Stairway To Heaven Read Online Free PDF

and I began using smack, no one aggressively intervened, even when it started having a noticeable impact. Jimmy became so caught up in his drug habit that he sometimes showed up an hour or two late for rehearsals. Bonzo’s behavior, already unpredictable, became more volatile. As for me, I was buying heroin from dealers within a few hundred feet of Peter’s office in London and was becoming less attentive to my day-to-day responsibilities in the Zeppelin organization. I still felt I was in control, but I wasn’t; I’m sure Bonham and Pagey were deteriorating, too.
    By 1980, Peter and I were constantly at each other’s throats. Peter never fired me, but we weren’t getting along at all. He was fed up with my heroin habit and gave me an ultimatum.
    â€œPick where you want to go to clean yourself up, and I’ll pay for it,” Peter said. “But you’re not going to bring down this organization with you.”
    At times, the thought of getting away actually sounded appealing. Particularly while we were on tour, Peter wanted to know where I was and what I was doing at every moment of every day. I felt I was on the spot all the time, and I didn’t like it. “Why are you bugging me?” I would scream at him. My drug use was making me paranoid.
    I even thought of quitting. But at the same time, I was unwilling to give upthe glamorous life-style of limousines, luxurious hotel suites, drugs, and groupies.
    Peter was an intimidating presence, a mammoth man, overweight, with an unkempt beard and a fast-receding hairline. More important, he was a hands-on, loyal manager who knew every twist and turn of the music industry. He deserved nearly as much credit for the band’s international success as the musicians themselves.
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    As for Bonham, I began seeing a very nasty side of him at times—an anger built on frustration—that grew out of his own mixed feelings about Led Zeppelin itself. He loved playing with the world’s number one band, and he glowed when critics called him the top drummer in the business. But with increasing frequency, he resented having to go out on the road or showing up for a particular concert when he just wasn’t in the mood. Like the rest of the band, Bonham no longer needed to play for the money. So when his state of mind just wasn’t in sync with catching a plane to the next gig—when his big heart and his loneliness for his family would make him ache to be back home—he would say to me, “It’s becoming harder to be somewhere where I don’t want to be. I’ll follow through because people are depending on me. But someday soon, I’m going to give it all up. I have to.”
    Bonham’s thirty-minute drum solos—which sometimes left the drumskins torn and his hands bloodied—were a way of getting out all that anger and all that pain.
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    Jimmy Page was just as complex, although his commitment to the band never wavered. Because Zeppelin was his baby, his creation, his enthusiasm remained strong. But his health was a constant worry to those of us around him, thanks to a vegetarian diet that sometimes bordered on malnutrition. He appeared frail and was more prone to colds than the rest of us. Still, his passion never ebbed onstage.
    Jimmy and I were very close during the early days of Zeppelin, although we spent much less time together in the later years. Offstage, we had once shared an excitement for art collecting, but as I began spending more of my money on drugs, I could no longer afford to indulge my own artistic interests, and so Jimmy and I drifted apart. He never seemed particularly impressed with his own wealth, perceiving it as a means of buying him seclusion—and maintaining his cocaine and heroin habits. But more than anything, music and Led Zeppelin were his real loves.
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    Through all the band’s travails, John Paul Jones somehow emerged unscathed. When he dabbled in drugs, it