The Daily Telegraph - Features
Inside Led Zeppelin’s wildest party
From tumbling dwarves to naked wrestling in jelly, the band’s label launch 50 years ago was a bash like no other. By James Hall
“The fact that I can remember it in such detail 50 years later shows you what an impact it made on me,” chuckles Simon Kirke down the phone from his home in New York. The Free and Bad Company drummer may be 74 years old but he has just recalled – with unflinching clarity – details of the most extravagant and debauched party in rock’n’roll history. The date was Halloween, 1974, and the location, under a full moon, was Chislehurst Caves in Kent, a labyrinth of centuries-old manmade tunnels just outside London.
The occasion was the official launch party of Led Zeppelin’s own record label Swan Song, which was formed half a century ago today. Led Zeppelin and their pugnacious manager, the former wrestler Peter Grant, never did things by half. The annals of rock history are stuffed with legendary parties – Keith Moon’s 21st birthday pool party at a Michigan Holiday Inn in 1967, or Queen’s swamp-themed bash in New Orleans for the release of their 1978 album Jazz – but Zeppelin walk away with the prize. Kirke was at the party because supergroup Bad Company were Swan Song’s new star signings.
His band – which comprised him and Paul Rodgers from Free as well as Mick Ralphs and Boz Burrell from Mott the Hoople and King Crimson respectively – were picked up from London on the evening of October 31 in a series of Rolls Royce Phantoms and stretch Mercedes limousines. It was the first time the group had been “introduced to the largesse” of Grant, the drummer recalls.
As he got stuck into the limo’s well-stocked bar, Kirke pondered the black invitation with its gothic script and pseudo-mystical language urging guests to “do what thou wilt” with “this summons”. “Peter had rented the whole of Chislehurst Caves and I thought, ‘Bloody hell, how do you rent out a national monument?’” says Kirke. He was about to find out. “When we got there the first thing I saw was men dressed in medieval yeoman outfits with those tiki torches, and there was a whole avenue of them leading up to the main entrance. They were big bouncers, basically,” says Kirke. Inside, a baroque fantasyland had been recreated, “like a f---ing Fellini movie”.
“The first thing I saw were two ladies dressed in nuns’ garb and they were frolicking in an extrawide coffin, doing various things with each other of a very explicit sexual nature. I know this is The Telegraph so I shall draw a veil around it,” says the musician. “Then there was the troupe of midgets who were tumbling and standing on each other’s shoulders. There were fire-eaters, jugglers, very scantily-clad girls [like the ones] who walk around boxing rings carrying the cards. The whole evening dripped with decadence and sex,” says Kirke. Naked male wrestlers fought in the alcoves while a menu of venison and mulled wine was served by waitresses wearing backless nuns’ habits with suspenders underneath. George Melly’s band the Feetwarmers performed bawdy songs to a 200-strong crowd that
‘The first thing I saw was two ladies in nuns’ garb frolicking in an extra-wide coffin’
included Oliver! writer Lionel Bart.
Melly himself was dressed as Mother Superior. Journalist David Wigg was also there. He tells me that “it’s a bit of a blur” after all these years. “Almost everyone was getting out of it in one form or another,” says Wigg. There was also an abundance of jelly in those lamp-lit caves. BBC Radio 2 DJ Bob Harris was present, and he once described the party as “like a medieval orgy”.
In the past, Harris talked about there being “naked girls wrestling in jelly in open coffins at [Melly’s] feet” and how it was a “strange and disturbing night”. According to Abe Hoch, the executive who ran Swan Song’s London office but wasn’t at the party, Grant had had the label’s logo of Icarus cast in a vast jelly mould. It was into Icarus’s wobbly wings that Nesuhi Ertegun, co-chairman of Swan Song’s distributor Atlantic Records and brother of the label’s president Ahmet, was thrown. “Just boys being boys,” says Hoch.
Nuns and wrestlers aside, there was a serious point to this peak rock excess. The launch of Swan Song was designed to take Zeppelin to the next level of success, adds Danny Goldberg, who ran the label in America (and went on to manage Nirvana). At the time, the band had yet to release Physical Graffiti, to many fans their greatest album. Having their own label on which to release their own music, and that of others, was Zeppelin shooting for the (full) moon. “There were three elements to why they launched Swan Song. One was to support artists they liked. Secondly, it was to leverage their superstardom into another business and income stream.
And thirdly, there was a status attached to artists having their own label,” Goldberg says. “The Beatles had started Apple and the Rolling Stones had Rolling Stones Records. Those are the three reasons, and I think in that order.”
Swan Song effectively sat under the auspices of Grant, who had a ferocious reputation in the industry. His temper, size and fierce loyalty to Zeppelin regularly reduced promoters and booking agents to quivering wrecks. But Hoch and Goldberg liked working for the manager, who died in 1995, and had his own way of dealing with things. At one point, a bored Hoch told Grant he wanted to resign. “I went to his office and he stood up and locked the door. He opened up his briefcase and took out a knife. I thought, ‘Woah, this is not going to be good.’ And he took out a pound of cocaine and he said, ‘Let’s talk.’ This was a Tuesday and I think it was Thursday when I left the office,” says Hoch, who – frazzled – agreed to stay on.
Swan Song, which ceased active operations in 1983, stands as a snapshot of a bygone era. Even the label’s more sedate launch bashes in Los Angeles and New York were lavish affairs. Groucho Marx attended the LA party at Hotel Bel-Air after Hoch met him through Elton John.
“The idea I could bring Groucho Marx to a Led Zeppelin party was very impressive [to the band],” says Hoch. Kirke remembers meeting the actor, then in his 80s. “Groucho was there with two of his ‘nieces’, shall we say. One on each arm. I said, ‘Groucho, thanks for all the years of humour.’ He leaned in and he said, ‘You know I’ve got millions of dollars and I’d give a million of that just to have one last erection,’” says Kirke. Meanwhile, the New York jamboree at the Four Seasons hotel descended into farce after Grant and Zeppelin’s long-time tour manager Richard Cole failed in their quest to hire live swans. “They ordered half a dozen geese. Peter said no one would know the f------ difference,” laughs Kirke. “But they escaped their cages in the lobby of the Four Seasons and started running down Fifth Avenue with Richard Cole chasing them.” Caves, jelly and renegade swan substitutes marauding down New York’s busiest street.
Things really don’t get more rock’n’roll than that.