John Bonham

by Mick Bonham

  With thanks to all those who took part

  in the writing of this book.

  For Dennis and Debbie

  without whom none of it would have been possible.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  In the Days of My Youth

  Tin Drums to Tin Pan Alley

  The Long and Winding Road

  Brum Beat

  John Bonham pre-Zeppelin Bands

  Reg Jones Interview

  Dave Pegg Interview

  Chris Jones Interview

  No Bloody Drum Sticks

  Brum Beat II

  Through Rose Coloured Glasses

  The Train Starts a Rolling

  What Now? America!

  Party Party!

  In Person, Led Zeppelin Into the 70s

  1971 – A Return to the Clubs

  The Search for the Old Hyde

  Zeppelin Takes Trentham Gardens

  The Elusive Moby Dick

  Bonzo on Touring

  Down on the Farm

  May Daze

  Celebration Day

  Births and Premieres

  Bonzo on the Band

  Bonzo on Drumming

  The Christening

  Old Farts, Young Farts (Age Doesn’t Matter)

  J.H. Bonham Developments (Incorporating Bodgit and Scarper)

  Scramble On

  Lulu Interview 1999

  A Quiet Game of Chequers

  The Sun Shines Again

  A New Decade and the End of an Era

  What is and What Should Never Be

  Chronology

  Deborah Bonham

  Last Word

  Copyright

  Above

  Mick Bonham

  Foreword

  About ten years ago, after reading yet another load of rubbish about his brother John, my husband Mick turned to me and said, “I should write a book about ‘our kid’, if only to tell Zoe (John’s daughter) what a great bloke her dad was.” And with that the seeds of this book began to grow.

  Mick was not a writer, he wrote as he spoke and when I read his book I can still hear him and feel his wicked sense of humour. I hope you will be able to share that too. As you read on, it becomes clear that John was not only his brother and friend, but also his hero, and when John died a large gap was left in Mick’s life and until his own untimely death, no one would ever fill it.

  Those who are close to our family will realise that Mick writes of a lighter side to life, he left a lot of memories untold as they were either private, personal or too painful, i.e. his description of John’s death is brief, he could not find the words to measure his pain.

  Mick died suddenly on 14 January 2000, aged 49. He had just completed the first re-write, but I guess it would have had several if time had allowed. However, we all felt that the book should be printed basically as he wrote it, so that his humour and character could be felt throughout. I hope you enjoy sharing their life together as Mick saw it.

  This book is a tribute to two heroes, one of Mick’s and one of mine…

  Linda Bonham

  September 2005

  Above

  Mick and John Bonham

  Chapter 1

  IN THE DAYS OF MY YOUTH

  “I’ve wanted to be a drummer since I was about five years old. I used to play on a bath salt container with wires on the bottom, and on a round coffee tin with a loose wire fixed to it to give a snare drum effect. Plus there were always my Mum’s pots and pans. When I was ten, my Mum bought me a snare drum. My Dad bought me my first full drum kit when I was 15. It was almost prehistoric. Most of it was rust.”

  – John Bonham

  My brother John was born with an extremely enlarged and bruised cranium, following twenty-six hours of labour, unfortunately for our Mum (Joan). He entered the world weighing in at a grand ten pounds four ounces.

  He was named after our Dad, John Henry, who for some unknown reason was called Jacko by everyone.

  Home was a nice three bedroom semi-detached house on the outskirts of Redditch, which is about 20 miles from Brum, in a village called Hunt End. John Henry Jr. was two years older than me, and this angelic looking little lad would take me on some great nights, and get me into some hard fights.

  As the first few years passed, I noticed that John had a passion for hitting things – biscuit tins, sweet boxes and anything else that made a sound. What made this a particularly fretful period for me was the discovery that I too was included in John’s make believe drum kit. But here it was, the start of the drumming career of John ‘Bonzo’ Bonham!

  Though John looked like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, he had a mischievous bent which came to light during our formative years. It first reared its head when he decided to try riding his tricycle down the stairs of the family home, knocking out his two front teeth in the process. This was followed by deciding (after discovering a tin of orange paint) that one of Jacko’s employees would be a much happier man if his motorbike was treated to a new coat of paint. Needless to say, John couldn’t understand why he was the only one pleased with the bike’s new look. After all, he had truly created a one-off; the only all-orange BSA in Redditch. Maybe all of England.

  Above

  John Bonham 1948

  After his ‘impressionist’ phase, John returned to hitting everything that didn’t move. This time it was with two drum sticks he’d been given as a present. As I was still considered a part of the drum kit I had to keep on the move. Mum assured me that it was just a phase that John was going through and that he’d soon grow out of it, which was all well and good but nobody had explained this to John. He never did grow out of it, but I became pretty nimble on my feet.

  The advent of 1953 finally brought me the peace my young self had been yearning for; John started school. This left me feeling safe between the hours of nine and four and I could relax and enjoy my childhood without being one of John’s cymbals. Throughout our childhood we were very privileged, some might even say spoilt, thanks to our Grandad’s fair sized construction business of which Jacko was a part of. This meant three holidays a year and trips to the different building sites with Jacko. A young boy’s dream you might think, but these always caused me more grief because of John’s realisation, after watching Jacko hard at work, that things could be hit much harder using a hammer. And thus began John’s two future careers – one as a carpenter, the other as one of the loudest drummers in the music business. But of course, all that was a long way off and we were still listening to 78rpm records on the gramophone, and listening to Children’s Favourites on the wireless. In those days, CD stood for Can Drums.

  School was a very large old house in Worcester Road, Redditch called Wilton House Private School and consisted of three classrooms with three lady teachers and a matronly headmistress who, luckily for us, didn’t believe in slapping young children if they were naughty. Over the next few years however, that belief would be pushed to the limit by an up and coming drummer and his brother.

  By now we’d moved from Hunt End into Redditch, so we were nearer school, which meant a short walk home through the town centre and down Easemore Road, where we lived. At the bottom of our road was another school. Given we were walking past this school in our alarming uniforms, taunts like, “Still got yer ‘jamas on then,” came flying thick and fast. This, of course, was like a red rag to a bull to our John, and out of his mouth would come these fateful words, “Come on our kid, let’s get ‘em.” Now I’m not putting our school down but I don’t think they’d taught my dear brother how to count properly.

  Above

  John, Jacko and Mick

  Either that or there was something wrong with his eyesight, as th
ere was always a gang of them, and only two of us. This, needless to say, was the start of the Hard Fights.

  School was way different back then, especially in the discipline department. Not wearing your cap whilst being in uniform would mean a severe lecture (nowadays known as a bollocking). This, I thought, did not apply to me. After all, I was a good boy, my Mum had told me so. That was until that dark and fateful day when, approaching the school gates, I realised I had forgotten my gloves. No big deal, you may be thinking, but on a sliding scale of one to ten in the punishment stakes, this was a two, or even a three. Tears began to flow, the bottom lip began to quiver. Even the backside tensed noticeably. It’s at times like this that you realise how much your big brother really does love you, for without hesitation John handed me his gloves and marched into the school yard, hands open to the elements, like Daniel into the lion’s den. Boy did he get a bollocking!

  After the glove incident I tried very hard to get things right, and all went swimmingly until the day it was reported that some lad had pissed on the toilet floor and the whole school was, somewhat dramatically, called up before the headmistress and the guilty party asked to own up. This time I was on my own. I knew brotherly love would not stretch to rescuing me for something like this. So own up I did, and was made a prefect for my honesty. Now the dictionary definition of ‘prefect’ is ‘school child in position of limited powers over the other pupils’. So I guess the moral of this story is simple – if you can’t be ‘perfect’, be ‘prefect’.

  The rest of my time at Wilton House passed largely without incident until the day John was ready to go to ‘big’ school; Lodge Farm Secondary School. By the time I was ready to join him we’d moved back to Hunt End, so it was Ridgeway Comprehensive School for me. I was on my own again.

  Chapter 2

  TIN DRUMS TO TIN PAN ALLEY

  “I was so keen to play when I left school, I’d have played for nothing. In fact, I did that for a long time, but my parents stuck by me.”

  – John Bonham

  Above

  Mick and John

  John never lost his love for playing the drums throughout his early school years and this was encouraged by a lovely man called Charlie Atkins. The name won’t mean much to you, but the music industry owes quite a lot to Charlie Atkins, as it was he who first saw the potential in John Bonham the drummer. He also gave John his first gig.

  Now as I mentioned earlier, Jacko had made a few shillings, so we had a caravan and a boat (named Isobel after Mum’s middle name) down in Stourport-on-Severn, a riverside town about 15 miles from Redditch. We spent most weekends and some of our holidays there, and this is where we met Charlie Atkins. Charlie would spend his weekends in the caravan next to ours, and he was the leader of a dance band. The kind of setup where the band use Brylcreem and the drummer uses brushes. If you were hip to a tango, waltz or a foxtrot then these were the boys to see. It may not sound exciting now, but to John, this was the business and he would sit and listen to Charlie talk about paradiddles and other such drumming terminology until the cows came home. It was after one of these meetings that Charlie gave John his own set of brushes, which was fine by me because there was no way they would hurt as much as sticks.

  By now it had become apparent that this was not a fad John was going through, so he was given a white, pearl snare drum to encourage him in his musical quest. After much practice and more chats with Charlie, John finally got his big break. Charlie asked him to sit in and play drums with the band, at the Caravan Club’s Members Dance, and for a kid of 11, this boy “wasn’t half bad”. There he sat, behind the drums, head full of Brylcreem and brushes in hand giving it his best. This, I believe, was the turning point for John Bonham, and I don’t think that from this point onwards, anyone or anything was ever going to stop him becoming a drummer.

  ‘When it came to bullshit, John could stand with the best of them.’

  During the years down at the caravan, John and I spent many happy times together. We’d go swimming and, when allowed, take the boat up the river on our own.

  Many years later we’d return to the river with John’s own boat Staysea. Typically John became a dab hand at taking Jacko’s boat out on his own without Mum or Jacko knowing, until one lazy Sunday afternoon.

  There we were on the boat, having a picnic, when an irate man pulled up alongside in his own boat and started giving Jacko grief about the “laws of the river” and having more respect for other boaters. Jacko, needless to say, was somewhat baffled by the intrusion until the gentleman pointed out that on that very morning Isobel had been seen travelling up the river at a rate of knots, causing a wash second only to Moses parting the Red Sea. The effect of this had caused this gentleman to deposit his breakfast all over his nice clean deck. Jacko duly apologised and assured the fellow it would not happen again. Throughout the entire conversation it amazed me how Jacko kept one eye on the irate sailor and one firmly fixed on our John. Yet, somehow John came out with some inspired bullshit and got away with the entire escapade. When it came to bullshit, John could stand with the best of them.

  All too soon those days of sun and fun came to an end and it was back to different schools and different friends. Yet whether he was on holiday or with friends, John’s mind was never far from drumming. So, during the following months, John saved his pocket money and other monies he had earned, doing odd jobs, and went off looking for items to add to his snare drum and brushes. After a while, he built up a drum kit of sorts, consisting of a snare drum, bass drum and floor tom, all of second-hand origin. He loved it and it would do the trick for now.

  Throughout the early 50s, the music scene was being dominated by names like Al Martino, Doris Day, Frankie Lane and Nat King Cole, yet by the end of the decade a distinctive change was starting to take place. It was a change that would take John with it. Until this point, the only real influence of John, bar Charlie Atkins, had been Edmundo Ross and his Band, who, for those that don’t know, were one of the best, if not the best, Latin American music bands to travel the airwaves. The very pronounced drumming riffs and heavy percussion inspired John even more. We would sit in front of the ‘wireless’ every Saturday and listen to Edmundo’s show, which was a rare treat seeing as there were only three choices of music at home: Jacko’s Lena Horne albums, Mum’s Frank Sinatra records, and Children’s Favourite for us kids. Nevertheless, it was all making way for a new era of sound drifting over from America, namely Rock’n’Roll.

  Above

  John Henry Bonham (Jacko)

  Suddenly names like Little Richard, Bill Haley and Elvis Presley were coming to the forefront of popular music and encouraging home-grown artists like Cliff Richard, Marty Wilde, Adam Faith and good old Lonnie Donegan, who John would eventually meet many years after when he was invited to play drums on Lonnie’s comeback album.

  Above

  Joan Bonham

  Until now, the only drummers really heard of were of the Big Band variety. As both Mum and Jacko were big fans (the latter a keen Harry James Band devotee, the former fond of Benny Goodman), John was repeatedly playing a record called ‘Don’t Be That Way’ and ‘Swing, Swing, Swing’, which featured a drummer called Gene Krupa. John had decided that this was the drummer he wanted to emulate and he spent many hours listening to and learning Krupa’s technique. But then it happened. In the penultimate month of the 50s, Sandy Nelson’s ‘Teen Beat’ entered the UK charts and John was mesmerised. So was I, but if you had to sit and listen to it over and over again for three days on the trot while he tried to learn it, you’d be bloody mesmerised as well! It was like kick starting a Harley Davidson – John was off, saying he was going to form a band.

  I was going to be involved in this venture too, given the highly honoured title of ‘lyricist’. “Lovely job,” I thought, but let me tell you that it meant something totally different back then. It meant that I was to be the dipshit that went to the record shop to buy the records and then sit down in front of the stereogram, listen to th
em repeatedly, and write down the words. A boring job, but I guess someone had to do it, and it was for the good of the band. My first assignment was ‘Running Bear’ by Johnnie Preston, a nice song but it hardly inspired me. The next record, however, did move me. In fact, I reckon it was one of the best singles ever released – ‘Till I Kissed You’ by The Everley Brothers.

  Apart from the American artists that were changing the mood of music with their influx of Rock’n’Roll, Britain was raising its own fine talent. One of these was Joe Brown. He’d originally formed the Spacemen skiffle group in 1956 and, with a change of direction and name, Joe had his first hit in 1960 with his version of ‘Darktown Strutters Ball’. Now under the handle of Joe Brown and the Bruvvers, a string of hits would follow. During this period John and I were holidaying in Brighton, on the South Coast of England, and we managed to get tickets for a Joe Brown show. With our parents’ permission, we set off with baited breath. What we saw that night left us quite stunned.

  There was Joe Brown, guitar behind his head, playing a solo as he tore into a version of The Spotniks’ 1963 hit ‘Have Nagila’. I remember saying to John after the show, “Shit, that was good.”

  It was after this holiday that John returned to school and made friends with another aspiring young musician called John Hill, who played guitar.

  Together they decided to form a band, but before they got started they would spend many a night setting up the drum kit, leaning the guitar against it and standing back staring at their mock stage set up – moving it every now and then for better effect. I was never involved in these rituals because I was still sitting in front of the bloody stereogram, listening to more bloody records and writing down more bloody lyrics! The name of the band would be the ‘Avengers’ but they unfortunately never got a gig.