On a spring day in 1973, the rooftop pool at the Continental Hyatt House Hotel in Los Angeles was filled with underage girls - with or without bikinis. The stage was set for another frantic Led Zeppelin party. One by one, the girls dove into the water, dizzy from drugs and alcohol, while the band members and their friends watched, casting lustful glances at them. Jimmy Page, the guitarist and big star of the world's hottest rock band, watched from a distance.
He couldn't swim and, besides, he had already picked the one he wanted - 14-year-old Lori Matix. He had been sent a picture of her earlier, and later that night, as the party continued at a seedy nightclub, the English Disco, he took Mattix aside and told her: "I told you I'd be with you."
She was upset - her friend just a year older, Sable Starr, had made it clear that she too had eyes for the diminutive British musician and had warned her: "If you go near Jimmy, I'll kill you." But Mattix didn't even have time to think and decide whether to stay away from Page as, she claims, two of Led Zeppelin's managers forced her into a limousine, threatened her with violence if she resisted and drove her, terrified, back to the Hyatt House Hotel for an erotic rendezvous with Page in his suite...
Monsters of Rock
Mattix says that, as a teenage girl enchanted by the Prince of Rock, she fell in love with him at first sight, adding: "He was 29, I was 14. It was no secret that he liked young girls." She claims Paige showed enough respect as she called her mother to make sure she wouldn't send him to jail for statutory rape. She shouldn't have worried-Lori's mother was, after all, the one who had driven her own daughter to the hotel.
Four years after Harvey Weinstein's downfall sparked the #MeToo movement, few areas of public life have not faced allegations of abusive male behavior. So why should rock music be left untouched? That question should also be asked of Led Zeppelin, who were "rock monsters"-in every sense of the word.B-17
Sex, Drugs, Rock and Girls
Although Led Zeppelin had particularly extreme attitudes, they were not alone: Many other music stars behaved in the same way, and Spitz believes there are still many such phenomena in rock - and beyond - music today. "The entire music industry has been corrupted because it covered up the scandals, did not bring such behaviour to light and did nothing to prevent it."Apologists for the "sex,drug and rock n'roll" culture of the 1960s and 1970s often say that this trifecta was exactly what was going on at the time, but Spitz insists that this is not true. He interviewed Sir Paul McCardney for his latest book about the Beatles, and he told him that the Beatles were also besieged by underage girls. The difference was that the Beatles didn't say yes. "All the Beatles' girlfriends had adults," Spitz says. "They were always looking for women their own age."Earlier this week, Richard Cole, Led Zeppelin's touring manager and "leader" of the group in... trouble, died. His death was followed by several obituaries, which painted a picture of a perpetually relaxed and unpredictable madman who once motorcycled up the nine floors of the Hyatt House to the band's apartments and rented a large jet equipped with a queen-size waterbed, faux-fur cover and shower for the female fans who followed them. Spitz reveals that Cole was also the one who selected the prettiest girls among the concert audience and in hotel lobbies to have sex with the band members.Slim, narcissistic and increasingly pompous and edgy, Led Zeppelin could never understand why they sold more records than the Rolling Stones but attracted far less attention, Spitz says. A key reason, according to him, was that a cloud of violence constantly covered both them and their image and they were much less liked by the general public.As they spent much time touring and recording in the US, they found their nirvana in the unbridled hedonism of California, particularly Los Angeles, where they created rabid groups of female fans while enjoying a huge supply of cocaine to fuel their audiences. "Los Angeles in particular was like Sodom and Gomorrah," Jimmy Page recalls. "There was a sense of 'we can do anything. There were no rules."Considering Page had been fascinated from the age of 11 by the infamous occultist Alistair Crowley-who had been described as the most evil man in the world and whose basic motto was "Do what you like"-he needed no encouragement, Spitz says. The fans were "shockingly young", he claims: "They were 13, 14, maybe 15 at the most. The girls just showed up-they came out of nowhere. "They were mostly kids with no parental supervision," says Michael Des Baires , a British-born musician and friend of Page's. "Their fathers were away and their mothers had no interest in them at all."Both Matix and her rival for Page's attention claimed to have lost their virginity to David Bowie at 13 and 12 respectively. And there were plenty of men ready to take advantage of their youth and freshness. Page learned of Matix's existence after being shown a photo of her with other underage Los Angeles girls in a third-rate showbiz magazine, "Star," which was headlined above the photos "Your Very Own Superfox."B-43]Bernard "Bip" Fallon, who had photographed the girls and shown the photos to Page, gives Page his highly controversial opinion: "The thing about fans being misunderstood is that there was always a consensus. The girls were the predators, not the boys in the band." Spitz, of course, sees it very differently, "A lot of their parents were complicit. Considering that these girls were teenage girls-maybe even younger-and that the responsibility fell on the parents and the men who took advantage of them."
He spoke to many of the young fans and was shocked that, even now, "there was no remorse" and "they were not shy about giving me personal details, which was also scary. Because they were too young to enter bars, they hung around hotels where rock stars congregated, often in bungalows with open doors and easy access to see their idols up close, ready for anything.
One club where girls were allowed in for youth parties was the English Disco. Led Zeppelin were regulars, sitting with a glass of Watneys Red Barrel and gawking at teenage and pre-teen girls alike as they danced. Club boss Rodney Bingenheimer told Spitz that he was sending out a general call to his underage patrons if Led Zeppelin were in town. "These guys were party animals, more than party animals," he recalls. "The wild guy, of course, was Bonham." Of the band, only bassist John Paul Jones was not involved. As for Plant, Spitz writes: "Robert's girlfriends were not as young as Jimmy's. Most were of consenting age."
Spitz says it is revealing of the attitudes of the time that none of the group members were ever accused of these behaviors. And Bonham never got in trouble either when he once tore off a female reporter's clothes in the band's dressing room and, on another occasion, tried to rape a flight attendant on their jet.
Led Zeppelin and their defenders have argued that these debaucheries took place at a very young age-some of the group's members were only in their 20s when they became stars. However, they were still behaving disgustingly to women years later. For example, their manager Peter Grant in 1977 tied a naked woman to the pipe under the bathroom sink in his Los Angeles hotel suite for an entire weekend. Page saw her, found a key to unlock the handcuffs and helped her escape.
For more than 40 years, the "architects" of such behavior have escaped public censure or legal consequences, but, after the publication of Spitz's book, it may be time to pay...
Source: protothema.gr
Contents of this article including associated images are belongs to
Cyprus TimesViews & opinions expressed are those of the author and/or Cyprus Times
Sourcehttps://cyprustimes.com/kosmos/led-...oyalika-orgia-me-efives-kai-rok-apokalypseis/
