The day John Bonham destroyed a limo: “For reasons I never understood”
The 1970s, in all its rock mythos and cautionary tale, found no greater emblem of the era’s fraught hedonism than John Bonham.
It was the age of the hellraiser. History holds a more complicated view of the unabashed decadence afforded to the rich and famous over 50 years ago, the lauded celebration of pop culture’s keen imbibers and non-stop party people now prickles with a disquieting tarnish to their legendary appetites.
The likes of The Who, The Rolling Stones, and Aerosmith are all surrounded by wild tales of queasy power dynamics, nonexistent boundaries, and an appetite for excess hurtling toward an early grave.
Led Zeppelin drummer Bonham towers with a colossal presence in the uneasy tapestry of rock’s feral past. Boasting a big character matching his thunderous heft behind the kit – “I want my drums to sound like fucking cannons,” he was reported to demand once in the studio – his allegedly explosive temper also mires a fascination with his hard-partying debauchery, roadies instructed to stay out of his way lest they trigger his infamous volatility.
It proved to be his downfall, dying at 32 after 40 shots of vodka in his system in September 1980.
But, perhaps all of us want to trash a hotel room? Or at least we’d like to if we knew the overworked, underpaid, and working-class room steward didn’t have to clean up after such destructive indulgence. Fact is, wild abandon amid the rock world, in all of its Dionysian thrill and selfish chaos, flashes a moment in broader culture before corporate muzzling, shrivelled economic wiggle room, and a neoliberal cult of career-obsessed social hustle shines a romanticised light on the detonating antics wrought from Bonham’s TNT bomb to social mores.
Amid tales of driving his Harley Davidson through the Chateau Marmont and downing bottles of vodka like water was a keen embrace of luxury automobile desecration. Freshly joining Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song label around 1976, Welsh guitarist Dave Edmunds was handed a chunky cheque and the offer to hang out with the band during their North American tour the following year. While mainly socialising with frontman Robert Plant, one brief encounter with ‘Bonzo’ Bonham’s gleeful carnage left an impression on the Love Sculpture guitarist.
“I was in a limo in New York with Robert and Bonzo once, and Bonzo tore the inside of the limo to pieces for reasons I never understood,” Edmunds recalled to Classic Rock in 2008. “It was an interesting experience travelling with them to see what life could be like with the big boys.”
It’s an act of car wreckage that fuelled Bonham’s mythos, no doubt shocking and hilarious in the moment, if leaving Edmunds perplexed when casting his mind back in later and wiser life. Perhaps no one said it better than Led Zeppelin’s road manager, Richard Cole? Legend has it that Bonham’s son, Jason, had asked Cole to tell him something great about his drumming legend father, to later state, “What was I supposed to tell him, that his father was a violent alcoholic fuckwit?”
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