vomit:
The investigation into his death showed that Bonham had more than a liter of alcohol in his system, some 40 shots. And while no other recreational drugs were found in his system, Rolling Stone reported that he was getting over a heroin habit and he was taking some other medication for his anxiety and depression.
Crawl Out from the Wreckage
After the 1977 tour concluded until Bonham’s death, many rock journalists simply ignored the group, dismissing them as ancient dinosaurs in the era of punk rock and new wave, often out of spite, fully aware of how much the band hated the media in general. After Zeppelin’s demise, the bands that dominated the early days of MTV also appeared to have little to do with Zeppelin’s brand of hard rock.
But then a funny thing started to happen. A hard rock group out of Sheffield, England, called Def Leppard, inspired by Zeppelin, right down to the two-word group name with a deliberately misspelled first word, were singing their praises. MTV-friendly acts such as Billy Squier were increasingly aping Zeppelin’s sound. By the mid-1980s, Page and Plant were touring America again, each somewhat tentatively, Plant as a solo artist and Page with his new group, The Firm, prowling stages alongside former Bad Company lead singer Paul Rodgers.
Then, a concert with the putative goal of raising money for the starving people of Ethiopia assembled dozens of bands performing for charity was scheduled for July of 1985. The concert’s organizer, Bob Geldof, pushed to get Page and Plant to reunite for a one-off concert with their former bassist. While the temporarily reformed Led Zeppelin’s actual set was rather shambolic, it sparked off a huge new resurgence of interest in the group.
Because of the omertà that Page and Grant had built up around their group, as late as 1985, few fans knew the extent of the band’s debauchery. In addition to Live Aid, that was the year that veteran rock journalist Stephen Davis released "The Hammer of the Gods," built around interviews with Richard Cole, the group’s road manager, whose quotes were laden with most of the words that George Carlin said could not be said on ‘70s-era television — and even more invective. (Driven in part by Cole being the only member of Zeppelin’s inner circle not to walk away with an enormous financial cushion.) Additionally, Davis interviewed Lori Maddox, an L.A. groupie who was 14 years old when Page first pursued her in 1972, decades before the phrase “hashtag me too” became, at least for a time, universally known.
1977: When It All Went Wrong
Davis, using quotes from his interview with Richard Cole, fleshed out the details of Zeppelin’s 1977 tour of America for the first time in print:
The 1977 tour began on April Fools’ Day in Dallas. Shows would again run over three hours through fifteen songs and the two encores, “Whole Lotta Love” and “Rock and Roll.” From the beginning, it was clear that this tour was different. Jimmy arrived in the United States very weak. Peter Grant’s wife had left him, which put a tremendous damper on the tour’s spirit. In the past Grant had been Led Zeppelin’s Jolly Roger, always keeping spirits as high as possible. Now he was angry and humiliated. “I think she went off with some guy who was working on the farm,” Cole says. “I think that’s what was really the f**king end of everything. It’s funny, but I hated that last tour. You could feel it . . . something very bad. It was all the drugs, I suppose. The drugs . . . I dunno, but there was something wrong. It wasn’t the same.”
For one thing, Cole’s job had expanded. With Jimmy Page and, according to Cole, most of the road crew strung out on heroin, a steady supply had to be assured. And there was no shortage. “It’s like anything,” Cole says. “If you want it, it’s there, and all you do is follow through.” In addition to the pulled curtains, lit candles and FM stereos, Jimmy needed heroin. “By the time it came to that,” Cole said, “I’ve got to have it as well.”
As that quote by Cole hints, this was the tour where Jimmy Page’s substance abuse issues began to rapidly accelerate. One concert in Chicago on April 9th was canceled an hour into the show after Page became ill. The official excuse was “food poisoning” — an astonishing claim considering Page looked so thin during the last years of Zeppelin’s existence as a group that he and food seemed to be on mutually exclusive terms. In one of his many outré interviews during the ‘77 tour, a dissipated Page told one journalist:
‘I prefer to eat liquid food,’ he explained with a stoned half-smile. ‘Something like a banana daiquiri, which I can put powdered vitamin in. I’m not really into solid foods very much [but] I know I’ll never turn down some alcohol, so a banana daiquiri, with all the food protein, is the answer.’
As Davis writes, the ‘77 tour ended with a pair of disasters. First, the bad blood that had been simmering for years between Grant and powerful American rock impresario Bill Graham finally reached spilled over when the Zeppelin played the Oakland Coliseum on July 23:
The flashpoint came when Peter Grant’s teenage son, Warren, began to remove the “Led Zeppelin” signs from the trailers serving as dressing rooms. The boy wanted them as souvenirs, but a Graham staffer named Jim Matzorkis told him they were needed for the next night’s show and roughly snatched them back. John Bonham, offstage for a minute, saw this and started to berate the guy. Then Bonzo, without warning, viciously kicked him in the crotch before returning to his drum stool.
A huge argument ensued as the band played on. Graham was summoned and tried to placate Peter Grant, who was stoned on pills and distraught that someone had shoved his son. Finally Graham was persuaded to produce his employee, so apologies could be made and the misunderstanding put behind them. Graham, Grant and John Bindon went into the trailer where Matzorkis was waiting to apologize. Grant went up and smashed Matzorkis in the face; when Graham tried to intervene, Grant brushed him aside like a fly and threw him out of the trailer, which then began to rock on its axles as Grant and Bindon beat Graham’s employee to a bloody pulp. Locked out of the trailer, Graham shouted for help. Richard Cole, out of his mind on pills, ran up swinging a big metal pole at Graham’s people. The trailer kept rocking. Some of the Oakland security people started to run to their cars to get their guns out of their trunks.
Finally, after Bindon tried to rip the eyeballs from his head, Matzorkis managed to get out of the trailer alive and ran off. Grant and Bindon retreated. The trailer was awash in blood and teeth. It looked like a torture chamber, which is what it had been for two or three minutes. As Led Zeppelin finished the night’s show, Graham’s employee was rushed to the hospital.
So much for “Whole Lotta Love.” But three days later, while in New Orleans resting before what was planned as the last leg of the 1977 tour, Robert Plant received a shock phone call informing him that his five-year-old son had died in England of a stomach virus:
“I remember we walked into the hotel lobby,” Cole says, “and as I was checking the group in, there was a call for Robert from his wife. I said, ‘Your old lady’s on the phone,’ and he said, ‘All right, I’ll take it.’ He went up to his room to take the call, and two hours later he called me and said, ‘My son’s dead.’ Like that. It was like . . . sh*t! Jesus f**king Christ!”
* * * * * * * *
At the beginning of the ill-fated tour, whose remaining dates had been canceled, Richard Cole had felt that something was going to happen. “The f**king whole thing was wrong,” he says ruefully. “There was something wrong. It should never have happened. The whole thing just went then. That was it. It never was the same again. Never. The whole thing just erupted. It was like somebody said, ‘Here, you f**kers, have this!’”
Led Zeppelin never played in America again.
Needless to say, Zeppelin’s vice-grip control of the rock media in the 1970s, which kept Lori Maddox, the group’s various substance abuse issues, and the punch-out of Bill Graham’s crew largely out of the news, wouldn’t be possible in today’s Internet era with every music fan armed with a video-equipped smartphone and a ubiquitous social media to upload the clips to. Davis’ book caused a sensation in the music press because so many of its details were largely unknown prior to its publication.
"The Hammer of the Gods" also caused a sensation among up-and-coming rock bands. Davis didn’t intend for his book to be a how-to guide for maximum rock and roll debauchery, but the book laid down a marker for ‘80s and ‘90s hard rock groups to attempt to surpass. It became a classic example of what, a few years prior to Hammer’s publication, Tom Wolfe dubbed “information ricochet” when talking with an interviewer (Ron Reagan, of all people):
The Hell’s Angels, for example, didn’t exist until the movie The Wild One. They looked at The Wild One and said, “Oh, that’s the way it’s done.” So they took their own name and insignia and stuff, and Roger Corman came by and said, “Oh, that’s the way it’s done,” and made a movie called The Wild Angels. And the Hell’s Angels came by and said, “That’s a nice idea; we’ll do that.” That’s information ricochet.
But while Zeppelin fans, both laypeople and budding rock musicians eagerly devoured "The Hammer of the Gods," the three surviving members of Zeppelin hated its release, with Jimmy Page stating, “I opened it up in the middle somewhere and started to read it, and I just threw it out the window. I was living by a river then, so it actually found its way to the bottom of the sea.”
As Jason Robards’ Ben Bradlee famously said in "All the President’s Men," that’s “a non-denial denial” of the events that Davis cataloged in "The Hammer of the Gods." Since its publication, newer books have been written that lock down some of the details that Davis initially broke in more detail and occasionally, more accuracy. But Davis deserves credit for getting there first. Like many older books that seemingly take forever to finally be published in the Kindle format, it likely took plenty of legal wrangling, but at long last, the first peek into lurid details of the biggest — and maddest — rock group of the 1970s is now available in digital form.
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