Pub where John Bonham started his last day

On September 24, 1980, John Bonham -- Led Zeppelin's drummer and one of rock music's most powerful and celebrated percussionists -- reportedly began drinking at the Chequers Inn in Cutnall Green, the Worcestershire village where he lived at Old Hyde Farm. He continued drinking through the day, consuming a reported forty shots of vodka over the course of roughly twenty-four hours, before travelling south to Jimmy Page's house at Clewer, near Windsor, where Led Zeppelin were due to begin rehearsals for a North American tour. He was helped to bed after arriving in a state of extreme intoxication. In the early hours of September 25, he was found unresponsive. He was 32 years old. The cause of death was asphyxiation.

Bonham had been struggling with alcohol for several years, a fact that those close to him were aware of and deeply worried about. His drinking was both a symptom of the pressures of a decade of Led Zeppelin -- the scale, the success, the relentlessness -- and a personal vulnerability that had worsened as the band had aged. His playing, however, had never diminished: the power, the precision, and the feel that made him one of the defining rock drummers of all time were fully intact to the end. He had just turned 32 six weeks before his death.

Led Zeppelin dissolved immediately following Bonham's death. The surviving members -- Page, Plant, and Jones -- issued a statement saying that they could not continue without him. The Chequers Inn in Cutnall Green stands near the farm where Bonham had settled with his family, in the Worcestershire countryside he had grown up in. The village is quiet agricultural England, an unlikely setting for the man who played 'Moby Dick' for twenty minutes every night, but that was exactly where he was most at home.