in Boston Garden so they wouldn’t freeze to death before the box office opened the next morning. A cheer went up as the kids, most of them wearing blue denim, were let into the building.
Soon they were passing joints and swigging from bottles of cheap Ripple and Boone’s Farm apple wine. When that ran out, some kids broke into the beer concessions during a shift change of the security guards. Someone opened an exit door and let in a few hundred more kids who had arrived to line up for tickets. The kids turned on the fire hoses and flooded the arena’s hockey rink. The police arrived as Led Zeppelin’s fans were looting merchandise stands and lighting bonfires composed of the Garden’s old wooden seats. Drunken kids then turned the high-pressure fire hoses on the cops and their dogs. It took the riot squad three hours to chase the kids out of the building. The Zeppelin fans then fought the police in the streets until they were dispersed sometime after midnight.
The box office failed to open on Tuesday morning. Damage was estimated at $50,000. A Boston Bruins hockey game was canceled because the rink was fucked up. Then the mayor of Boston, after visiting the sacked and still-smoking arena, declared the city would refuse to grant the local promoter a permit to hold the February 4 concert. Led Zeppelin would be forced to bypass Boston on their 1975 American tour.
When things get out of control, everyone loses money. So promoters in other cities took note. An official from the Ticket-ron agency, the nation’s biggest ticket-seller, contacted Jerry Weintraub, the concert promoter Zeppelin shared with Elvis Presley, and asked him to postpone announcement of ticket sales, but Weintraub refused to go along. In New York, Madison Square Garden managed to avoid a riot by not announcing when Zeppelin tickets would go on sale.
“If we had,” a spokesman told The New York Times, “the youngsters would have stayed there all week.” But demand for Zeppelin’s three February shows in New York was so intense that lines began to form in substantial numbers anyway as word leaked out that the box office would open at one A.M. on Sunday morning. Sixty thousand seats for the three shows sold out in three hours. It was reported that 45,000 were sold through the box office and 15,000 sold through Ticketron.
It was different out on Long Island, one of the most passionate of Zeppelin’s suburban strongholds. Kids began to line up at the Nassau Coliseum, in Uniondale, three days before the box office opened. To prevent disorder, numbers were assigned to 2,000 people, who were then locked in the hockey arena’s exhibition hall and allowed to remain overnight, under guard. In the morning, only the first 900 buyers were able to buy all 20,000 tickets, leading to complaints about scalping and corruption in the ticket industry. When the cops told disappointed fans to go home, there was some shoving and cursing though no arrests.
But two miles away, six fans were arrested when an estimated 2,000 fans jammed into a Macy’s department store at the Roosevelt Field mall in Garden City. The line was orderly until twenty-five Nassau County policemen attempted to “reorganize” the waiting line. Some kids at the front of the line were evicted by the cops, and their places immediately filled by others, who seemed to be friendly with the police. Bryan Brett, nineteen, of Glen Cove, told the Times: “The cops pushed some of us out of the line, and other kids stepped in front, and they got the tickets while we got nothing after waiting for hours.”
Some of the kids told the cops they were crooks and assholes. There was shoving and threats. Six Zeppelin fans were arrested on charges of disorderly conduct and harassment. The Times reported that “the extent of any ticket scalping for the rock shows could not be determined yesterday. The Department of Consumer Affairs said it had not received any complaints.”
Led Zeppelin’s entire 1975 North American tour sold out within a few hours after its tickets went on sale. According to Jerry Weintraub, even Evis Presley was impressed.
“Well, I may not be … Led Zeppelin” the king of rock & roll would drawl. “But I can still pack ‘em in.”
Sure, Elvis. Anything you say. Viva Las Vegas.
I clipped the press accounts of the Led Zeppelin riots from the Boston and New York newspapers because I was currently on a magazine assignment to cover the tour.
This had started the previous month when I received a message that my friend Danny Goldberg had called from New York. Danny was the twenty-four-year-old vice president of Swan Song Records, Led Zeppelin’s new record label. I was surprised to hear from him because I’d heard Danny was extremely busy. Swan Song was not only releasing Zeppelin’s own albums but was also putting out records by artists that the members of Zeppelin liked. Already signed to Swan Song were Bad Company, a new band made up of young veterans of the English rock scene; Maggie Bell, a bluesy rock belter who was often described as the British Janis Joplin; and the reconstituted Pretty Things, a legendary London band that had started at the same time as the Rolling Stones, playing the same Bo Diddley songs at the same venues as the Stones. Danny’s job was to coordinate Swan Song’s relations with the press and the media, as well as handle innumerable details concerning Led Zeppelin’s upcoming American tour.
I returned Danny’s call and left a message with his assistant. I had met him three years earlier, in 1972, when I was an editor at Rolling Stone magazine. A mutual friend had told me about Danny wanting to break into the music business in New York and asked if I could assign him a few record reviews so he could build a clip file and tell prospective employers that he wrote for Rolling Stone, which at the time was an instant entrée into the booming music industry of the 1970s. I met with Danny at our friend’s flat on West 79th Street, and he struck me as a sincere and very spiritual person who knew a hell of a lot about rock & roll and music in general. He was also totally hilarious, had survived a youthful era of contraband and firearms, and had come out of it something of a Hindu/Buddhist angel. I assigned Danny a review of the new comeback album by Lloyd Price, a star of fifties rock & roll, and Danny nailed it. A few clever Rolling Stone reviews later, he landed a job with Lee Solters, the doyen of Hollywood press agents, whose main client was, famously, Frank Sinatra.
One day in 1972, Danny flew to Paris with Solters to meet a new client—Led Zeppelin. The band had a serious problem with the rock press, who generally hated them for arrogance, pomposity, “heavy-osity,” and especially for their incredible success with young kids. Zeppelin also had a problem with the mass media in general, which totally ignored the band despite repeated attempts to alert the world that Led Zeppelin was outselling the biggest bands of the day—the Stones, The Who, Jethro Tull, and Yes.
Danny explained to Solters that Led Zeppelin had a negative reputation in the rock world. There were widespread rumors in the music industry and its demimonde that guitarist Jimmy Page, whose interest in black magic had been publicized in England, had made a deal with the devil to ensure the band’s success. There were stories about some of the band’s brutality toward the young women, so-called groupies, who were drawn to them, especially in Los Angeles. Rock writers, notably in England, claimed that members of the band insulted and abused them. A reporter for Life magazine claimed she’d been stripped of her clothes, and feared she was going to be raped, in the band’s dressing room in 1969. Rolling Stone’s critics complained that Led Zeppelin recycled old blues songs into bombastic anthems that sold millions without giving credit (and paying royalties) to the still-living bluesmen who wrote the original songs.
In short, Danny explained, Led Zeppelin had the worst reputation of any band in the world. All Danny’s friends in the influential New York music media thought Led Zeppelin were wild barbarians, and they were literally afraid of the band.
So, Solters asked, what’s our pitch?
Danny
