Promoter Larry Vaughn of Concerts East had worked with Zeppelin since their first American tour. Back then, things were so ramshackle that Vaughn once stood beneath a sagging stage with tour manager Richard Cole, holding it in place with pieces of wood and willpower.
As well as navigating the demands of individual band members, Vaughn and Brutsche [Rusty Brutsche, co-founder of ShowCo, a Dallas-based company that provided sound equipment] had to contend with the intimidating triple act of Grant, Cole and Weiss — not always successfully in Vaughn’s case. In The Song Remains The Same, Grant is shown berating a moustached man in the dressing room whom he blames for allowing some bootleg posters to get into the venue. That was Vaughn, who still wonders how a poster seller sneaked into the Baltimore Civic Auditorium only to get caught in the balcony section by Richard Cole and a film crew.
“I walked into a real shitstorm,” laughs Vaughn. “The guy behind me sitting meekly for a change is Steve Weiss. Weiss was a Madison Avenue attorney and could be very rough.
“I had a lot of involvement with Peter Grant. He terrified most of the promoters. He felt everybody was trying to rip them off. His reputation was well earned. I saw him in Rochester backstage beating the snot out of a kid who brought a poster into the venue. I stepped in before the kid wound up in hospital. He had the power that came from managing a supergroup. I saw him years later when he was managing Patti LaBelle and he was a totally different person. But when you are managing a nuclear arsenal you can push your weight around, and he did.”
Even for a band as big as Zeppelin had become, some things remained private. ... Roy Harper won’t discuss the robbery that concluded the tour, when $203,000 was stolen from a safe at the Drake Hotel — a crime featured in The Song Remains The Same that’s never been solved. “I have my suspicions but I’m not going to level those,” he says. “Everyone I knew was innocent.”
Vaughn too has suspicions. Before the concerts at Madison Square Garden, he had been ordered by Weiss to tell the venue that the band were shooting a home movie in a bid to avoid the minuscule filming fee — a subterfuge that collapsed when the professional film crew turned up. Yet now the same people were shrugging off the loss of more than $200,000. “Peter didn’t seem that shaken,” he says. “I’d seen him almost kill somebody over a poster, and now he took the theft of $200,000 very calmly. I couldn’t figure it out. Let’s put it this way, it put them on the front page of the Daily News. So either they got ripped off or it was a colossal publicity stunt [or—most likely—a tax-evasion scheme].”
There have been many theories about the theft, which was never solved. Questions remained about all the cash floating around, unaccounted for, doled out for arbitrary purposes, often to avoid paying income tax. The British rate for the kind of money Led Zeppelin made was 90 percent, and no less an aggrieved tax drudge than Peter Grant alluded to his "false-bottomed suitcases" stuffed with cash being smuggled into Great Britain to avoid the levy. Maybe that's what happened to the safe-deposit-box stash. No less than five sources close to the band told this author that Grant had admitted spiriting the Drake money away. Michael Des Barres, who later recorded for Led Zeppelin's record label, says, "Peter told me that Richard did it. It was a tax thing. He said, 'Why would you let all that money go to these other cunts?'"
The band didn't seem too put out by the theft. "Jimmy and I just laughed about it," Robert said cavalierly. He thought it "somehow made sense."
"It was heavy-duty shit, but Jimmy told me not to worry about it," Lori [Mattix] recalls, "that Richard had taken the money, and everything was fine."
Led Zeppelin: The Biography, by Bob Spitz, 2021
