The infamous tale involving Led Zeppelin, a groupie and a mud shark in 1969
There are too many stories of rock ‘n’ roll excess from back in the day that look disgusting with the passing of time. However, trust Led Zeppelin to do something so heinous that even in the late 1960s, with Bernard Manning and Roy Chubby Brown regularly on television, people were grossed out.
During this period of hedonism, The Who racked up headlines for their bad behaviour on tour and fair play to them, Keith Moon did his level best to nab the spotlight, but it had nothing on Led Zeppelin for depravity.
For the really dark stuff, there are only three people to report to. John Bonham, Jimmy Page, and a man who may be unfamiliar, Richard Cole. Cole was Led Zeppelin’s tour manager and Bonham’s right-hand man for mayhem, responsible for as many eye-opening stories as anyone else on their team.
Case in point, this story that has followed Led Zeppelin like a foul smell emanating from a Seattle hotel room that, try as you might, just won’t stop reminding you of a fishmonger’s. The mudshark story. Or is it the red snapper story? I mean, right from the off, no one can tell it to you straight what kind of fish was used, and that’s just the first fuzzy detail of this rancid little tale.
In July 1969, Led Zeppelin were in Seattle for a gig. Cole and Bonham’s room overlooked Elliot Bay, and the two friends spent the afternoon fishing from their hotel window. Enjoy that moment of purity because it’s the last one in the entire story.
What happened next first surfaced, bafflingly enough, on a Frank Zappa live album. Fillmore East – June 1971 contains a ribald ditty called ‘The Mud Shark’, which is a very thinly veiled song about how the band, along with their opening act The Vanilla Fudge, allegedly tied a groupie of theirs to their bed and proceeded to “pleasure” them with one of the fish caught earlier that day.
What makes the Zappa song worthy of mentioning here is something that many versions of the story don’t tend to repeat, which is the claim that the whole thing was captured on “an 8mm movie camera”.
As you can probably imagine, the story spread around the music scene like wildfire, but the world didn’t really know about it until Stephen Davis’ notorious, unauthorised Zeppelin biography Hammer of the Gods was published in 1985. Davis got Cole on the record, where he recounted the story in graphic detail. By this point, Bonham had been dead for five years, but the rest of the band immediately rubbished Cole’s recollection of it.
Robert Plant himself said that Cole spent most of his time on the road with the band out of his mind on drink and drugs rather than doing his job. Cole himself has admitted to this in other interviews. Therefore, there was reason to believe that this was nothing more than a made-up tale that got out of hand. Especially because nobody could find this supposed video footage of the incident. However, then The Vanilla Fudge’s drummer, Carmen Appice, wrote about the incident in his memoir, the unfortunately named Stick It!, and his testimony is a lot harder to discredit than Cole’s.
After all, Appice wasn’t a drinker or drug-taker like the other members of Led Zeppelin and the Fudge were. Admittedly, it is a low bar to clear, but it meant that for years, he was the guy that people went to in order to clear up any stories from that time, as he was the one who remembered it. Appice remembers the deal in excruciating detail, but at the very least, he does seem to remember it as an enthusiastically consensual act, which a lot of the stories about the event seem to have forgotten.
Still gross, though. A good memory is, after all, as much a blessing as a curse.