Chris Salewicz - Jimmy Page - The Definitive Biography

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.