Richard Cole, Led Zeppelin’s road manager who played a full part in their lurid offstage antics – obituary

Richard Cole, who has died aged 75, was Led Zeppelin’s road manager from 1968 to 1980, and according to Stephen Davis’s unofficial band biography Hammer of the Gods (for which he was the primary source), “responsible for much of the mayhem” around the group.

Cole joined the British foursome – singer Robert Plant, bassist John Paul Jones, drummer John “Bonzo” Bonham and guitarist Jimmy Page – at the outset, organised their first North American tour in 1968-69 and remained with them as they became a $500,000-plus per night stadium act on a par with, or even bigger than, the Rolling Stones.

Led Zeppelin’s concerts, delivered via 70,000 watts of amplification, were mind blowing, not to mention ear-drum-busting, experiences, yet their best music was characterised by melodic discipline and intricate arrangements. They released 10 albums, most of them multimillion sellers, while their Stairway to Heaven continues to top radio lists of the greatest rock songs ever.

Backstage was another story, however.

Led Zeppelin did not invent sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Yet they raised the first two to a level of excess which, as one commentator put it, “made the likes of Mick Jagger look like Cliff Richard”, their antics satirised in the film This is Spinal Tap (1984).

While other acts hired private jets to transport themselves about on tour, Led Zeppelin got Cole to acquire a customised Boeing 720B called the Starship which they had adapted to include a bedroom with queen-size waterbed, fake fur bedspread and shower, so that they could entertain female admirers.

Not only did Cole’s job description include arranging flights and security, it included “escorting girls to the rooms of the band and keeping Zeppelin nourished with drugs,” according to his not-for-the-fainthearted 1992 memoir, Stairway to Heaven: Led Zeppelin Uncensored.

He depicted a typical Led Zeppelin tour as a tale of trashed hotel rooms, heroic quantities of booze and drugs, stray acts of violence and large quantities of sex with always-willing (and often underage) groupies.

“Chairs crashed against the walls. Couches soared out of shattered windows. A television set followed close behind, exploding on an air conditioning unit more than a dozen storeys below,” he wrote of one hotel riot.

In 1969 he and the band’s drummer,“Bonzo” Bonham, were at the centre of an infamous, if much disputed, incident at the Edgewater Inn in Seattle which in 2000 was voted No 1 in “100 Sleaziest Moments in Rock” magazine survey.

It followed a fishing expedition in which they caught mud sharks and hung them in their hotel wardrobes. “Everyone was smoking joints and hash. A blonde groupie was stripped naked,” the tour photographer, Robert Zagaris, recalled. Then, according to one version someone emptied a bag of fish entrails over the girl, who was writhing about with Cole and Bonham, after which Bonham reportedly grabbed a shark and performed a “sex act” on her.

Cole’s own memory of the incident was different, if no less revealing of attitudes at the time: “It wasn’t a shark,” he told Lisa Robinson of Vanity Fair, “it was a red snapper. And ... the girl … was a willing participant.”

Other stories were even more disturbing. Many of their security guards on tours of the US, Cole recalled, were off-duty policemen, and he described one incident when, after he and Page brought a pair of girls to their hotel rooms, the father of one called and threatened: “My daughter’s in the hotel with one of your musicians. I’m going to call the cops!”

“Don’t bother,” the security guard allegedly told him. “You’re talking to an LA police officer. There’s no one fitting your daughter’s description up here. Try another hotel.”

Led Zeppelin, Cole concluded “was like a teenager riding a motorcycle without a helmet. We thought we were infallible, that nothing or nobody could topple us from the throne.”

Band members, however, contested many elements of Cole’s account. “These stories would filter out from girls who’d supposedly been in my room when in fact they’d been in his,” Robert Plant said in an interview in 1985; “... he got paid a lot of money for talking crap.”

Cole was eventually dismissed just months before the classic rock-and-roll death in September 1980 of Zeppelin’s drummer John Bonham, aged 32, after drinking “40 vodkas”, falling unconscious and choking on his own vomit, after which the band dispersed.

Like Bonham, Cole ingested terrifying amounts of heroin, cocaine, and alcohol. During the 1970s, he explained “drugs were seen as something innocent. They were very easy to obtain. Fans used to give them to us. I don’t think we even thought about it.”

At the time of Bonham’s death he was sitting in prison in Italy, where he had been sent to detox, having been mistaken for a terrorist involved in the 1980 Bologna railway station bombing.

Richard Cole was born on January 2 1946 in Kensal Rise, north London. His father was an architect. He left school aged 15, and worked as a scaffolder and sheet-metal working apprentice, before being drawn into the music business after meeting a Record Mirror journalist at the Marquee Club in 1965.

He became a tour manager, working for, among others the Yardbirds and The Who whose bass player John Entwistle and drummer Keith Moon, he once drove to Scotland: “We were passing through this little town when Moon said to me, ‘Stop the car.’ Entwistle knew exactly what was going on, but he wasn’t about to divulge anything. Moon had gone to fetch weedkiller and sugar so they could make a bomb. Moon let the f------ thing off in the Caledonian Hotel in Edinburgh and we all got thrown out.”

There were more brushes with the law during his time with Led Zeppelin. In 1973 he was briefly the prime suspect when US$203,000 disappeared from a hotel safe deposit box, to which he had been entrusted with the only key. However he claimed to have passed a lie detector test with flying colours. The money was never recovered, and no one was ever charged.

In 1977, with Bonham and two others, he was arrested on a charge of battery after an attack on three stage hands at a concert in Oakland. All four received suspended sentences.

In his memoir Cole recalled that he was under orders to “come down on people who seemed to run counter to our own best interests.” He recalled an incident in 1970 when he and crew members grabbed one suspected bootlegger, threw him to the floor and smashed his recorder. The man turned out to be a government employee measuring the band’s decibel level to make sure it was within legal limits.

The attitude to young women conveyed in Cole’s memoir would sink any would-be rock group today, but in 1992 Cole dismissed charges of sexual exploitation as “a bum rap . . . they made themselves available to us. We never forced them into doing anything they didn’t want to.”

It took Cole until the mid 1980s to turn his life around. He recalled waking up on his 40th birthday with only a bus pass and a Cartier watch, so broke that he sold 10 of Led Zeppelin’s gold records, for US$2,500.

After sobering up he worked as a tour manager for other performers and acted as a “sober companion” ( with varying degrees of success) for celebrities including Robert Downey Jr and Ozzy Osbourne.

“It doesn’t hurt to have someone older with authority along. Someone who knows right from wrong,” he told an interviewer in 2001.

In 2007, despite his disagreements with band members, he was invited to the VIP section of the Led Zeppelin reunion.

Richard Cole married at least twice and is survived by a daughter.

Richard Cole, born January 2 1946, died December 2 2021