by Mick Wall
So you picked up your acoustic guitar, said, ‘I’ve got an idea for this one’, and began playing your own arrangement of ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’, and slowly, slowly, it began to sink in. Not all of it but enough to get him started; get him thinking about it on the train back to Brum or wherever it was he came from. Then you said he could crash for the night if he wanted and he did.
‘I really didn’t know much about the Yardbirds,’ Robert Plant would tell me. ‘I knew what they had meant and that in their latter stages they’d made a lot of pop records, which were good. But they didn’t…they were very much…’ He struggles to find the right words but what he’s trying to say is that he’d never actually bought any Yardbirds records, never been what you’d call a fan. He had certainly never seen himself being in a group like that. He and his friends saw themselves more as the English version of Moby Grape, if they saw themselves as anything. Or as he put it, ‘I knew that Keith Relf had got the kind of voice that he’d got and I couldn’t see where I’d fit in. But of course I didn’t know where it would go…’
Nearly thirty years after they broke up, Led Zeppelin is still a tricky subject for Robert Plant, full of ‘grey areas’ and things he doesn’t want to talk about, particularly from the latter half of their career, when the drugs had taken over and the madness seemed to double with every stumbling, life-wrecking step the unruly giant they had created took. The early days are safe ground, though. In fact, by the summer of 1968, Robert Plant had all but given up on the idea of having a career in the music business. He’d sung in various groups since he was a teenager, coming closest to the spotlight in the Band of Joy, a bunch of Birmingham-based American West Coast wannabes specialising in covers by Love, Moby Grape and Buffalo Springfield, who’d got as far as some club dates in London before falling apart from lack of any real record company interest. After that, he’d sung and played briefly with Alexis Korner, but still no cigar. He’d even released a couple of solo singles – both flops. Now he was back home, working on a building site and singing part-time in the horribly named Hobbstweedle.
Looking back now though, he tends to idealise those days. ‘I really just wanted to get to San Francisco and join up. I had so much empathy with the commentary in America at the time of Vietnam that I just wanted to be with Jack Casady and with Janis Joplin. There was some kind of fable being created there, and a social change that was taking place, and the music was a catalyst in all of that.’ He gave a more accurate description of his circumstances back then, when in 1969, he told hippy bible, International Times: ‘It was the real desperation scene, man, like I had nowhere else to go.’ Even his old pal, John ‘Bonzo’ Bonham, was now doing better than him, earning £40-a-week drumming in American singer-songwriter Tim Rose’s backing band. Forty quid a week! Robert could pretend he wasn’t jealous but no-one believed him, let alone his pretty Anglo-Indian fiancée Maureen who he had met at a Georgie Fame concert two years before. As he later told me, ‘For a while I was living off Maureen, God bless her. Then I did some road-making to earn some bread. I actually laid half the asphalt on West Bromwich High Street. But all it did was give me six shillings-and-tuppence an hour [31p], an emergency tax code and big biceps. All the navvies called me the pop singer…’
Plant told me he actually ‘ignored the telegrams’ he’d received from Peter Grant, inviting him down for an audition in the New Yardbirds, but it’s hard to believe. He said he only really considered it after Grant had phoned and left a couple of messages for him at his local pub in Walsall, the Three Men in a Boat. (Grant had phoned the pub, he explains in an aside, because he didn’t have a phone of his own and used the pub as his ‘office’.) The fact, though, as he had told IT, was that ‘everyone in Birmingham was desperate to get out and join a successful band…everyone wanted to move to London.’ Nineteen-year-old Robert Plant was no exception. He may not have had the same yearning to go and live in ‘the smoke’, as the rest of the country still called its capital, but he was desperate to make a living out of his singing, a dream that had stubbornly refused so far to come true. Finally, he said, ‘I went down there and then I met Jimmy. I didn’t know whether or not I would get the gig but I was…curious.’
You bet he was. Paul Rodgers, then fronting Free, recalls seeing Plant perform in the summer of 1968. ‘It was just before he joined Zeppelin,’ he says. ‘Free played up in Birmingham with Alexis Korner at the Railway Tavern, a blues club and Robert got up to jam with Alexis and he was the Robert Plant that we know and love today – full-on hair and tight jeans and everything, doing that “Hey babe!” [imitates Plant’s trademark vocal]. Full on everything, you know? He was giving it large with Alexis who was playing an acoustic guitar, and people didn’t quite get it. He really needed Bonham and Page behind him. We were staying at some hotel and afterwards he came back for a cup of tea. He said: “You know, I’m thinking of going down to London. What’s it like down there?” I said, “Oh, it’s pretty cool, you know, it’s good.” He said, “I’ve had a call from this guy called Jimmy Page, have you heard of him?” I said, “Oh yeah, everyone’s talking about him, he’s a big session guy down there.” He said, “Well, he wants to form a band with me. They’ve offered me either thirty quid or a percentage.” I said, “Take the percentage.” Next thing I knew it was Led Zeppelin, right?’
Thirteen days after the final Yardbirds show in Luton, Plant packed an overnight bag and bought the cheapest train ticket available that would take him from Birmingham to Reading, and then onto the local stopping service to Pangbourne. He walked the rest of the way to Jimmy’s, ignoring the disgusted looks of the distinctly middle-class denizens who mainly lived alongside the river. Trying not to look too impressed as Jimmy showed him in and went to put the kettle on, the wide-eyed would-be wild man was utterly overawed by his slightly older host. When they started putting on records and talking about music, there was more of a connection, he said, though it was Jimmy who did most of the picking and putting on.
‘You can smell when people have had their doors opened a little wider than most, and you could feel that was the deal with Jimmy. His ability to absorb things and the way he carried himself was far more cerebral than anything I’d come across before and I was so very impressed. I don’t think I’d ever come across a personality like it before. He had a demeanour which you had to adjust to. Certainly it wasn’t very casual to start with…’
Nor would it ever truly become so.
2
Daze of My Youth
You had wanted to be a singer for as long as you could remember. You were fifteen-and-a-half the first time you went to Brum town hall to see a concert on your own. Your uncle had taken you when you were a kid but this was something different. It was February 1964 and you were there to see the great Sonny Boy Williamson. Stood there in his black bowler hat, a mockery of the strait-laced world he was sending up, his shoulders hunched over like a vulture’s. Sonny Boy looked more dead than alive, more out than in: a ghostly black-and-white reflection of some hazy, distant world full of smoky bar rooms and laughing, painted ladies crossing and uncrossing their legs. The kind of place you had dreamed of as you sat on your bed, listening to the music and staring at the LP covers. Now here that world was – a small but significant part of it anyway – right in front of you, right here in Brum. You could hardly believe what you were seeing, up there on the town hall stage, so near to him you could hear the old blues master breathing into the mike, yet still so far away from your life in Kidderminster you may as well have been looking through a telescope at the moon.
Closer to home and much more believable, yet just as inspiring, also on the bill that night was the Spencer Davis Rhythm-and-Blues Quartet, and Long John Baldry’s All-Stars, both of whom had singers – Stevie Winwood and Rod Stuart [sic] as he was billed on the posters outside – who couldn’t have been much older than you. Winwood was even a local lad. If he could do it, then you could too, couldn’t you?
What a great night that was. All your
mates were there too and there were loads of birds. Not yet the dope-smoking hippy you would soon become, you were still Jack the Lad. When it came out after the show that Sonny Boy’s bass harmonica had gone missing, everybody knew it was probably Planty that had ‘had away with it’. What a prize it was! Like getting your hands on an actual piece of the dream, a tiny bit of something to make it all seem more real.
You’d been a teddy boy but now you were mad about the blues, everybody knew that. Not just Sonny Boy Williamson, but Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters…Then came that first show at the Wolverhampton Gaumont, the year before the Sonny Boy concert. A package bill starting with The Rattles, Mickie Most and The Most Men, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, the Everly Brothers and the Rolling Stones. You were sweating with excitement even before The Rattles came on. The star of the show was Bo Diddley. The Stones were good too but they had nothing on Bo Diddley! ‘All his rhythms were so sexual,’ you’d recall later, ‘just oozing…’ It was after seeing Bo Diddley that you bought ‘Say Man’. There was a sale on at Woolies and you’d got that and ‘I Love You’ by The Volumes, ‘I Sold My Heart To The Junkman’ by Patti Labelle and The Blue Belles, and ‘My True Story’ by The Jive Five, scribbling your name – Robert (not Rob, as your mates called you) Plant – in the corner of the labels.
After that came singles by Solomon Burke, Arthur Alexander, Ben E. King…then your first LP, Muddy Waters’ Live At Newport 1960 …it used to be Elvis, now it was Muddy you sang along to, ‘I’ve Got My Mojo Working’…then came Blues Volume 1 on Pye International with Buddy Guy, Jimmy Witherspoon, Howlin’ Wolf, Chuck Berry and Little Walter…various EPs…Chuck Berry’s ‘This Is…’, Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Smokestack Lightning’…you kept finding more and more stuff, going right back to the original jook-joint guys like Charley Patton, Son House, Robert Johnson, Earl Hooker…Folk Blues of John Lee Hooker was one of the greatest LPs ever made by anyone! And you could prove it. It was all in the book. The great book – Blues Fell This Morning by Paul Oliver – which you’d refer to in the way other people did the Bible, using it to help you choose which records to send off for. Real rare stuff, too, all the best gear by everyone from Hooker, Sonny Boy and the Wolf, to even less well-known American blues originals like Bukka White, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Snooks Eaglin, Tommy McClennan, Peetie Wheatstraw…all of them. The bloody lot! What a gang! Peetie was known as ‘the Devil’s Son-in-Law’ and the ‘High Sheriff of Hell’. Crazy, man!
By the time you’d seen Sonny Boy at Brum town hall you considered yourself an expert. A proper connoisseur, able to trace stuff back to its proper roots, eventually all the way back to obscure collections of African roots music and field recordings. As anal as any trainspotter, you would file, catalogue and rate your ever-growing collection of treasures. Every week you bought Melody Maker, the only music paper which covered blues, folk and jazz as well as the pop scene, and sit there after school reading it cover to cover. On Saturdays, when you weren’t at Molineux watching the Wolves, you were hanging around the record shops in Brum’s Soho district, especially The Diskery, which only proper fans went in, fingering the racks, always on the lookout for something new. That is, something old. Best of all, something good that nobody you knew had ever heard before. You were ready for anything. One week it was ‘Shop Around’ by the Miracles. The next it was Chris Kenner’s ‘I Like It Like That’, never heard singing like it. You were past all that now, though. A serious collector now, combing The Diskery for rare French RCA EPs by Big Bill Broonzy’s harp player Jazz Gillum, or the original Sonny Boy Williamson LP with sleeve notes by Alexis Korner. Even some folk and jazz. You had to hear it all, to see for yourself what it was like. It was always the blues you came back to, though. That was the ideal. Pestering Mum and Dad for the money to buy it, then taking it home, putting it straight on the little cream and red Dansette, singing along while watching yourself in the bedroom mirror.
Mum and Dad said you were mad but you’d been that way since you were nine, singing along at the top of your voice to ‘Love Me’ by Elvis. Standing behind the curtains in the living room, flicking the baby quiff you’d perfected that Mum would make you get rid of soon after. That was the first time you realised you could actually sing – a bit. It was also the first time you cottoned on that Mum and Dad didn’t actually share your love of this music, as if there was something funny about it. Didn’t even like Johnnie Ray! Bloody ’ell! You felt a bit sorry for them, actually…
Before Terry Reid had suggested Robert Plant, Jimmy Page had been giving serious thought to inviting Chris Farlowe to join him in the New Yardbirds. Years later, Chris would sing on Jimmy’s soundtrack for the Death Wish II movie, and again a few years after that on his 1988 solo album, Outrider. Twenty years before, however, Farlowe was busy building a solo career that had already seen him in the charts with his version of the Stones’ tune, ‘Out Of Time’, which Page had played on as a session guitarist. Ultimately, Plant got the gig because he was the only decent vocalist who was available right away and willing to give it a go; the only decent singer Page could think of that didn’t have anything better to do. Nevertheless, he still harboured doubts. ‘I liked Robert,’ he would later tell me. ‘He obviously had a great voice and a lot of enthusiasm. But I wasn’t sure yet how he was going to be on stage; what he’d be like once we actually got together as a band and started playing.’
What sealed the deal was the arrival into the story of a pal of Plant’s from Brum, a drummer named John Bonham. Bonham and Plant had been in the Band of Joy together. According to Jimmy, ‘The one I was really sure about right from the off was Bonzo.’ Until then, Page’s inclination had been to offer the gig to Procol Harum drummer B.J. Wilson, who he’d played with recently on the Joe Cocker session that had produced ‘(I Get By) With A Little Help From My Friends’ – an ornamentally heavy treatment of what had originally been a lightweight Beatles tune sung by Ringo, and a rough template for the kind of guitar-heavy musical melodrama that Page had in mind to utilise in his own next project. But Wilson wasn’t interested, understandably rating his chances of lasting success with Procul Harum – who had arrived with a huge splash the year before with the no. 1 hit, ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ – as infinitely better than the revival of a band that hadn’t had a hit for two years.
Other drummers considered included Aynsley Dunbar; Mitch Mitchell, who’d been in the Pretty Things before joining Hendrix in the Experience, where it was whispered he was now falling out of favour; and Bobby Graham, Jimmy’s old ‘hooligan’ session pal who’d never been tempted before to give up his hefty regular wage packet for the insecurity of a full-time post in a group. And not just any group, either, but the possible flogging of a dead horse. In desperation, Grant also invited out for lunch to ‘discuss a new project’ the similarly disinterested Clem Cattini, another old pal of Jimmy’s from the session scene. But Clem was always so busy earning fortunes from playing on hits by Ken Dodd, Sandie Shaw, Dusty Springfield, Gene Pitney, P.J. Proby, Marmalade and countless others, he could never find the time to sit down with Grant, who simply refused to discuss it over the phone. ‘I now had a family,’ Cattini later recalled, ‘and I thought – wrongly – that I’d found my niche as a session drummer.’ Two years later, when Zeppelin was the biggest-selling band in the world, Clem recalled running into Peter and asking him: ‘“That lunch date”, was it to do with…?” He just nodded.’
And so, at new boy Plant’s urging, Page had gone to see his pal John ‘Bonzo’ Bonham play with Tim Rose at the Country Club in Hampstead, north London. It was 31 July 1968 and, Page told me, ‘He did this short five-minute drum solo and that’s when I knew I’d found who I was looking for.’
‘Jimmy rang me up and says, “I saw a drummer last night and this guy plays so good and so loud, we must get him”,’ Peter Grant would recall. But Bonham, already rated as one of the best young drummers in England, was not convinced. With a wife, Pat, and two year-old son, Jason, to support, the regular weekly wag
e he was getting from Tim Rose was not something he was about to just give up. Never one to mince his words, the thought of joining the New Yardbirds hardly thrilled him, either. ‘When I was asked to join the Yardbirds, I thought they’d been forgotten in England,’ Bonham explained. ‘[But] I knew Jimmy was a highly respected guitarist, and Robert I’d known for years,’ so he did at least finally agree to meet with Page and Grant. But only after they had virtually begged him to do so. Unable to reach him by phone because Bonzo didn’t have one, at Page’s urging Grant had bombarded him with over forty telegrams – nearly all of which were ignored. But with time running out and their options swiftly dwindling, Grant had been even more persistent than usual. One day G and Jimmy just turned up on John’s doorstep, taking him for a pub lunch where Page says he ‘basically spelled out the whole deal. How this was gonna be unlike any band he’d ever been in. That it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing.’ The fact that his mate Plant was also involved appears to have swung the deal. That and the fact that there was no guarantee Rose would take Bonham with him when he returned to America, or that Bonham would have wanted to go.
Word was out on the drummer, though. Not only was he earning a good weekly wage now, the Rose tour was the first time the name John Bonham had been mentioned in the music press, when one of the shows was reviewed favourably in Melody Maker. Chris Farlowe, whose new album had been produced by Mick Jagger, now wanted to offer him a job too, as did Joe Cocker. Page was abject at the thought of being forced to stand by and watch yet again as someone he wanted for the group appeared to be spurning him for what they felt would be a better opportunity with someone else he knew. Which is when Plant says he stepped in. ‘I went to Bonzo and said, “Hey, the Yardbirds!” And [his wife] Pat said to me, “Don’t you even think about it! John, you’re not going off with Planty again! Every time you do anything with him you come back at five in the morning with half-a-crown!” [12½ p] So I worked on it and worked on it. I said to Jimmy, “What can you offer him?”’