Which hotel was the location of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Riot House’?
Motorbike rides through corridors several storeys up. Glass bottles lobbed at distant billboards, shattering on busy roads below. Furniture shunted out of windows. Other furniture was broken up and set ablaze. And a hyperbolic proclamation in the direction of the Hollywood sign by Robert Anthony Plant. These were just some of the shenanigans that Led Zeppelin got up to in their notorious ‘Riot House’ during the mid-1970s.
Whether it was Zeppelin’s drummer John Bonham or Richard Cole, the man supposed to be keeping the band out of trouble as their tour manager, riding the Harley Davidson around walkways frequented by other guests is still up for debate. We do know that the motorcycle belonged to Bonham, and that he’d tried similar things before in a hotel lobby.
What’s beyond doubt is that the British progenitors of heavy metal created their own playground within the four walls of a Sunset Boulevard home-from-home. They splashed out on six floors and a $50,000 security deposit for them and their entourage to do as they pleased while on tour in the US. And, as it turned out, that deposit came in handy on multiple occasions, as Zeppelin left a trail of destruction in their wake, once coming close to burning down the whole building.
Perhaps the best-known incident of all at the hotel occurred on one of the hotel’s balconies in 1975, when Robert Plant, almost certainly in an inebriated state, surveyed the scene before him and declared without a hint of irony, “I am a golden god!” Of course, this incident has since been spoofed in Cameron Crowe’s semi-biographical film Almost Famous. Unlike Crowe’s character Russell Hammond, though, Plant would likely have found much of the world in agreement with him at the time, as ridiculous as his proclamation was.
So, where were they staying?
Zeppelin didn’t invent the ‘Riot House’. They were just picking up from where the Rolling Stones, The Who and The Doors had left off at the same hotel. It was there that Keith Richards flung the TV out of the window that gave rise to the proverbial example of rock star behaviour. Keith Moon soon followed suit. And Jim Morrison nearly fell to his death while living there in the late 1960s, and the place probably inspired the title of the Doors album Morrison Hotel.
Somehow still standing and open to guests today, the Andaz West Hollywood is one of the oldest hotels leased by Hyatt Hotels & Resorts. It opened in 1963, and became a hotspot for some of rock’s biggest names later in the decade because of its prime location in the middle of the Sunset Strip, and its proximity to some of Hollywood’s most celebrated music venues and nightspots.
Since its ‘Riot House’ heyday, the hotel has been host to various other stars, including Thin Lizzy, Guns N’ Roses, and Little Richard, who lived there for a decade. But even he didn’t wrack up a tab quite as large as Led Zeppelin at their most outrageous.
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