Legendary drummer Jason Bonham has revealed how Led Zeppelin‘s Jimmy Page gave him his first line of cocaine when he was just 16.
Jason, the son of Led Zeppelin’s late drummer John Bonham, told Howard Stern how the guitar icon offered him the drug at a hotel while the band was on tour.
Appearing on Stern’s SiriusXM show, Bonham explained how he entered Page’s hotel room to discover a woman on the floor who was meowing and wearing a collar.
“Jimmy was the first one to ever give it to me,” Bonham told Stern. “We got called to his room. … I was 16 at this point, and there was a woman on the floor with a collar on, meowing, and he had this grinder thing … and he turned it over and he went, ‘Here you go,’ and I went, ‘Thanks.’ He’s like, ‘You’ve done this before, right?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, of course I have.'”
But in his naivety, Bonham hoovered up the drug without realising that it was supposed to be shared between the whole band.
“I just did all of it, and he went, ‘Just like your father – you know, that was supposed to be for all of us.’”
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While Jason originally viewed the comparisons to his dad as a positive thing, he later realised that it wasn’t necessarily the case.
“I was taking it wrong. Sometimes when I got really drunk, they’d go, ‘He’s just like his old man.'”
Sharing other memories of working with Page, Bonham explained how the guitarist once cut short a performance after learning that he was taking cocaine.
“I would be doing blow, and they found out,” he continued. “So Jimmy cut his guitar solo short. I was halfway down into the dressing rooms and I suddenly hear [that] I’m supposed to come in now. … So we ran back and Jimmy’s just standing there. He was angry because we didn’t offer him any.”
Bonham has since stood in for his dad at several Led Zeppelin reunions – including the band’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995 and their comeback performance at Ahmet Ertegun’s O2 Arena tribute concert in 2007.
But it’s unlikely that another comeback will ever happen, with frontman Robert Plant previously admitting that the band would only reunite in a “chip shop”.