The young lady I was speaking with told me that Bonzo had tried to get her to go to his room
with him, but she had turned him down. “I’m holding out for Pagey,” she said.
At that moment, Bonham stopped right in front of me. He glanced at the groupie with a dull, stupid look on his
face, then focused on me. Without a word, he suddenly and quite casually reached out, took my big blue rock
and roll glasses off my face, twisted them ‘til they broke, and handed them back to me. Oh shit! What the fuck?
Hell, Bonham could have whisked my friend away, for all I cared. He could have spit in my face. He could have
slapped me silly. But fuck with my glasses?! Fuck him!
Without even thinking I grabbed hold of a glass ash tray on the bar and smashed it against the asshole’s head. In
a split second his bodyguard had me throttled against the bar. The bartender, with whom I had become friendly,
was reaching over the bar to shove the thug away. And Bonham’s blood was on my hands.
In a few seconds the melee was over. I was furious and embarrassed and stunned.
Storming out of the bar, I called Gary LoConti in L.A. and told him what had happened. Gary suggested that
I threaten to file assault charges against Bonham and his bodyguard Saturday afternoon so that the arrest
would force Zeppelin to cancel the show. That sounded good, although I really didn’t want to be responsible for
disappointing 20,000 Zeppelin fans. Nevertheless, I found and cornered one of Zeppelin’s crew who happened
to be road manager Richard Cole’s top assistant. I demanded $500 for my broken glasses...or else. He tried to
bargain with me, but I was in no mood to bargain. Five hundred bucks, that’s the deal motherfucker.
The next morning, I went down to the front desk. There was an envelope in my mailbox. It contained five
one hundred-dollar bills. No note. No release form, just $500 cash. I had beaten Bonham. Now, having heard
so many stories of John Bonham’s drunken offenses, I realize how rare that was; he most often skipped away
without consequence.
Years later, I learned the rest of the story from Gary. Bonham had good reason to pay me.
“Didn’t you ever wonder why Zeppelin paid you that money so easily?” he asked. “They could have blown you off
and left town without ever paying you a penny.”
After my confrontation with Cole’s assistant, Gary called his dad Nick--an influential man in Cleveland, to
say the least--and Nick called a friend of his on the Cleveland Police Department. That very night, unknown to
me, two huge off-duty cops showed up at Swingos and knocked on Bonham’s door. Bonham was there. The cops
assured him that if he did not pay me $500 by morning they would be back after lunch to break both his arms.
So...he paid me. LOL!
One week later, Bonham, Cole, and manager Peter Grant were arrested in an infamous backstage incident in San
Francisco after assaulting two concert promoters of Bill Graham’s stage crew.
Bonham was one of rock’s greatest drummers. By all accounts he was a sweet and loving family man. But when
he got drunk, he was a miserable and despicable human being. I wasn’t at all surprised when he eventually killed
himself with an overdose of vodka a couple of years later.
by Steven “Ace” Acker