I posted part of this on the chat, but here is
Vulture's Bill Wyman (not the Rolling Stones bassist) cold sketch of Peter Grant from Number 71 ("Hats of to (Roy) Harper"),
"All 74 Led Zeppelin Songs, Ranked From Worst to Best":
.....Grant is an interesting case. He is a member of an important trio, along with Dylan manager Albert Grossman and David Geffen — the people who foresaw big, big money in the rock game and took steps to get as much of it as possible for their clients. The bands deserved their money, of course, but by all accounts Grant was a brute not above hiring gangsters, beating up kids he caught taping concerts, and the like. And, of course, his role in the Oakland incident is beyond the pale. (The account in the Bill Graham oral history is sickening.) Towering sweetmeats like Robert Plant aside, the world of hard rock was not known for its handsome participants. Even by metal standards, Grant looked a fright; he was an enormous blob of a man adorned with a thatch of grotesque facial hair that looked like it had been transplanted from the butt of a mangy hyena. And he spoke like one of the unintelligible supporting characters in a Guy Ritchie movie. Still, he loved Page and his band uncritically, and can be said to have remade the music business in his career. Grant died in 1995 of a heart attack, one of those rare people whose death gives the net humanity of the world a solid uptick.
And here is the Oakland incident (plus a pointless slam at John Bonham):
74. "Moby Dick," Led Zeppelin II. Ginger Baker of Cream pioneered the idea of the heavy, heavy drum solo; Zeppelin's unmercifully hard pounder, the semihuman John Bonham, followed suit. You want to call Bonham a psychopath, but that's almost too romanticized a word for his psyche. This is a guy whose sense of humor ran to taking a dump in a groupie's purse when she wasn't looking, such an alcoholic that he was known for drinking himself senseless and then urinating where he sat, notably on planes. Those are the sorts of stories told fondly by his "friends," like the band's longtime road manager, Richard Cole, in his memoir; from others, words like
abominable,
lout, and
fuckhead come up. Anyway, Bonham's hard, hard, hard pounding and his surprisingly swinging attack characterized Zep's sound, and Page and various engineers in the studio found just the right dry but very broad way to record it. This grinding workout was stuck on the second album as a souvenir of the times; onstage, when Bonham would embark on an extended drum workout to give fans, their senses' benumbed, a chance to catch their bearings; and, now and again, for the other three members to get a group blow job backstage from a willing female fan. Docked 30 or so notches for Bonham's role in an infamous on-tour incident at Oakland, California, in 1979. A stagehand for Bill Graham had stopped manager Peter Grant's son from ripping backstage signs down. In retaliation, Grant and a few other thugs in the band's employ trapped the guy in a trailer and beat the holy shit out of him. Years of legal wrangling followed this deliberate and vicious assault. A footnote to the story is that Bonham had gone to the guy first — and kicked him in the balls without warning.
