Robert Plant: A Life (8 page)

For their charge CBS had earmarked an Italian ballad, “La Musica è Finita,” which had been a Number One in its country of origin. For Plant the track was retitled “Our Song” and he was once more paired with CBS’s in-house producer, Danny Kessler, to record it. Kessler was as unstinting in his use of strings and brass as he had been on Listen’s ill-starred “You Better Run,” but such a backdrop was better suited to “Our Song” since it was the most saccharine of confections. Not that the same could be said for Plant, who sang it as if straitjacketed. He told his friend Kevyn Gammond that it took him ninety takes to get a finished track, the process reducing him to tears.

Plant’s first solo single was released in March 1967, the same month that Pink Floyd’s “Arnold Layne” and “Purple Haze” by Jimi Hendrix came out. It was an abject failure, selling fewer than 800 copies. Even one of his first champions, the
Express & Star
newspaper’s pop columnist John Ogden, dismissed it as “a waste of a fine soul singer.”

“I got a phone call from Robert’s mother soon after,” says Ogden. “She wanted to know if I really thought her son was any good or not. I told her that while you could never guarantee anything, he stood as much of a chance as anyone of making it. She must have been terribly disappointed over the next year or so because it just didn’t happen for him.”

Plant was not yet deterred from throwing himself into this radical transformation. Back in the Midlands, he crimped his hair into a bouffant, bought a dark suit and told anyone who asked that he was going to have a career in cabaret. He reasoned to himself that there was nothing not worth trying. He even had business cards printed up that unveiled a new identity, advertising “Robert—The E Is Silent—Lee, now available for bookings.”

And he found an unexpected ally in his father. A local big-band leader, Tony Billingham, had hired Robert Plant, Sr. to design and build an extension to his home.

“Robert’s father noticed the coming and going of musicians, and one day told me that all his son wanted to do was sing and asked if I could take him on,” recalls Billingham. “I said that I would give him a go. We were called the Tony Billingham Band, and it was a traditional dance band.

“I couldn’t say how many jobs Robert did with us but I remember one of them being at Kidderminster College. He sang some Beatles songs that night. We usually wore evening dress for functions in those days although we wouldn’t have contemplated doing so for a college date. For that we’d have worn black shirts, something like that. Robert had got his long hair and his shirt open right down to the last button. Dance people didn’t do that kind of thing.”

Five months after “Our Song” had sunk, CBS tried again with a second single, “Long Time Coming.” This was better tailored to fit Plant’s voice, being R&B-based, but it was no less aimed at the middle of the road than its predecessor had been. It was also no more successful. But by then Plant had headed off in yet another direction, this one moving closer to the spirit of the time.

He had put together a new group, calling it Robert Plant and the Band of Joy. The guitarist, Vernon Pereira, was a relative of his girlfriend Maureen. Although the Band of Joy’s lineup would be fluid for as long as it lasted, Plant’s inspiration remained the same—the new American music he had by now picked up on.

The catalyst for this was John Peel, a twenty-seven-year-old DJ born into a well-to-do family in Liverpool and boarding-school educated. Peel’s father was a cotton merchant who in 1961 had packed his son off to the U.S. to work for one of his suppliers. He remained in the country for six years, during which time he got his first job as a DJ—an unpaid stint at a radio station in Dallas—and also acquired a stack of records emanating from America’s West Coast.

Returning home in 1967, Peel was taken on by the pirate station Radio London, creating for it a show called
The Perfumed Garden.
He filled this with the records he had bought back from the U.S., exposing the bands behind them to a British audience for the first time. Coming out of LA and San Francisco, they included the Doors, the Grateful Dead, Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. These were rock groups born out of blues, folk, country and jazz traditions, but which pushed further out there through their consumption of the newly available psychedelic drugs and an uncontrolled urge to freak out.

“We’d never heard any of this music till John started playing it,” says Peel’s fellow DJ Bob Harris. “It changed my perception of things and I’m sure Robert was listening in the same way.”

Plant was indeed enraptured by it, digesting this American music with an appetite the equal of that he had first shown for its black blues. Of the bands then emerging from San Francisco’s psychedelic scene the two that hit him hardest were Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape. The Airplane’s
Surrealistic Pillow
album of that year gave rise to a brace of acid-rock anthems, “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love,” singer Grace Slick’s spooked vocals haunting her band’s lysergic drone. Released that summer, Moby Grape’s eponymous début LP fused rock, blues, country and pop into a sound that oozed heady adventurism and a sense of unbridled joy.

From LA he embraced a further two bands in particular. Buffalo Springfield brought together two gifted Canadian-born songwriters, Neil Young and Stephen Stills, whose woozy folk-rock was setting as much of a template for the era as the Byrds, the same tensions destined to pull both bands apart. Then there was Love and their ornate psych-pop symphonies conjured up by another singular talent, Arthur Lee. Love put out two albums in 1967,
Da Capo
and then
Forever Changes
, their masterpiece. Although neither of these records would make stars of Lee or his band, each served up a kaleidoscopic musical tableau for others to feast from.

“All that music from the West Coast just went ‘Bang!’—and there was nothing else there for me after that,” Plant told
Melody Maker
’s Richard Williams in 1970. “Three years before I had been shuddering listening to Sonny Boy Williamson. Now I was sobbing to Arthur Lee.”

Soon John Peel brought this music to his front door. The DJ began hosting a regular Sunday evening session at Frank’s Ballroom in Kidderminster, often appealing on air for a lift up to the Midlands.

“It was fantastic,” enthuses Kevyn Gammond, like Plant a champion of these shows. “Peel would bring up people like Captain Beefheart and Ry Cooder, but also the first incarnation of T-Rex. There was a great story about Captain Beefheart’s band being sat in the dressing room, rolling up these big joints, and Peel offering them cups of tea and cucumber sandwiches. Peel hipped us to this whole great scene and Rob especially got so into it.”

The first incarnation of the Band of Joy began to gig in the spring of 1967, playing both of Birmingham’s hippest clubs, the Elbow Room and the Cedar Club, the latter as warm-up to former Moody Blues man Denny Laine’s Electric String Band. It was still a covers band but one heading gingerly for the acid-rock frontiers.

Local music historian Laurie Hornsby recalls the group he was then playing guitar for doing a show with the Band of Joy at the city’s Cofton Club on April 25.

“The club was an old roller rink,” he says. “I remember the place was packed. Drugs hadn’t yet become a part of the scene. It was all about going out for a pint and to pull a bird. The mod look had gone by then—Robert and his band were all wearing Afghan coats, buckskins and things like that.

“Because they were far superior to us, we went on and did forty-five minutes and then they did an hour. I watched the Band of Joy’s set but I only remember Robert. He sold himself so well, knew exactly how to make people watch him.”

“In the Midlands, there were two schools of thought about Robert at that time,” says John Ogden. “People either liked him or hated him. All the women loved him. You could see them eyeing him up from the audience. Because of that the blokes most often didn’t.”

This antipathy toward their singer extended to the band’s de facto manager, “Pop” Brown, father of their organist Chris Brown. Following a heated altercation between the two, Plant conspired to get himself fired from the Band of Joy.

“Robert had his own ideas and ‘Pop’ Brown didn’t like it,” suggests Ogden. “Robert’s always known his own mind and what he wanted, which was, basically, to be a star.”

That June the Beatles presented
Sgt. Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band
to the world and with it Britain was launched into its Summer of Love—one founded upon sounds, fashions and a predilection for mind-bending drugs that were all directly imported from California. The suggestion that this amounted to a sweeping cultural revolution has been exaggerated—the preposterous Humperdinck, Tom Jones and a crooner of even greater vintage, Frankie Vaughan, fronted four of Britain’s ten bestselling singles that year. Yet there could be no denying the extent of its impact.

This much was fast apparent to Plant. Within weeks of Sgt. Pepper’s emergence both his beloved Small Faces and Stevie Winwood’s new band Traffic scored hits with songs that mined the same seam of psychedelic whimsy, “Itchycoo Park” and “Hole in My Shoe.” The Traffic song would have jarred him most. Again he was confronted by the stark fact of how far his contemporary Winwood had traveled, and the distance he trailed behind.

By the time “Hole in My Shoe” had risen to Number Two in the U.K. charts Plant was working as a laborer for the construction company Wimpey, laying Tarmac on West Bromwich High Street. Turning up for his first day on site, his new workmates took one look at his long, blond hair and began calling him “The Pop Singer.”

It would not be long before Plant hauled himself up from this latest low ebb, since he was never lacking in resolve or self-assurance. He soon gathered about him another group of musicians, announcing them as Robert Plant and the Band of Joy. “Pop” Brown howled in protest and for a time there were two Band of Joys hustling for gigs, but the others blinked first, changing their name to the Good Egg and drifting to obscurity. The following year Plant would marry into their guitarist Vernon Pereira’s family—Pereira was Maureen’s cousin—although the two of them never played together again. Pereira died in a car crash in 1976 at a time when Plant was consumed by other troubles.

To manage his latest band Plant called on an old contact, Mike Dolan, who had stewarded Listen. Dolan had an immediate effect, although not perhaps a considered one. Plant had an impending court date to answer a motoring charge and Dolan convinced him this could be used to drum up publicity. Dolan hatched a plan to stage a “Legalise Pot” march on the same day. He contacted the local press, suggesting that his singer was going to lead a crowd of young disciples to the courthouse steps, protesting their civil rights.

In the event Plant arrived at Wednesbury Court on the morning of August 10, 1967 accompanied by a supporting group that numbered just seven, one of whom was his girlfriend’s younger sister Shirley. This ragged band carried placards daubed with slogans such as “Happiness Is Pot Shaped” and “Don’t Plant It . . . Smoke It.”

A report in that evening’s edition of the
Express & Star
described the scene: “Police peered curiously from the windows of the police station and some even came out to photograph the strangely assorted bunch, which included two girls in miniskirts.” Dolan denied that the whole farrago had been stage-managed, telling the paper: “It was a completely spontaneous act on the part of these youngsters, who regard Bob as a kind of leader.”

Although Plant was cleared of the charge of dangerous driving, a fellow protestor, a nurse named Dorette Thompson, was less fortunate, losing her job for her part in the march.

“That pantomime was Robert’s scuffling side,” says John Ogden. “He didn’t need to do it, but he tried everything. He actually defended himself in court attired in the costume of an Indian bridegroom. Now, I’d been in court once to give a character reference and gotten cross-examined by this snotty lawyer. It’s an intimidating experience. Yet he did that when he was still just eighteen.”

Plant’s domestic arrangements at the time were no less haphazard than the march had been. He lived on and off with Maureen and her family in West Bromwich but crashed with friends, too. That summer he also moved in to a house at 1 Hill Road, Lye, close to his Stourbridge stomping grounds. One of his new housemates was Andrew Hewkin, an aspiring painter then in his final year at Stourbridge College.

“I can’t imagine that house is still standing—it would be in need of serious renovation after what we did to it,” Hewkin tells me. “People came and went all the time. It was hard to know who was living there and who wasn’t because you’d bump into a different girl or guy every morning. We were all paying virtually nothing in rent.

“There were lots of rooms, each one with a different color and smell, all sorts of music blaring out from them. I don’t remember seeing much of Robert’s room but then I don’t recall seeing much of Robert either. The big dormitory up at the college was called West Hill; that’s where all the action happened and where Robert was most of the time. He wasn’t a student but he knew that all the best-looking birds hung out there.”

The house in Lye soon doubled up as a rehearsal space for the Band of Joy. The band set their gear up in the cellar, which was cramped, windowless and feverishly hot.

“It was seriously loud down there and Robert would drip with sweat,” says Hewkin. “I saw them perform a lot, too. He was very much the same on stage then as he is now, the chest puffed out, but even more so. I think he probably learned quite a bit off Mick Jagger because Robert strutted, too, though he was more of a cockerel.

“Otherwise, he was very down to earth, and charming, too, although he was heavily into his hobbits and underworlds. Sad, isn’t it? He bought a car, an old Morris Minor, and parked it in the garden of the house, which was completely overgrown. It never moved in all the time he was living there. I heard later that the police eventually came and took it away.”