Publicist Marsa Hightower on touring with Led Zeppelin in 1973
Excerpt from What You Want Is in the Limo, by Michael Walker, 2013
Led Zeppelin at the Forum, Inglewood, 31 May 1973
By the time of the β73 tour, the sex and drugs around Zeppelin have evolved to include a full-time doctor to prescribe anything anyone in the entourage needs to get through the night and day, plus two women in their twenties [probably Vanessa Gilbert and Gyl Corrigan-Devlin] who provide the usual comforts of broad-minded female companionship. βThey had their doctor and they had their two special groupies,β says Marsa Hightower. βAnd that, sort of, kept them out of trouble.β Like Carol Klenfner and other young women who work the 1973 tours, Hightower, a former Blackwell model, contends with, on the one hand, a womenβs movement then in full swing and on the other a rock culture steeped in sexism. βJimmy [Page] and I used to have fights in the hallways,β she says. βHe was very into trying to seduce women or control them. So he didnβt appreciate my lack ofβmy not wanting to be controlled or to sleep with any of them, or sleep with him. And I didn't. I never slept with a client. If you weren't a client, it was okay.β Page, she notices, is βactually really quite shy. He was very inhibited. I donβt know what he did behind hotel room doors, but he would never make the first move on anybody. He would just wait for them to come to him.β [John] Bonham, she says, βwas very standoffish and very much more into drugs and groupies than the other three.β John Paul Jones, fiercely independent when offstage, mostly absents himself from the entourage and its druggy, sexual camaraderie. βHe was rarely around,β says Hightower. βHe wasnβt always on the plane. He just sort of did his own thing, which drove Peter [Grant] crazy. And any time we were on the plane, he would always be reading a book. Iβm sure there were lots of groupies that would have liked to have been around him. He was just by himself.β
The groupies who manage to penetrate Grant and [Richard] Coleβs heavily defended security perimeter tend toward the very young. βThey all were,β says Hightower. βI was always, βWhere are your parents?ββ During the tour Page commences a lengthy relationship with a fourteen-year-old from L.A., Lori Mattix, with the consent of the girlβs mother. βThey were like little kids that you wanted to slap and say, βIf you really think one of these guys is going to marry you and carry you off to England, you're crazy,ββ Hightower says, βbecause that was the fantasy: βThey're going to take me away, and Robert's going to leave his wifeβ¦ββ Among the aspirants, there is no greater dream than to be commemorated in songβone liaison is alleged to be the source material for Plantβs lyrics in βHot Dog.β But their deepest delusion and the secret justification for their supplicant's role is both eye-rollingly grandiose and pathetic in its naivetΓ©. βWe're their muses,β more than one confessed to a tour insider, who emphatically clarified, βNo, you weren't.β
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