When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  As a result, Plant told me, both he and Bonham were initially offered £25 per week in England; £50 per week in Europe and £100 per week for touring America. He chuckled as he recalled how Bonzo said ‘“That’s not enough for me.” He did some kind of deal with Peter Grant whereby he got an extra £25 per week for driving the van! Bear in mind that he never even had a driving licence. It was a bit like a Keystone cops chase half the time, constantly leaving the road and driving through hedges…’

  Plant had first met Bonham four years before, at the Oldhill Plaza in Birmingham, where, as a seventeen-year-old, Plant had blagged a job as an occasional MC. That night, however, he’d also been singing there in his band, the Crawling King Snakes (after the John Lee Hooker song). He was actually on stage when he first laid eyes on him. ‘I noticed this guy looking at me,’ he said. ‘He came up to me afterwards and said, “You’re pretty good but your band’s shit. What you need is somebody as good as me”.’ It was Bonzo, a name all his friends called him for no particular reason other than it fitted him so well. This big, beefy bloke who could hit a drum kit so hard he would literally smash it to pieces, and would do so for fun, especially to other drummers’ kits. This larger-than-life, hard-drinking, outspoken absolute git of a bloke who could be as soft-hearted as a girl one minute and punch your lights out the next.

  The whole thing really took off for you – the mad idea that the audience would actually ‘take notice’ of you as a drummer – when Dad took you to see Harry James at Brum town hall. Sod the trumpet. It was the drummer, Sonny Payne, who you couldn’t take your eyes off. Sonny Payne, who would bounce the drumsticks off the skins and catch them behind his back! Fucking hell, look at that! That was when you knew for sure. You’d tell ’em: ‘It’s all very well to be playing a triple paradiddle – but who’s going to know you’re actually doing it? Being original is what counts.’

  You didn’t need lessons, either. Buddy Rich never had lessons, did he? No, he bloody didn’t, mate. Much better to learn as you went along, that way it stuck in your head and stayed there, no matter how many pints you’d had that night. Better to suss out who the good ones were and stand there and watch them, and listen. Knock on their doors if you had to. That was how, when you were fourteen, you’d met Garry Allcock. Garry had been playing drums since 1951. He was also mad about cars, which was good too, sitting together in Garry’s front room with your sticks and your practice pads, nattering about cars when it got boring and having a fag. Garry, who used to sit there frowning when you hit the snares too hard, shouting: ‘For Chrissakes, John, take it steady!’ Gary, who used to tell you to watch it or you were, ‘going to knock it through the floorboards!’ Gary was a worrier but a good bloke, too. Knew his drums and his cars. Ace geezer.

  Then there was Bill Harvey, another good ’un who knew his drums, who you’d met down the youth club when you were fifteen. Bill was in his twenties, an older fella who’d been drumming for years. Bill had laughed at you and called you ‘a tiny lad’ and told you to come back later. But you weren’t having none of that. So you kept on, turning up and pushing him, letting him know all about it, and before long Bill was coming round to your dad’s caravan to give you ‘clinics’. Dad would go mad at the noise. ‘Not you two at it again – clear off!’

  Once, when Bill had had a row with his band, the Blue Star Trio, and fucked off in a huff, you offered to sit in for him. The band had laughed but when you got up and started hitting them fucking skins they’d shut up quick, like. When Bill came back later that night and saw you thumping away on his kit he went all funny on you. But then you had a brainwave and told him, ‘Come on, let’s do a solo together,’ and you’d both got up on the same kit. It was great! It went down so well Bill said you should make a regular thing of it, like. From then on, whenever he played he’d pretend to pull you, this kid, out of the crowd. Years later, you were still laughing about it. ‘Everybody went, “How did they do that?” They didn’t realise we had rehearsed it for hours.’

  You and Bill became good mates in other ways too. Already fond of a pint, you would get behind the wheel of your dad’s Ford Zephyr convertible and the two of you would go out on the lash together. No bloody breathalyser in them days, mate, and the two of you would get paralytic. Them were the days. But the best thing Bill ever did for you was introduce you to the Dave Brubeck Quartet, whose drummer Joe Morello was famous for his ‘finger control’ technique – this weird bloody thing he did with his fingers, tapping on the snare drum in a way that made it sound like a lion’s roar one minute, then doing something else that made it sound like a bow and arrow the next. You couldn’t get over the idea of using your bare hands on the drums. You thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. Then Bill showed you another ‘great pattern’ from a Humphrey Lyttelton recording he had called ‘Caravan’, where the drummer played floor-toms with his hands. You couldn’t get over it and begged Bill to show you how it was done. ‘Forget it, you’ll never get it,’ he’d said. But you bloody well did, mate. You bloody well fucking did!

  At first, you’d shout and swear as you cut your hands and broke your fingernails on the rims and cymbals but you were buggered if you were giving up and eventually you got it. ‘It wasn’t so much what you could play with your hands,’ you’d say later, when they all came round to ask you about it. ‘You got a lovely little tone out of the drums that you couldn’t get with sticks. It hurts your hands at first, but then the skin hardens.’ In the end you got so used to playing drums with your hands you believed you could hit ’em harder with your hands than with the sticks. And you could, you bloody well could.

  By the time you left school you were so determined to become a drummer, you said, that ‘I would have played for nothing. In fact, I did for a long time. But my parents stuck by me.’ And you stuck by them, joining the family business as an apprentice carpenter. Brick-laying and hod-carrying made you physically strong but getting up for work at six every morning nearly fucking killed you, especially when you began playing in local pub bands, waking up the next morning for work still pissed. But music was becoming even more important than cricket. Once you cycled forty-eight bloody miles to see Screaming Lord Sutch and get his autograph. And you began building up your record collection. Not that you were fussy, like. Johnny Kidd & The Pirates were all right, so were the Hollies and the Graham Bond Organisation, whose drummer, Ginger Baker, you liked better than anyone since Gene Krupa. The way you saw it, Ginger was responsible for the same sort of thing in rock as Krupa had been in jazz. ‘Ginger was the first to come out with this “new” attitude – that a drummer could be a forward part of a rock band – not something that was stuck in the background and forgotten about.’

  You didn’t make a big thing of it but you were always learning, always keeping your eyes and ears open, even when you were pissed. When you were seventeen you’d go and see Denny Laine and The Diplomats whose drummer, Bev Bevan, was about the same age as you and a good bloke. He’d let you sit by his side during the gig sometimes, just watching what he did, seeing if there was anything you could nick. US soul and R&B was good too, especially once you’d worked out how to get that big, open drum sound all those records had. The trick, you reckoned, was to get your hands on the largest drums you could find, without the poncey dampers and mufflers, and just start hitting them, bashing them like bricks. You were determined, you said, to ‘get that sound’.

  It wasn’t long after this that you finally got out of the pubs, when you got your first real break on what they called the Ma Reagan Circuit – the Oldhill Plaza, the Handsworth Plaza, the Gary Owen club, the Birmingham Cavern, all them sorts of places – playing in groups like Terry Webb & The Spiders, the Nicky James Movement, Locomotive and A Way of Life. You’d even drummed briefly for The Senators and got to play on a track, ‘She’s A Mod’, that ended up on that compilation album, Brum Beat. It was 1964, you were sixteen, and if that didn’t make you a real drummer you didn’t know what bloody did, mate…

 
‘Robert said you should really come along and see this drummer, he’s working with Tim Rose,’ Jimmy Page remembered. ‘I was gonna find the singer first and then pull it together. But when I heard John Bonham, albeit in quite a limited experience compared to how everyone else knows his playing now, he had that sort of energy in his drumming that was inspiring, you could tell that straight away. I’d been used to drummers who were [very good] going right the way back to Neil Christian & The Crusaders. I mean, he was like the best drummer in London. He’d been a drum major and he was really, really active on the kit, bass drum independency and all that. And I’d been used to all of that, and in the studios [there] was Bobby Graham who did all the sessions, playing on Kinks and Dave Clark Five records. Bobby was a real sort of hooligan drummer as well. So I’d been used to all this sort of stuff. And I knew that because it was gonna rely on this three-piece, that the drummer had to be somebody who, basically, had an amazing intellect on the kit as well as all the power and the passion. But I’d never seen anyone quite like Bonzo.’ As soon as Jimmy saw him play, ‘That was it, it was immediate. I knew that he was gonna be perfect.’ Not just for what he calls the ‘hooligan’ stuff either, he said, but for ‘this thing in my mind of employing dynamics and light and shade. I knew he was gonna be the man; that he could do all this.’

  And yet it so nearly didn’t happen. Bonzo seemed so disinterested when Plant first discussed it with him the singer furtively sounded out other local drummers. One such was Mac Poole, an old friend of Bonham’s who had replaced him as drummer in A Way of Life after ‘John lost them too many gigs for playing too loud’. Poole bumped into Plant at a Joe Cocker gig in Birmingham a couple of weeks after the singer had returned from Pangbourne, where ‘Robert put it to me in a very kind of simplistic way,’ Poole said. ‘He just said, “I’m doing these sessions with a guy called Jimmy Page, and we’re gonna put a band together and we’re gonna call it the New Yardbirds – and we need a drummer”. That was like asking me if I was free. That’s how we did it in Birmingham, you sounded people out first, you didn’t just say, “Do you want the job in the band?” But I just said, “Well, I’ve got my own band, Rob, we’ve got our own deal.”’

  Poole had, in fact, recently formed Hush, who had indeed just signed a deal. ‘I said to Robert, “What’s wrong with John?” He said, “He’s touring with Tim Rose.” Which he was and of course Tim Rose was paying regular money. And at that time anyone paying regular money was worth holding on to. Then Robert said, “OK, maybe I’ll try Phil Brittle.”. He was kind of running ideas past me.’ Brittle was another Birmingham-based drummer who would later find fame locally in a band called Sissy Stone. ‘He was a very good drummer,’ Poole told me in 2005, ‘and of course Robert wanted somebody that would probably do what he was told a bit more, you know. And probably wouldn’t get drunk, cos I mean Robert knew John of old and that it might be a bit of a dangerous deal.’ Less than two weeks later, however, Poole ran into Plant again – this time in company with Bonham. ‘We met up in the room where we all used to meet up after gigs, at the Cedar Club. They were both together and I said, “Ah, don’t tell me, he’s joined your new band.” And Robert said, “Yeah.” They were still called the New Yardbirds, which I shied away from. I thought they were all gonna be wearing dickey-bows doing “Over Under Sideways Down”. I thought, “Bloody hell, Bonzo ain’t gonna last in that lot…”’

  When Jimmy finally persuaded him to give it a try, Bonzo had asked him what sort of drummers he liked ‘and I played him a single called “Lonnie on the Move” [by Lonnie Mac]. It’s like “Turn on Your Love-light” as an instrumental, and it’s got this drumming that’s really super hooligan [and] I said, “This is the sort of angle that I’m coming in at”.’ Bonzo picked up on what Jimmy was talking about no problem at all. As Mac Poole points out, ‘John had hammered his own style together well before Zeppelin. So when he joined Zeppelin it was easy, he just pissed all over the band. John was always an effective drummer; he was always determined to be part of it. And there was nobody that was gonna fucking put him at the back and tell him to sit there like a good little boy because that wasn’t the man that you were dealing with.’ He laughed out loud. ‘Even in the early days, he was determined to be heard!’

  Poole does concede that having to perform for a name musician of the calibre of Page did force Bonham to ‘toe the line a lot more – certainly in the beginning. Jimmy was the one giving all the directions.’ He talks about how he and Bonham and future ELP drummer Carl Palmer – another local lad destined to make good – were ‘all in this melting pot with this equipment, smacking seven bells out of the kit just to be heard’. The advent of rock’n’roll ‘changed the whole method of thinking, certainly on the drum kit. John would always be saying things like, I worked with such-and-such a group and the fucking guitarist deafened me! After that, just to make sure his bass drum was heard, he’d put silver paper in it so that it would project. John was determined not to be sunk down.’

  It was an attitude, Poole said, which worked to his detriment in a lot of the early bands he played with – hence the reputation for being too loud. ‘If the band wasn’t gonna turn down, he sure wasn’t. I know Dave Pegg [later bassist of Fairport Convention] had problems with him like that in A Way of Life. Every gig they did they got banned because John wouldn’t play quieter. And through that he developed this whole attitude towards other musicians which was tantamount to war, you know? He was a good drummer, a good time-keeper. But whatever they call the X-factor, John had it. He didn’t care about technique, it was like he was gonna try something new that he’d thought about in his head. And even if it didn’t come off and it absolutely messed the band up, he didn’t care, he’d play it anyway. Most drummers practise a new idea and come back with it perfected. John would perfect it on stage [and] when it fitted, it was a fucking stroke of genius. And that’s where his innovating spirit came from – a complete disregard for the other musicians. Guitarists, all they had to do was turn up the volume control and they could be louder.’ It was this same belligerence, said Poole that ‘came through in Zeppelin and made the band what they were, musically. I think Jimmy immediately understood what he had and helped him harness it.’

  It was towards the end of these approaches that the final piece of the jigsaw fell into place, again, quite by accident, or possibly destiny, depending on what you believe. In Jimmy Page’s case, that meant it was almost preordained. Whichever it was, John Paul Jones came in ‘late in the day,’ said Page ‘and all of sudden all the ingredients are now there. Like it was meant to be…’

  But while Page may insist he never had any doubts about how Bonham and Jones would work together as a rhythm section, the difference between their two personalities could not have been more stark. Like Bonzo, Jones was already married with children. But Jones was also a softly-spoken middle-class Southerner; Bonzo a raucous, working-class Midlander. Yet somehow the two hit it off immediately. Even later on when Bonham was on a drunken rampage, Jones was rarely the target for his ire. As he later told me, ‘Musically, we were very proud of our capabilities as a rhythm section. We’d listen and leave space for ourselves. There was a great deal of mutual respect. We were always incredibly locked-in – phrasing the same and always coming to the same musical conclusion. The empathy we had when we played was always incredibly exhilarating. But then I was fortunate. I was playing with the best drummer I’d ever known, and I’d known most of them…’

  You’d been John Paul Jones for four years now and you still weren’t any more famous than you’d been as plain old John Baldwin. What was the bloody point? How had it come to this, churning out nonsense for Harry Secombe and Des O’Connor? You may as well have stayed behind in the Home Counties and got yourself a proper job. The pay might not have been as good but the hours were the same and at least you’d feel like you were getting somewhere. More and more this felt like nowhere. This was nowhere. Not even a window to gaze out of. Just the four walls, the endless cigarette sm
oke, putting one out, lighting another, endless bloody cups of tea, watching the clock ticktocking by. Then coming home at night and complaining to your wife: ‘I’m making money, Mo, but I’m not enjoying it anymore…’

  How had it happened? You felt more like a pop star when you were seventeen than now at twenty-two. At least back then you felt like you were getting somewhere, your future opening up. Things had been groovy back then, touring the country with Tony Meehan and Jet Harris. Proper touring, not just wedding parties and youth clubs; proper gigs in front of proper audiences that had come to hear the hits…‘Diamonds’, ‘Scarlet O’Hara’, ‘Applejack’…sleeping in proper digs; guesthouses, bed and breakfast, then in the van again and off. Smoking reefer for the first time, chatting up the birds, the birds chatting up you. All that and thirty quid a week! Bloody heaven! Absolute bloody heaven! Then suddenly – it was all over. Just like that. Finito; gone. Even though Tony had tried to keep it going, it was never the same again after Jet’s accident. Suddenly it wasn’t about the hits anymore. It was about…something else. Something the punters didn’t get or even like. Oh, there had been ‘Song of Mexico’ but who remembered that? ‘I wanna try something new,’ Tony had said after Jet had gone. Jazz and pop. You were up for it. Till you started getting booed off every night. Still plenty of reefer to smoke but no more birds to chat up or thirty quid a week to spend. Then Tony took the job as an A&R man at Decca and that was that. You were out on your ear.