Robert Plant: A Life (6 page)

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 story 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!

“It was unreal to be able to hear such quality—to see that shit and still being at college. Being close to that kind of energy . . . Man, you can’t ask for a better ticket than that. If that isn’t going to turn your head and make you say, ‘Is there anything else I can do?’ ”

There were more mundane matters to attend to first. His father had packed him off to a job interview with a firm of accountants and they took him on. He went to work as a trainee chartered accountant in Stourport, a picturesque town on the banks of the River Severn, sixteen miles from Stourbridge. His wages were £2 a week, less than he could earn for one gig.

This didn’t stop him going out most nights—to perform, to watch other bands or to dance in clubs. He dragged himself into the office for just two weeks before he was politely asked to clear his desk. It was then he decided to turn pro with the Crawling King Snakes, although he had to take on additional work at a local carpet factory to supplement his income. In any event, this latest act of rebellion left his father despairing that his son was throwing his life away.

It was at this moment that Plant met John Bonham for the first time. Bonham, known to one and all as “Bonzo,” approached him after Crawling King Snakes had completed one of their twenty-minute slots at Old Hill Plaza. He told Plant his band was good but that the drummer was hopeless and he was better. Bonzo joined Crawling King Snakes soon after.

Born in the Midlands town of Redditch in the spring of 1948, Bonham was ten when his mother bought him his first set of drums. Her son had been gripped from the moment he saw the great jazz drummer Gene Krupa pummelling out the tribal rhythm of “Sing Sing Sing” in the 1956 film
The Benny Goodman Story
. Bonham was drumming in bands from the age of fifteen, passing through the likes of the Blue Star Trio, the Senators, and Terry Webb and the Spiders.

Bonham was just three months older than Plant but was already married. He and his wife Pat were living in a caravan parked behind his family home. Not only worldlier than his new friend, in terms of ability Bonham was also ahead of anyone Plant had played with to that point. In the Black Country’s pubs and clubs, he was already spoken of as a drummer of prodigious ability, a powerhouse.

“Bonzo had at one time been in a dance band,” Plant said to me. “So he got all of his chops from being able to play those big band arrangements. I’d never seen anything like it.”

“John was a bit odd even in those days,” adds Tolley, Plant’s school friend. “Every time he walked into a room there was a strange aroma—he was definitely smoking a lot of wacky baccy. But he was a great drummer and he had a better kit than anyone else.”

For a short spell the possibilities seemed boundless. With Bonham propelling them, the Crawling King Snakes opened up for the Spencer Davis Group, Gene Vincent, the Walker Brothers and others. Plant was brought closer than he had ever been to the magical center of things, so close he could taste the glories that were being offered up.

He and Bonham stood at the side of the stage at Stourbridge Town Hall and watched the Walker Brothers, listening to teenage girls scream at their singer Scott Walker as if he were a god. Even a band such as Liverpool’s the Merseybeats, for whom fame was fleeting, could pull into town in their blue and white station wagon and appear to Plant as “renegade guys who ran off with all our teen queens.”

“There was no notion of where we were going but no known cure either,” he told me. “I mean to say, I didn’t have any concept of fame as a seventeen-year-old kid. It was just the fact of being able to get away from the clerks desk as a chartered accountant. And then to go back to my parents, who only ever wanted the best for me, and proclaim that I had to go . . . and forever.”

Plant felt more now than just the pull of singing the blues. He had heard the screams, smelled the sex and sensed the power that could be bestowed upon the man with the microphone. And then, as was his custom in those days, Bonham walked out on the Crawling King Snakes. He had been lured back to his previous band, the Way of Life, by the promise of more money, and this he needed since his wife Pat was now pregnant.

With Bonham’s departure the Crawling King Snakes dissolved. Yet Plant would not have to wait long for his next gig. While DJ-ing at the Old Hill Plaza, he spotted a band called the Tennessee Teens. A three-piece, they played blues and Tamla Motown covers, and had recently returned from a resident club gig in the German city of Frankfurt. Plant introduced himself to their guitarist, John Crutchley.

“He asked me if he could sing with us,” Crutchley recalls. “That’s how it started. We were doing the Plaza three or four times a week; it would always be the last venue of two or three we’d do each night. When we got there, Robert began to get up and do a song with us; some blues stuff, some Chuck Berry, Solomon Burke’s ‘Everybody Needs Somebody to Love.’ I can’t remember who asked whom but we agreed to make it into a band.

“He stuck out, even then. He liked to wear bomber jackets and he’d got this big, blond, curly hair. We were working-class lads and he came from a completely different background to us. We used to have to go and pick him up on a Saturday night. I remember his mum was quite prim and his dad being an ex-sergeant major type. His dad seemed a nice chap but neither of them was at all supportive of what he was doing. They never came to see him play.”

Watching their son go off with yet another band, Plant’s parents tried one last time to reason with him. The fall-out resulting from this encounter led to him leaving home at seventeen. He went off to live with his new bassist Roger Beamer, whose parents ran a bed and breakfast down the road in Walsall.

At the beginning of 1966 the Tennessee Teens changed their name to Listen. The band members had also thought up nicknames for each other, although it seems unlikely this over-extended their imaginations. John Crutchley became “Crutch,” drummer Geoff Thompson’s bulk led to him being christened “Jumbo,” while the rationale behind making Roger Beamer “Chalky” and Plant becoming “Plonky” is lost to time.

In a short press biography they put together at the same time Plant listed his hobbies as motoring and listening to soul records. “Mod girls” and clothes were foremost among his likes, “phonies” his biggest dislike. He soon revealed a flair for publicity, too.

Plant fed a story to John Ogden, the pop columnist at local newspaper the
Express & Star
. He told Ogden he had won a dance competition judged by Cathy McGowan, the alluring host of TV pop show
Ready Steady Go!
Plant claimed McGowan had accepted an invitation to come and see his new band, and had then asked them to perform on her show. Listen, said Plant, had declined as the proposed date clashed with a gig—“And we don’t break bookings like that,” he nobly added. It was enough to get them into the paper, Ogden’s piece running on March 3, 1966, in the week the Rolling Stones topped the U.K. charts with “19th Nervous Breakdown.”

“They came into the office and we had a chat in the works canteen,” Ogden says. “It wasn’t at all surprising to me that Cathy McGowan would go for him—she wasn’t alone. He looked great. There was something special about Robert, although not everyone saw it at the time.”

Listen’s beginnings were otherwise decidedly small-scale. Fashioning themselves as a mod group, their first gigs were mostly in pubs such as the Ship and Rainbow and the Woolpack in Wolverhampton, alongside the now-traditional warm-up engagements on the Reagan circuit. Yet Plant had by this stage developed into an impressive performer. He had learned to better control his voice, although it remained very much a strident blues roar. And he had gained enough confidence to unveil the dance moves he had honed strutting his stuff at mod clubs.

“Oh, he was great,” says Crutchley. “We’d start off our set with ‘Hold On I’m Comin’ ’ by Sam & Dave, and Robert would dance across the stage like he was floating. We rehearsed at my parents’ house, which was an old corner shop. My dad would ask me, ‘Is the Rubber Man coming tonight?’

“Rob gave us all an extra confidence. He was ambitious, but not so as it was in your face. He was a bit more relaxed off the stage. But once he got on it he would go into a different mode. He had a great stage presence and the voice was very much there from the start. For sure, he was very popular with the ladies, too.”