The 10 Wildest Led Zeppelin Legends, Fact-Checked

Led Zeppelin Once Defiled a Groupie With a Mud Shark

THE BACKSTORY: The most notorious of all Zeppelin legends began when the band played the Seattle Pop Festival on July 27th, 1969, then retired to the Edgewater Inn. The building sits atop Seattle’s Puget Sound; guests can actually fish directly from their windows. The 1985 Led Zeppelin biography Hammer of the Gods – which got much of its information from Zep road manager Richard Cole – describes a graphic scene in one of the rooms. “A pretty young groupie with red hair was disrobed and tied to the bed,” wrote author Stephen Davis. “Led Zeppelin then proceeded to stuff pieces of shark into her vagina and rectum.”

THE TRUTH: This one’s fishy. A different version of the mud-shark incident has Cole as the fish-wielding culprit; the band Vanilla Fudge have also claimed responsibility for the incident. Their drummer, Carmine Appice, says the girl in question was a groupie who’d tagged along with him, and his keyboardist Mark Stein filmed the entire encounter. Zeppelin were supposedly in the hotel at the time, though only John Bonham was around for the incident. Somewhere out there is a sixtysomething woman who might be able to confirm the whole thing, but it’s hard to imagine her coming forward.

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