What actually happened with Led Zeppelin, a mud shark, and a groupie in 1969

Of all of the wild urban legends in the history of rock and roll, Led Zeppelin’s infamous 1969 ‘Mud Shark Incident’ is perhaps the most baffling and graphic. And it might even be true. 

The story involves a groupie, some of the most famous rockers of all time, plenty of drugs, what could arguably be called outside-the-box thinking, and, well, a mud shark.

If your first question is, ‘What is a mud shark?’ you certainly aren’t alone. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a mud shark refers to ‘several kinds of sluggish bottom-dwelling sharks.’ If you’re having trouble picturing it, the fish looks more like a giant catfish than a shark. 

You’ll be upset to have such a clear mental image shortly, but now that you do, we can get down to it.

Music rapidly changed in the late 60s, with a cultural revolution sweeping the US and UK and leaving a restless generation starving for a new kind of music to represent them. Led Zeppelin was among the bands answering that call, earning a level of devotion from fans that bordered on fanaticism and idol worship. 

As the legend goes, the band played the Seattle Pop Festival on July 27, 1969, just months after their eponymous debut album skyrocketed them to global stardom. 

Who was involved in the Mud Shark Incident?

Jimmy Page (founder and lead guitarist), Robert Plant (lead singer), John Paul Jones (bassist and keyboardist), John Bonham (drummer), and their road manager Richard Cole stayed in the Edgewater Inn after the gig. 

The specific hotel is worth noting because, sitting atop Puget Sound, it’s known for the fact that guests can fish directly from the windows of their rooms. Maybe you can see where this is going. 

Summarily, as the story goes, some or all of the members of Led Zeppelin and a band called Vanilla Fudge (with whom Zeppelin was playing at the festival) pleasured (or at least… sexually engaged) a groupie with a mud shark and filmed the encounter. 

Over the years, many have written off the salacious rumour as entirely made up, while others insist it’s just too bizarre to be fiction. Here’s everything we know about the truth behind one of the most famous and bizarre pieces of lore in rock history. 

How a Frank Zappa song made the Mud Shark Incident famous 

The fishy tale has been circulating for decades, and it’s challenging to know when it first became a fixture of Led Zeppelin fan knowledge, but it was definitely memorialised (and perhaps sensationalised) on Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention’s live album, Fillmore East, in 1971.

Simply and aptly titled The Mud Shark, the song includes the lyrics: ‘Let’s say you were a travelling rock‘n’roll band called The Vanilla Fudge / Let’s say one night you checked into the Edgewater Inn with an 8mm movie camera.’ 

The song continues: ‘Enough money to rent a pole, and just to make it more interesting — a succulent young lady (mnaaaah!) with a taste for the bizarre…’ The chorus then describes The Mud Shark as a new dance craze sweeping the nation. 

The song claims Zappa heard the story straight from members of Vanilla Fudge during a ‘chance meeting’ in the airport in Chicago right after the incident supposedly took place. 

This version of the story agrees with the one your run-of-the-mill Zeppelin fan is most likely to know: Vanilla Fudge’s drummer Carmine Appice handled the seafood and keyboardist Mark Stein was behind the camera. 

According to this account, only Zeppelin’s John Bonham was involved, and even that is questionable. The rest of the members of Led Zeppelin were either merely onlookers or not there at all, depending on who you ask. 

Richard Cole’s version of the Mud Shark Incident

(Trigger Warning: Graphic depictions of a sexual situation involving an animal and violence from this point on)

A more concrete account of the incident came to light in 1985 when the unofficial Led Zeppelin biography Hammer of the Gods hit bookshelves. The book claims that all or most Going to California band members were involved in the event. 

Road manager Richard Cole describes the incident as follows, according to author Stephen Davis: ‘A pretty young groupie with red hair was disrobed and tied to the bed. Led Zeppelin then proceeded to stuff pieces of shark into her vagina and rectum.’

If this is to be believed, Cole and Bonham were the primary fish wielders and Mark Stein was behind the camera (this detail remains consistent in most versions…).

Cole defended the incident in the book, saying: ‘It was nothing malicious or harmful, no way!…She might have been hit by a shark a few times for disobeying orders, but she didn’t get hurt.’

The road manager gave another first-hand account in his 2002 autobiography Stairway to Heaven: Led Zeppelin Uncensored: ‘Word about the escapade spread quickly. Rumours circulated that the girl had been raped…that she had been crying hysterically…that she had pleaded for me to stop…that she had struggled to escape…that a shark had been used to penetrate her. None of the stories was true.’

It’s worth noting that members of Led Zeppelin have long dismissed many of Cole’s stories over the years as nonsense, claiming that not only did he have a penchant for exaggeration, but he was so obliterated on drugs and alcohol during his years with the band that it’s unlikely his memory is very reliable. 

Carmine Appice’s version of the Mud Shark Incident

This brings us to what is probably the most accurate version of the Mud Shark Incident (if such a thing exists), and it’s by far the most shocking. 

In Carmine Appice’s 2016 autobiography, Stick It! My Life of Sex, Drums, and Rock ‘n’ Roll, Appice gleefully describes the drug-fuelled night that has become a famous part of rock history. 

We can trust Appice’s memory, according to his co-author Ian Gittins, who wrote: ‘Carmine has never really been a big drug-taker or big drinker, so his memory’s intact. He can remember things in excruciating detail and is an unusually fertile source.’

According to the drummer, his bandmate Tim Bogert, John Paul Jones, Robert Plant, and Plant’s wife, Maureen, were getting high in Jones’ room on the night of the incident when an unnamed groupie Appice hooked up with the night before reappeared and declared: ‘I want to make a movie with you guys.’

At some point, Appice went to the next-door hotel room where John Bonham, his wife Pat, and Richard Cole were fishing out the window. He told them about the groupie and took a look at the ‘two-foot-long, dead-eyed, ferocious-looking mud shark’ they had reeled in and kept alive in the room’s bathtub. 

Sometime later, back in the first room, Appice recounts that Bonham, Cole, Mark Stein, and several crew members came into the room with a camera and lights, wanting to fulfill the groupie’s cinematic aspirations. 

The details of what went down between the groupie and the shark are even more shocking than you think (Trigger Warning, again)

While Appice insists it was all consensual (did anyone ask the shark?), he does allow that the girl was on drugs at the time, and it’s not clear whether she knew a live shark was going to be involved. 

When Appice realised the shark had been transported from the other room, he asked the men: ‘What the f*** are you going to do with that?’

Told to strip naked, the groupie was ‘thrown on the bed,’ and Cole ‘started whipping the girl with it [the mud shark], beating her again and again as she writhed around the bed,’ as Stein filmed. 

Each time the shark hit the girl, Appice writes, ‘its teeth ripped her skin and left tiny blood-red scars all over her back.’ 

As dark as that sounds, Appice claims she ‘was bucking and screaming with pleasure’ throughout the ordeal. 

Things only escalated from there, and soon the groupie was penetrated by the fish (the details of this are blessedly vague). At some point, Led Zeppelin roadie Clive Coulson and Vanilla Fudge road manager Bruce Wayne joined the chaos, according to this version. 

Appice said the girl was ‘so into it’ and that the room was crowded with people involved in both bands – though it was Wayne and Cole who were the leading players – as Stein continued to film. 

According to Appice, it was Wayne and Cole who took it into the realm of bestiality, and it was at this point that most people left.

He claims the rest of the people in the room soon entered the hallway, laughing hysterically in disbelief. At some point, the whole thing got so loud that the hotel manager appeared and put an end to the home movie. 

Appice later wrote of the groupie: ‘I wish her well. Believe it or not, she was a nice girl.’

In a (somewhat) comforting addition to the sordid business, Appice told Classic Rock in 2016: ‘I started doing these weekly radio shows in the States a few years ago. One time we were talking about Fairbanks, Alaska, and this person called up claiming to be the woman. 

‘She actually spoke to my friend, the DJ on the morning show. Let’s face it, you’ve got to be either the woman or out of your mind to make that claim. But she said she had moved to Alaska, raised a family, and lived happily ever after.’

Is the Mud Shark Incident silly folkore or a disturbing account of something darker?

While it’s often told as a funny and far-fetched bit of trivia involving one of the most famous bands in history, the incident is a reminder of the excesses and debauchery synonymous with rock and roll in its heyday. 

To call musicians like those in Led Zeppelin ‘rock gods’ was by no means an exaggeration throughout the late-60s, 70s, and 80s, when groupies were so devoted to their favourite bands that they were willing to do anything to get close to them. 

Men in the rock scene – often young, often thrust into the spotlight suddenly and with very few guardrails in place – were allowed to operate with near impunity as they partook in a growing drug culture yet to fully reveal its lethal consequences. 

As a result, rock stars and other powerful people in the industry often took advantage of their status to treat those in their orbit (often women nad young girls) as disposable forms of entertainment. 

Steven Tyler of Aerosmith was just one rock star to publicly date an underaged girl without consequences, having groupie Julie Holcomb’s mother sign over custody to him when Julie was just 16. 

Its common knowledge that Lori Mattix, one of many children in the rock scene in the early 70s known as ‘baby groupies,’ was approached by and subsequently began a relationship with 28-year-old Jimmy Page of The Doors when she was 14, after first losing her virginity to David Bowie. 

Nicki Sixx of Motley Cue admitted in the band’s autobiography The Dirt that in the 80s, he ‘pretty much’ raped an intoxicated groupie and then sent Tommy Lee to do the same.

Guns N’ Roses’ lead singer Axl Rose was notorious for his ‘rock and roll lifestyle,’ which often fell into grey areas of sexual consent. In Rose’s case, as with many of his peers, he was enabled by the industry and its representatives. 

In just one example of his dubious treatment of groupies, the band’s manager, Vicky Hamilton, let Rose hide from the police in her house after a woman pressed charges against him in the 80s. 

As The Telegraph notes, famous rock journalist Mick Farren was appalled at finding backstage scenes with Led Zeppelin ‘running in semen and beer and unpleasantness,’ noting that he witnessed members of the band ‘getting their d—- sucked by 13-year-olds under the table.’ 

Many women involved in the scene during classic rock’s golden years now recall toxic, drug-fuelled environments in which saying no rarely felt like an option. 

Even when there was no implication of wrongdoing, the culture of hedonism was distinct. Gene Simmons of KISS often boasts he slept with over 4,200 women during the band’s biggest years, and even claims to have taken a Polaroid picture of each woman. 

It’s impossible modern musicians could get away with this kind of behaviour at such a large scale without backlash. In fact, during the #MeToo movement, other famous figures faced backlash for their years-past behaviour, but classic rock stars seem immune to similar reckonings. There’s even a kind of awe and glorification that continues to exist, even now, around industry stories of stars taking sexual advantage of their positions. 

Dr Rosemary Lucy Hill, from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the University of Leeds, uses the example of Pamela Des Barres to The Guardian – a famous groupie who slept with Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, and Jim Morrison, among others – when discussing the way the rock and roll groupie has evolved.

‘Her idea is that the groupie is the muse,’ Hill says of Des Barres, who has written numerous books about her experiences. ‘The way that she talks about sex with musicians as being about getting close to the music is really powerful.

‘When you start to think about music and sex in those terms, it changes your idea of what it means to be a groupie. I’m talking about consensual sex, but some people think it’s never a free choice because of all the expectations. I think both of these things are true at the same time – and that makes it really complicated.’

Cameron Crowe – who the film Almost Famous is based on – was a teenage Rolling Stone journalist profiling Zeppelin in 1973. He later said of the film’s depiction of rock groupies: ‘What I was trying to capture was the elaborate denial that the girls buy into. They talk about themselves as muses… but when you get the rock stars, you realise (the girls) of course are the trinkets.’

The ‘free love’ of the 60s also played a role in creating an environment in which the Mud Shark Incident could happen, and it’s not impossible that everyone involved was a willing and enthusiastic participant despite uneven power dynamics. 

As Appice put it to Classic Rock: ‘You have to understand that those days were so different. It was all peace and love and women walking around with no bras and see-through blouses. It was a really crazy time, birth control pills were just coming out and, politically and socially, everything was different.’

Jimmy Page has put it even more succinctly: ‘There’s a lot of water under the bridge for everyone who survived that era. End of story.’

However you want to contextualize it, the Mud Shark Incident is undoubtedly among the most memorable stories in rock and roll history – even as it forces one to consider the genre’s problematic legacy that modern fans remain reluctant to face. 

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