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Jimmy Page with Mattix, his 14-year-old groupie lover, in 1970. (
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Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and Robert Plant – now so respectable they got a Kennedy Center honor. (Walter McBride/INFphoto.com)
Led Zeppelin: The Oral History of the World’s Greatest Rock Band
by Barney Hoskyns
Wiley
Deep Purple vocalist Glenn Hughes had been “partying pretty strong with Mick Jagger at the Plaza” after having an ounce of cocaine flown in from Los Angeles. At one point during this 1975 stay, he called Jagger’s room to invite him up for more, but unbeknownst to him, the switchboard mistakenly put him through to Mick Hinton, a much-abused roadie for Led Zeppelin drummer John “Bonzo” Bonham, who was staying at the same hotel.
Hinton — dressed in the white jumpsuit and bowler-hat uniform from “A Clockwork Orange,” since Bonham had decided to dress that way for his band’s entire tour and forced his roadie to do the same — accepted the invitation meant for Jagger and arrived at Hughes’ door.
“I’m completely off my tree, shaking, sweating, completely paranoid. The last thing I want to see is Bonzo’s evil-twin ‘Clockwork Orange’ brother, frothing at the mouth,” recalls Hughes in this astounding new oral history from British rock journalist Hoskyns.
“Mick goes, ‘I know what to do with you, f- – – ing Hughesy!’ And he pulls out a f – – – ing syringe and says, ‘I’ll f – – – in’ stab you with this.’ Obviously, it was heroin or something, so I was convinced I was going to die. Fortunately, there was a guy in the room who got him out of there. Hinton scared the s – – – out of me.”
Led Zeppelin has become an institution. They were presented with a Kennedy Center honor last week, with the president noting that “a generation . . . survived teenage angst with a pair of headphones and a Zeppelin album.”
But as Hoskyns shows, through interviews with pretty much everyone associated with the group, the drug use, sex and violence loomed as large as any of their epic songs. Led Zeppelin may have been the most debaucherous band in rock ’n’ roll.
Zeppelin was an immediate sensation upon the release of its 1969 debut album, and as they became the world’s most popular rock band, temptation rose as quickly as fame.
Before the mood curdled, though, the spirit surrounding Led Zeppelin was more one of slightly debauched playfulness.
A friend of the band named Vanessa Gilbert recalls a visit to a cottage in the woods where they used to stay and record, where she once found bassist/keyboardist John Paul Jones face down in a plate of spaghetti, “talking real slow” after taking Mandrax (a form of Quaaludes). A band publicist who went by the moniker BP — they called him Beep — was there as well.
“Beep, who’d probably also taken a couple of Mandrax, went to sleep in a little bedroom,” Gilbert said, “and the guys went outside into the garden with the sheep and herded them into Beep’s room. Like, ‘How many farm animals can we get into this room?’ Poor Beep.”
The members of Zeppelin would also occasionally dress in drag, and one LA party saw guitarist Jimmy Page and vocalist Robert Plant in dresses — Plant’s was Chanel — and Bonham, too rugged to ever look glamorous as a woman, done up like “a fishwife.” Stevie Wonder was also at the party, and the band decided to toy with the blind superstar.
“The guys come down in drag,” said former Page girlfriend Lori Mattix, “and Stevie goes, ‘What’s going on, man?’ Everybody is cracking up, laughing, and nobody has the heart to tell Stevie what’s going on.”
Led Zeppelin adopted Los Angeles — the Hyatt House Hotel in particular — as its American home, and soon became the grand prize of the LA groupie scene, attracting seemingly every damaged young girl in the city.
“The really famous groupies were extremely tough and unpleasant,” said UK journalist Nick Kent. “Jimmy told me that one of his Hollywood girlfriends bit into a sandwich that had razor blades in it.”
Band founder Page, then in his late 20s, developed an infatuation with the then-14-year-old Lori Maddox, a k a Mattix — who describes herself in the book as having been one of the “young Paris Hiltons of our decade” — and the two wound up in a torrid 3 1/2-year relationship.
Following a brief flirtation from which Mattix fled after another groupie threatened to beat her up, Page pursued Mattix and had her delivered to him by the band’s notorious road manager, Richard Cole.
“Richard told me to get in this limousine. It was a bit scary. I was a frail little thing, I didn’t know what the f – – – was going on. He was like, ‘Just sit there and don’t move,’ ” recalls Mattix, who calls Page her “first love.”
“They drove me back to the [hotel], and all of a sudden I’m being escorted down the hallway by three bodyguards. A door opens, and Jimmy is sitting there in a hat, waiting for me, and he says, ‘See, I told you I’d have you.’ ”
Amazingly, Mattix and Page conducted much of their relationship out in the open, as the phenomena of adult rock stars dating or sleeping with young girls was then shockingly common.
“Roman Polanski got caught, but there were all these 40-year-old men who were seeing young girls on the Strip,” said Morgana Welch, who began her groupie career at 16.
“It went both ways: There was a notch in your belt as a girl if you went with a famous guy. There would be parties after the [club called the] Rainbow closed, just big sex parties. People got loaded, put good music on, and everybody was with everybody. And most of the guys were much older.”
Page’s relationship with Mattix ended when Mattix and several friends attacked Bebe Buell, then the girlfriend of musician Todd Rundgren (and now better known as the mother of actress Liv Tyler), after she committed the crime of talking to Page on his bed.
But if sex was abundant, it slowly took a back seat to drugs and violence. While band manager Peter Grant, a 6-foor-5 mountain of a man who had once worked as a professional wrestler, was notoriously dedicated to the band, his ultimate allegiance was to Page. Bonham learned this the hard way when, after questioning Page’s direction during the recording of the band’s first album, Grant asked Bonham if he could “play drums in a wheelchair.”
Grant’s increasing aggressiveness set the stage for the violence to come.
“One time Peter was in New Orleans, and Don Fox, the promoter, was demanding this and demanding that,” said Terry Manning, one of the band’s engineers. “They had just delivered coffee to Don and tea to Peter. Peter stood up, pulled down his pants, and put his you-know-what right in the hot teacup. He just stood there looking at Don. It was saying to Don, ‘There’s nothing you can do to me.’ And Don just sort of went, ‘Okay, I give up.’ ”
Grant, who Kent called “the closest thing to a Tony Soprano I’ve ever known,” was not the only madman in the crew. As life on the road got to the lonely, homesick Bonham, he turned into a rage-filled drunk.
Publicist Bill Harry recalls seeing Bonham — who once got so drunk on a plane that he urinated on his seat, then forced Hinton to sit there for the rest of the flight — driven to wilding after mixing copious amounts of vodka, Cointreau and more with a friend at a London bar.
“I heard a big bang, and they knocked [a] door off the hinges and grabbed hold of [a local music manager] and got all this tape and completely wrapped him up and dumped him in Oxford Street,” Harry said. “For some reason, they then came after me and dangled me out of the window.”
“Bonzo was a sweet, cuddly, goofy fella until he got drunk, and then you wanted to avoid him,” said famed groupie Pamela Des Barres. “I saw him slug my friend Michelle Myer right in the jaw just for being in the doorway with him at the Rainbow.”
By 1977, any journalist interviewing the band was presented with a set of rules that included, “Do not make any sort of eye contact with John Bonham,” which was presented with the addendum, “This is for your own safety.”
The aura grew darker as most of the band and their entourage drastically increased their cocaine use, and Page and Bonham also tangled with heroin, with Mattix saying that Page did the drug for “seven years straight,” and that “in the seventh year he went to Switzerland and had his blood changed like Keith Richards.”
“I only got into heroin because I thought it could make me more creative,” said Page, who by the band’s later years would occasionally pass out on stage and other times launch into the wrong songs. “That was a big mistake.”
Meanwhile, Jones and Plant — the latter of whom says that he gave up drugs in 1977 — grew so disgusted that Jones once threatened to quit the band to become the choirmaster at Winchester Cathedral, and late in Zeppelin’s tenure, rock god Plant actually applied for a job at a teacher training college.
The ugliness reached its apex when, during the band’s 1977 tour, Bonham, Grant and a “psychopathic criminal” Grant had brought into the fold named Johnny Bindon viciously beat a security guard after the man supposedly knocked over Grant’s young son.
(Arrest warrants were issued for the three and for Cole, but Zeppelin’s high-powered attorneys ensured that it went no further.)
Two days after that incident, Plant’s son Karac died suddenly, and the singer was crushed when neither Jones, Page or Grant attended the funeral.
The band’s caustic lifestyle ultimately led to its demise, when Bonham died in September 1980, at age 32, after a day of marathon drinking.
There have been several one-off reunions since, including a well-received 2007 show at London’s O2 Arena (with Bonham’s son Jason on drums) that was just released as a concert film/CD called “Celebration Day.”
Page, Jones and Jason Bonham were keen to continue, but Plant has made it clear that his Led Zeppelin days are behind him. While the idea has seemed to be that he wanted to move on musically, Hoskyns’ book shows that there are also likely many memories that he’d simply rather not revisit.
“I was part of something magnificent,” Plant said. “But in the end, what are you going to get out of it? Who are you doing it for? Who pays the piper?”