Introduction

      John Bindon, Led Zeppelin’s security guard, had stagehand Jim Matzorkis pinned to the floor of a backstage trailer at Oakland Coliseum. Bindon, a sometime actor and London gangland heavy who had reputedly once bitten off a man’s testicles and would stab another man to death the following year, was viciously pummelling Matzorkis with his fists and feet. But it was only when Bindon started trying to gouge out the stagehand’s eyes that Matzorkis fully appreciated the danger he was in.

      For much of this day of Saturday 23 July 1977 the possibility of such a grim outcome had been building. Many of Zeppelin and their crew seemed in a state of permanent rage, as if they had surrendered control to the large quantities of drugs consumed during the course of a 51-date tour that had begun on 1 April.

      Later, Jimmy Page would be obliged to deny to me that what happened that day was karmic recompense for his flirtations with the occult. ‘I don’t think we were doing anything … evil,’ he said, two years later.

      It was especially ironic that what happened at Oakland Coliseum that day, which would utterly transform the fortunes and career trajectory of Led Zeppelin, should be on the turf of Bill Graham, whose Fillmore West had been a temple of popularity for the Yardbirds, Page’s previous group, and, along with Graham’s New York showcase the Fillmore East, the scene of early break-out triumphs for Led Zeppelin. Although the confluence of the interests of Bill Graham and Peter Grant, Led Zeppelin’s manager, had proved mutually advantageous in the past, it was always a disaster waiting to happen. Graham was the most powerful music promoter in the United States; Grant had reinvented the relationship between managers and promoters in the United States, often through heavy-handed behaviour. And as much as Grant terrified people, Graham also possessed a fierce temper.

      The previous evening, Graham, who was promoting Day on the Green, as this event was billed, for an audience of 65,000, had been summoned to Led Zeppelin’s hotel, the San Francisco Hilton, to honour a sudden demand for a $25,000 cash advance against their fee for the shows. Entering their suite, Graham noticed a cowboy-hat-wearing local dealer of hard drugs; in a flash he realised what the money was needed for.

      Arriving only 20 minutes before the start of the gig, Page was so evidently befuddled from his drug consumption, by that stage largely heroin, that Graham could only watch as the Led Zeppelin leader set off for the stage in entirely the wrong direction; he was rescued by an aide who stopped him and despatched him on the correct course. Midway through the set Bindon crawled out onto the stage on his hands and knees and licked Page’s boots.

      As the wheezing, out-of-shape man-mountain that was Peter Grant lumbered up to the stage, Jim Downey, a member of the stage crew, commiserated with him about the excessively steep climb. For this presumption Bindon, who was accompanying Grant, punched Downey with such force that he slammed him into a concrete pillar and knocked him out.

      ‘What happened? The fuck did I do?’ wondered the victim as he came to. Downey was clearly unaware of an extraordinary management edict – egregiously pathetic in its arrogance – on what would become the final Led Zeppelin American tour: no one was permitted to speak to any member of the act, or to Grant, unless they were first spoken to. (Flying on the group’s plane, journalist Steven Rosen had been made fully aware of this. He was startled when the normally benign bass player, John Paul Jones, had verbally assaulted him, demanding all of his interview tapes – a response to an apparently unfavourable comparison of Zeppelin to the Jeff Beck Group that Rosen had made years previously. This incident was indicative of the prevailing mood on the tour.)

      ‘What I didn’t like about Led Zeppelin was that they came with force,’ Graham wrote later. ‘I had heard stories from other cities about how they had muscled promoters to get better deals. How they had shaken them down for money … I had heard about the ugliness of their security.’

      But far worse was to come. Midway through Led Zeppelin’s show, during Page’s acoustic set, Matzorkis noticed a young boy removing wooden plaques from the doors of the dressing-room trailers: plaques that had the names of the artists on them, and which would be required for the repeat show the following day. Also on the bill, as support acts, were Judas Priest and Rick Derringer. Matzorkis told the kid to put them back. The kid was insistent that he would be taking them. So Matzorkis took them from him – allegedly cuffing him round the back of the head, although Matzorkis has always denied this – and wandered over to the storage trailer to lock them away. Unbeknown to Matzorkis, the boy was Warren Grant, the 11-year-old son of Peter Grant.

      A few minutes later Matzorkis was still in the storage trailer when John Bonham, Led Zeppelin’s drummer – surplus to requirements during Page’s acoustic set – called to him from the bottom of the short flight of steps outside it. Peter Grant was with him.

      ‘You don’t talk to my kid that way,’ Grant said, as Matzorkis stood in the trailer’s doorway. The burly Bonham, an effigy of muscle and blubbery booze-fat, simply stood there, as though he was Grant’s security wingman. Then Grant escalated matters, like the barrack-room lawyer and bully he could be: