Cole, Richard

Cole, who at first was planning to become a drummer (and even bought himself a drum kit), then tried several professions: he worked, in particular, as a clothing designer, and even claimed that it was in his shirts that John Lennon and Ringo Starr appeared on the cover of the album Revolver ^[1] .

After meeting with Record Mirror journalist Richard Green in 1965, Cole entered the music business and soon entered the rock band Unit 4 + 2 as a tour manager, from where he transferred to The Who and then to The New Vaudeville Band (1966). In 1967, Cole went to the USA and for some time worked as a sound engineer with Vanilla Fudge . After learning that The Yardbirds were going to the USA, he got in touch with manager Peter Grant (a friend of the New Vaudeville Band) and went to work under his supervision. After the collapse of The Yardbirds, Grant and Cole became respectively the manager and tour manager of Led Zeppelin.

Richard Cole remained an odious figure in the history of Led Zeppelin (since he was directly related to all the scandals associated with the group), but in his professional activity he showed some innovative qualities. In particular, for the first time under his leadership, a British rock band touring in the USA, abandoning the use of other people's equipment, began to bring it with him, along with the English crew of stage workers. This practice was subsequently widespread ^[2] .

It was Cole who took upon himself the responsibility of supplying the “groups” to the Led Zeppelin members; he knew some while still working with The Yardbirds and The Who ^[3] .

Cole was also responsible for receiving cash after the concerts. It was in May 1973 that he became the main suspect in the case of the loss of a large sum ($ 203 thousand) from a safe at the Drake Hotel during the Led Zeppelin concert in Madison Square Garden . Cole, who had the keys to the safe and turned out to be the first to notice the loss, was arrested, but passed a lie detector test, after which the charges were dropped from him ^[4] . No money was found, nor was the kidnapper. Subsequently, the group sued the Drake Hotel ^[5] .

In 1977, during a tour of Led Zeppelin in the USA, Richard Cole was one of the participants and is believed to be the main culprit of the incident during the tour of the USA in 1977, when he personally invited security guard John Bindon started a fierce fight with promoters Bill Graham ^[6] . Grant, Cole, Bindon, and John Bonham, who also participated in the massacre, received suspended sentences. Grant later admitted that having hired Bindon, he made the most serious mistake in his career as a music manager ^[7] .

Richard Cole, who was solely responsible for delivering drugs and alcohol to the members of the group, was eventually fired in the summer of 1980 after Grant decided to put an end to these abuses ^[8] . Going to Italy to take a detoxification course, he was mistakenly arrested on charges of terrorist activity (he was mistaken for the man who organized the bombings in Bologna) and spent some time in prison ^[9] .

After being fired from Led Zeppelin, Cole worked as a tour manager for Eric Clapton , Black Sabbath , Lita Ford , Ozzy Osbourne and Three Dog Night ; in later years he collaborated in the same field with Gipsy Kings , Crazy Town and Fu Manchu , worked as the manager of Fem 2 Fem ^[10] .

After the collapse of Led Zeppelin, Cole began to invite authors of unofficial biographies of the group, in particular, Stephen Davis, who wrote perhaps the most famous of them, “Hammer of the Gods” ( English Hammer of the Gods ). Cole, on whose memoirs most of the book was built, claimed that he received only $ 1250 for his work. Davis, in addition, “repaid” him with the conclusion that it was he, Cole, who created all the chaos that was going on around Led Zeppelin ^[3] .

Robert Plant criticized both Davis and Cole in a 1985 NME interview, saying their book is not credible. “All these stories were leaking from the girls who were supposedly with me in the rooms while they were with him,” ^[11] , said the former vocalist of the group. Plant noted that it was Cole who created the unhealthy atmosphere within and around the group, for which he was eventually fired ^[11] . “Most of the time he was out of his mind,” Plant said, explaining why the “facts” that Cole insists should not be trusted.

Cole, frustrated by his collaboration with Davis, wrote his own unofficial story, Stairway to Heaven: Led Zeppelin Uncensored, inviting Richard Trubo to collaborate. Jimmy Page admitted that he was able to force himself to read only two chapters, from which he felt “just bad”, the presentation of events was so absurdly false. A similar opinion was expressed by John Paul Jones : he said that the authors mixed up all kinds of gossip in a heap, providing them with fictional finals, and set as their task “to portray us as pathetic scum, and not as funny guys as we really were” ^[12] .

Jones was particularly outraged by how Cole portrayed John Bonham in his book: the bass player vowed never to speak with his former tour manager ^[12] . In an interview with PR-Inside magazine, Jones said that when he directly asked Cole why he had distorted the facts to such an extent, he explained that he needed money for drugs ^[13] . Despite his disgust with Richard Cole, three former members of Led Zeppelin invited him to a 2007 concert in the VIP box ^[14] .

• Interview with Richard Cole
• Cole, Richard, and Trubo, Richard (1992), Stairway to Heaven: Led Zeppelin Uncensored , New York: HarperCollins, ISBN 0-06-018323-3
• Welch, Chris (2002), Peter Grant: The Man Who Led Zeppelin , London: Omnibus Press. ISBN 0-7119-9195-2 .