Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon by Pamela Des Barres Page B

Robert “a pretty soul belter who can do a good spade imitation,” comparing Zeppelin to the Jeff Beck Group in “self-indulgence and restrictedness.” Despite hundreds of protest letters, the press continued to slag off Led Zeppelin, creating such contempt within the band that they refused to do interviews for many years to come, which added to their burgeoning mystique.
    Bonzo needed hours to unwind after one of his bombastic performances and, on that first tour, engaged Richard Cole in the first of many, many post-show antics. It all began innocently enough with raw eggs and half-eaten dinners sailing through hotel rooms, but soon degenerated to the lowest levels of rock-and-roll debauchery. From the outside, Zeppelin’s naughty road hijinks seemed almost decadently glamorous. In reality, the band had too much pent-up energy and too many hours to fill.
    Zeppelin spent only two months in England before their second trip to America, opening at the Fillmore West with a three-and-a-half-hour set. In May they hit the American Top Ten, and most of the next year was spent on
the road. Bonzo was playing with the biggest bass drum made, and his solo was evolving into the highlight of the show, sometimes lasting over thirty minutes. When he threw away his sticks and played with his hands, the crowds went insane. The rest of the band took to ambling back to the dressing room during Bonzo’s thrash fest, where Jimmy and Robert would do a bit of primping (and later a bit of boozing, popping, snorting, and sundry sexual favors).
    Bonzo had a gigantic appetite for booze, often becoming belligerent, passing out, and sleeping it off in jail cells all over the world—and getting into reams of trouble in general. It was road manager Richard Cole, a mighty abuser himself, who was in charge of keeping Bonzo in line. Richard is a longtime friend of mine, and has been clean and sober for many years. He has plenty of tales about Bonzo dumping huge amounts of baked beans on Richard and his girl of the moment while they made love, then calling in Peter Grant, who doused them with champagne; trimming an adoring groupie’s pubic hair with Robert’s shaving gear; flooding John Paul’s hotel room with a garden hose; punching out complete strangers; or relieving himself in the most unlikely places.
    The hedonistic concept of “free love” peaked with Zeppelin’s rise, freeing thousands of teenage girls to pursue these British cream-boats with rampant fervor. The band was besieged by packs of persistent dolls more than willing to sacrifice themselves to the hammer of the gods. “Percy” (as Robert was nicknamed), “Bonzo,” and “Jonesy” were married men but couldn’t always resist the teenage temptresses. In the middle of one night at the Chateau Marmont, Bonzo dressed himself up as a waiter and rolled a service cart featuring Jimmy Page as the main course into a roomful of underage girls the guitarist always fancied.
    The Zeppelin “mudshark episode” at Seattle’s Edgewater Inn has become a torrid slice of rock-and-roll folklore. Though Richard Cole admits to being the ringleader, Bonzo was front and center with his fishing pole dangling off the balcony. “It wasn’t even a shark!” Richard asserts. “I caught this red snapper, and the chick was a redhead. It was still alive and I just pushed it in on her ginger pussy! Bonzo was in the room, but it was me that did it.” I am amazed that Bonzo didn’t assist. “No, he didn’t, but he brought his wife in to have a look!”
    And then there was the octopus incident. “We were doing two shows that night and it was Bonzo’s birthday,” Richard tells me with a gleam. “Bonzo had a four-foot-high bottle of champagne next to him onstage. A lot of times on that second tour we did two shows a night, but had to stop them because we got so drunk during the shows—especially Bonzo—that the second show was always a fiasco.” After the mad second set, a friend took some of the