What Does Mudshark Mean? an Objective Guide to the Word, History, and Backlash
On July 28, 1969, Led Zeppelin and psychedelic rock band Vanilla Fudge shared a bill at the Seattle Pop Festival. Both acts booked rooms at the Edgewater Inn. What occurred in room 227 over that weekend became one of the most distorted urban legends in music history.
Sensationalized accounts, most notably Stephen Davis’s 1985 Led Zeppelin biography Hammer of the Gods, alleged that Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, and John Bonham forcibly tied up a young red-haired groupie and subjected her to horrific acts using a freshly caught shark. The reality, confirmed decades later by the musicians and witnesses in the room, involved an entirely different cast of characters.
Vanilla Fudge drummer Carmine Appice and bassist Tim Bogert had spent the afternoon dangling fishing lines from their hotel windows. They hauled in dozens of small spiny dogfish, leaving them in bathtubs filled with ice. Led Zeppelin’s wild tour manager, Richard Cole, alongside members of Vanilla Fudge and a willing groupie, staged an absurd, drunken bedroom scene. Cole briefly pressed the nose of a small, deceased dogfish against the woman’s skin while Mark Stein filmed parts of the room with an 8mm camera.
No members of Led Zeppelin participated directly in the act. Robert Plant and Jimmy Page were not even in the room. As Appice later confirmed in his autobiography and repeated interviews, the incident was an unhinged, consensual prank between tour personnel and a groupie looking to shock the room, which rock journalism subsequently exaggerated into an act of horrific violence attributed to rock's biggest band.
