The Mammoth Book of Hard Bastards (Mammoth Books) (26 page)

“Bonzo’s dead,” said a shaky voice on the phone. It was Ray Washbourne – the PA to Peter Grant, Led Zeppelin’s manager.

The enormity of his words took a few moments to sink in. And then that cold fact took its grip on my guts. I was sickened. John Bonham was such a lovely bloke; I’d been through so much with him … It was a shock. But there was no time for grief – not yet. But maybe I’m starting at the end? Before going into John’s tragic death, I’ll explain how I came to be involved with Led Zeppelin and how I had come to be so close to that legendary band’s members.

They say first impressions last – and that’s certainly true of my first encounter with Peter Grant. The name Peter means “rock”, and no one ever epitomized rock – in both senses of the word – like Peter. He was physically huge; an enormous hulk of a man, a former wrestler who, on a fateful night in 1964, had landed the job of road manager for the evening’s show at the Regal Theatre in Edmonton, North London. With wild American blues legend Bo Diddley and the latest teen sensations, a louche and motley bunch of kids called the Rolling Stones on the bill, it wasn’t going to be an easy ride. But old Peter was a rock in the face of any crowd, no matter how unruly. And, as I was to find out later, he was “rock” personified in other ways too – notably in his unrelenting passion for what became known as “rock ’n’ roll habits”. But more of that later …

I wasn’t exactly uninitiated in the esoteric ways of the music business behind the scenes and I’d turned up to take care of someone else on the bill: Tommy Roe, who’d just scored a big hit with Sheila and who was represented in the UK and US by GAC, the massive American agency into which my mentor Vic Lewis had tied his own London firm. Used to breezing my way unquestioned past security to the backstage area, I strolled through the front-of-house and made my way easily to the pass door (the door at the side of the stage leading into the auditorium that was a feature of all the old theatres). There, I was accosted by this towering giant with piercing eyes and a Mandarin style moustache and beard who growled, “Who are you and where do you think you’re going?”

I gave him my name and humbly explained that I was there to look after Tommy Roe. After a painfully long and, on my part at least, very tense pause, the future legend shrugged and let me pass with a gruff, “OK.”

Sad to say, the strikingly vibrant Regal Theatre’s days as a Rank cinema, concert hall and focus of local social life are long gone. Like so much that we took for granted as part of the rock ’n’ roll life’s rich fabric, it’s been torn apart and now, where guitars and drums rang out almost nightly, you only hear the ring of cash registers. No longer Regal, it’s now a lowly local supermarket. Thinking back on it, I and associates like Peter Grant, Don Arden, Mickey Most and countless others were incredibly lucky to have been starting out in the music business in the mid 1960s – a time now acknowledged as one of the most creative, vibrant and innovative that British rock ’n’ roll has ever seen. At the time, though, like the people who saw no heritage of great import in the old Regal Theatre, we just saw every epoch-making event as another “day at the office”. If only we’d known the significance of the times we were living in – and our impact on them!

It may not have seemed the most auspicious of introductions, but increasingly my life was to become intertwined with Peter’s – and those of the bands with whom we both became associated. Within a year or so I found myself sharing the same London business address – 35 Curzon Street – with Peter and a whole gang of blokes whose names now read like a list of the biggest music business figures: Vic Lewis, Mickie Most, Pat Meehan, Barry Clayman, Ken Pitt, Alan Blackburn, Don Black, Barry Dickens, Irene Korf, Colin Berlin and Richard Cowley.

I was still working for Vic – and Peter was the road management supremo for another soon-to-become-legendary rock figure: Don Arden. He was one of the new, seminal breed of band promoters that the 1960s sired – dynamic, charismatic, creative and often even more outrageously flamboyant than the artists they looked after. With a fast-growing stable of the hottest, brightest stars, including the Small Faces and Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne’s Birmingham rockers who were to become the definitive heavy metal act, Don was something of a star himself. Incidentally, his daughter Sharon later managed and married Ozzy. And the more he shone, the more trouble gravitated towards him, wherever in the world he showed his face. Which, of course, was why he needed to be surrounded by brick shit-houses of men like Peter and his equally imposing colleague, Pat Meehan. No matter what he got up to, you simply didn’t cross Don Arden – and over the years there were many who rued the day they’d tried. One hapless accountant springs to mind. He made the (almost literally) fatal mistake of mismanaging Arden’s financial affairs in the early 1970s. Don and his son David weren’t the types to call the cops. They called the shots.

I don’t recall exactly what that poor accountant’s fate was, other than that he was held prisoner for a while – but I’m sure their
vengeance
was swift and terrible. It was certainly illegal, because David ending up doing time for it and Don fled to the States, just out of reach of the long arm of the British law. As Arden’s right-hand man, and a force to be reckoned with in his own right, Peter was a
formidable
character – and one you definitely wanted on your side. Although I never had any business dealings with him, I always got on well with Don Arden and found him great company.

Another nascent manager/producer saw the value of having a man of Peter’s magnitude in his orbit – and soon Peter was installed at the Oxford Street offices of one Mickie Most (now sadly departed) and Ron Madison. Mickie was riding his first wave of success – and it was a big one. He was an immensely successful producer with hits by the likes of Donovan and Herman’s Hermits but he was also handling seminal acts such as the New Vaudeville Band and crucially, the Yardbirds – a group whose success at this stage was to lead to undreamed prosperity in the future for Peter. Mickie went on to set up his own label, RAK Records, in 1969, and continued to work with Peter and the bands he managed.

Things were taking off for everyone around me – and by late 1965 I thought it was time I struck out on my own. I knew all about the hassles the most popular acts faced – and the three most
important
of them were security, privacy and transport. With my new venture I was going to solve all three it a stroke, filling what I saw as a gaping hole in the market – and, with a bit of luck, filling my pockets at the same time!

I was right. Artistes Car Services, as I christened my new
enterprise
, was an immediate success. The core of the idea was to offer performers a genuinely luxurious ride to and from their concerts with a minimum of fuss, total security and discretion. This proved to be exactly what the new breed of pop stars needed as their fans’ adulation began to feel like persecution. That year some very big people rode in our sumptuously appointed limos, including the Beatles and Donovan among many others in an increasingly galactic list that began to read like a Who’s Who of British rock ’n’ roll. But undoubtedly the biggest arse to grace the seats of my fleet of cars was that of Peter Grant! From 1966 onwards he relied on us to get his fledgling acts from A to B (and often via C and D and all the way to Z!) and back again without incident or embarrassment. Of course, that meant we saw each other on a regular basis and, with so much in common, it was almost inevitable that we became close friends. What it really all boiled down to was trust. A simple thing, you might think – but a rare and valuable commodity in that exciting yet frightening dog-eat-dog time. Ultimately, Peter knew that he could rely absolutely on me – and, by association, on the team of level-headed, broad-minded, strong but utterly discreet men I employed. The old-school rule books had gone out of the window and he knew we could cope with any of the bizarre problems this new untamed form of showbiz could throw up. More importantly, he knew we could make them go away.

Nevertheless, it soon became apparent that many of these problems were actually of Peter’s own making – certainly, he increasingly involved us in circumstances that had little to do with our original remit, which was just to chauffeur the artists to the gig and back again and protect them all the way. Drawn into all sorts of disputes from run-ins with the authorities to “withdrawing” illegal bootleg albums from record shops, I found myself in the dubious role of Peter’s personal trouble-shooter. I suppose it was a
compliment
really. It showed his utter faith in my integrity – a faith that was, though I say it myself, completely justified. However, over the following years, it embroiled me in difficult personal, even intimate, situations that often I could have done without – even if Peter had convinced himself that he was merely acting in his artists’ best
interests
. For example, if a band member lost interest in a particular
girlfriend
it was our job to make her
persona non grata
and ensure that she was no longer on the scene. Cast-off groupies were “cleansed” from the band’s entourage with ruthless efficiency – the unfortunate girl concerned would suddenly find that the backstage doors and party venues that had once magically opened for her were now firmly closed, and often slammed, in her face. But it wasn’t only people who were intimate with the band that we had to remove. Sometimes Peter simply took an instant dislike to a face in the crowd for no apparent reason. Ours was not, as they say, to question why and it was down to me to get the unfortunate owner of the face he’d taken exception to removed. Of course, I tried to elicit some sort of rationale from the great man as to what constituted a “threat to security” – but in the end it was a lot easier to just “do it” than to try and reason with him.

All the hassle and heartaches paid off handsomely. When Peter asked me to take on the road management duties for the
forthcoming
US tour of his new management signings, the Jeff Beck Group, it was quite an honour. Probably the first “supergroup”, the band comprised four established faces (two quite literally!) who were destined for a place among the greatest in the history of rock ’n’ roll: former Yardbirds, guitar hero Jeff Beck, of course; future Faces and Rolling Stones strummer Ronnie Wood on bass: new boy Tony Newman on drums; and a fresh-faced former gravedigger with a voice that sounded like it was made from the gravel he dug – one Rod Stewart. Like everything else in the music business in those days (and right up to this day I suspect) the job description of road manager was an elastic one. I imagine even the uninitiated would expect it to involve overseeing the hotel bookings, flights, shipping, trucking, setting up, sound-checking and breaking down the PA, lighting and staging at each venue. In fact, most of that would be handled by the roadies themselves – and the road manager would only get hands on when there were problems to sort out, such as equipment going astray. Less obvious are what you might call “ancillary” duties – they were often the least predictable, most onerous and prone to disaster. There were disputes and fights to settle, bills to pay, concert promoters to harangue and haggle with, and percentages of gross and “dead wood” to keep an eye on (“dead wood” was the unsold tickets, which had to be meticulously checked because they were our only means of verifying the number of tickets sold, and therefore the percentage owed to the band). And then there were services of a more personal and often illicit nature that are always in demand by a rampant rock group pumped full of adrenalin and testosterone after a great gig. I’m sure I don’t need to spell out the exact nature of such missions! Suffice to say I jumped at the job and threw myself into it wholeheartedly, as always!

I’d already met Jeff Beck some years before – he’d turned up at the office in his pre-Yardbirds days several times while Vic Lewis was courting him for a management deal. Jeff had recorded a single called “That Noise” and CBS were keen to sign him, but he hesitated before signing just long enough to get another offer. As you can imagine, Vic was gutted when “the one that got away” joined the Yardbirds and began his meteoric rise to stellar status. That single never saw the light of day. It turned out that Vic’s loss was Peter Grant’s very lucrative gain – and it was my baptism of fire in the sheer madness and barely contained anarchy that was rife on the road in the States with one of the original hair-raisingly
hedonistic
rock supergroups.

I didn’t meet the rest of Jeff’s boys until our rendezvous at Heathrow. Like a dog urinating to mark out its territory, I knew I had to make my mark immediately – stamp my authority on the lot of them. If I didn’t I might as well not get on the plane. I should explain that some of the road manager’s more banal duties are also the biggest nightmares, like coaxing a hideously hungover musician from his hotel bed and getting him on to the plane/tour bus/stage on time. They don’t thank you for it and a lot of the time you have to be the “bad guy”. In fact, at times I felt like some kind of satanic scoutmaster!

The high jinks started almost the second that the plane levelled out at cruising altitude and the seat-belt lights went out. The boys were in a particularly playful mood, like a bunch of schoolboys on an outing with a teacher – although considerably less innocent. They seemed set on testing me; goading me to see just how far they could push me and at times it was hard to tell the playing up and play-acting from whatever would pass as normal behaviour in the unique world of a successful rock musician, which is, as far as I can tell, one gigantic amusement park. I took the wind-ups and pissing about with good humour until suddenly the atmosphere of levity dropped like a … well, like a Led Zeppelin. Young Rod was squirming in his seat, clearly overcome with nausea. As he clutched his stomach in agony, and gagged and heaved those dry retches that make everyone around feel sick too, a couple of concerned fellow passengers got out of their seats and rushed to his aid. Right on cue he shuddered, convulsed and spewed forth a torrent of evil looking grey vomit all over his would-be Good Samaritans. I bet that was the last time they rushed to the assistance of an unruly rocker! It turned out that the disgusting globby mess that splattered out of Rod the Mod’s mouth wasn’t vomit at all – just an unpleasant papier mâché of superstar spittle and the paper he’d been chewing up since take-off. Not, I imagine, that this was much consolation to the people whose clothes were soaked in it!