A New Stairway to Heaven

Dick Trubo, who co-authored the tell-all Stairway to Heaven (Led Zeppelin Uncensored) with Richard Cole (Led Zeppelin's longtime, long-suffering tour manager), commonly chooses a leading question for chapter openers, the most memorable being, "Do you think these cars really float?" That alone would allow this Zeppelin biography, first released in 1992 and reprinted now with a new afterword (HarperEntertainment, 362 pages, $15.95), to dethrone the reigning Hammer of the Gods. Cole's account is much more than a funny-as-fuck, anecdote-packed page turner. It's an honest, insightful account of the members from their biggest fan, and a testament to the band's enduring music and mythology.

Stairway (I know, I know) opens with a profile of each performer, leaving the reader with a clear understanding of how and why these four men came to be legends in their own time and required reading for every adolescent boy after. None of the musicians has any lineage to speak of, although Robert Plant's father was a professional man who considered himself cultured, and his son was never encouraged to pursue his career as a rock 'n' roll singer. Not much changed outside the Plant parlor, where Robert's peers found him rather talentless, and he found himself without many prospects. (Cole never mentions the rumor that the rest of the boys considered kicking Plant out themselves until they found he had grown too popular.) Plant's defining moment was when he rejected these opinions and advice.

John Bonham emerges as a gifted child early on, a kind of idiot savant (good drummers have to be) turning his mother's pots and pans into a makeshift kit before he could talk. His father was working-class, thank you very much, and we can see some of this pride and resentment later in Bonham as he stands outside a country pub in 1975, lovingly cleaning his Rolls Royce with a worn rag. One patron remarks good-naturedly that it's the first time he's ever seen a man washing his own Rolls Royce.

"Is that right?" Bonham responds, promptly working over the vehicle's body with the considerable force in his fists and legs (everybody who's anybody keeps a lead pipe in the trunk). "I suspect that's the first time you've ever seen a man smash his own fucking Rolls Royce as well!"

John Paul Jones is described here as Zeppelin's "Rock of Gibraltar." Unlike the others, the most salacious story we walk away with about "Jonesy" is that he, along with the band's infamously large, tough business manager Peter Grant and the rest of the group, once got naked in a Waikiki hotel room (they were bored) and took pictures of one another's penises (sizes and shapes not disclosed). But while his mates are able to hide the 13-year-olds, the heroin and?the other 13-year-olds from their wives, Jones is discovered. Naturally it is his own doing: during a slide show of the Hawaii trip at Jones' home he forgets to take out "the dick shots." To her credit, Jones' wife Mo calls Plant's old lady the next day on the phone. "Oh, I saw a lovely photograph of your husband last night taken in Hawaii. Absolutely lovely!" Perhaps it was because the only time he hit on a groupie it turned out to be a dude, but for whatever reason, Jones found it easy to be a family man.

And then there was Jimmy Page, because without him there couldn't have been anything else. He's pale, prone to illness and "otherworldly" (sigh). He spends his nights at the mixing board agonizing over which solo to use while his friends fight over who gets the first fuck. He reconciles himself to humping dim groupies yet confesses to Cole that Joni Mitchell is his dream girl, only problem being he's too shy to talk to her. And Page is constantly, constantly reminding everyone that, hey, this is about "the fans," man (mission control, we have official bodice ripping; I repeat, the bodice has been ripped). Jimmy's "fantasy sequence" (I know, I know) from the band's concert film The Song Remains the Same, (which Page "concepted" himself) explains it all. A young, heartbreakingly beautiful Page appears on the screen, dressed plainly and climbing an intimidating cliff. (Actually, they did seven takes to get it right and almost stopped altogether for fear he would collapse?our hearts are racing?okay, okay.) Anyway, the camera eventually shows that, even though it is probably killing him, Jimbo's slowly yet determinedly making his way toward a hooded figure looming above him?the hermit. When Jimmy reaches the top that shadowy face is raised to reveal an old man. Uncommonly old. Impossibly old, in fact. One would probably guess at least two centuries of hard, passionate living in those lines. And the craziest part is?but no. It's too soon for that.

First there was the music. One of Stairway's many refreshing characteristics is its lack of music critic/cultural context crap. Fans?the majority of the people reading this thing?already know the songs, and Cole tells the rest far more about them by, for example, describing the "lengthy, deserted stretch of road connecting Goulimine and Tantan in the Moroccan Sahara," which, after having driven it several times, and "always with the feeling that it would never end," inspired Jimmy to pen the Zeppelin classic "Kashmir." "There was no scenery," Cole and Trubo explain, "other than an occasional camel and its rider to break the monotony. Jimmy had written the lyrics to the song, complete with its mystical references, while making that drive alone a few months earlier. The sometimes otherworldly, often dissonant quality to the music merged perfectly with Pagey's words." Zeppelin fanatics can hear it in their heads, and everyone else will be intrigued enough to want to.

Then there was, quickly, all the other bullshit (which is almost equally entertaining). Like the time Bonzo asked (with a straight face) for some help picking up the pool table after he'd thrown everything else in his hotel suite out the window. Or the time he broke a $5000 painting (this was 1970) over a reporter's head (it was a Led Zeppelin press party) when the man asked Bonzo what he thought of it ("You really wanna know what I think of it?"). Or the time when, after the band received its first gold records, Bonzo looked around cautiously and whispered to the rest, "if we melt this down, how much coke do you think we could buy?" It seems, oddly, that poor Keith Moon got the blame for most of the Bonham "incidents," as they are listed in the index?e.g., "gun-pointing incident," "shitting incidents" and (my personal favorite) "shitting-in-shoe incident."

Subcategory: groupies. Cole and Bonham leave a couple handcuffed to the bed in their room while they're at a show: "Can we party now?" is the first remark directed to them upon returning. (The average age of these girls was between 13 and 15 throughout the band's career.) Jimmy pulled a wife-swap with Ron Wood at a party, and Ron and the missus had their marriage "rocked by the mutual attraction between Pagey and Krissie [Wood]." (Sixteen pages later the two guitarists are ensconced in a limo headed for a club in Harlem with Mick Jagger?see "gun-pointing incident"). Robert Plant was possibly more good-looking than he was insecure and horny, but only barely, as witnessed by his treatment of Cole after their tour manager was blown in a bathroom stall before him. (Cole expected Prince Valiant to go second?) Let's see?during that drum solo in The Song Remains the Same, the rest of the band is backstage getting head?from the same Brooklyn teenager. Oh, and their adventures in marine biology don't begin and end with sharks. Can you say Octopussy?

Subcategory: substance abuse. "I know there were just six of you!" a bartender in Frankfurt exclaims when Cole questions the evening's bar tab (120 mixed drinks, 160 beers). There were blackouts, only not of a few hours or a whole night, but of full days together. Robert was hooked on painkillers. Jimmy was cocaine, heroin? Kenneth Anger accused him of being a drug addict! The coroner's report stated that the night John Bonham died he'd consumed 40 shots of vodka.

Finally there was the myth. If they'd auctioned Aleister Crowley's ball sweat Jimmy would've bought it?he already owned everything else, including Crowley's old house. No one really knows how deep this fascination with the black magic man really went, but it spawned much speculation and plenty of far-out theories. Whatever the truth, the facts are that by the end of their roughly 10-year run, during which time they rivaled the Beatles and the Stones for record sales and were soon able to command a million dollars for a single performance (again, this was 1970), each member had lost what he most held dear. John Paul sacrificed a steady gig (his father had been a wedding-type-band piano player and John got his start in a bad tux at his side). Robert lost his son (freak illness wherein the child had become infected and passed away in less than 12 hours). John had forfeited his life (no one lived more fully or more often). And then there was Jimmy Page.

So what of the man behind the curtain? Remember the hermit atop the cliff, the one who held the knowledge Page had sought his whole solitary life? It was Jimmy's own face he saw when he looked into that man's gray, faded eyes. As the film continues, the hermit proceeds to wield some kind of sword or instrument, and the image of him there, and the movements he makes with it, remain with the audience long after they're gone from the screen. When Bonham died, Jimmy said he'd never play the guitar again. In retrospect, that may have been a prudent move. Certainly none of his projects post-Zeppelin are worth mentioning, and it was indeed three years after his friend passed before Page played in front of a crowd. The few times one sees him now?onstage with the Black Crowes, lurking around awkwardly at charity events?he looks?old. Uncommonly old. But, as I mentioned before, Page orchestrated that whole fantasy sequence back in October of 1973, so maybe he knew the real price before he even bid. Or, maybe he's still at the controls, and "all will be revealed." In any case, he had 10 incredibly successful (although never with the critics, and therefore, to Jimmy, incomplete) years as an artist. And after watching footage of the band live, and everything I've read in this book, I believe it meant the world to him.

One thing is absolutely for certain: you can bet that nobody associated with the group patted Richard Cole on the back for writing this, as it truly is "Led Zeppelin uncensored" (or if it's not, I ain't interested in seeing the director's cut). Yet Cole, who was with them from the first note to the last, and often at great risk to all parties' health, has done Led Zeppelin its biggest favor. The legend will now live that much longer, and folks like me will continue to find plenty to love, and even more to learn, there. Thank you.