THE YEAR OF THE MOON

Richard Cole was the black box of rock ’n’ roll.

The smoldering, indestructible child of postwar Kensal Rise, London, he became not just a legendary road manager, but the de facto chronicler of more than four decades of life inside and outside the van, thanks largely to his 1992 tell-all, Stairway to Heaven: Led Zeppelin Uncensored. An affably raucous, unpredictable, yet oddly punctual man, Richard was the embodiment of a Keith Moon drum fill. Cole passed away on Dec. 2, 2021, at age 75 after a long fight with a cancer that is surely now hobbling around with a broken jaw. Thinking of the man almost a year later, it still feels like he left the world much too soon. Richard loved fresh flowers in his Notting Hill Gate home; he loved his daughter Claire and his cat Puss Puss. But he would also have no problem throwing someone over a balcony and into a dustbin if he felt his environment was in peril. And Richard was more than capable of creating his own brand of chaos, most notably during the longest stretch of employment he would ever have: as road manager for Led Zeppelin, from their inception out of the ashes of the Yardbirds in 1968 to Cole’s cataclysmic descent from the Zoso orbit, including a doomed detox attempt that led to an improbable stint in an Italian jail after being mistaken for a terrorist bomber in 1980.