The Long Shadow of Led Zeppelin

Things were even worse on this tour. Grant was going through a painful divorce, and his temper was flaring. In addition, Cole brought in John Bindon as a security coordinator. Bindon had played hard-guy roles in films like Performance, Quadrophenia and Get Carter, but some found him more frightening in real life. Plant, Page and Jones had all complained about Bindon and Cole's handling of people, but that didn't curtail much of it. In Mojo, British writer Nick Kent described Cole in particular as "a genuinely terrifying" person. "One night," Kent wrote, "I saw him harassing a timid thirteen-year-old girl who'd come to the group's hotel simply to get an autograph of Robert Plant. The more frightened and hysterical she became, the more Cole seemed to enjoy it."

In his autobiography, Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock and Out, Graham recounted Cole calling him the day before the first of the Oakland shows, demanding the immediate delivery of a $25,000 advance on the shows' earnings. When Graham brought the money to the band's hotel, he realized what the call was really about: "This was drug money." The next day, July 23rd, when the band's road crew and security arrived at the Coliseum, Graham was further disturbed. "I [had] heard about the ugliness of their security," he wrote, "how they were just waiting to kill. They had these bodyguards who had police records in England. They were thugs."

Graham soon saw those reputations played out. When one of Graham's crew made what Grant took as a remark about his weight, Bindon approached the man and knocked him out. After the show, another of Graham's staff, Jim Matzorkis, saw a boy removing a sign with the band's name on it from a trailer door. Matzorkis took the plaque back, explaining that they needed it for the next day's show. The boy was Grant's son. Bonham saw the incident and reported it to Grant, who went looking for Matzorkis. Graham tried to intervene, but when Grant and Bindon found Matzorkis taking shelter in a trailer, they threw Graham out, shut the door and began to work the staffer over seriously. Graham tried to get back into the room to stop the beating, but Cole guarded the door, wielding a pipe. Matzorkis later said that when Bindon tried to gouge his eye out, he summoned his strength and escaped the trailer, bleeding. Graham had him rushed to the hospital.

The next day, before Led Zeppelin took the stage, one of the band's lawyers required that Graham sign a letter of indemnification, releasing the group and its organization of any responsibility for the beating. Graham signed. He didn't want to risk the chance of a riot if the band wouldn't play. He also knew that the letter didn't bind any of Matzorkis' legal options. Plant tried to reach some sort of conciliation, but Graham wouldn't speak to him. Disheartened and angry about the whole matter, Page played guitar sitting down for much of the show.

The next morning, an Oakland SWAT team surrounded Led Zeppelin's hotel, and police officers arrested Grant, Cole, Bindon and Bonham. They were all charged with assault, and Matzorkis filed a $2 million civil suit.

The day after the arrests, July 26th, the group traveled to New Orleans for the next show. As they were checking into the hotel, Plant received a call from his wife. Plant's son, Karac, was seriously ill—a respiratory infection. Two hours later, Maureen called back; their son was dead. Plant, Bonham and Cole caught the next flight back to England.

After the events of July 1977, Led Zeppelin were in pieces. The death of Plant's son stopped all band undertakings immediately. Bonham and Cole were the only members of Led Zeppelin's inner circle to attend Karac Plant's funeral in Birmingham. According to Cole—whose accounts are sometimes questionable—Plant was confused and hurt that the others hadn't joined him on this day. Plant, Cole claimed, said, "Maybe they don't have as much respect for me as I do for them. Maybe they're not the friends I thought they were."

Jimmy Page had to fend off rumors that his flirtations with the occult had backfired and created a curse, and that Led Zeppelin were now paying the cost. "I don't see how the band would merit a karmic attack," Page responded. "All I or we have attempted to do is go out and really have a good time and please people at the same time."

But Plant later acknowledged that he had been forced to reevaluate everything. "After losing my son," he said, "I found that the excesses that surrounded Led Zeppelin were such that nobody knew where the actual axis of all this stuff was. Everybody was insular, developing their own world. The band had gone through two or three really big—huge—changes: changes that actually wrecked it before it was born again. The whole beauty and lightness of 1970 had turned into a sort of neurosis."

Grant and the other members of Led Zeppelin agreed to give Plant as much time and distance as he needed to grieve and come to his own decisions. "I felt quite remote from the whole thing," Plant told Uncut in 2005. "I wasn't comfortable with the group at all. We'd gone right through the hoop and, because my hoop was on fire, I didn't know if it was worth it anymore." On another occasion Plant said that Page's and others' drug use was also an issue: "Addiction to powders was the worst way to see yourself, a waste of your time and everybody's time. You make excuses to yourself why things aren't right or about what's happening to your potential. You lie to yourself first and rub your nose later. It was time to get out."

By late 1978, Plant was ready to try again with Led Zeppelin. The band recorded a new album in Stockholm. This time, Plant and Jones took the helm. "There were two distinct camps by then," John Paul Jones said, "and we were in the relatively clean one." But with the exception of "In the Evening," "Carouselambra" and "I'm Gonna Crawl," the new album, In Through the Out Door, was a misfire—the only one among the band's studio works. What was absent was Jimmy Page's fucked-up quality, except Page was too fucked up to deliver it. (In Through the Out Door became best known for selling in such massive numbers out of the box that it single-handedly rescued the flagging American music industry.)