by Rees, Paul
“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.”
Bill Bonham, no relation of John’s, was then a fourteen-year-old schoolboy playing keyboards in a covers group called Prim and Proper. They shared a bill with Listen at one of these early shows. “I remember going ‘Whoa’ when they started the first song, and the next thing they’d finished and I breathed out again,” he says. “To me, Robert was a star and I was mesmerised by him. He’d already got a big female following. We became friends but you couldn’t trust him with your girlfriend for two seconds, that’s for sure.”
That May, Bob Dylan and his new backing band, the Hawks, played the Birmingham Odeon. On this same tour a member of the audience at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall shouted “Judas!” at Dylan for the perceived crime of plugging in his guitar. Yet Dylan was instrumental in whipping up the storm clouds of cultural change that were billowing across the Atlantic. In all its speed-fuelled wonder, that year’s Blonde on Blonde, a double album no less, cemented the idea of the rock album as an art form.
By the summer Dylan had crashed his motorbike in Woodstock and retired from view, but all that he had set in motion had begun to fly. The Beatles made Revolver; Brian Wilson went to the edge and brought back Pet Sounds for the Beach Boys; and the Byrds soared through “Eight Miles High.” It was this latter track, and the album upon which it featured, Fifth Dimension, that announced the arrival of the psychedelic movement. It was to be a fitting soundtrack to a decade of social and civil upheaval in the U.S., one filtered through the new perspective of the hallucinogenic drug LSD.
These sounds coming out of America would soon enough have a profound effect on Plant. It would be another year, however, before Britain basked in the Summer of Love. Yet the sands were shifting even in the Midlands, where people are traditionally cautious of such radicalism, as if wanting first to weigh up its substance. The boom in venues opening up to music continued unabated, the classifieds pages of the local newspapers filled each night with ads for gigs in pubs, clubs and dancehalls.
In Birmingham, the Elbow Room and the Cedar Club were the places to be and to be seen. The latter club, it was said, attracted the drinkers, while the clientele at the former preferred to smoke dope and intellectualise about jazz. It was through such sessions at the Elbow Room that Stevie Winwood’s Traffic would come together the following year. Out of the Cedar Club, in the first weeks of 1966, came the Move, who at a stroke raised the bar for the other local acts, Plant’s Listen among them.
Bringing together the pick of Birmingham’s musicians, the Move consisted of singer Carl Wayne, guitarists Trevor Burton and Roy Wood, bassist Ace “The Face” Kefford and drummer Bev Bevan, each of whom had served a beat-group apprenticeship. To begin with they covered the same tunes as every other band in town but added songs by the Byrds and other blossoming West Coast acts to the mix. Their own songs came later, although from the start the Move’s multipart harmonies were one of two things setting them apart. The other was their image. At the insistence of their manager, Tony Secunda, a former merchant seaman, the Move kitted themselves out in gangster-style suits. Securing his band a residency at London’s Marquee Club, Secunda further compelled them to add an element of theater to their presentation.
“Tony said to Carl one night, ‘Be a great idea if you smashed up a television on stage,’ ” recalls Trevor Burton. “The next day Carl went out and got a TV and an axe. There was outrage. We let off a couple of smoke bombs, too. The third time we did it we had the fire brigade and the police hit the place. It made all the papers, which is what it was all about.”
The impression this made on Listen was instantaneous. The four of them went to a second-hand clothes shop in Aston, Birmingham, and bought double-breasted suits, co-opting the Move’s gangster chic. Their idea for whipping up drama was more prosaic, amounting as it did to Plant and Crutchley staging a mock fight each night.
“Rob and I used to go at it for about two or three minutes,” says Crutchley. “The bouncers would often intervene and stop us. We really should have mentioned beforehand that it was part of the act.”
Such mishaps seem to have been a common occurrence. Jim Lea, then the bassist with the N’Betweens, recalls frequently seeing Listen.
“The first time was at the Civic Hall in Wolverhampton,” he says. “Plant had got that testosterone-filled thing about him. He had on plaid trousers and a shirt buttoned up to the neck, and he’d backcombed his hair. He was doing this really exaggerated kind of strut. At one point he got up on the bass cabinet, which was turned on its side. He was standing up there going ‘Ooh, baby, baby’ and got his mike stand trapped under the cabinet. He jumped down, went to strut off and was yanked backward, almost off his feet.
“But the girls thought he was wonderful. They used to have these Monday-night dances at the swimming baths in Willenhall, down the road from Wolverhampton. I saw him there, dancing with a neck-coat on, showing off to all the birds.”
By then the N’Betweens had become the biggest band in Wolverhampton and were looking for a singer. Their new guitarist, Neville “Noddy” Holder, had assumed the role but he recommended to Lea and the others that they hire Plant. Like the rest of Listen, Holder hailed from Walsall and had on occasion driven them to gigs in his dad’s window-cleaning van.
Says Lea: “Nod told us, ‘Plonk’s a good singer, but all the birds like him—that’s why he’ll be good for us.’At the time I didn’t get what all the fuss was about. By then he’d got a reputation for getting up with all of the B-list bands in town. The thing is, once he was up you couldn’t get him off the stage, so I was adamant we weren’t letting him on with us.”
Lea’s reasoning that retaining Holder as sole singer would mean more money for each of them swung the argument, and Plant was not asked to join the band. Had he been, it’s doubtful he would have remained loyal to Listen. He had gone along to see the Who at Kidderminster Town Hall that May. Pete Townshend had sung lead vocals that night, Roger Daltrey having temporarily walked out following the first of many clashes. After the gig Plant waited outside the stage door for Townshend and offered him his services. If nothing else, he was sure of himself.
The English summer of 1966 was a wet one. There was a new Labor government in office and mounting anticipation of football’s World Cup kicking off in the country that July. On a chill, damp night Plant met his future wife at a concert by British R&B singer Georgie Fame. Although she was born in West Bromwich, Maureen Wilson’s family had come to the Black Country from Goa in India. Petite and pretty, she was a keen dancer, and the attraction between her and Plant was immediate.
Their relationship would have been frowned upon by many around the Midlands at that time. Less than two years earlier the General Election of October 1964 had exposed the nasty tensions simmering beneath the surface in the area. In a notorious vote in West Bromwich’s neighboring constituency of Smethwick the sitting Labor MP had been unseated by the Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths, who had fought a campaign protesting at the influx of Asian immigrants into the town.
Such was the vitriol stirred up by Griffiths that the victorious Labor prime minister, Harold Wilson, suggested he be met at Westminster as a “parliamentary leper” when he took up his seat. Griffiths was ousted in the ensuing election of March 1966 but it would take many years for the raw wounds he had opened up to heal.
“Robert did everything against the rules then and it was quite brave of him to do so,” reflects Perry Foster, Plant’s first mentor. “Be it leaving his perfectly nice, middle-class home or stepping out with a girl from Goa. I will say this for him, he’d got more balls than I had.”
It was equally true that Maureen had a positive influence on Plant. He became a frequent guest at her family’s home on Trinity Road in West Bromwich, there acquiring a taste for Indian curries and spices, and also hearing new and exotic sounds.
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p; “A lot of Asian families lived in that part of West Brom,” he said to me. “Those amazing sounds of the Indian singers from the ’50s . . . It was all around, coming from next door and up the alley from the terraced house where I was staying. I was intrigued by it.”
Says John Crutchley: “Maureen was good for Robert, and he couldn’t have wished for a better family because they took him under their wing. He stayed at Trinity Road quite a lot, among all the comings and goings there. I fancied Maureen’s younger sister, Shirley, and the four of us used to go about together. It was a nice, cosy scene.”
Not that Plant’s restless ambitions were stilled. He was mindful of the precedent being set by the Move, who had struck out beyond the Midlands, and he convinced the others that they needed to get off the local circuit, too. Listen’s answer to Tony Secunda would be Mike Dolan, who ran a tailoring business in Birmingham. Dolan approached the band with a view to becoming their manager, telling them he had money to invest.
His money did not go far, but Dolan did get Listen taken on by two booking agencies, the London-based Malcolm Rose Agency and Astra in Wolverhampton. They began to get gigs in far-flung places such as the 400 Ballroom in Torquay on the English south coast, and up north at Newcastle’s Club A’GoGo. On July 30, the day that England won the World Cup at Wembley Stadium, Listen opened for the Troggs, of “Wild Thing” fame, at the Boston Gliderdrome in Lincolnshire.
“We went all over the place in a van Mrs. Reagan had given to us,” recalls Crutchley. “It had belonged to another of her bands, the Redcaps, but they’d split up. A friend of Robert’s from Kidderminster, a lad named Edward, used to drive us. He was a total nutcase, this chubby little guy who used to take loads of substances.”
