Robert Plant: A Life (9 page)

This second incarnation of the Band of Joy was no more durable than the first. Their cause wasn’t necessarily strengthened by the image they adopted—daubing their faces in war paint. In particular, this look did nothing for bassist Peter Bowen.

“It frightened everybody to death,” Plant told Richard Williams. “This big, fat bass player would come running on, wearing a kaftan and bells, and dive straight off the stage and into the audience. I howled so much that I couldn’t do anything at all.”

By the end of the year Bowen and the others had gone, leaving Plant to pick up the pieces once more. This he did with great zest, persuading both Bonham to join him again and Kevyn Gammond to walk out on reggae singer Jimmy Cliff’s backing band. With typical chutzpah, he next turned to the Good Egg, bringing in their bassist Paul Lockey and organist Chris Brown, doubtless to the considerable ire of his father.

With this lineup, the Band of Joy gelled at last. Bonham’s hulking drums giving them added weight, they were all heft and power, indulging themselves on sprawling instrumental workouts. This was a precursor to all that would soon enough change the lives of Plant and his hooligan drummer, although at the time neither could have known it. Yet it was all too much for the Midlands audiences of the time.

“I used to run a club at the Ship and Rainbow pub in Wolverhampton and booked them for a gig,” says John Ogden. “It wasn’t really a success because a lot of the audience were still blues freaks and Robert wasn’t doing that then.

“I do remember him singing Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ and it being bloody great. We had a chat afterward and he was disappointed with the response. He was saying people ought to listen, that he couldn’t keep doing the same thing. But back then if you were unusual, and especially if you were loud, you couldn’t get gigs around here.”

Mike Dolan took the band outside of the area to the Middle Earth and Marquee clubs in London, and up north to Club A’GoGo in Newcastle. That March they did a handful of dates around the country with an expat American folk singer, Tim Rose. Such gigs were intermittent and paid less than the covers circuit they had each started out on but to begin with a shared purpose spurred them on.

“You couldn’t call what we were doing freak rock but it had that spirit to it,” says Kevyn Gammond. “It was exciting and it set us apart from all the twelve-bar stuff that we’d grown up with. A number could go on for ten, fifteen minutes—God help the poor audience. There was also a battle going on between John and Rob, because Bonzo was such a showman. He’d set up his drums in such a way that Rob and I could be pushed a bit to the side or behind him.”

Just as he had done with Listen, Dolan got the band to record a demo tape. It was done at Regent Sound Studios in London and featured versions of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” and the murder ballad “Hey Joe,” plus two self-penned songs, “Memory Lane” and “Adriatic Seaview.” Both covers suggest the potency of this Band of Joy, although little room was afforded for subtleties and even less for restraint. Plant embodied their full-on assault, his voice pitched lower than it would later be, attacking “Hey Joe” as if by doing so he could rid himself of all his doubts and demons.

Yet each of the Band of Joy’s own songs was as unremarkable as the next and the tape generated no great interest, Plant not even being able to rustle up enthusiasm at CBS, who retained his contract. Dolan managed to secure the band a residency at the Speakeasy Club in London but by then the game was up. Bonham accepted the princely sum of £40 a week to join Tim Rose’s backing band and the Band of Joy crumbled.

It had become an all-too-familiar scenario to Plant, this act of coming so far and then falling short. He had other, more pressing matters on his mind now, too. Maureen was pregnant. And he was just a few months from turning twenty, the point at which he had promised her he would give all this up.

He went back to laboring and got engaged to Maureen. One can imagine the pressure exerted on them by their parents to do the right thing and uphold traditional values, however belatedly. He had come to appreciate the true worth of money, how helpless he was without it, how to treasure it and not to waste it. But still he would not quit. Still he kept on seeking that elusive break.

Meanwhile, the Move’s guitarist, Trevor Burton, had passed on the Band of Joy’s demo to his manager, Tony Secunda. Eventually, having listened to it, Secunda invited Plant down to London to audition for him and his business partner, Denny Cordell. Plant asked Kevyn Gammond to go with him.

“We had no money so we hitched down there,” Gammond remembers. “They put us up in the shittiest, run-down hotel—the Madison. The next day, we went to Marquee Studios, just Robert and myself and those guys. They said, ‘OK, write us a song.’ We made something up, demoed it . . . I don’t know what happened to it.

“On the way back we couldn’t get a lift. We met this girl hitchhiker at the start of the M1. We asked her to pull her skirt up, and we ran and hid behind a hedge. A car pulled up, the door opened, and we leaped out of the hedge and jumped in as well. Got us back as far as Birmingham.”

During the Band of Joy’s Speakeasy residency the blues musician Alexis Korner had popped his head around the dressing door to say hello. Then forty years old, Korner was the son of an Austrian-Jewish father and a half-Greek, half-Turkish mother, and had come to England via France, Switzerland and North Africa. Proficient on guitar and piano, he had joined Chris Barber’s jazz band in the ’50s, putting together his own blues collective in 1961. He named it Blues Incorporated and the band became a finishing school for a generation of young British blues players. At one time or other Charlie Watts, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce passed through the Blues Incorporated ranks. And Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Rod Stewart and an angel-faced guitarist named Jimmy Page each got up to jam with Korner at his band’s regular Marquee Club residencies.

Plant went along to see Korner perform at the Cannon Hill Arts Center in Birmingham, reintroducing himself to Korner with his usual boldness. He told me: “Alexis was up there playing away. He had this guy called Steve Miller on piano, a great player. I had a harmonica in my pocket and I started playing along, looking up at Alexis as he stood there on the stage. I just had that audacity, couldn’t get enough of anything.

“He finished the song and looked down at me. I said, ‘Can I get up and play harp with you on one song?’ He told me to come by the dressing room in the break. I ended up doing some eight-bar blues with him. He was a very charming and regal man.”

Korner asked Plant back down to London, putting him up in his flat in Queensway. He told his guest the sofa he was sleeping on was the same one Muddy Waters bunked down on whenever he was in town. Together with Steve Miller, Korner and Plant did a handful of club shows and began writing songs.

The trio cut two of these tunes—“Operator” and “Steal Away”—at a recording session. Both were solid but unspectacular blues numbers. Plant, however, sang each as if for his life, baying, howling and desperate sounding, here at last able to show he had the measure of Jagger, Rod Stewart and all the others ahead of him in the queue. The idea that the three of them might make an album was left hanging in the air.

Back in the Black Country he went to see his old friend Bill Bonham’s new band and asked if he could join. They had the truly awful name of Obs-Tweedle but he would be able to earn some beer money and, since Bonham’s parents ran a pub in Walsall called the Three Men and a Boat, have a place to lodge when he was not staying with Maureen’s family.

Billed as Robert Plant plus Obs-Tweedle, the band did a bunch of local gigs during June and July of 1968. They were on at the Three Men and a Boat each Wednesday and most Saturday nights. There were dates at the Connaught Hotel and Woolpack pub in Wolverhampton, the sort of places Plant must have thought he had seen the back of. He taught them the same Buffalo Springfield and Moby Grape songs he had first done with the Band of Joy, although there was now no Bonham to make them sound murderous.

“I went along with anything he said, all of his ideas,” says Bill Bonham. “He was great to be in a band with; hard-working, constructive in his criticism. People have often said to me that Robert is aloof or cold but I never experienced that from him.”

On July 20 Obs-Tweedle were booked to do a gig at the West Midlands College of Education in Walsall. It was a Saturday night and Bill Bonham recalls it being a typical student audience: “They just stood there and watched, trying to be cool.”

There were three interested members of the small crowd that night, though. One was Jimmy Page, now guitarist in the Yardbirds, and a second was that band’s bassist, Chris Dreja. The third was also the most conspicuous, their manager Peter Grant. A great, looming lump of a man, Grant had once worked as a bouncer—and as a wrestler, too—before breaking into the music business as minder to Gene Vincent and Little Richard. He shepherded the visiting American rockers around Britain, sucking it up and cracking skulls. The reason each of them found themselves in Walsall on this particular evening was Robert Plant.

The Yardbirds were then going through their death throes—wunderkind guitarists Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck were gone, the blues-boom hits long since dried up. On their most recent, wretched tour Page had confided in Grant his concept for a new band, one of all talents that could use the blues like heavy artillery and do much more besides. He would be its general, with Grant at his right hand.

Page had reached out first to the Who’s drummer Keith Moon and their bassist John Entwistle but this had come to nothing. For a singer, he thought of Steve Marriott of the Small Faces, until their manager, the notorious Don Arden, asked him how he would like to play in a band with broken fingers. He next approached Terry Reid, an eighteen-year-old British blues singer then tipped to be the next big thing. Reid was working on his first solo album and declined but he tipped Page off to Plant, recalling a gig he had done earlier in the year with the Band of Joy.

So here, to Walsall, Page and the others had come, and there they stood watching Obs-Tweedle load their gear onto the stage. The initial omens were not good.

“They mistook me for a roadie,” Plant told me. “Makes perfect sense—I’m a big guy. Terry Reid had told me that he’d mentioned me to Jimmy and I knew the Yardbirds had cut some great records—I’d seen them play with Eric. I didn’t have anything to lose.”

Obs-Tweedle did nothing to impress Page that night. But their singer was something else. Page left the Midlands wondering how Plant had remained undiscovered, fearing it must be the result of some defect in his personality or a fault he had yet to spot. He decided to give the matter further thought.

Plant was left to carry on as before. That summer, a club opened up in an old ballroom in Birmingham. It was called Mothers and it fast became a magnet for the growing band of local “heads” and hippies. Plant began to hold court there, a king still looking for his kingdom.

Recalling first seeing Plant at Mothers, the English folk singer Roy Harper says: “I was twenty-six and he was nineteen. He was accompanied—or being followed, I don’t know which—by four women. He automatically struck a light in my estimation. My clearest memory is seeing him waft away into the middle distance, surrounded by this coterie of chickpeas, and thinking, ‘That guy’s got something very attractive going on.’ ”

Returning to his lodgings at the Three Men and a Boat one night, Plant found a telegram from Grant waiting for him. It read: “Priority—Robert Plant. Tried phoning you several times. Please call if you are interested in joining the Yardbirds.”

A month shy of his twentieth birthday, Plant’s moment had come at last. Not that it seemed this way to him at first. He had, after all, grown used to having his hopes raised and then dashed. And anyway, the Yardbirds were no longer anyone’s idea of a sure thing.

“I ran into him one night at the Queen Mary Ballroom in Dudley and he told me that he’d had this offer to join the Yardbirds,” says Jim Lea of the N’Betweens. “He’d got Maureen with him and he said he wasn’t sure about it, didn’t know if it’d work out. He told me he’d rather be playing the blues with Alexis Korner.

“We were doing quite well at the time and I’d bought myself a sports car, an MG Midget. Planty had this green Ford Prefect. I was just getting into my car and he shouted over, ‘Nice car—I guess I’ll have to start playing pop!’ ”

Plant went and picked up the phone to Grant. What else was he going to do? Speaking a year later to Mark Williams of the
International Times
he said, “It was the real desperation scene, man. I had nowhere else to go.”

PART TWO

AIRBORNE

We were really good and we didn’t fuck about.

© News Ltd/Newspix/Rex Features

6

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Do what this man says, or fuck off.

Peter Grant passed on an invitation to Plant to meet with Jimmy Page at his home in Pangbourne on the banks of the River Thames so that they could test the waters and get the measure of each other. Stepping off the train from Birmingham, Plant found himself being set upon by an old woman. She began slapping his face and shrieking about the length of his hair. This would soon seem in keeping with everything that happened to him. He would feel as though he were walking in an alien land, the terrain littered with the unfamiliar and unexpected.