The infamous Seattle hotel that Led Zeppelin were banned from entering
Hotels and rock stars are natural enemies, admittedly, for reasons largely unknown.
Seemingly, since the dawn of rock and roll hedonism, rock stars have taken it upon themselves to besiege and destroy hotel rooms across the land, and Led Zeppelin were instrumental in starting that trend towards the tail-end of the 1960s, much to the chagrin of one Seattle institution.
Since it first opened back in 1962, The Edgewater in Seattle’s Central Waterfront has certainly made its mark on the music history of the city. For starters, it played host to The Beatles during their 1964 tour of the States, seeing it set upon by the crazed devotees of the Beatlemania age. In the many decades that followed, everybody from The Rolling Stones to Kurt Cobain passed through its corridors, but few ravaged the building in the same way as Led Zeppelin.
During their journey to the upper echelon of hard rock stardom, Led Zeppelin laid the foundations for many of the tropes that came to define the hedonistic lifestyle of rich, young rockstars. Among them was a tendency to destroy hotel rooms in a haze of drug and alcohol fueled anarchy, and while a few broken TVs is a small price to pay for the kind of rock mastery Zeppelin were creating, some of their antics had far more sinister elements to them.
Perhaps the most famous – or infamous – incident of Led Zeppelin’s touring days occurred at The Edgewater back in 1969, after the band had performed at the Seattle Pop Festival. Along with fellow hard rock harbingers Vanilla Fudge, the band returned to their hotel rooms to engage in the kind of drunken, drug-fueled depravity that they were already growing a reputation for.
At some point during the evening, reportedly after both Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, and John Paul Jones had left the vicinity, things took a rather serious turn when the band’s tour manager, Richard Cole, tied a young groupie to a hotel bed.
At that time, The Edgewater allowed guests to fish from their hotel rooms, given the building’s location right on the water, which is reportedly how this mob came into possession of either a mud shark or a red snapper – depending on whose account of the evening you believe.
One fact that seemingly isn’t up for debate, however, is that somebody in the group sexually assaulted that so-called groupie with the fish, with some suggestion that the incident was even filmed. Needless to say, the incident casts a rather shameful shadow over Led Zeppelin’s early days, even if none of the band members themselves appears to have been the ones to carry out the heinous act of assaulting a – according to various accounts – teenage girl with a shark.
In the wake of the incident, Frank Zappa translated it into his 1971 track ‘The Mud Shark’, in which he pinned the blame largely on Vanilla Fudge. Nevertheless, it was enough to get Led Zeppelin banned from The Edgewater indefinitely.
Unfortunately, being banned from the Seattle inn was not enough to curb Led Zeppelin’s trail of hotel-based destruction, their famously destructive tendencies becoming the basis for the comedic stylings of both Spinal Tap and the group at the heart of Almost Famous, and Cole remaining their tour manager until their 1980 split. Still, the mud shark incident remains one of the most bizarre and shameful tales in the history of rock and roll depravity.
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