One of the biggest bands on the planet, Led Zeppelin, was coming to New York and there was a palpable buzz in the air. This was BIG and everyone wanted to see Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Bonham, and John Paul Jones live and in person. As I recall there was some sort of mail in lottery for tickets (yes there was a time when you had to buy a stamp and place your request in a mailbox). Led Zeppelin was playing a multiple night engagement and the we all wanted to go.
Scott lived on the next block over from us on Franklin Avenue. Scott was a year or two older than us, exuded a cool confidence and ran with a different crowd. While I was donning my best Peter Framptonesque shoulder length hair, Scott kept his short black hair impeccably coifed and was prone to wearing the sleeveless white t-shirt sometimes referred to as a “wife beater” or “guinea T”. He lived in an apartment building with his parents and brothers and was known to be a bit of an “entrepreneur”. He was a rocker in the mold of the Stray Cats before they had strut. On the rare occasion we would run into him when we went up to see his younger brother Brett, Scott would be smoking cigarettes, lifting his dumbells, or both. Scott was a man of few words to us younger kids as he seemed to have real things of import going on and he always appeared to have a hot girlfriend in tow. Although he could play no musical instument, his confidence was such that he purchased an amplified microphone for the time he believed he would front a rock band. Scott was the tough guy but there seemed to be more to him and he helped support his middle class family with his business acumen. Scott worked “off the books” in the underground economy that permeated Queens while his older brother wound up working for the NYPD where I am told he was eventually injured in the line of duty. There are many paths in life and forks in the road, even within families, and ours were about to unfold.
I was thrilled to get a ticket to one of the Zep shows but I still remember Scott heading off to multiple shows with an expensive Canon camera in tow. It was incredibly impressive that he managed to obtain tickets to four of the shows as the tickets were impossible to obtain without paying scalper’s prices. Led Zeppelin was rock royalty and the visit was newsworthy making all the local papers and TV newscasts.
My vantage point at Madison Square Garden was midway up to the left of the stage. The band was everything they were supposed to be. There was a feeling if unabashed joy in the building and when the band hit the stage you knew they had the goods. Jimmy Page’s guitar solo with bow and triangulated laser lighting was mind blowing for its time and when Bonzo pounded the drums to start “Rock and Roll” the place went wild. A communal celebration of the power and glory of rock was happening and we were a part of the celebration day. I’ve seen various incarnations of Plant and Page through the years but this was the stuff of legend.
All of the Led Zeppelin albums are great but my favorite has always been the expansive double album classic “Physical Graffiti”. The 70’s were a time of great album packaging and the record companies seemed to spare no expense when it came to the big acts. The apartment building on the cover of Physical Graffiti could have been from my neighborhood; it was a building any one of us could have been living in at the time. There was a cosmic connection and the band was somehow still in touch with it’s fanbase while flying the world in private jets.
Every Led Zeppelin album release was an event so when “In Through the Out Door” was released, we all knew when it was going to land at Jimmy’s Music World on Roosevelt Avenue. The album was in a non-descript brown paper bag cover yet its contents were as anticipated as any before it. Somehow the Franklin Avenue kids got to Jimmy’s Music World first and bought it before the rest of us; they headed home, threw it on a turntable and immediately proclaimed that the album “sucked”. The classic hard rock Led Zep sound had been transformed into something else and it was an affront to many. No one could know then where Plant and Page would take us going forward but the hard rock torch had seemingly been passed that day to David Lee Roth and the Van Halen brothers.
A seemingly short time later while working at Gertz Department Store, I was listening to Scott Muni of WNEW in the stockroom on my FM radio, as I did every afternoon, when I learned that John Bonham had died from an alcohol overdose. Robert Plant proclaimed the band was done as they could not continue without Bonham and the rumored upcoming New Year’s Eve Led Zeppelin show at the Nassau Coliseum was never going to take place. A tragedy to be sure and not the first, or last, in the annals of rock and roll.
Just recently we lost Rick Rosas, the great bass player for Joe Walsh and Neil Young, Ian McGlagen, Jack Bruce, and Joe Cocker. Cocker played the Jones Beach Theater just a couple of summers ago and was in phenomenal voice; it’s hard to believe he was probably ill then. Those that survived the tumultuous 60’s and 70’s are starting to pass from, unbelievably, natural causes. Unfortunately, it is true that time waits for no one.
R.I.P.
and Rock On
GQ
