The silence that fell over the rock world on the afternoon of September 25, 1980, was not the silence of a pause, but the silence of an ending. John Bonham, the human earthquake who had powered Led Zeppelin for 12 years, was dead at 32, found in a bedroom at guitarist Jimmy Page’s riverside home in Windsor, having choked on his own vomit after a catastrophic day of drinking. The coroner’s verdict would be accidental death, but for millions of fans, the cause was simpler and more devastating, the silencing of the loudest heartbeat in rock music.
The news did not break immediately. For more than two months, a vacuum of grief and uncertainty surrounded the band. The three surviving members, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, and John Paul Jones, retreated into a private purgatory, unable to speak, unable to conceive of a future without the man from Redditch.
When they finally emerged on December 4, 1980, it was with a press release of only a few lines, a terse, devastating announcement that confirmed what the world had dreaded, there could be no replacement for John Bonham. Led Zeppelin, the most colossal touring machine of the 1970s, was over, not because of a business decision, but because an affair of the heart had been severed.
The man whose passing triggered this seismic collapse was born John Henry Bonham on May 31, 1948, in Redditch, Worcestershire, a market town stitched into the industrial fabric of the English Midlands. His father, Jack, ran a small carpentry business; his mother, Joan, kept house and raised three children in the austere, coal-fired England of the post-war years. It was an unglamorous, reliable middle of working England, where boys were expected to learn a trade and be home for tea.
John Bonham was not built for that bargain. He was built for noise, banging on pots, biscuit tins, and a bath salts container with a loose coil of wire strung across it to approximate a snare drum from almost the moment he could sit up. By five, he had a proper snare drum; by ten, a full, battered kit, and he was already listening, hungrily, to the American jazz drummers his parents’ generation played on the wireless.
Gene Krupa was his first god, Buddy Rich the next, Max Roach after. These were not the usual influences for a child in the English Midlands, but they would remain all his life the ghosts in his machine, giving even his most brutal playing a shape, a phrasing, a pure grandstanding theater that owed everything to the big band era
He was, by every honest account, a terrible pupil, restless, loud, allergic to instruction. He left school at 15 with little academic standing, but a headmaster’s report, repeated in biographies for decades, supposedly predicted he would end up either a dustman or a millionaire. There was no middle setting on the young Bonham.
He was going to be one thing or the other, and what he would not be was quiet. He had played in a school pantomime, and it had, in his phrase, just sort of materialized from there. He was not, as he put it in a 1972 interview, a person who had ever been really set on something.
The drumming was simply what he was doing because the drumming was what he could do. For an English adolescent in 1962, with the first shockwaves of Merseybeat rolling down the motorway from the north and American records drifting in through the crackle of Radio Luxembourg, it was enough of an answer
In his teens, he went into the building trade, laying bricks and carrying hods for his father’s business, but the music gradually took over. “I used to play, but I used to have a job as well,” he said. “The job gradually gets less and the music more.
” For a while at 16, he tried going full-time as a drummer, then the gigs dried up, and he was forced back to the day work. This was the rhythm of the provincial musician in early 60s Britain, day work to survive, night work to stay sane, and the constant hope that the balance might one day tip permanently toward the stage. He played everywhere, youth clubs, pub backrooms, wedding receptions, joining local Birmingham andRedditch outfits with names like Terry Webb and the Spiders, A Way of Life, The Senators, and The Crawling King Snakes.
It was in The Crawling King Snakes that he first met a tall, curly-haired singer from the Black Country with a voice that seemed to belong to someone twice his age, Robert Plant. The two played together in Band of Joy, and Plant took note of something that everyone who ever shared a stage with Bonham eventually took note of, the man simply hit harder than anyone else. There was no argument with the volume he produced.
He was standing in it, whether you wanted to or not
He was barely 19 when he married Pat Phillips, with sources giving the wedding date as either 1965 or 1966, but all converging on a central fact, he was a teenager, she was barely much older, and the marriage would, surprisingly, hold for the rest of his life. Their son Jason arrived in 1966, their daughter Zoe followed in 1975. From the very first, Bonham preferred the domestic to the nomadic.
He liked his wife, his children, his farm, his cars, and he liked to be left alone on his own patch of England with people who knew him before he was famous. This is not a minor detail. This is, in fact, the fault line down which his later life would eventually crack open
By 1968, Bonham had built a small devoted reputation on the Midlands circuit as a drummer of almost frightening power. Phil Collins, then a teenager prowling London’s Marquee Club, caught him playing with the folk singer Tim Rose, and was dumbstruck inside the first few minutes. “He was doing things with his bass drum,” Collins said, “that I’d never seen.
” The word that kept attaching itself to Bonham was heavy. Mark Ashton of Rare Bird put it more colloquially, “He’s so [ __ ] heavy. ” It was not a compliment about weight, it was a compliment about gravity.
Later that summer, Jimmy Page was trying to assemble a new band out of the ruins of the Yardbirds. He had a bassist, John Paul Jones, already in place, and needed a singer and a drummer. Plant, summoned from Birmingham and hired on the spot, suggested his old friend from Redditch.
Page and manager Peter Grant went to see Bonham play with Tim Rose at a North London pub, and by the end of the evening, they wanted him badly. There was a problem. Bonham was earning a respectable wage on the road with Rose, and he already had offers from Joe Cocker and Chris Farlow.
He was not keen on gambling steady money for a speculative venture headed by a guitarist trailing the afterlife of a broken-up band. Grant resorted to telegrams, one after another, relentlessly, each promising a better future. Bonham, who had no telephone at home, was fetched out of a pub in West Bromwichby the landlord to take the calls.
He would later describe the courtship with unfained amusement. “We all thought it was a bit of a joke,” he said, “getting the telegrams. ” But he came around, convinced that something uncommon was being offered.
“It was like a gift from heaven,” he said
The four of them first played together in a basement on Gerrard Street in London’s Chinatown, ran through a blues standard called Train Kept a-Rollin’, and by the end of it, understood, without anyone needing to say it, that the chemistry was not ordinary. Within a month, they were in Scandinavia, fulfilling contractual obligations of the old Yardbirds under that name, but in reality, it was a covert dry run for something that would completely eclipse the Yardbirds. The first concert by the lineup that would become Led Zeppelin is dated to the 7th of September, 1968, at a teen club in Gladsaxe, just outside Copenhagen.
They had about 15 hours of rehearsal behind them. Bonham’s drum solo spot was already in the set, billed quaintly as Pat’s Delight in honor of his wife. They may have been billed as the Yardbirds, but by the time they came home from the tour, they were Led Zeppelin
The debut album, recorded at Olympic Studios in London across late September and October of 1968, and released on the 12th of January 1969, introduced Bonham to the world as a drummer of a kind rock had not quite heard before. The playing on Good Times Bad Times, the opening track, is almost absurdly advanced. The bass drum triplets alone had drummers in New York and Los Angeles rewinding their copies and trying and failing to imitate them.
John Paul Jones asked later what struck him most about Bonham in those first weeks, answered plainly, “The first thing to strike me was his confidence. There was no hesitation in him. He sat down and played as if he already knew where the song was going.
” What followed was a run of albums, tours, and earnings almost without precedent in the history of rock music. Led Zeppelin II arrived on the 22nd of October 1969 with Whole Lotta Love and its seismic open-bottomed groove. Led Zeppelin III landed on the 5th of October 1970, folding in acoustic textures with Welsh hillsides.
Led Zeppelin IV, officially untitled and adorned only with four runic symbols, was released on the 8th of November 1971, and became one of the most successful albums ever pressed onto vinyl. Houses of the Holy followed in March of 1973, Physical Graffiti in February of 1975, Presencein March of 1976. For 6 years, they were, by almost any commercial measure, the biggest band in the world, outselling the Rolling Stones, outselling everyone, and doing it largely without the usual machinery of singles and television appearances.
We don’t do any television. It doesn’t mean we’re not brilliant, Plant explained with a shrug. The point was the live show and the masterful albums to carry the live show home in a paper sleeve
Within that catalog, Bonham’s role mutated album by album. On Led Zeppelin 2, he was a brute with exquisite taste. On Led Zeppelin 3, he learned to play quietly, picking out brushed patterns behind That’s the Way and Tangerine.
On Led Zeppelin 4, he produced in a single session perhaps the most imitated drum track in the history of recorded music. In the winter of 1970 into early 1971, the band decamped to Headley Grange, a decaying Victorian poorhouse turned private rental in East Hampshire. They hauled in the Rolling Stones mobile studio, parked it in the driveway, and began cutting tracks.
One evening, engineer Andy Johns was alone in the place with Bonham, the others having been politely expelled to the pub on the instruction, You guys bugger off, but Bonzo, you stay behind because I’ve got an idea. Johns set Bonham’s kit up not in a room, but in the building’s three-story entrance hall, a stone-floored stairwellwith a balcony running around the second level. He hung two microphones down from that balcony high above the drums and pressed record.
What came back down the cables changed the physics of recorded drums. The track was When the Levee Breaks, a slow narcotic blues reworking of a 1929 Memphis Minnie song, and Bonham’s playing on it is by any measure one of the most influential drum performances ever committed to tape. The snare hits arrive with the weight of a slamming door at the end of a long corridor.
The room itself, that resonant stairwell, is audibly part of the instrument, with Bonham flailing like a transcendent, exquisitely controlled force at the kit. A drummer drumming within a giant drum. When the track was compressed and run through tape delay, something more than a drum sound came through.
A blueprint emerged. It has been sampled by hip-hop producers, post-rock bands, film composers, pop stars, and advertising houses for the best part of half a century since. It is, effectively, the drum sound that every other drum sound in modern music has had to measure itself against
The live show around this music became one of the most elemental spectacles of the decade. They played for 3 hours, 4 hours, sometimes longer before crowds of 20,000 and more in arenas that had barely existed as rock venues a few years earlier. Bonham’s solo vehicle, Moby Dick, expanded in that live setting from a compact feature into a 10- or 15-minute tour of the drummer’s art.
Beginning on sticks, shifting to bare hands on the toms until the skins were bloodied. He was quoting jazz phrases and parade ground rudiments, building to a climax that on the best nights could reorganize the hair on the back of the audience’s neck. He was a showmanby inheritance as much as by instinct, carrying the Krupa and Rich tradition straight into the cold, cavernous age of the Enormadome
Offstage, the picture was more complicated. The touring life did not suit him. He disliked the hotels, he loathed flying, and as Zeppelin’s operations ballooned into the private jet, the fleet of limousines, the nightly armies of hangers-on, Bonham’s internal equilibrium began to fray.
He drank. He’d always drunk as most of the men of his generation and background had drunk, but now the drinking took on a different shape. It was nervous, protective, insulating.
It was also dangerous. In a 1975 Melody Maker piece, written in the middle of the band’s triumphant American tour, he was startlingly candid. “I’ve got worse,” he said.
“I have terribly bad nerves all the time. ” He was, he admitted, often frightened before he went on stage. The man who could make 20,000 people stand up and shout with a single snare hit was in the hour before the show pacing the hotel corridor in a state of real distress, reaching for the bottle because it was the nearest tool to hand
And once the alcohol was in him, his misdeeds were as limitless as his drumming. The road map of ’70s Zeppelin touring is in part a map of hotels from which Bonham was subsequently banned. The Continental Hyatt House on Sunset Strip, rechristened the Riot House by the band, came to accept the annual visitation of Led Zeppelin as a kind of catastrophic weather event.
Televisions went through windows, furniture came apart by hand, and on one particularly inventive evening, Bonham took delivery of a Harley-Davidson, rode it out of the lift, and gunned it up and down the corridors. The tire marks were still legible on the lobby carpet years later, preserved by managementwith a kind of resigned pride, until the building changed hands in 1990. Not far away at the Chateau Marmont, he repeated the trick.
And at the old Edgewater Inn in Seattle, whose rooms gave directly onto Puget Sound, he and tour manager Richard Cole ran the notorious [ __ ] afternoon in the summer of 1969, an episode so baroque and so unpleasant in its particulars that it has been reprinted in every Zeppelin biography since. Japan, 1971, provided one of the more cinematic set pieces. Bonham and Cole, well into a row over a long bottle of sake, acquired a pair of samurai swords from a curio shop in Tokyo, and spent the small hours chopping John Paul Jones’ hotel room into matchwood, while Jones, unconscious on a mattress carried out into the corridor, slept through the entire demolition.
Limousines were, by the middle of the decade, routine collateral. The Welsh guitarist Dave Edmunds, riding with the band in New York on the 1977 tour, later told Classic Rock he had watched Bonham rip the interior of a town car to pieces, seat stuffing and trim, for reasons nobody in the car could afterwards explain. “It was an interesting experience,” Edmunds said, in a phrase admittedly so English in its understatement it could have been stitched on a tea towel
The behavior had an uglier edge, too, and it should not be tidied away. Richard Cole, asked much later by Jason Bonham for something nice to remember his father by, is said to have muttered in private, “What was I supposed to tell him? That his father was a violent alcoholic [ __ ] Women on the periphery of the tour, journalists and flight attendants among them, were sometimes grabbed, pulled, and cornered.
The American music writer Ellen Sander, embedded with the band on their second United States tour in 1969, was set upon in a hotel room by Bonham and others on the last night of the tour, had her clothes half pulled off, and later wrote that she had been in genuine fear of rape before Peter Grant arrived and hauled Bonham physically off her. On board the band’s private Boeing, the Starship, in the middle of one mid-70s flight, he lurched drunk from a bathroom in an open robe, seized a stewardess, and was pulled off her by Cole and Grant in full view of the assembled press pool. Bev Bevan of Electric Light Orchestra, a Midlands contemporary who had known Bonham since the pub circuit, tried years afterward to reconcile the two men he had known.
“He was an extrovert, a friendly, huggable bloke,” Bevan said, “but unfortunately, the drink just got too much for him. He could become quite aggressive. ” That was the euphemism that had to do in later years for the full ledger
At home in Worcestershire, on the farm he had bought with the Zeppelin money, he was a different creature altogether. He kept cattle, he collected hot rods and muscle cars. He played with Jason, who was showing from very early on a drummer’s interest in his father’s kit.
He drank, of course, but he also gardened, walked, and behaved like a man who genuinely preferred a quiet lane in Worcestershire to a suite at the Continental Hyatt House. The famous wild man of Zeppelin lore, demolishing hotel rooms and riding motorcycles through lobbies, was not entirely mythology, but it was, in part, a role he had been cast in, defined by the relentless comparison to Keith Moon of The Who. Bonham, in more reflective moments, seemed to understand that the expectation had become its own trap.
“There were times when I blunderedand got the dreaded look,” he said. The dreaded look came usually from Peter Grant, the towering bear-like manager who in private was capable of a fierce paternal tenderness, and in public could deliver admonitions when one of his charges had gone too far. Bonham was admonished more than once, more than most
The dark turn arrived in the summer of 1977. On the 23rd of July at the Oakland Coliseum in California, Led Zeppelin played the first of two scheduled stadium shows on what was already a troubled tour. Backstage before the concert, a member of the band’s retinue came into an altercationwith a security guard employed bythe promoter Bill Graham.
What happened next is disputed in its particulars, but consistent in its outline across multiple accounts. The guard was assaulted violently by a group that included Bonham and Zeppelin’s notorious head of security, John Bindon,with Peter Grant’s young son having been the flashpoint of the dispute. The guard was hospitalized.
The next day, Oakland police arrested Bonham, Grant, Bindon, and tour manager Richard Cole on assault charges. They were bailed, played the second show, and left California under a cloudthat would never quite lift. Fines and suspended sentences followed in the months afterward.
The band would not tour North America again in Bonham’s lifetime. Two days later, while the band was in New Orleans preparing for the next leg of the tour, Robert Plant took a phone call from his wife in England. Their 5-year-old son Karac had died suddenly of a stomach virus.
The tour was canceled. Plant flew home. Bonham, devastated for his friend, flew with him.
He was, by the account of those close to him, as shaken by Karac’s death as he had been by almost anything in his life. The two families were intertwined, and Plant had been his friend long before either of them had ever heard of Jimmy Page
For 2 years afterward, Led Zeppelin effectively did not function as a touring band. They made the 1979 album In Through the Out Door at Polar Studios in Stockholm, released on the 15th of August of that year, and they played two enormous warm-up shows at Knebworthin August 1979. But the machine that had once coveredthe globe four times over had cracked somewhere deep inside its chassis, and nobody seemed quite sure how to repair it.
By early 1980, there was a decision to try again. A scaled-down European tour, deliberately unambitious, opened in Dortmundon the 17th of June 1980, the band’s first live datesin almost 2 years. It was meant to be a reboot, a way of getting match fit for a planned North American tour in the autumn.
The European dates went well. Bonham was, by all accounts, drummingwith something close to his old force, though those close to him noted he was drinking more than ever, and that the old stage anxiety had deepened into something harder to name
On the 24th of September 1980, the band reconvened at Bray Studios in Berkshire to begin rehearsals for the American tour. Bonham was picked up that morning by his assistant Rex Kingand driven toward the studio. According to the evidence later given at the Windsor inquest, he had already begun drinking before the journey.
Breakfast, at a pub somewhere along the route, consisted of ham rollsand, in Rex King’s phrase, around four to five quadruple vodkaswith orange. At rehearsals, he continued downing, as King testified, two or three large ones before the band even began to play. The session broke up in the evening, and the four musicians, with assorted staff, drove to Jimmy Page’s newly bought country house, The Old Mill House, on Mill Lane in Windsor,a handsome Georgian propertyby the Thames.
The drinking continued there. By midnight, Bonham had reportedly consumed in total something in the order of 40 measures of vodka across 12 hours. He fell asleep on a sofa at some point after midnight.
Page’s assistant, Rick Hobbs, carried him to a bedroom, laid him on his side, and put a cushion behind his back to keep him from rolling. Standard practical care had been given to him before. He was found in the early afternoon of the 25th of September, 1980.
He had rolled onto his back in his sleep, and he had inhaledthe contents of his own stomach,and he had not woken. He was 32 years old
The inquestat Windsor, conducted by the East Berkshire coroner, Robert Wilson, heard testimony from Page, from Rex King,and from Rick Hobbs. The pathologist, Dr. Edmund Hemstead, reported an alcohol level of 276 mg per 100 mlin the bladder sample, more than several timesthe legal driving limit.
He also noted a trace of what was described in reporting as a tension-relieving drug. The coroner recorded averdict of accidental death by the inhalation of vomit. The pathologist’s view was that Bonham had not died immediately.
The initial inhalation event had occurred some hours before death,and he had rather awfully drowned unconscious over a period of time. The three surviving members of Led Zeppelin did not speak publicly for more than2 months. They did not, so far as any close observer could discern, even seriously discuss continuing.
On the 4th of December,1980, they issued a press release of just a few lines, unsigned but understood to carry the collective voice of Page, Plant, and Jones, along with Grant. “We wish it to be known,” it began, “thatthe loss of our dear friend,andthe deep respect we have for his family,together with the sense of undivided harmony felt by ourselvesand our manager,have led us to decide that we could not continue as we were. ” There was no name for a replacement because there was no replacement under consideration.
What had been Led Zeppelin had been a four-sided thing,and three-sided things, they were saying politely,and not Led Zeppelin. Jimmy Page asked about it more than30 years later, put the matter as simply as it could be put. Led Zeppelin wasn’t a corporate entity, he said.
It was an affair of the heart
Bonham was buried on the 10th of October 1980in the churchyard of St. Michael’s in Rushock,a quiet parish not far from the farm he had loved and worked at. Jason, who was 14, was there.
So were Pageand Plantand Jonesand Peter Grant,and a long line of musiciansand engineersand roadiesfrom a dozen years of the strangest,loudest,most consequential touring life anyone of their generation had attempted. Locals later recalledthe scale of the floral tributesandthe press presence. He lies there still under a plain stonewithinearshot of the lane.
The posthumous arithmetic was set in motion. Coda,a tidy-up album of outtakesand leftovers from across the band’s working life, was released on the 19th of November 1982,and it preserveda handful of previously unissued Bonham performances. In 1995, Led Zeppelinwere inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,with Jason Bonham taking his father’s place at the drumsfor the ceremonial performance,a gesturethat managed to be both a tribute,andfor anyone who had known the father,almost unbearable to watch.
On the rare occasionsthe three surviving members have reunitedin the decades since,most memorably for the O2 Arena benefit concert of December 2007,it has been Jason,now a formidable drummerin his own right,seated at the kit. It is the only arrangement they will countenance. Whatever Led Zeppelin was,they seem to have decideddied with its drummer,but the Bonham blood legacycan occasionally still be revivedby the prince
There is a tendencyin the long afterlife of big rock figuresfor the mythology to swallowthe person. Bonham has been particularly vulnerable to this becausethe myth was so loud to begin with. He was,of course,the destroyer of hotel rooms,the thrower of televisions,the drinker of epic quantities,the monstrous forceat the back of the most enormous band of the ’70s.
All of that was,in some measure,true. But the John Bonhamthat emerges from his own few guarded interviews,from the witness testimonyat the Windsor inquest,from the accounts of those who worked beside himat his peak,is a recognizably smaller,humbler,and yet greater figure. A Midlands bricklayer’s son who loved his wifeand his kidsand his farm.
A drummer who listened obsessively to Krupaand Richand wanted more than anything to make the instrument say something new. A man with bad nerves who found the glare unbearableand reached for the vodkabecause the vodka,for a time,made the glare bearable. Drumming,he told Melody Makerin 1975,was the only thing I was good at.
It was self-deprecation,of course. It was also,in its way,a complete statement of a life. The sound he made is still,40 odd years on,the sound every rock drummeris measured against.
The stairwellat Headley Grangeis long since silent. The farm in Worcestershirehas passed to other owners. The old mill houseat Windsorhas changed hands more than once.
But somewhere tonight,a producer will reach for the 4-second opening drum figure of When the Levee Breaksand loop it into a new song,anda kid in a bedroomin Ohio or Sao Pauloor Osaka will put on headphonesand hear,for the first time,what a drummerfrom Redditchdid one winter eveningin a cold Hampshire hallwaywhen he was trying,as he always said,to be loud. The loudness has outlived himby more than40 yearsand shows,on present evidence,no sign of running out
