CLEVELAND, Ohio – Sex, drugs and rock & roll don’t begin to describe Led Zeppelin’s 1977 North American tour.
There was a tremendous amount of violence. Hundreds of people were arrested, including band and crew members. Hotel bills went well above the $10,000 mark. Copious amounts of heroin and prescription drugs were used. Sex with “women” whose ages would make your jaw hit the floor.
The stories from that time are the stuff of legend with details that might make you wish you were there if you weren’t terrified of the consequences.
In April 1977, Led Zeppelin arrived in Northeast Ohio for a two-night stand at Richfield Coliseum, a place that had become an epicenter for live music. That first night would produce a soundboard recording that would become known as “Destroyer,” one of the most coveted live bootlegs in rock history.
It remains an iconic artifact both for its sound quality and as a snapshot of a massive rock and roll band approaching its demise.
“From a historical standpoint, that was Led Zeppelin peak experience, peak live powers,” says Cleveland music historian and author Peter Chakerian. “The wheels really came off the band not long after that. I don’t think there were even that many shows on that tour after Richfield. And then that next tour just didn’t happen because John Bonham died.”
[You can listen to audio version of this story via our CLE Rocks pocast]
Dazed and Confused
Medina resident and vinyl collector Craig Bland remembers vividly the first time he heard Led Zeppelin.
“In 1969, I was 11. I was with my cousin and we went to a guy’s house for a small party,” recalls Bland. “I remember the guy saying, ‘Hey have you heard this album? You gotta listen to this.’ And he put on ‘Led Zeppelin I’ and ‘Dazed and Confused’ came on. I remember thinking, ‘My God, we’re having some kind of satanic séance here.’”
Jimmy Page formed Led Zeppelin in 1968. Page was best known for his time with influential blues band The Yardbirds and playing dual lead guitar with Jeff Beck.
Page would recruit three musicians to help round out his new band: A session player named John Paul Jones on bass, former Band of Joy member John Bonham on drums and Bonham’s bandmate, a singer by the name of Robert Plant.
The band’s self-titled debut album arrived in January 1969. But not everyone was a fan. In his infamous review of “Led Zeppelin I,” Rolling Stone’s John Mendelsohn referred to Led Zeppelin as a twin of the Jeff Beck Group.
“If they’re to help fill the void created by the demise of Cream, Led Zeppelin will have to find a producer and editor and some material worthy of their collective attention,” Mendelsohn wrote.
But Led Zeppelin’s live shows quickly cemented the band’s status as something special. John Gorman, future operations director for Cleveland’s WMMS, was finishing up college in Boston when he first encountered Led Zeppelin in 1969.
“They played a place called the Boston Tea Party, which held about 300 people,” Gorman recalls. “The tickets read the ‘New Yardbirds.’ The show was booked before they settled on the name Led Zeppelin. It was the first time I saw them and they blew me away.”
Led Zeppelin’s sophomore album, released in October 1969, would outdo its predecessor. “Led Zeppelin II” debuted at No. 1 on the charts in the United States, smacking The Beatles’ “Abbey Road” out of the top spot.
With The Beatles breaking up and The Rolling Stones just hitting their creative stride, Led Zeppelin entered the 1970s as the biggest band in the world. And they were only getting bigger.
A new place to play
As Led Zeppelin’s career was taking off, Cleveland was also reaching its peak as a music city. WMMS had become one of the most important radio stations in the country. Music venues like The Agora, Music Hall and Allen Theatre were hosting rock’s greatest up-and-coming acts, such as Bruce Springsteen, Black Sabbath, Patti Smith and David Bowie, who played his first U.S. show in Cleveland on Sept. 22, 1972.
Still, the area lacked a music venue the magnitude of other cities. Nick Mileti, the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, had a vision for a venue that could become ground zero for major live events in Ohio. His idea would become Richfield Coliseum, which opened in 1974.
Nick Mileti proudly describes the finer point of the $25,000 mockup of his Midwest Coliseum. (Dudley Brumbach / The Plain Dealer)Cleveland Plain Dealer
“It was the epic center of everything and I think that’s what Nick Mileti wanted when he opened the building,” says Chakerian. “A lot of people will complain about the building as not being a sonic delight. It was sort of a log jam. The sight lines weren’t great. But it was a bit of a right place, right time kind of thing that speaks to that time period.
“Rock and roll was exploding. It was shifting from being counterculture in the 1960s to being this gigantic pop-culture phenomenon in the 1970s and 1980s.”
Richfield Coliseum’s impact on the local concert scene was tremendous. Blossom Music Center had yet to become a frequent stop for major rock and roll acts. Public Auditorium, the biggest music venue in downtown Cleveland at the time, couldn’t fit more than 10,000 people.
The 19,000-seat Coliseum would play host to a who’s who of iconic rock acts, from Elvis Presley and the Eagles to KISS and The Who. The venue solidified Cleveland as one of the great rock and roll cities in North America.
Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page in all his glory during the band's April 27, 1977 show at Richfield Coliseum.
White Summer
Several high profile rock and roll tours took place in 1977. But none were more anticipated than Led Zeppelin’s North American run.
The band’s manager Peter Grant intended for the trek to reassert Led Zeppelin’s status as rock’s greatest band. The tour would become Zeppelin’s biggest ever with tickets selling out in record time.
“Me and three buddies of mine went to see them in Cincinnati a week before ‘Destroyer,’” Bland recalls. “We were probably in the first 10 people to try to get in the doors. One of the doors started to open up and some dude was trapped between the door and the handrail.
“Everybody behind us starts pushing. I was lifted off the ground, being pushed so hard, I couldn’t draw a breath. But finally, we got in and, to this day, it’s the greatest show I’ve ever seen.”
The shows proved fantastic. Yet, behind the scenes, there was turmoil. Fan arrests at concerts became a regular occurrence. Heroin had become such a part of the band’s life that doctors would accompany Led Zeppelin on tour to administer prescriptions when needed.
During a show in Oakland, Grant’s son tried to remove a “Led Zeppelin” sign from a dressing room. He was confronted by a security guard. That led to Grant, Bonham, tour manager Richard Cole and John Bindon, a London gangster hired to help with the band’s security, being arrested for assaulting the security guard, who had to be rushed to the hospital.
The band member’s promiscuity had also reached new heights. In a Vanity Fair article, reporter Lisa Robinson, who followed Led Zeppelin on tour, recalls Robert Plant telling her, “I’ve met members of the opposite sex who were only eight or nine when we first went into a studio...and they’re great f**ks.”
Cleveland photographer Janet Macoska shot Led Zeppelin’s first concert at Richfield in 1977. She witnessed Plant’s antics toward women first hand.
“Robert had some cohorts on stage. He had one on the left and one on the right behind the speakers,” Macoska remembers. “He would look into the audience and pick out the girls, women he wanted to come backstage afterward.
“He’d stand there and point, and one of the guys would run out and give the little girl or woman a pass for backstage. So for three hours, he was working it.”
Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant makes a gesture with an inflatable blimp passed up to the stage at Richfield Coliseum.
Such a lifestyle would inevitably lead Led Zeppelin to Swingos, the hotel that would serve as the party palace for rock stars coming through Cleveland during the 1970s. Led Zeppelin arrived at the hotel the day before its April 27, 1977 gig at Richfield Coliseum. The band would leave with a bill totaling well over $10,000.
“[Owner] Jim Swingos knew how to accommodate the bands. He knew how to accommodate everybody from Frank Sinatra to Elvis Presley to Led Zeppelin,” says Gorman. “He also had a restaurant that had magnificent food. It just became a rock and roll hangout. When Led Zeppelin played, I know they destroyed at least one room. I’m sure there was more.”
The creation of Destroyer
Led Zeppelin’s partying ways didn’t prevent the band from putting on a show the following night at Richfield. Macoska remembers taking her place at the front of the stage, stationed just below Plant and Page to photograph the entire three-hour gig.
Macoska’s photos of Plant are particularly striking. Just two years removed from a car accident, the iconic frontman stood tall with his shirt open, showcasing a stage presence unmatched in rock history save for the likes of Roger Daltrey or Freddie Mercury.
“He was a majestic lion. Robert had it all,” says Macoska. “He was very charismatic. He was a big stud guy. He would just stand there and allow the women to admire him. He had the stance, the look and the sound. He was a joy to photograph.”
Macoska’s photos of Page are equally impressive. The guitarist wore a white version of his trademark dragon suit as he bounced around the stage. Page even chose one of Macoska’s photos of him wearing sunglasses for the back cover of his autobiography.
Jimmy Page
Whether April 27, 1977, was Led Zeppelin’s greatest show from a performance standpoint is something diehard fans have debated for decades. But everyone agrees it is one of Led Zeppelin’s most iconic concerts thanks to “Destroyer.”
The bootleg is a soundboard recording of that first night, striking in its sound quality and the most sought after concert recording in the band’s history.
How it came to fruition is still somewhat of a mystery. Rumor has it Bonham used to record his concerts so he could listen to them later and make adjustments. Following the Cleveland show, he supposedly got into a fight with Page, who hated bootlegs, causing Bonham to hand the recording over to someone just to spite the guitarist.
A four-LP edition of “Destroyer” thanks Bonham for the recording in its liner notes. Though, the drummer’s involvement was never confirmed.
Regardless of how it happened, “Destroyer” is an astonishing listen. Bonham’s drum solos hit even harder. Page’s guitar work is piercing with passion. Plant’s voice magically echoes off its own sound delay. Even the mistakes – Page’s fingers getting stuck in his guitar strings on ‘Sick Again’ or him coming in too early on “Kashmir” – are fun to hear.
The entire thing peaks with “Achilles Last Stand.” Some would argue that Page’s magnum guitar opus has never sounded better in a live setting.
The second night of Led Zeppelin’s Richfield Coliseum run would also feature a fan recording that would circulate among collectors under the title “The Destroyer.” Some say the band put on a better show the second time around. However, the sound quality of night one, which was released in 1980, remains unmatched.
John Bonham
Led Zeppelin and Richfield’s last stand
The Richfield show would be Led Zeppelin’s final performance in Northeast Ohio in the band’s original form. Two weeks after the show in Oakland, Plant received a phone call while on the road. His 5-year-old son had been rushed to the hospital with a respiratory infection and died. Plant returned to England and the 1977 tour came to an abrupt end.
It would be two years before Led Zeppelin would perform live again. But the band never toured in full. Bonham would die on September 25, 1980. Zeppelin would officially call it quits two weeks later. A planned 1980 tour to follow the release of “In Through the Out Door” was scheduled to hit Richfield Coliseum in 1980, but never happened.
The biggest rock band in the world was gone. But Richfield Coliseum would remain a premier music venue well into the 1980s and 1990s, hosting legendary concerts by Bruce Springsteen, Prince, Michael Jackson, Madonna U2 and numerous others.
“Springsteen in particular often would come through Cleveland before he would hit big places like New York because he could try out things on audiences here and the audiences would eat it up without judgment,” says Chakerian. “I think for a lot of acts that came through Cleveland, they felt like they let their hair down here, too. That’s something that I think is part of that bygone era. It isn’t like that now.”
Bruce Springsteen plays to the crowd in the front row at the Richfield Coliseum. (The Plain Dealer/Roadell Hickman)
Richfield Coliseum would close its doors in 1994 after the Cleveland Cavaliers moved to a new sports complex in downtown Cleveland. The final concert at the Coliseum was headlined by Roger Daltrey, which brought an end to perhaps the greatest era of live music Northeast Ohio has ever seen.
“That was one special time,” Gorman says. “I think it had everything to do with the Baby Boomer generation. There were just more people being born during that period of time and, as a result, you had a lot more musicians and a lot more people listening to music. That’s why rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and all these genres of music started to gel together and appeal to such a wide audience.”
Richfield Coliseum would remain vacant until 1999 when it was torn down. The site that once housed the venue is now a woodland area. But the remains of a parking lot and section of Route 303 are enough to bring back vivid memories.
“It’s kind of like when you have a picture hanging up on the wall and you haven’t painted for a long time,” Chakerian says. “When you take the picture off the wall, you can see that outline of where it was.
“It feels like that for me with the Coliseum. I can drive past there and you can almost kind of see in your mind’s eye where it was. Your brain makes that space, the ether and the ozone around it fill in where it was.”
Richfield Coliseum in 1999, just before it was turned over to the National Parks.
The story of Led Zeppelin’s “Destroyer” is part of our CLE Rocks podcast. You can listen to an audio recording of this story, featuring interviews from those who were there and music from the Led Zeppelin concert on Acast.
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