by Rees, Paul
The Seven Stars modelled itself on the great Chicago blues dens and a crowd of aficionados began gathering there to drink, smoke and play. Chief among them was Perry Foster, a local character who had hung out with the Yardbirds in London and chauffeured Sonny Boy Williamson around Birmingham. Foster, who always dressed in a blue suit with a porkpie hat perched on his head, played mean slide on a customised nine-string Hofner guitar. He had also recently put together a half-decent blues combo, the Delta Blues Band.
To Plant and his wide-eyed school friends Foster was a man to know, since to them he was a real musician. One night Plant approached him and asked if he could get up and sing with his band.
“He told me his name was Bob Plant and whipped out a washboard,” says Foster, remembering that first encounter. “I’m nine years older than him but he was a cocky little bleeder, I’ll tell you that much. He had to be educated. Being older, I knew a lot more about the blues. I told him who was who and what was what, showed him how to do the twelve-bar. But then, when you’d told him once, you didn’t need to again.”
With the Delta Blues Band, Plant began performing at the Seven Stars and other local venues. He, Foster and their rhythm guitarist, Peter Groom—soon christened “Gobsy” on account of his unfeasibly large mouth—would also get up as a trio at folk nights such as the weekly one at Stourbridge Conservative Club. Their staple set featured such blues standards as Lightnin’ Hopkins’s “Ain’t Nothing Like Whiskey” and assorted Robert Johnson songs.
The band were earning £16 a night, split five ways between them and with a pound spare for petrol. Often as not, beery audiences greeted the fifteen-year-old grammar-school boy with shouts of “Get your hair cut!” and worse, but these seemed not to ruffle him.
“Not everyone wanted the blues but he’d got what it took all right,” says Foster. “I was always saying to people, ‘If that kid ain’t a millionaire by the time he’s twenty-five, my name’s not Perry.’ I’d growl at the band if they weren’t doing things right, and I was a bit of a tough nut at times, so as Robert would say I was a terrible man but I got on with him smashing.
“He was a great big, gawky teenager, all knees and elbows. We used to drive around in a little MG sports car and make him sit in the back. He said to us his father wanted him to be an accountant. Coming to the Seven Stars was seen as taboo—he always used to tell his parents he was going off somewhere else.”
For Plant this was another new world opened up to him. He was playing with older guys but treated as an equal, begging cigarettes off them and drinking beer before he was legally allowed to do so. It did not sit well with his parents or his schoolmasters when he rolled in each morning, often late and usually bleary-eyed. But he could not—and would not—turn back. His path was set.
He began to hang out and jam with some of the other ambitious young musicians who had started turning up at the Seven Stars. There was twenty-year-old Chris Wood, quiet, withdrawn and greatly accomplished on multiple instruments, and a bassist named Andy Silvester. Both were in a band called Sounds of Blue, which was led by singer David Yeats and also featured a hotshot guitarist, Stan Webb, and pianist Christine Perfect. Sounds of Blue eventually mutated into blues rockers Chicken Shack, by which time Wood had hooked up with Stevie Winwood in Traffic. Later still, Christine Perfect married Fleetwood Mac’s bassist John McVie and joined that band.
“It was at the Seven Stars that I met Robert for the first time,” says Stan Webb. “He was with Perry Foster. He didn’t say much but I remember he had a very mod haircut and was wearing a fur coat. From the word go he had that thing about him. I guess you’d call it arrogance or an ego.”
Yet the Delta Blues Band was not to last. With little money being made and no sign of progress beyond a handful of staple gigs their singer upped and left.
Says Foster: “Robert just suddenly disappeared. Though he did leave me with his washboard.”
As 1964 progressed, so the music coming out of, and passing through, the Midlands began to evolve. A strong R&B movement had taken root in Birmingham, one fired by the release of the Rolling Stones’ cover of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” that February and with the Spencer Davis Group at its apex. It was this scene that gave rise to the Moody Blues in April 1964.
Mod truly arrived in the city at the end of the year. Taking their inspiration from the black American sounds of Stax and Tamla Motown, a glut of bands sprung up on the pub circuit, each as sharp dressed as the next, practically every one of them having Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street” in their repertoire. Earlier in 1964 a compilation album titled Brum Beat had been released (“Birmingham’s 14 greatest groups,” it erroneously trumpeted), featuring a band called the Senators performing “She’s a Mod.” The sixteen-year-old drummer on that track was named John Bonham.
Plant was not impervious to such things. He had resolved to get himself onto the local ballroom circuit, albeit still playing his beloved blues. The names of the bands he would flit through during the next year or so spoke for themselves: New Memphis Bluesbreakers, Black Snake Moan, so called after a Blind Lemon Jefferson song, and after a John Lee Hooker track, the Crawling King Snakes. All but the latter were to be short-lived and soon forgotten.
“I went to see Black Snake Moan play in a pub near Stourbridge,” says school friend Gary Tolley. “We all just thought the stuff he was doing would never catch on. We were very much still in the pop idiom while Robert was off doing something on his own.”
One song Plant had begun performing by now was Robert Johnson’s “Travelling Riverside Blues,” more commonly referred to as “The Lemon Song” on account of its suggestive lyrics—Johnson lasciviously leering, “You can squeeze my lemon ’til the juice run down my leg.” Before the decade was out it would become a calling card of Plant’s, although there was no suggestion of that then.
“That was probably his favorite one to do,” says Tolley. “I’m sure he used to sing it sometimes just to watch the reaction on people’s faces when he got to the bit about squeezing his lemon. The rest of us hadn’t got the nerve to do it, but he had. Because he was different, people in authority reacted quite strongly against him. One or two of the nastier pieces of work at school didn’t like him either, because he never seemed to have any problem picking up girls.”
He was having other troubles at King Edward VI. His studies were coming a distant second in his priorities to rehearsals and gigs. He had often struggled to get to school on time in the morning, but now his late arrival, and a subsequent dressing-down from the prefects who manned the gates, were a daily occurrence.
“The prefects had their own little room,” says Tolley. “If they didn’t particularly like you, you’d have to go there and be made to stand on a table while they all sat around looking up at you. I suppose it was designed to humiliate and embarrass, but Robert just thought it was stupid. But for all of us who were playing in a band, our academic work suffered. We were rehearsing one night a week, and playing most Wednesdays and Thursdays, and certainly every Friday. You’d get home from school, have your tea and rush through your homework, then the van would pick you up.”
At the end of each term, students filed into the school library to be confronted by Headmaster Chambers, who would summon them up one at a time and pass comment on their grades. Chambers would have told the errant Plant to pull his socks up in no uncertain terms.
With external exams looming and the pressures of his father’s expectations upon him Plant suffered a period of anxiety about his falling grades. But this passed and with it any chance he might catch up. Instead he spent the remainder of that school year skipping off the school premises and into Stourbridge town center with his clique of budding musicians.
“We would bunk off school and go and sit in the railway station café,” remembers Tolley. “Or there was a place called the Chicken Run, which was down a side street next to the town hall. We used to go in there for the bacon rolls, which you could eat down in the cellar
and feel more grown up. Robert never seemed to have any money in those days. He was always cadging cigarettes. Four of us would take our school lunch money down to the station café and each get a cup of coffee and beans on toast, and we’d all have to share with Rob.”
That summer Plant and his friends sat their O-level exams. Of the Jurymen, Tolley, Dudley and Baggott scraped a handful of passes between them and left school, off to find jobs. Plant managed but a single pass, in history. His parents intended for him to remain at King Edward VI for another year and to resit his exams.
At least things had taken a turn for the better outside of the school. Plant was singing and blowing harmonica in the Crawling King Snakes, a band that had grown up in Kidderminster, the nearest town immediately southwest of Stourbridge. From messy beginnings at such places as the local YWCA they had gradually improved enough to get themselves on the Ma Reagan circuit, and were playing twenty-minute slots at her venues as a warm-up act.
“By the time I was capable of stepping in front of a microphone the Midlands scene was full of beat groups and I was a bit late getting on the bandwagon,” Plant told me. “But I’d gotten a really good schooling playing with people quite a bit older than me. I’d already been getting up in the blues clubs for more than a year before I even thought about going to places where women danced.”
In many respects 1965 was to be a pivotal year. The first rumblings of dark and crazy days ahead were felt in the U.S. that summer as Los Angeles burned during the Watts Riots. In October, with the number of troops being drafted to Vietnam doubling, anti-war protests swept through American cities. That same month in Britain, police in Manchester arrested Ian Brady and his girlfriend Myra Hindley, charging them with the murder of five children, three of whose bodies had been discovered on nearby Saddleworth Moor.
This was also to be the year that pop music came of age. The Beatles made Rubber Soul; Bob Dylan went electric and released his first masterpiece, “Highway 61 Revisited”; the Byrds emerged on America’s West Coast; and the Who crashed out of London shouting “My Generation.” And as rock grew up out of pop, the notion that this was all to be a flash in the pan receded into the distance.
In Stourbridge, the town hall became a hub of activity, hosting weekly “Big Beat Sessions” that brought both the Who and the Small Faces to town. Each found an especially enthusiastic supporter in sixteen-year-old Plant, by now a fully fledged mod. He got a taste of this action closer to home, too. Out of Wolverhampton came the N’Betweens, later to change their name to Slade and then cranking out fuzzbox-heavy Tamla Motown covers. There were also the Shakedown Sound, formed—like Crawling King Snakes—in Kidderminster, but steps ahead of Plant’s band, bagging opening spots with the likes of the Who and local heroes the Spencer Davis Group.
Plant was especially taken with the Shakedown Sound’s singer, Jess Roden. A year older than him, Roden had, like Stevie Winwood, a freakishly soulful voice. His band were gigging most nights of the week on the Reagan circuit and beyond, performing powerful versions of blues staples such as “Smokestack Lightning” and “Hoochie Coochie Man.” The Crawling King Snakes and the Shakedown Sound became close, hanging out and copping songs off each other.
“I suppose Robert was King Mod,” says Kevyn Gammond, then guitarist in the Shakedown Sound. “He had a good eye for fashion, so he’d always have the latest Ben Sherman shirt on and the right hairstyle. I think the N’Betweens and the Shakedowns had a big influence on him, because we were all little mods, and our band had played with the Who.
“Rob was really impressed by Jess. They’d both come around to my parents’ house and ask me to work out all the chords to songs like ‘I Go Crazy’ by James Brown. That’s the way you learned then, by putting the records on. I’d be left to sit there and get on with it while they went off to play pinball at the Flamingo Café down the road.”
It was in Kidderminster at this time that Plant first came across a gifted young guitarist named Robbie Blunt. The two would hook up after school, going around to each other’s houses to listen to records and work out songs together.
None of this allowed for any appreciable improvement in Plant’s relations with his parents, or with regard to his studies during what would be his final year at King Edward VI. He had grown to like his math teacher, Mr. Colton, but otherwise the state of things between him and the masters had, if anything, deteriorated.
Michael Richards, a contemporary of Plant’s at the school, recalls him by then having a reputation as “a bit of a hooligan,” although he qualifies this by saying that “he was mischievous more than anything.” He continues: “The chemistry master was a guy named Featherstone, a nice old bloke who should have retired years ago. I remember that Robert played him up no end. But Robert was very popular, too. He hung around with a lot of people. Everybody wanted to be his friend.
“You’d hear lots of things about him, and I’m not sure a lot of them were true. There was one story that Robert’s parents had gone off on holiday and left him to stay with someone else, and he’d broken back into his own house and thrown a party.”
In that last year Plant did join the school’s jazz society and ended up sitting on its social committee. In this role he helped oversee three concerts in the school hall by King Edward VI’s resident jazz band, the Cushion Foot Stompers. For a time he also joined a jazz-influenced group called the Banned with another schoolmate, Martin Lickert, who played bass. Lickert would go on to become Ringo Starr’s chauffeur, appearing alongside his employer in Frank Zappa’s surreal 1971 movie 200 Motels.
The Banned got as far as opening the bill at the town halls in both Stourbridge and neighboring Dudley in the spring of 1965, although Plant was forced to miss the latter engagement after having contracted glandular fever. The proprietor of the town’s Groove record shop, David Yeats, who had sung in Sounds of Blue and seen Plant at the Seven Stars, replaced him for that one show. He went around to Plant’s family home the night before the gig for a hastily convened rehearsal. Shown up to his small bedroom, he found Plant lying stricken in bed.
“He took me through this book of song lyrics he had got together,” says Yeats. “I did the show, and I’d never heard anything before that was that loud. I remember standing in the middle of this fantastic noise. The audience seemed happy enough, but what they must have thought I don’t know, seeing this teenage sex god being replaced by a little bloke like me.”
Whenever things got especially strained at home, as was increasingly the case, Plant would sleep the night in the Banned’s van. The vehicle made quite an impression, since they had used lipstick and nail varnish to graffiti it.
That summer, he resat his O-levels with a little more success. He gained passes in English, English literature, geography and math. This was reported in the school’s newspaper, the Stourbridge Edwardian, as was the fact that he would be leaving King Edward VI on July 22 to train in accountancy. Yet his departure appears to have taken place rather earlier than this, and was enforced.
“I heard that one day he was off playing truant in Birmingham, walking around with a mate of his and smoking, when he bumped into one of the masters who happened to be in town on his day off,” says Michael Richards. “He was still wearing his school uniform so it was seen as a bit of a disgrace. I believe that was the culmination of a long series of problems and Robert was expelled. It did create a bit of a stir around the school. Most people thought he’d had it coming but there was also the sense that he’d had a bit of bad luck.”
There is some doubt about the veracity of this story. Gary Tolley dismisses it, although he had left King Edward VI the previous year, and no record of it happening is kept at the current school. But another of Plant’s fellow pupils during his final year, Colin Roberts, who would later return to the school to teach, supports Richards’s account.
“I don’t know the circumstances of his being expelled,” Roberts tells me, “but he must have done something bad because very few people got thrown out. The sto
ry goes that Headmaster Chambers told him that he’d never make anything of himself. When I came back to the school in the early ’70s, Chambers himself told me that Robert had later turned up at his house in a Rolls-Royce and asked the Headmaster if he remembered him.”
4
THE RUBBER MAN
He would dance across the stage, like he was floating.
The summer of 1965 would be the last time Plant’s parents were able to assert themselves when it came to his future prospects. At their behest he enrolled on a business studies course at Kidderminster College of Further Education, one supposed to equip him for a career in accountancy.
Before term started he took a temporary job as a stock boy at Stringers department store on Stourbridge High Street. He made the most of his time there, cracking jokes with the women on the shop floor. And with money in his pocket, the young mod could be seen zipping around town on a scooter, sporting a parka jacket with a Union Jack emblazoned on its back.
His second brush with academia, however, was no more diverting for him than the first. He wasn’t at college long, but long enough for his fellow students to remember him. Recording her memories of the era on a local website, one of them later wrote: “I was at Kidderminster College at the same time as Robert Plant. He used to strum a guitar in the common room, but unfortunately he didn’t impress most people and was often told to shut up.”
As had become the norm, it was in his other life that Plant was animated. Continuing to sing with the Crawling King Snakes, he had also ingratiated himself with local promoter Ma Reagan. She had him spinning records in between acts at her Old Hill Plaza. He would play Stax and Motown tunes, but also the Small Faces, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. On occasion Ma Reagan would also ask him to take on the MC’s duties at the ballroom.
“I became the apple of her eye,” Plant told me. “When she made me Master of Ceremonies, I’d arrive at the Plaza on my Lambretta, go into the dressing room and put my suit on, and then go out and introduce people like Little Stevie Wonder. I remember he came out with his hand on his bandleader’s shoulder, and he put him on the microphone. Then he started playing ‘Fingertips Part 2.’ This was in Old Hill in the Black Country!