by Richard Cole
Robert Sr. spent many idle, anxious hours wondering how to steer his son back toward a more “respectable” life and career. All the while, the younger Plant was making his own homemade instruments (harmonicas and kazoos) and treating each as if it were a Stradivarius. While his dad was dejected over Robert’s disinterest in making the most of his education, the teenager was poising himself in front of a mirror, teaching himself to sing by imitating Elvis records.
Most of the rock musicians—from the Beatles to the Stones to Led Zeppelin—who emerged in the sixties came from a working-class background. Their parents had survived the terrors and the heartaches of World War II—including Germany’s savage bombing of London that ignited the city in flames and left much of it in ruins. The British economy had been devastated as well by years of war, and it struggled to recover. For many young musicians in Britain—who had grown up in households listening to Frank Sinatra and the Stan Kenton Orchestra—rock music became not only a way they might escape poverty, but it was their form of rebellion, too, a means of lashing out at the middle-and upper-class traditions that, to them, represented the oppression and the pain they and their families had endured. As the years progressed, rock music increasingly became one of their most potent weapons in the rebellion.
But while rock music may have primarily been the domain of the underclass, the Plants were purely middle class. Born in 1948 in West Bromwich, Staffordshire, and growing up in the west Midlands in the small rural town of Kidderminster, Robert had a background that was so highbrow that in the earliest days of Led Zeppelin, he used to look a bit disdainfully at the rest of us “commoners.” He never said much that was condescending, but he sometimes seemed to breathe arrogance, as though he were a cut above us.
Robert attended King Edward VI grammar school in Stourbridge, where schoolboy pranks were part of his way of life. One afternoon, he concealed a pair of tennis shoes inside a piano, making it impossible for the teacher to play—a caper that got him expelled from the music program, which was the class he most loved.
Beginning at age fourteen, Robert let his hair grow (ostensibly to attract girls) and started playing with rock bands. He began spending less time on his schoolwork, although he did show some interest in subjects like archeology. More than anything, he felt driven to pursue his musical interests, even if his family reacted skeptically to them.
At one point, Robert Sr. hoped that his son would eventually get his musical passions out of his system. He used to drop his boy off at gigs at the Seven Stars Blues Club, where the teenager sang with the Delta Blues Band, accompanied by Chris Wood’s flute and Terry Foster’s eight-string guitar. When the songs were familiar, the crowd cheered and the young singer became ecstatic. But Robert was also inclined to introduce blues songs by unknowns like Blind Boy Fuller, hushing the audience and leaving them as bewildered as if he were performing Carmen or Madama Butterfly.
Robert was bright enough to realize that his odds of achieving success were slim. “Even the most talented singers usually don’t make it,” he said. “I’ll give myself till the age of twenty; if I’m still struggling by then, I’ll move on to something else.”
Robert bounded from one band to another: The Crawling King Snakes (named after a John Lee Hooker song)…Black Snake Moan (named after a tune by Blind Lemon Jefferson)…the New Memphis Bluesbreakers. As he played this version of musical hopscotch, his voice began to get more attention. It literally brought people through the doors to hear that soulful, sensitive, powerful voice.
“Maybe something’s starting to happen,” Robert told his friends, jacking up his hopes as he sang before full houses. But despite the increasing recognition, he still had to deal with more disappointments.
In 1966, after joining a band called Listen, some scouts from CBS Records liked what they heard. They were awestruck by Robert’s strong voice and nearly as impressed with his nonstop body gyrations on stage. CBS signed the band to record three singles, the first of which was a slick remake of the Young Rascals hit “You Better Run.” It was released with little fanfare, however, and attracted even less attention from radio stations and record buyers. It was a brutal introduction to the music industry.
Robert was discouraged but not defeated by the lack of recognition the record received. “It’ll happen,” he told friends, trying to keep his own confidence level high. “I believe in myself, and that’s half the battle.” In fact, he was battling his own inner turmoil, beginning to wonder if anything would ever really start to break in his favor.
In 1967, CBS Records asked Robert to record two additional singles to fulfill its contract with Listen. It seemed like a wonderful opportunity—the chance to go into the studio on his own. But Robert’s excitement was crushed by CBS’s selection of the songs he would record. One of them, “Our Song,” was a lushly orchestrated Italian ballad for which English lyrics had been written. One of Robert’s friends said, “What the hell are they trying to do to him? Turn Robert into the next Tom Jones?” Robert was embarrassed by the record. He almost felt like going into hiding or personally melting down all the vinyl on which it was pressed. His instincts about it may have been correct: “Our Song” sold an unremarkable 800 copies as the record company did, in fact, try to promote him as a Tom Jones incarnate—a campaign about as successful as the Edsel. At least for the moment, a very downcast Robert saw his recording career hit a nasty brick wall.
“If my mom hadn’t bought a copy of the records, the damn things wouldn’t have sold at all,” Robert joked. He wasn’t exaggerating by much.
During this time, despite his middle-class background, Robert became a Mod, wearing Chelsea boots and snugfitting jackets and joining battles with Rockers in the borough of Margate. He also cut his long, blond locks into a French style that he patterned after Steve Marriott, the lead singer of Small Faces, who had posed the compelling musical question, “How’s your bird’s lumbago?” during a concert Robert attended in Birmingham.
With Robert’s musical career sputtering, his parents tried again to steer him in more traditional directions. “Why don’t you study to become a chartered accountant?” his worried mother suggested. Robert was dejected enough already—and now this!
Even though Robert was intelligent enough to recognize that he might be reaching for an impossible dream, he was upset with the lack of support from his parents in his musical pursuits. He still thought he had a shot at stardom, even while his mom and dad wondered whether he would ever outgrow his “fantasies” about making a career in music. He felt frustrated, hurt, and sometimes angry. At times when he was home, he sensed a growing emotional wedge between him and his parents. On some level, he desperately wanted to prove to them that he could succeed in music.
Nevertheless, to make peace in the family, Robert finally agreed to some accountant’s training, even though his heart was still possessed by blues performers like Robert Johnson, Tommy McClellan, Otis Rush, Muddy Waters, and Sonny Boy Williamson, whose records he often found in the junk shops he used to scour.
After just two weeks of accountant’s training, Robert threw in the towel. He was being paid a forgettable two pounds a day, but even more important, he realized that there was much more to life than ledgers and balance sheets. “I just don’t want to spend my whole life counting other people’s money!” he complained to friends. “I’d rather be the one making the money!”
Without any regrets, Robert shifted his full attention back to music. As before, he jumped from one band to another, ending up with a group called the Band of Joy. Like Robert’s earlier musical ventures, however, this one had only minimal success. The gigs came much too infrequently, and most of them played to half-empty houses. As if Robert wasn’t feeling bad enough, he was constantly at odds with the band’s manager.
“Do you know what the problem is, Robert?” the band’s manager asked him one day. “I don’t think you sing very well! You might think seriously about leaving the band.”
Robert left in a rage with h
is ego bruised. Yes, his voice was a bit wild, but he felt there was something unique about it, too. He tried to deflect the criticism, not let it grate upon him, but it was hard. He was determined to keep on going, even though his voice wasn’t making him any money. He held onto the group’s name, and the Band of Joy soon re-formed in a second—and then eventually a third—generation that went off in a number of unexpected directions. The last incarnation featured a zany, long-haired, mustachioed drummer named John Bonham, who was never fully content with the enormous power and fury he used to bring to his performing. To create even more gusto, Bonham would line his drums with aluminum foil to give them more of a crackling, explosive sound—and hopefully to attract more public attention to the group.
But, in fact, the Band of Joy had to resort to much more to win the hearts of its audiences. The members of the band sometimes performed with painted faces. They wore long tailcoats. They staged miniwars with one another, using toy machine guns. The overweight bass player, attired in a caftan and bell-bottom pants, would swan dive from the stage into the crowd, creating terror on the faces of its members, who must have thought the Hindenburg (or was it the Zeppelin?) was crashing upon them. If there was a message he was trying to communicate, no one could quite figure out what it was.
One night as the Band of Joy performed at Victoria Hall in Selkirk, an inebriated member of the audience heaved a pie at Plant. Since Robert was a constantly moving target, the pie splattered harmlessly a few feet from him.
“The Band of Joy played about two gigs a week, but we weren’t making much money,” recalled Robert a few years later. “If I hadn’t been married by then, and my wife, Maureen, didn’t have a job, I wouldn’t have eaten. It was that simple. I would have been in the welfare lines.”
In a sense, Maureen was Robert’s savior, and he knew it. Without her financial support—not to mention her emotional support—he might have given up long before anyone had ever heard of Led Zeppelin. He had met her at a Georgie Fame concert, and they began living together shortly thereafter and eventually got married. When Robert wasn’t bringing home any money, she made sure they still had a roof over their heads. When his self-confidence wavered, she helped stabilize it. He often said that if it hadn’t been for Maureen, he might have gone nuts.
The Band of Joy continued to struggle. They worked their way up to about seventy quid a night, played songs by Sonny Boy Williamson and the Grateful Dead and even recorded a few demos at the Regent Sound studios. But much to their frustration, they never landed a recording contract. Finally, disheartened that the band wasn’t going anywhere, Robert decided that the battle wasn’t worth fighting anymore. The Band of Joy disbanded.
Once again, Robert was faced with making some hard decisions about his future. In early 1967, he did some construction work, pouring asphalt along West Bromwich High Street and using his earnings (six shillings tup-pence an hour) to buy Buffalo Springfield, Love, and Moby Grape albums. Most of the British rock scene, he thought, was an embarrassment and barely worth the vinyl on which the records were pressed. But the Grape—with its combination of blues, folk, rock, r&b, country, and bluegrass—left Robert humming and itching to get back to music, much to his parents’ continued distress.
Even long after Led Zeppelin had turned Robert into a millionaire, a reconciliation with his father took years. Robert’s dad still had trouble accepting his son’s rock music career, even with the enormous success—a fact of life that troubled Robert a lot. At a social function in Birmingham, I was chatting with the elder Plant and offered him a bottle of beer—with no glass. He looked at me with disgust, as if to say, “Who the hell do you think I am that I would drink out of a bottle?” He was from a different world.
4
BONZO
John Bonham was as down-to-earth as they came. For as long as I knew him, there weren’t pretensions that needed to be peeled away to get to the real Bonham. All the loudness, all the craziness, all the wit, and all the talent were all Bonzo. What you saw was what you got.
As a child, long before John had become the drummer with the Band of Joy or Led Zeppelin, he was banging on just about anything that could make noise. Born in 1948 in Redditch—about twelve miles south of Birmingham—he would pound on his mother’s pots and pans or on a round coffee tin that had a wire attached to it in an attempt to mimic the sound of a snare drum.
Bonham’s mother bought him his first real drum at age ten, and before long, his father brought home a full drum kit, secondhand and a bit worn. That drum set may have been rusty, but John absolutely treasured it. He would become upset when some of his friends and fellow drummers wouldn’t give their own instruments the tender loving care he felt was warranted. To Bonzo, that kind of neglect was just a rung below child abuse. Music became his first addiction, and if he went a day without playing the drums, it was like going through withdrawal.
Shortly after John left school, at a time when Ringo Starr was already the envy of every youngster in England with a set of drumsticks, Bonzo began trying to make a living with his music. He performed with Terry Webb and the Spiders, attired in a string tie and a purple coat, with his hair greased back. His playing was a bit calmer and more controlled than it would soon become.
Like Plant, Bonham was pressured by family members to give up music. “There’s a lot of honest work out there, John,” his father told him. “You can make a decent living if you really want to.” Bonham’s dad was a carpenter and a builder, and John helped him for a while, putting aside the drumsticks for a set of hammers. But he loved music—nothing he had ever done made him so happy—and before long, he was back playing in local bands: the Nicky James Movement, A Way of Life, and Steve Brett and the Mavericks.
John believed that music was the only thing he was good at, but nevertheless he became the stereotypical starving artist. At age eighteen, when he met his future wife, Pat, she was level-headed enough to think twice about marrying someone whose future might include more famine than fame. Bonham, however, was persistent.
“It’s just a matter of time,” he told Pat. “I’m going to make it if you have faith in me. Don’t give up on me.”
Despite the odds, she didn’t. Pat finally relented, and they moved into a fifteen-foot trailer together. On occasion, when Bonzo was feeling dejected about the slow pace at which his career was moving—and when he’d lose his temper and lash out when reality fell short of his expectations—he might promise Pat that he would quit if things didn’t soon turn around. But they were hollow promises, and both of them realized it. Music was an undeniable part of him. He never seriously thought of giving it all up.
At times, Bonzo might have done better panhandling than playing music. When he was part of the Nicky James Movement, the band was frequently so short of funds that they often performed with equipment they hadn’t fully paid for; more than once, when a gig was over, their instruments or PA equipment was confiscated because they were unable to meet their payments. “This isn’t the way to make good music,” John told himself. But at least for the moment, he didn’t have many alternatives. And he felt an unwavering loyalty to those who let him play with them; he loved being part of a group, a feeling that continued throughout the long run of Led Zeppelin. Even during those tough periods, Bonzo’s notoriety spread: “He’s the best drummer in England”…“He plays so loud that you can barely hear yourself think”…“He breaks more drumskins in a week than most drummers do in a lifetime.”
With time, Bonzo developed more finesse and less belligerence as he played. Even though he remained a team player, he yearned for the same attention as the musicians who played in front of him, particularly as he saw other rock drummers move into the spotlight. He admired and envied Ginger Baker, dating back to the Graham Bond Organisation, when Baker never let himself become overshadowed by the others in the group despite the strong musical presence of Bond and Jack Bruce. “That’s the way I want to be,” Bonzo would mutter, “an equal member of the band, not someone just keep
ing the beat for the forward musicians.” Later, when Cream’s album, Fresh Cream, was released early in 1967, with Ginger Baker’s “Toad” solo turning him into a headliner, Bonzo set his sights on stardom. Less than two years later, he was a member of Led Zeppelin.
5
JOHN PAUL
Even for those who knew John Paul Jones well, he was somewhat of a mystery man. He methodically went about making his music with a cool confidence that never was shaken. For as long as I knew him, no matter how much feeling he brought to his music, he was solid and dependable. He knew what he was capable of doing—and he did it.
John Paul’s real name is John Baldwin. He came from a family that enthusiastically nurtured his musical interests. He was born in 1946 in Sidcup, Kent, where his father was a piano player and a bandleader. While still a child, John Paul performed on the piano with his old man at weddings, bar mitzvahs, and parties. John Paul realized that it wasn’t Madison Square Garden or the London Palladium, but it was a good training ground for what was to come.
John Paul picked up the bass for the first time in his early teens. He had only one lesson on the instrument, but that seemed to be enough. He let his musical instincts and sensitive fingers take over, along with the influences of musicians like Charlie Mingus, Scott La Faro, and Ray Brown.
John Paul’s first bass was a Dallas model (“It had a neck like a tree trunk”). But while encouraging his son’s interest in music, John Paul’s dad saw no future in the bass. He urged his son to concentrate on the tenor saxophone, convinced that the bass guitar’s days were numbered.
Despite such ominous predictions, the bass never went the way of the accordion or the autoharp. In fact, when John Paul proved to his father that he could actually earn money with the bass, the old man had an immediate change of heart.