THE YEAR OF THE MOON

Richard Cole was the black box of rock ’n’ roll.

The smoldering, indestructible child of postwar Kensal Rise, London, he became not just a legendary road manager, but the de facto chronicler of more than four decades of life inside and outside the van, thanks largely to his 1992 tell-all, Stairway to Heaven: Led Zeppelin Uncensored. An affably raucous, unpredictable, yet oddly punctual man, Richard was the embodiment of a Keith Moon drum fill. Cole passed away on Dec. 2, 2021, at age 75 after a long fight with a cancer that is surely now hobbling around with a broken jaw. Thinking of the man almost a year later, it still feels like he left the world much too soon. Richard loved fresh flowers in his Notting Hill Gate home; he loved his daughter Claire and his cat Puss Puss. But he would also have no problem throwing someone over a balcony and into a dustbin if he felt his environment was in peril. And Richard was more than capable of creating his own brand of chaos, most notably during the longest stretch of employment he would ever have: as road manager for Led Zeppelin, from their inception out of the ashes of the Yardbirds in 1968 to Cole’s cataclysmic descent from the Zoso orbit, including a doomed detox attempt that led to an improbable stint in an Italian jail after being mistaken for a terrorist bomber in 1980.

In the summer of 2014,1 was writing a feature about Cole and had the good fortune of meeting him near his home in London. At the time I had only a crude knowledge of him as Led Zeppelin’s mythic muscle, and a preconceived archetype of the cartoonishly brute “roadie” characters ubiquitous in sitcoms and films of the late 20th century. With a very heavy presence even as he neared 70, it wasn't surprising to me that he had once unleashed actor and notorious underground figure John Bindon onto Oakland, or headed a pack of London underdogs in pummeling a posse of cash-scheming Teamsters on the Boston Garden loading dock, or greeted the FBI with glasses of champagne and a grin at his Manhattan hotel after Led Zeppelin were robbed of $202,600—a heist that remains unsolved to this day. In the currency of shark-screwing folklore alone, Cole was bigger than U.S. Steel.

So I was particularly disarmed by how sweet, paternal, and hysterical I found him to be during our meal. He still relished his fish suppers and scones, regularly laid flowers at his parents’ grave site, and lived for swimming and lounging along the sunny beaches of the French Riviera. When my mother passed away in November 2020, Cole reached out to my father, a man he had never met, to send his condolences and trade stories of fast living in late1960s Europe. I had also been unaware at that point that Richard truly cut his teeth on the road at age 19, when the teenage dropout-turned-scaffolder haphazardly landed the job of road-managing the Who in 1965, a gig he would lose only a year later along with his license, for speeding.

It was a fascinating era for a primitively dazzling band—and also for Cole, one of the original teenage mods traveling Europe before landing a left hook on the world of rock management. And so I continued to stay in touch with him through email as he regaled me with tales of a time when the Who were just beginning to nip at the fab heels of the Beatles and the Stones. After being recognized out in public due to the feature I had written on him, Cole offered me the chance of a lifetime to help him work on his pre-Zeppelin memoirs, offering me these assuring words: “I knew it would take someone who really understood life with no real hope and found their niche and made a success of it, xx.”

Thus began a yearslong effort of shopping Cole’s project, titled Mods and Rockers, to publishers both big and small, with even Benedict Cumberbatch graciously offering assistance from friends in that world to help in our endeavor. But alas, our mission fell short in light of Richard's progressing illness. At our last meeting in London on March 6, 2020 (the day after COVID was first detected in the city), I asked him once more about making another big push to get the book out, but he was far too ill at that point, and certainly needed his weakening energy for his fight against cancer rather than to woo publishers. But after speaking with close friends and family of his in the wake of his death, it seemed too great a waste for these stories to die with a man who himself gave me important advice passed on to him by Zep manager Peter Grant: “The word CAN’T should never be in your fucking vocabulary!” So with that, I am happy to share some of Richard Cole’s chronicles of the Who from 1965 to 1966.

In the pantheon of hotel debauchery, perhaps no one ascended to the heavens quite like Richard Cole during his years with Led Zeppelin. From his exploits at Seattle’s Edgewater Hotel with Vanilla Fudge drummer Carmine Appice, a teenage groupie, and yes, a mud shark, to his unofficial night job as architect of the multi-floor “Riot House” escapades of Led Zep at the Continental Hyatt House in West Hollywood, Cole certainly had no qualms about injecting a little hostility into the hospitality if the end result was a good time.

But there is a brilliant irony to Cole’s real rise in the music world beginning with the Who—and especially a teenage Keith Moon. Pensively eager to do his best on the first day of work, Cole recounts how his initial feelings of calm and wonder as the guest of a grand hotel were decimated by a panicked scramble to find the band new digs thanks to the high jinks of their infamous rhythm section.

From the moment Keith Moon got into the van he was bubbling like a percolator full of excitement and enthusiasm. As with John Entwistle, we had met before at the same time and become instant friends. On the surface we were clean-living lads: None of us smoked, no one drank alcohol in the van. Our first stop was on the Ml motorway at the Blue Boar service station, which was a place most pop groups on the move stopped at for a nice English breakfast served all day and night. We had a full day to get to Edinburgh and our hotel, but that was no reason to not put my foot down on the gas since we all wanted to get there as quickly as possible. However, there would be two unexpected stops thanks to an unusual request from Keith, who insisted that we pick up some weed killer at a hardware shop and a couple bags of sugar from a grocer. None of this made sense to me, but if I had known Keith and John better, Entwistle’s sly little grin would have spoken volumes when I asked what was going on.

The Caledonian Hotel was the biggest and grandest hotel in Scotland, and one of the great hotels of Europe. For me it was the first time I had ever stayed in such an elegant and luxurious place. My assistant Alan Oates and I shared a room, as did Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey, who were already checked in, leaving me with only John and Keith to tend to. With my job done for now, we all got into the elevators and headed straight to our rooms to relax before deciding what to do with ourselves for the evening. I was quite hungry so I ordered myself a round of sandwiches and a pot of tea from room service. As soon as I had taken the first bite out of my ham and cheese sandwich, I heard the almighty blaring of the fire alarms going off. When I looked over at Alan he had this big stupid grin on his face as though he knew something I didn’t. When I opened the door I was shocked to see smoke steaming out of the emergency-exit door. I then looked the other way and saw the grinning faces of Moon and Entwistle peering around their room door. As I closed the door behind me the phone started ringing. I answered it to the irate voice of the hotel manager requesting my presence at the front desk immediately. Alan, who had started up with the band before I came around, was still smirking on his bed when I left the room. To him, it was just another day on the road with the Who.

The fire brigade was just leaving when I walked across the hall to the front desk. The manager had made out our bills, but there were no room charges, just a bill for my sandwiches and the fire brigade. We were then given instructions to get out of his hotel immediately before he called the police to throw us out. A very pissed-off Daltrey and Townshend walked over to me at the desk with their bags in tow. “Has that cunt Moon fucked another hotel for us?!” Townshend asked me. “Well, don’t just stand there, find us another hotel as quick as you can!” he demanded as Daltrey silently looked on, his face looking longer than usual. It was certainly not the best way to start a new job.

My first show with the Who was the first time I had seen them play live since they were known as the High Numbers when they played at the Scene Club back in 1964. They were good then, but now a year or so later with a couple of hit records behind them, they were great to watch. It was a powerhouse of high-volume music and wild theatrics. Moony played his cymbals with his arms raised over them in a poncy limp-wrist movement, but his poor old drums were beaten mercilessly, while his eyes bulged out of their sockets as if they were headed towards his wideopen mouth. Entwistle stood so still, I thought if he played outside, the pigeons would have perched on his shoulders. Daltrey bounced about all over the place, swinging his mic frantically in the air, sometimes even hitting Moony’s cymbals, which would provoke Moony to tell him to fuck off. For some reason this cymbal-bashing displeased Moony very much, but later I realized anything Roger did displeased him.

Townshend was an original in every sense of the word, from his dress to his frenzied acrobatic moves on stage, his long arms flying around in a circle while striking the guitar strings on cue, before stabbing the Vox speaker cabinets with the top of his guitar neck, which would then get caught in the cloth covering the speakers before he pulled them manically all over the place. Poor old Alan had to hold the cabinets to stop them from being pulled off the stage at times. The finale would be Moon kicking over the drums, which was amusing to see until it dawned on me that it was a Saturday night and if he fucked them up badly, I had no idea where I would get new parts on a Sunday morning if I needed to. The stage was littered with gear after the show, but thankfully nothing was broken beyond repair. As Alan and I packed up the instruments to be carried out to the van, Moony and the Ox [Entwistle] stayed in the dressing room drinking beers. Townshend and Daltrey were long gone on the way back to the hotel, which was something I found strange for pop stars.

Having realized Keith Moon was going to work him as hard as he played on stage, Cole began to understand he would in turn have to walk a tightrope to keep the more business-minded duo of Daltrey and Townshend satisfied with his efforts—especially if he was going to hop around the carousel of nightlife with Moon and Entwistle, the three becoming regular fixtures at the ultra-hip Scotch of St. James. But he was soon to realize that Townshend had a darker, more domineering side to him as well, which Cole first noticed at a show on Oct. 23, 1965:

For me, Bishop’s Stortford is a gig etched in my brain. During their performance, one of the microphones fell over close to the edge of the stage and the audience. As I ran across the front of the stage to stand it up, Townshend kicked me into the audience. As I went off the stage my leg got wedged between the stage and a radiator, so I was trapped there with all these fucking girls grabbing me and pulling out chunks of my hair, which was one of the most frightening things that had ever happened to me. As I struggled to get myself out of the crowd and back on the stage, Townshend was watching and laughing at me from above. If I had not liked the job so much I would have ripped his throat out.

As if that fucking ordeal wasn’t enough, due in part to Pete being drunk and pissed off with something or someone, it quickly became a guitarand drum-smashing night for him and Moon. Everyone except Entwistle joined in, and the more Roger hit Keith’s cymbals with his mic, the more violent Moony got with his drums, until they were ripped out of their sockets and thrown all over the stage.

Only one of Entwistle’s Vox Beatles cabinets was left standing as the group left the stage.

Of course, not everyone was as able as Cole to handle the antics of Moon and Entwistle—or the more hostile tendencies of Townshend.

Ronnie Fowler started his job as the Who’s production manager on my 20th birthday, Jan. 2, 1966, at a club in Hassocks. His main task was to collect money for the band and keep things sorted. As he wasn’t quite sure what he had to do, he asked me, and on Moon’s instructions I told him he had to give the gig money to Keith, then buy drinks and whatever the group wanted for them as they did not carry any cash with them. Only Moony and Entwistle found this funny because they managed to get most of the gig money out of him—even more so after taking him to the Kilt to get him drunk that night. The next day I got an awful bollocking from Stampy, one of the Who’s managers, for letting all this happen, but it was a giggle after all.

A couple of local gigs later and we had a double show in Wales at the Ritz in Skewen first and then the Regal Ballroom in Ammanford, 20 miles away, in the middle of nowhere. It was hardly a ballroom as one would imagine by the name, more like an old farmer’s barn, and with some of the most scruffy people I had ever seen. It looked as though most of the girls had their front teeth missing, and they were a wild and drunken bunch of people. Near the end of the show, road manager Neville Chesters and I managed to talk Ronnie into going on stage to adjust Pete’s mic for him. Of course it didn’t need adjusting, so when Ronnie tried to lower it, this pissed Pete off and he shoved him into the wild rabble of an audience. When he managed to get back onto the stage, he was as white as a sheet, with his clothes ripped to shreds. Moony and the Ox laughed so hard Moony fell off of his drum stool. Two days later the Who were looking for another production manager.

Just 19 at this point, Keith Moon was already a Molotov cocktail of mischief. Along with Cole, 20, and Entwistle, 21, the three lads quickly became a regular after-hours power trio around London. Perhaps thanks to Moony and the Ox, this was also around the time Cole began pulling the stunts he would take to cartoonish and sometimes violent levels with Led Zeppelin just a few years later.

The Who began their first major concert tour in February 1966 with the Fortunes, a group with a No. 2 hit record, “You’ve Got Your Troubles,” along with some other well-known acts including the Graham Bond Organization, one of Robert Stigwood’s groups. The tour was produced by Stigwood, and the tour manager in charge was Phil Robertson, the Moody Blues’ old road manager whom I had met at the Moodys' Roehampton home when I went to a party there, subsequently landing my job with the Who from Mike Shaw.

The first show was in London at the Finsbury Park Astoria on Seven Sisters Road, perhaps the largest theater in London. For all of us it was a new way of working: a set time of playing that had to be adhered to by all the bands, who would hopefully all be getting along together. Of course, Moony soon found a way to make mischief for the Fortunes, who used a reel-to-reel tape recorder to play the Spanish-type trumpets from their hit record. Just at the crucial time when their road manager turned it on to the cue, our Mr. Moon pulled the mains plug out, fucking up their performance of the song. Of course, Moony wasn’t caught and lived to try it out again later.

The next day was in Southend at the mouth of the River Thames by the Kursaal amusement park. On the road to Southend we came across the Fortunes speeding along the arterial road to the gig. Moony, who had the eyes of a hawk for mischief, recognized their van and instructed me to overtake it or, better still, pull up level with it. While Moony rummaged like a ferret in the van, I drove up alongside. The next thing we knew, Moony had pulled back the sliding door and was swinging an ax into the side of the Fortunes’ van, horrifying us nearly as much as the guys in their van, who were watching a crazed Moon in action with their mouths hanging wide open while I tried to keep our van from colliding with theirs. Of course, all being crazy guys, the Fortunes took it all in good nature. The nice thing about this tour was that the shows started at 7:30 p.m., and that meant we were finished early enough to get back to our beloved clubs for a boozy celebration of the day’s work.

Keith Moon’s persona would, of course, not be universally loved by every band they toured with, and he was also not against fucking with members of his own band (particularly Roger Daltrey, who was referred to as “Daisy Daltrey”). Cole recalls the start of the Who’s tour with the Spencer Davis Group in Southampton on April 14, 1966:

The two most memorable things about this show were back-to-back examples of Moony’s outrageous behavior—or his way of having fun. Pete York, who was Spencer Davis’ drummer, was very particular with his dmms. When he set them up, he used a couple pieces of cloth to handle his drums to keep the chrome rims from getting smudged from his hands. This, of course, was great amusement to the three of us watching him, but it also gave Moony food for thought. Just as he had turned off the Fortunes’ tape recorder with their backing tracks during their performance on that tour, he was waiting for a chance to get up to mischief here as well.

Upstairs in the dressing room, Moon was tormenting the screaming fans from the window by shouting at them and throwing toilet rolls at them. Then he spotted something really interesting: Roger’s Volvo P1800 parked below the window.

No one had any idea why Moony suddenly left the dressing room while leaving the window open, until five minutes later when he came back with an old house brick in his hand. Moony went straight to the window and lobbed the brick right on top of the bonnet of Roger’s Volvo, putting a nasty dent in the car. Then he closed the window and sat himself down on the sofa to get his mind working on the next plan of action.

The first show went down well for all the bands on the bill. Who manager Kit Lambert was especially happy that his new group the Merseys, consisting of Billy Kinsley and Tony Crane from the now-defunct Merseybeats, had gone down so well. The Who relaxed between shows, everyone hoping Roger wouldn’t look out the window at his car—no one was going to own up about what happened to the car bonnet. Moony went off for a wander and the next thing we heard were screams and threats coming from down below. By all accounts the mischievous Moon had demonstrated to Pete York how to take care of a drum kit by kicking Pete’s bass drum over in front of him, and by the time we got down to the stage, people were holding them apart. Pete York was a pretty big guy compared to Moony and would have killed his little arse had he landed a punch on him. Kit, ever diplomatic, took charge of the situation, and Moon was confined to the dressing room till stage time.

By the spring of 1966 the Who were bona fide pop stars, and their popularity only continued to defy gravity—as well as their own British borders—when they arrived in Paris to tape a performance for the Ready Steady Go! TV show at the Locomotive club. With a day off before rehearsals, Cole had no desire to relax, and unwittingly had the first of many episodes of mischief that would carry potentially legal consequences.

The one mission I was on for this trip was to buy myself a gas gun and shoulder holster. Viv Prince had given me the location of a gun shop near the Opera, as most of the group were either sleeping or shopping. Neville and I decided to try our luck at getting around Paris in the van and find the shop.

France, like a lot of other countries on the continent, sold guns, and since the gas gun was only for self-defense, we had no trouble buying them complete with ammunition for our future amusement. We still had to devise a plan to get them into England as they were very illegal at home, but where there’s a will, there’s a way.

For now it was fun to have them under our jackets in their shoulder holsters—they certainly gave the Ox and Moony a shock when we pulled them out on them at the hotel for a laugh later that evening.

Of course, after being at the hotel for a number of days now, it had become common knowledge that the Who were staying there, and that meant visitors of all types, some bearing gifts of drugs, others providing their bodies for our amusement since we had three rooms on the same floor. It was bedlam, with half-naked girls running around and guys getting out of control. One guy in particular had passed out on the floor and was hardly breathing. The only thing that I had heard you should do in an event like this was put them in a bath of cold water to revive them.

I ran a bath of cold water and rushed to throw him in, still clothed, and after a very short time it seemed to do the trick. Only now I had an angry French youth, pissed off, screaming and shouting, and he quickly got into a fight with me. Well, he ended up going over my balcony to the street below, which frightened the life out of me and threw me into a panic, wondering if I had mistakenly killed him. He must have fallen onto the dustbins below, making a hell of a row, which was more than enough for the hotel staff to call the police. The last thing I needed on top of everything else was to get caught with guns and drugs in my possession, and to go downstairs would lead me into the arms of the police.

Dear old Daltrey was up on the top floor with his girlfriend Anna, and my best bet was to stick the guns and drugs in his room for safekeeping. Once I reached Roger’s room, I banged on his door for him to let me in, only to have him tell me to fuck off and leave him alone. When I urgently told him I was in trouble and needed his help, I got the same answer from him. Then the screaming voice of Anna started shouting at Roger to help me and open the door, which he finally did. It was best not to tell him too much, and I asked him to let me put my little bag under his bed till the next morning. Poor old Roger nearly choked when I told him what was in the bag as I closed the door behind me. It was very lucky for me that I had gone out with Anna a year before Roger had met her.

And lucky for us, Richard, that you had a chance to share these memories. Here’s hoping that, wherever you are, Moony and the Ox aren’t causing you too much trouble.