The New Yorker - USA (2022-01-31)

(Antfer) #1

62 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY31, 2022


unimportance of the band’s lyrics, the
devoted belatedness of its musical trib-
ute, the reliance on American sources,
American markets, American reverence,
invited punk’s slashing nativist retort.

I


t had to be the States. Peter Grant,
Led Zeppelin’s thuggish, gargantuan
manager, knew that the money and the
stadiums and the FM radio stations
were all in America. But also America
was the only temple vast enough for a
properly oblivious performance of the
rites that went with being a “rock god.”
Britain is a bitterly humorous little is-
land. It’s hard to imagine Robert Plant
shinning up a tree in Kent and announc-
ing—as he famously did at a pool in
the Hollywood Hills—“I am the golden
god!” Back home, he would have been
laughed at, possibly by his mum. Tell-
ingly, we learn that the band behaved
much better in Britain than in Amer-
ica. At home, Page said, “your family”
would come along to the shows. “But
when we went out to the States, we
didn’t give a fuck and became total
showoffs.” It was 1973, and they had
reached the high altar. Referring to
Plant, Spitz breathlessly annotates the
American moment: “What a life! He
was the lead singer of the most success-
ful rock ’n’ roll band in the world. He
had all the money he’d ever need, a lov-

ing family back home, unlimited girls
on the road. Every need, every whim
taken care of. Not a care in the world.
The city of Los Angeles stretched out
before him like a magic carpet.”
In fact, the devil’s bargain was al-
ready calling in its debts. The ledger of
dissipation, first recounted at length in
Stephen Davis’s “Hammer of the Gods”
(1985), was alternately horrifying and
comic. At the Continental Hyatt House
on Sunset Boulevard, which became
the band’s go-to den of instant iniq-
uity, guests who complained about Bon-
ham’s playing music at four in the morn-
ing would find themselves relocated.
What was it like to trash a room like
a rock star? The desk manager at the
Edgewater Hotel in Seattle, Spitz tells
us, wanted to “go bonkers in a room
himself.” So Grant led him to an empty
suite, peeled off six hundred and sev-
enty dollars in cash, and said, “Have
this room on Led Zeppelin.” The fun-
niest boys-gone-wild detail in the book
may be that, in the first year and a half
of the band’s existence, Bonham bought
twenty-eight cars.
But violence and addiction were
stalking the tours. Grant was a former
bouncer, with connections in the Lon-
don underworld, who, as Spitz says,
“brought a gangster mentality to the
game.” He and his vicious sidekick Rich-

ard Cole threatened the press and at-
tacked audience members they didn’t
like the look of. Cole concealed small
weights in his gloves, for heavier blows.
Crowd control was nastily martial. Cole
would hide under the front of the stage
and, when fans got too close to the
band, begin “smashing them on the
kneecaps with a hammer.” Money lay
around like silt. By 1972, as the band
was filling stadiums and selling mil-
lions of records, Grant had essentially
bullied exceptionally favorable terms
from promoters, who were commanded
to pay in cash, partly to avoid puni-
tive British taxes. The band journeyed
throughout the United States accom-
panied by sacks stuffed with hundreds
of thousands of dollars. Drugs followed
the money. Grant was a coke addict by
1972; he helped himself to bags of the
stuff. Jimmy Page soon caught up, and
eventually added heroin. Although
Page’s addiction appears to have turned
him sleepy and sloppy—benignly vam-
piric, he slept during the day and palely
loitered at night—drugs and alcohol
made Bonham, seemingly sweet-na-
tured when sober, an energetic mon-
ster. At one point, he bit a woman’s fin-
ger for no apparent reason, drawing
blood. The reader of Spitz’s book be-
comes inured to the horrors that “Bonzo”
would inflict, including near-rapes of
women, random assaults, repellent prac-
tical jokes: “On the overnight train to
Osaka, he drank himself silly again, and
while Jimmy and his Japanese girlfriend
were in the dining car, Bonzo found
her handbag and shit in it.”
Then there were the underage
groupies. Girls who made themselves
available for sex got to hang out with
the increasingly wasted golden gods.
“We were young, and we were grow-
ing up,” Page says in self-defense. But
they were not as young as the group-
ies. Spitz calls the girls in L.A. “shock-
ingly young”—thirteen, fourteen, fif-
teen. When Plant sang, in “Dazed and
Confused,” “I wanna make love to you,
little girl,” he wasn’t being figurative.
Some people thought that these girls
could handle themselves. We can try
to be tough-minded, in an Eve Babitz
kind of way, and coolly appraise the
twisted seventies scene. Still, it’s unset-
tling when Page, at twenty-nine, takes
up with a fourteen-year-old named

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