What You Want Is in the Limo: On the Road with Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, and the Who in 1973, the Year the Sixties Died and the Modern Rock Star Was Born
An epic joyride through three history-making tours in 1973 that defined rock and roll superstardom—the money, the access, the excess—forevermore.
The Who’s Quadrophenia. Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy. Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies. These three unprecedented tours—and the albums that inspired them—were the most ambitious of these artists’ careers, and they forever changed the landscape of rock and roll: the economics, the privileges, and the very essence of the concert experience. On these juggernauts, rock gods—and their entourages—were born, along with unimaginable overindulgence and the legendary flameouts. Tour buses were traded for private jets, arenas replaced theaters, and performances transmogrified into over-the-top, operatic spectacles.
[Michael] Walker revisits each of these three tours in memorable, all-access detail: he goes backstage, onto the jets, and into the limos, where every conceivable wish could be granted. He wedges himself into the sweaty throng of teenage fans (Walker himself was one of them) who suddenly were an economic force to be reckoned with, and he vividly describes how a decade’s worth of decadence was squeezed into twelve heart-pounding, backbreaking, and rule-defying months that redefined, for our modern times, the business of superstardom. Source: Goodreads
I skimmed through this book a few months ago for the Zeppelin content. The cover is egregious. However, there are some substantiating and new-to-me stories in the book. Several sections from it are quoted below.
"The common denominator in the operation that Peter Grant and Richard Cole ran was fear," says Danny Markus, an executive at Atlantic Records who traveled extensively with the band [Led Zeppelin]. "They were thugs, and they ran it like thugs."
Neal Preston, a Los Angeles-based photographer, would shoot the band in 1973 and thereafter tour with them extensively as their court photographer. "They had a very, very, very small inner circle," says Preston. "You look at the Stones—the Stones must have had easily ten times the staff that Led Zeppelin had. They were very careful about who they trusted. Peter was very of the street—he came from that rough, British hooligan background. He was very representative of that era of manager and that style of doing business." Grant told a friend of Preston's that "his nose could tell if someone was good people or not. 'The nose does not lie.' It was not even that he had to size you up or anything, he just had a feeling about you. Peter, for whatever reason, trusted me and decided to welcome me with open arms into the fold." Danny Markus also made the cut, thanks to his capacity to absorb the band's casual abuse while doing their bidding. "I never let them see me sweat," Markus says. "Somehow I got over the wall. There were so many perimeters, you didn't get inside. Nobody did."
Grant would make sure that Markus was never entirely secure in his position. "I'm sort of like in on a pass: I don't play any instruments. I'm not in charge of royalties. I'm just here to help him get through this experience in America. He just had a way about pulling the rug out from under you and making you sort of fearful. He never, ever showed his wrath to me. But he was scary; he was very scary looking. I mean, he was like six five and weighed three hundred pounds and he wore these gigantic Hawaiian shirts and Navajo jewelry, and he loped when he walked."
One of Danny Markus’ first tasks when he joins Zeppelin's ’73 tour is to stock the band’s suites at Chicago’s Ambassador East with stereo equipment. After going to some trouble to assemble audiophile-level gear, Markus stops by the hotel to check up on his charges. “So I'm up in Robert’s room, I think Jimmy was there, and I guess they were sharing some marching powder and I'm looking around, ‘What happened to the stereo? Did it work out?’ And Robert says, ‘Come here.’ And we go down to one of the guest bathrooms in the suite and there it was, in the bathtub, in like a foot of water.” Markus, like all who deal with the band—or those who do the bidding of any band at the Zeppelin level in 1973—takes the moment in stride. “That was his way of saying, the ‘road’ way of saying: ‘Hey, this didn’t work out.’ He didn’t take it out on me personally, he just thought that’s where it deserved to be. And again, I never let them see me sweat. I'm like: Okay. Y’know? Not a problem.”
The thousand-dollar custom stereo disappoints so it is drowned in the bathtub? No problem. The Budweiéer in the dressing room is brewed in Calgary and has to be replaced by a case flown in from Detroit? No problem. I'm tired of fucking you and want to fuck your friend instead so get out of my suite even though it’s three A.M. and you're wasted on Quaaludes? No problem. This is the mindscape—financial, philosophical, logistical, sexual—that defines rock stardom on the road in North America in the spring and summer and fall of 1973. It is light-years away, in every respect, from the attitudes and realities that shaped Led Zeppelin, the Who, and Alice Cooper when they first plugged in the electric guitars, tested the drum kit, and raised their voices as young unknowns. It’s at once the end of one era and the beginning of another, not that anyone can apprehend that at the time. That will come later, with hindsight, perhaps wisdom.
British bands in particular on their first visits to America set a formidable standard for depravity—the shark incident, in which Zeppelin’s Richard Cole supposedly plumbs the vagina of a groupie with a mud shark caught from the balcony of a Seattle hotel on the band’s first U.S. tour, is merely the most traveled. “A lot of things went on in the hotels with all the British bands that I can’t reveal, even now, because they were so outrageous,” Bill Harry, Zeppelin’s first publicist, told Chris Welch thirty years after the fact.
