Читать книгу Jimmy Page: The Definitive Biography - Chris Salewicz, Chris Salewicz - Страница 7

John Bindon, Led Zeppelin’s security guard, had stagehand Jim Matzorkis pinned to the floor of a backstage trailer at Oakland Coliseum. Bindon, a sometime actor and London gangland heavy who had reputedly once bitten off a man’s testicles and would stab another man to death the following year, was viciously pummelling Matzorkis with his fists and feet. But it was only when Bindon started trying to gouge out the stagehand’s eyes that Matzorkis fully appreciated the danger he was in.

For much of this day of Saturday 23 July 1977 the possibility of such a grim outcome had been building. Many of Zeppelin and their crew seemed in a state of permanent rage, as if they had surrendered control to the large quantities of drugs consumed during the course of a 51-date tour that had begun on 1 April.

Later, Jimmy Page would be obliged to deny to me that what happened that day was karmic recompense for his flirtations with the occult. ‘I don’t think we were doing anything … evil,’ he said, two years later.

It was especially ironic that what happened at Oakland Coliseum that day, which would utterly transform the fortunes and career trajectory of Led Zeppelin, should be on the turf of Bill Graham, whose Fillmore West had been a temple of popularity for the Yardbirds, Page’s previous group, and, along with Graham’s New York showcase the Fillmore East, the scene of early break-out triumphs for Led Zeppelin. Although the confluence of the interests of Bill Graham and Peter Grant, Led Zeppelin’s manager, had proved mutually advantageous in the past, it was always a disaster waiting to happen. Graham was the most powerful music promoter in the United States; Grant had reinvented the relationship between managers and promoters in the United States, often through heavy-handed behaviour. And as much as Grant terrified people, Graham also possessed a fierce temper.

The previous evening, Graham, who was promoting Day on the Green, as this event was billed, for an audience of 65,000, had been summoned to Led Zeppelin’s hotel, the San Francisco Hilton, to honour a sudden demand for a $25,000 cash advance against their fee for the shows. Entering their suite, Graham noticed a cowboy-hat-wearing local dealer of hard drugs; in a flash he realised what the money was needed for.

Arriving only 20 minutes before the start of the gig, Page was so evidently befuddled from his drug consumption, by that stage largely heroin, that Graham could only watch as the Led Zeppelin leader set off for the stage in entirely the wrong direction; he was rescued by an aide who stopped him and despatched him on the correct course. Midway through the set Bindon crawled out onto the stage on his hands and knees and licked Page’s boots.

As the wheezing, out-of-shape man-mountain that was Peter Grant lumbered up to the stage, Jim Downey, a member of the stage crew, commiserated with him about the excessively steep climb. For this presumption Bindon, who was accompanying Grant, punched Downey with such force that he slammed him into a concrete pillar and knocked him out.

‘What happened? The fuck did I do?’ wondered the victim as he came to. Downey was clearly unaware of an extraordinary management edict – egregiously pathetic in its arrogance – on what would become the final Led Zeppelin American tour: no one was permitted to speak to any member of the act, or to Grant, unless they were first spoken to. (Flying on the group’s plane, journalist Steven Rosen had been made fully aware of this. He was startled when the normally benign bass player, John Paul Jones, had verbally assaulted him, demanding all of his interview tapes – a response to an apparently unfavourable comparison of Zeppelin to the Jeff Beck Group that Rosen had made years previously. This incident was indicative of the prevailing mood on the tour.)

‘What I didn’t like about Led Zeppelin was that they came with force,’ Graham wrote later. ‘I had heard stories from other cities about how they had muscled promoters to get better deals. How they had shaken them down for money … I had heard about the ugliness of their security.’

But far worse was to come. Midway through Led Zeppelin’s show, during Page’s acoustic set, Matzorkis noticed a young boy removing wooden plaques from the doors of the dressing-room trailers: plaques that had the names of the artists on them, and which would be required for the repeat show the following day. Also on the bill, as support acts, were Judas Priest and Rick Derringer. Matzorkis told the kid to put them back. The kid was insistent that he would be taking them. So Matzorkis took them from him – allegedly cuffing him round the back of the head, although Matzorkis has always denied this – and wandered over to the storage trailer to lock them away. Unbeknown to Matzorkis, the boy was Warren Grant, the 11-year-old son of Peter Grant.

A few minutes later Matzorkis was still in the storage trailer when John Bonham, Led Zeppelin’s drummer – surplus to requirements during Page’s acoustic set – called to him from the bottom of the short flight of steps outside it. Peter Grant was with him.

‘You don’t talk to my kid that way,’ Grant said, as Matzorkis stood in the trailer’s doorway. The burly Bonham, an effigy of muscle and blubbery booze-fat, simply stood there, as though he was Grant’s security wingman. Then Grant escalated matters, like the barrack-room lawyer and bully he could be: ‘You don’t talk to my kid that way. Nobody does. I can have your job.’ Grant continued in this vein, accusing Matzorkis of ‘roughing this kid up. I heard you hit this child.’

Stepping up the stairs, Bonham then kicked Matzorkis between the legs, sending the stagehand flying back into the trailer. Bonham followed him in, while a pair of bodyguards endeavoured to restrain the drummer, shouting at Matzorkis to get out of there. He did, through a rear door.

When he learned of the incident, Graham went to find Grant in his trailer. For 20 minutes Graham put up a spirited defence of Matzorkis, yet Grant refused to budge from his thinking: ‘Your man put his hands on my people. On my son. How could you let this happen? How could you hire these people? I’m very disappointed in you.’

‘Let me speak to this man,’ Grant repeatedly demanded. When Grant finally insisted that all he wanted was to meet again with ‘the man’ who had caused these problems to ‘make my peace with him’, Graham somewhat reluctantly agreed to the manager’s request.

Walking over to find Matzorkis in another trailer, Graham observed that Grant was now flanked by a pair of other men; one of them was Bindon.

When Graham introduced Grant to Matzorkis, Led Zeppelin’s manager seized the stagehand, yanked him towards him and smashed him full in the face with a ring-covered fist, knocking him back into his seat. When Graham lunged at Grant, one of the security men picked up the promoter, threw him down the steps and shut the door of the trailer, standing guard in front of it.

Inside the trailer Bindon held Matzorkis from behind, while Grant started to work him over, punching him ceaselessly in the face, knocking out a tooth and kicking him in the balls.

Somehow, Matzorkis, who was screaming for help, broke free of Bindon. He managed to manoeuvre himself to the rear of the trailer, but this was when Bindon leapt upon him and went for his eyes. Fuelled by adrenaline, Matzorkis finally twisted away and got to the door.

Despite the security man guarding it, Matzorkis managed to get out of the trailer and run off across the backstage area.

Meanwhile, tour manager Richard Cole, armed with a chunk of metal pipe, had been attempting to enter the trailer. Bob Barsotti, who with his brother served as Bill Graham’s creative director, had prevented him, so he then turned on him. Realising that Cole was demented from the drugs he had seen him consuming during the day, Barsotti ran off, leading him on a merry dance down into the car park, where Cole ran out of steam.

By now several of Graham’s security men had gone to retrieve their ‘pieces’ from where they were stashed in their cars’ boots, but a seasoned member of the backstage crew reminded all concerned that the next day there would be another Led Zeppelin show: if the group did not play, 65,000 fans might very well riot. Yet the Graham crew consensus was that somehow the next day they would ‘deal’ with Zeppelin and their team. The promoter agreed with this thinking. He also made an offer: if they couldn’t ‘do’ Led Zeppelin and their cohorts the next day, then he would personally fly 25 of his men to New Orleans, the next date on the tour, and they could mete out revenge there.

At Graham’s home that evening, where the promoter had taken Matzorkis for protection following his release from hospital, he received a call from Led Zeppelin’s US lawyer: he demanded that Matzorkis sign an indemnity waiver, giving Led Zeppelin protection against being sued over what he referred to as a ‘minor altercation’. Unless this was received, Led Zeppelin ‘would find it difficult to play’ the next day.

Graham agreed to sign; his own lawyer told him that as he was acting under duress, it would not be legally binding. Besides, Graham had a plan. Knowing that Led Zeppelin would be staying in San Francisco for a further night following the Sunday show in Oakland, he had arranged with the local district attorney to arrest those culpable on the Monday morning.

At the Sunday concert the loathing of Graham’s entire crew towards Led Zeppelin was palpable: they glowered at the band and anyone connected with them. Page played most of the show seated, and he and Jones both looked bored. Robert Plant, however, sang very well indeed, dropping occasional words of commiseration in the direction of Graham; bootlegs indicate that it was a far better show than the previous day, partly because Led Zeppelin appeared drug-free. Still, it was a tense affair, and many in the audience were drunk and rowdy. Rumours were running round that a murder had been committed the previous day.

The next day, Bonham, Grant, Bindon and Cole were arrested at the San Francisco Hilton and taken, hands cuffed behind their backs, across the bay to Oakland to be booked, where they were held in a cell for three hours. There was a very real chance that if the case went to a criminal court, all involved would be deported and never be able to work again in the United States, a serious financial worry.

Bonham was charged with a single count of battery, as was Grant; Cole and Bindon were each charged with two counts of battery. The news of their arrest and the incident at Oakland Coliseum made the news all around the world. When they were eventually released they were bailed at $250 on each charge.

As the arrests at the hotel were taking place, Jones was exiting the Hilton through a rear door. He climbed into a camper van with his family and drove out of San Francisco towards Oregon and Washington state, on a planned holiday before Led Zeppelin’s next date, in New Orleans, at the city’s Louisiana Superdome. He was set to rejoin the band there on 30 July, in time for the show that night.

‘As far as I was concerned, every one of those guys in the band was absolutely 100 per cent accountable for that shit. Because they allowed it to go on,’ said Bob Barsotti. ‘And we weren’t the only ones it happened to. We were just the last ones. We were the only ones who stood up and said something. When we started looking into it, there were incidents like that all across the country on that tour. Trashed hotel rooms. Trashed restaurants. Literally like twenty-thousand dollars’ worth of damages at some restaurant in Pennsylvania. Really outrageous stuff. Like where they physically abused waiters and people in the restaurant, and then just bought them off.’

‘They would do things after the show,’ said Peter Barsotti. ‘The traditional “go get chicks out of the audience for the band”. I remember standing by the ramp and seeing these guys get girls to come over. It was like no other feeling I’d ever experienced. It was like these girls were going to be sacrificed. I wanted to go out and grab these girls and say, “Don’t do it, honey. Don’t do it.” I’m as hardcore as the next guy. But I was afraid for these girls.’

If it could be possible, worse was to come. Arriving on 26 July at the Royal Orleans Hotel in New Orleans, Plant received a phone call from his wife in England: she told her husband that Karac, their five-year-old son, was seriously ill and had been taken to hospital.

Then came another call from her. Karac had died.

A devastated Plant flew back to England. All remaining dates on that eleventh Led Zeppelin tour of the United States were cancelled.

At the funeral of Karac, Plant was joined by Bonham and Cole. But there was no Page, who had flown instead to Cairo, where he was ensconced by the pyramids in the luxurious Mena House Hotel. Jones, for his part, had simply resumed his family holiday. And Grant had also remained in the US. Plant would not forget this.

On 26 July Graham received a call from the Zeppelin manager. ‘I hope you’re happy,’ Grant muttered down the line.

‘What are you talking about?’ Graham asked.

‘Thanks to you, Robert Plant’s kid died today.’

That one absurd assessment by Grant captured everything that had gone wrong with Jimmy Page’s Led Zeppelin project.

Just considering the death of Karac Plant sets off an inescapable collision of images of those nude blond children crawling up the boulders on the Houses of the Holy sleeve, and of the child being held aloft, as though for sacrifice. You can’t help but feel that this might have crossed the mind of the bereft Robert Plant on his wretched plane ride home.

The Oakland incident, and the death of his singer’s son, marked an extraordinary, certainly hubristic fall for Jimmy Page, who since the beginning of Led Zeppelin in 1968 had become the greatest archetype of a globally successful rock star that Britain has ever seen.

‘Jimmy Page grew up in the hypocrisy of the United Kingdom in the 1950s and found three chords that saved him,’ said his friend Michael Des Barres. ‘As Led Zeppelin developed, heroin was obviously the fuel of that mad coach ride through the countryside. And inevitable.’

The mystery of Led Zeppelin had been established almost entirely through the endless enigma that is Page; later, as the apprentice matured, Plant would offer a separate sort of leadership within the group. In tandem with their extraordinarily lyrical atmospherics, Zeppelin’s complex beats were the dominant soundtrack for popular culture for nigh on a decade. But the music was only one part of it; without Page’s extremely pure comprehension of the intangibles of rock ’n’ roll – the perfect manner in which to exit a limousine, for example – Led Zeppelin would not have been granted their place in the pantheon of rock ’n’ roll gods.

From the very start – those first publicity pictures with his fluttering eyelashes and choirboy’s face – Page displayed a slightly smirking look of utter confidence and haughty control, with a hidden promise of something sinister cloaked beneath it. There is that very early photograph of the four Led Zeppelin musicians in 1968 clustered around the bonnet of a Jaguar Mk 2 3.8, which had a reputation as a bank robber’s car. Page is encased in a then fashionable double-breasted overcoat, its collar pulled rakishly up; he stares at the camera from between those curtains of crimped black hair, smouldering with self-assurance and poise. It is an image maintained in the first official promotional shot of the band, issued by Atlantic Records: the utter Capricorn control of Page leaning over the other three members – his string-pulling hands resting on the shoulders of the two Midlands neophytes, drummer John Bonham and Plant, who resembles a frightened faun caught in the headlights.

Their look – especially that of Page – is like that of Charles I’s cavaliers, perhaps especially of Lord John Stuart and His Brother, Lord Bernard Stuart, Anthony van Dyck’s 1638 painting of two teenagers who would be killed in the English Civil War.

Half an inch under six foot tall, permanently clad in sensuous velvet and sexy ruffled shirts, his jawline frequently dusted with five o’clock shadow, and always with that aura of androgynous otherness, Page looked to many women – and plenty of men too – like dirty sex on a stick. This image was as integral to his art as the 20-minute guitar solos with which he would blast his audience’s eardrums – the violin bow he would employ when performing ‘Dazed and Confused’ clearly doubled as a wizard’s wand to manipulate concertgoers.

And it only gets better: this romantic dandy lives in a castle with a moat. Jimmy Page does very bad drugs seemingly forever and – unlike Keith Richards, a mere also-ran in the greatest ever UK rock star stakes – never gets busted … at least until Zeppelin is over. Moreover, he is held responsible for an entire genre of music – heavy metal! – with which his group is only tangentially involved, his true focus being a blending of UK and US folk traditions with a garage band sense of hard rock.

In his renowned isolation he is like a rock ’n’ roll version of Howard Hughes. But in many ways, the very idea of Jimmy Page is as much a construct as any of David Bowie’s personae. And – lest we take this too seriously – it is worth considering that when his own persona is deconstructed, Page is sometimes little more than a high-art version of Screaming Lord Sutch, the plumber rock ’n’ roll showman on whose attractively kitsch shock-rock records he played session guitar.

‘Everyone I worked with in the 1960s thought that rock ’n’ roll was really an aspect of showbiz,’ said Dave Ambrose, who played bass in Shotgun Express (with Rod Stewart) and the Brian Auger Trinity, who supported Led Zeppelin in San Francisco in April 1969. Later, as an A&R man, Ambrose signed the Sex Pistols, Duran Duran and the Pet Shop Boys, among others.

Many of Page’s expenditures – the palatial residences, the vintage cars he was unable to drive (he never passed his test), the enormous collection of rare guitars – seemed designed to garner respect and support among the world’s wealthy and influential, to make people aware of him, to elevate his extraordinarily inscrutable profile, and to establish himself as one of the principal men about whichever town he found himself in.

But at the same time, here was a rebel cocking a snook at the Establishment, having what he knew he wasn’t meant to have. With Led Zeppelin there always was that sense of being resolutely ‘underground’, a card played with perfect panache by the band for most of their career: hardly ever on television, with no singles released in their homeland, Zeppelin existed from the very beginning as their own outsider identity. In a sense the damning review of their first album by John Mendelsohn in Rolling Stone, a magazine Page came to loathe, was perfect for them; it set in motion the ‘us against them’ agenda from which Led Zeppelin’s success soared.

By 1977, the year their myth savagely unravelled, they would come to be seen as the embodiment of behemoth rock, all that the new punk movement stood against, but when Led Zeppelin started out in 1968 their anti-Establishment stance was about as punk as it could be.

‘The big question today is, Why hasn’t he done new music?’ said Michael Des Barres. ‘Well, why does he have to? Jimmy Page is his own art piece, a performance artist, and he’s busy curating his legacy. There is nobody else whose roadie was Aleister Crowley. And it worked. Led Zeppelin were not a band; they were a cult.

‘Led Zeppelin brought together all those kids who otherwise would just hang around parking lots in two-bit American cities, kids for whom the obvious decadence of the Rolling Stones didn’t really connect. Instead, Led Zeppelin were their cult; they became a focus for and brought together all those disaffected, lost souls who would take the fantasy world of the group and its subject matter and project onto it their own interpretation of what they were.’

The world was ready for just such a package. Around the time the Rolling Stones were writing 1968’s ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had dabbled in a friendship with the Californian film director and occultist Kenneth Anger, but – as though proof that in such areas they were distinctly lightweight – fled his company the next year after the debacle of Altamont. Instead it was Led Zeppelin, driven by Page’s assiduous academic interest in altered states and realities, that provided the soundtrack to the building public interest in the occult. In 1972 TIME magazine ran a cover story bearing the strapline ‘Satan Returns’. Colin Wilson’s mammoth groundbreaking study simply titled The Occult had been published in 1971. More populist was the Man, Myth and Magic partwork series, which commenced in 1970, providing highly readable accounts of a secret world that was exciting to the newly stoned with their now-opened third eyes. As was the manner of partworks, Man, Myth and Magic was extensively plugged in television adverts, featuring an image of a demonic figure, painted by Austin Osman Spare. Spare had been close to Aleister Crowley and was sometimes described as ‘Britain’s greatest unknown artist’; Page would become the world’s leading collector of Spare’s work.

By then there was something frightening about the very notion of Led Zeppelin. After I interviewed Page in 1979 in a relatively forthright manner for the NME, a senior editorial member asked me if I wasn’t nervous of any potential repercussions. When I told casual acquaintances I was writing this book, I was met with similar responses: ‘Jimmy Page? Black magic?’

For some years – a decade or so – this was the prevailing view of Page. But of course time is a healer, so it should be no great surprise that by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, and in his own seventh and eighth decades, Page had redeemed himself to become the most loved and revered of all classic rock stars.

This redemption was fitting, given that this is the man who almost singlehandedly established the notion of the guitar hero as part of contemporary culture. ‘What about Eric Clapton?’ you may ask. No: Clapton was too diverse in the paths he trod. It was the singularity of Page’s work with his vehicle Led Zeppelin, underpinned by his extraordinarily startling and sinisterly attractive appearance, that awarded him the guitar hero crown. Guitar hero? Guitar god, more like.

His is an extraordinary story that has taken him to the very darkest of areas – but always driven by the search for his art. You might not approve of the methods employed to unleash and liberate his creativity, and you can’t avoid the impression that Page was vain, arrogant, fanatical and power-hungry, and indulged in a scandalous private life – much, of course, to the adoration of his fans. Yet many of the accusations against him were probably fabricated or at least exaggerated by his numerous enemies – though many of these, in the timbre of the times, were no more than cosmic spivs.

Certainly, Page was a man of his age – ambitious, worldly and pleasure-loving – but the demonic caricature of evil is mostly an elaborate myth. Not that he didn’t gladly play it himself, of course. By mentioning in a very matter-of-fact manner how the congregation of the original church at Boleskine House, a home of Crowley, had burned to death, Page was positioning himself as being metaphysically hard, a cosmically tough motherfucker with complex connections to ghoulish gangs of strange spirits. It was, of course, a good way to attract impressionable women, a variant on those college student ‘astrologers’ who would take girls back to their rooms to read their charts and then shag them.

For a time Page was fascinated with – to give it its full title – the Isis-Urania Temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a late-19th-century group of occultists whose members had included the Irish poet W. B. Yeats and Crowley, who – unsurprisingly – considered his poetry superior to that of Yeats and had a bitter falling out with the Irishman.

‘Much of the Golden Dawn magic,’ wrote Gary Lachman in his biography of Crowley, ‘as well as Crowley’s, has to do with what is called the “assumption of the god form”, when the magician imagines he has become the particular god he wants to invoke by visualising his form enveloping his own.’ Except you might feel that the ‘particular god’ Page wished to invoke was none other than himself: Jimmy Page, rock god.

And this stance was carried through to every aspect of his existence, including his appearances on stage.

‘On the surface,’ writes the American cultural commentator Erik Davis, ‘Page’s live performances present typical rockist values of spontaneity, virtuosity and sweaty abandon. But Page adds a novel element to the figure of the guitar hero, an element … of mystery. So even as Page bares his cock rock before tens of thousands of fans, the Zoso doodle emblazoned on his clothes, he reminds us that he knows something that we don’t. There is a gap between the hero whose performance we consume and the sage behind the curtain, who remains concealed, literally occult. This mystique makes Page far creepier than Ozzy Osbourne, who is hiding nothing, except maybe his debt to The Munsters.’

A balanced appreciation of Page’s character reveals traits both admirable and detestable, but claims of his ethical failings have sometimes overshadowed an appreciation of his keen creative mind. Besides, his flamboyantly dissolute lifestyle was hardly different from that of many other rock stars of his age – such as David Bowie, or Mick Jagger, or Rod Stewart.

But Page had a longstanding relationship with the art of destruction, and had been preparing for a career of hotel-wrecking since early in his life. At the rear of the secondary school he went to, on Epsom’s Danetree Road, there was a bomb shelter left over from the war. Although efforts to destroy it had been made on several occasions by his fellow pupils, it was a 14-year-old Jimmy Page who finally succeeded.

In what seems less an example of urban terrorism and more like a yarn from one of Richmal Crompton’s Just William stories, an older boy had combined sodium sulphate, weed killer and icing sugar to make several miniature bombs. A couple of these had exploded in the school grounds, with the blame always attributed to the rough kids from the neighbouring council estate.

But then this arms race escalated. Another boy constructed a pipe bomb and placed it inside the bomb shelter. Once lit, however, the fuse on the bomb burned interminably slowly. After some 20 minutes without much progress, one of boys offered a solution: he had a fuse taken from a Jetex, a motor for model aircraft that was popular at the time, which they put in the pipe bomb.

‘But nobody dared light it,’ remembered Page’s friend Rod Wyatt. ‘So Jimmy said, “I’ll do it.” So he goes in the entrance of the shelter, and then he comes running out. As he runs out it goes off: P-F-O-O-F! B-R-A-MMM! And the whole corner, which was thick concrete, flies up in the air, bricks following it. And Jimmy is running out, laughing his head off into the playground.

‘Reflecting on this, I thought, “Was that a sign of the times? That he was going to be part of the loudest rock ’n’ roll band ever?” This gentlemanly young guitar player says, “I’ll light the jet engine. I don’t mind.” It fits Led Zeppelin perfectly.’