Led Zeppelin had more than its share of sexcapades on the road, but things got freaky even for them with a young groupie and some fish in 1969.
The incident — which is detailed in Bob Spitz’s new book “Led Zeppelin: The Biography,” out Tuesday — went down at the end of a tour with Vanilla Fudge in Seattle. The road managers for both bands — Richard Cole for Zeppelin and Bruce Wayne for Vanilla Fudge — had caught a bunch of mud sharks and red snappers while fishing from a waterfront room at the Edgewater Inn. They brought their haul to John Paul Jones’ room, where the Led Zeppelin bassist was smoking pot with Vanilla Fudge drummer Carmine Appice and a 17-year-old groupie named Jackie.
After Jackie had gotten pretty high, Cole and Wayne told her to take off her clothes. “Once she was naked, they started hitting her with the fish, and it left little teeth marks on her back,” says Appice in the book. “Things got pretty ugly, pretty intense, so we went out into the hall, where Bonzo [Led Zep drummer John Bonham] and his wife, Pat, joined us, and we watched the action through the door.”
Other voyeurs would join them in the hall. “In fact, we were invited to bring our wives to take a look,” recalls Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant, “but after a while we left because it was all a bit unsavory.”
But later on, things got even more degrading when Cole and Wayne came with their bucket of dead fish to Appice’s room, where a naked Jackie sat on the bed as others were eating room service. “They grabbed the butter off the cart,” recalls Appice, “and rubbed it around her p—y. Then they started screwing her with the nose of the fish, pushing the snappers into her as far as they could.”
And when they were done with all that, they urinated and defecated on Jackie.
Led Zeppelin would continue this disturbing sexual behavior at the Continental Hyatt House on LA’s Sunset Strip in the ’70s. It was there that a 29-year-old Jimmy Page seduced a young groupie named Lori Mattix, when she was just 14, in 1973.
“He just swept me off my feet and made me fall madly in love with him,” Mattix says in the book, which also details the 1973 NYC robbery of the band, in which $200,000 was looted from a hotel safe.
“He was the rock-god prince to me, a magical, mystical person who was really convincing. I know he fell in love with me because of my innocence … It was no secret he liked young girls.”
