Robert Plant: A Life: The Biography

‘Rob was so much into the kind of music that we weren’t,’ says Dudley. ‘I mean, where on earth he got the knowledge that he had of the blues from I don’t know. He was forever going on about people like Sonny Boy Williamson, and from that age. For God’s sake, in those days you wouldn’t hear anything like that on the radio.’

Plant got to see a physical manifestation of the blues for the first time on 10 October 1963 when his aunt and uncle took him along to the Gaumont cinema in Wolverhampton to see one of the new package tours that had begun travelling around the UK. This one featured the young Rolling Stones, the Everly Brothers, Little Richard, and a Mississippi bluesman, Bo Diddley. It was Diddley who transfixed him.

‘I was sweating with excitement,’ he told Q magazine in 1990, reflecting back on that night. ‘Though the Stones were great, they were really crap in comparison with Diddley. All his rhythms were so sexual – just oozing, even in a twenty-minute slot. Now that’s an evening.’

Before the year was out Plant had also stepped onto the stage himself. His opportunity came when Andy Long was struck down with appendicitis, which at the time required a six-week period of convalescence. Long’s Jurymen were by now playing several nights a week and did not want to turn down the work, so who better to fill in for their singer than their friend Robert Plant, given that he already knew their set inside out?

Plant’s début live performance came at the Bull’s Head pub in Lye, a regular haunt of the Jurymen since it was run by John Dudley’s grandfather. On this night one might imagine that he would have been stricken with nerves as he looked out from the small, low stage and into the eyes of an audience for the first time. That here, in this smoky bar, he would wilt before such judging looks and when standing next to his then more experienced schoolmates.

‘When he first got up there, he was full of it – absolutely full of confidence,’ says Dudley, laughing at the memory. ‘He played more than half-decent harmonica even then and so he transformed our set into something a lot more bluesy. We had to busk it but we went down okay. I can’t remember how many gigs we eventually did with Rob but people always reacted favourably. Even then he sang in this blues wail. He used to like to take it down to a low rumble and then build back up to a crescendo.’

His stint as the Jurymen’s singer took Plant as far away as the East Midlands city of Leicester, a two-hour drive from home in the band’s old van. It also brought what he wanted to do with his life into clear perspective. Before Andy Long returned Plant began to go to work on his fellow Jurymen, attempting to persuade them that he should now become their permanent singer. He was to be frustrated in his efforts, just as he would be many times during the next few years.

‘We told him Andy was our singer and thanks very much,’ says Tolley. ‘We were all a bit mercenary. To be honest, we all had our stage uniforms and there wasn’t anything that would fit Robert.’

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He was a cocky little bleeder, I’ll tell you that much.

Plant entered his sixteenth year able both to follow the pull of music and all that it offered, and keep up his school work. In November 1963 he won a school prize for finishing top of his form in the end-of-year exams. Yet it was a precarious balance he had struck and one he was not destined to maintain.

The scales started to tip from academic achievement almost as soon as 1964 began. At 6.36 pm on New Year’s Day the BBC launched Top of the Pops, a new weekly music TV show. Beaming the pop hits of the day into British households, it brought to the nation’s teenagers the promise of something out there other than the drab and everyday. For his part Plant felt ambivalent about the British beat groups, but even he must have stirred at the sight of the fledgling Rolling Stones opening that first show – the young Mick Jagger pouting and preening through Lennon and McCartney’s ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ as if in celebration of his own beautiful youth.

On 28 February Plant hopped onto a bus to Birmingham, his parents allowing him to go off into the city on his own for the first time to see a gig. It was at the Town Hall, with Sonny Boy Williamson topping the bill. Plant snuck backstage afterwards and attempted to introduce himself to the venerable black American bluesman, happening across him in the urinal. Williamson, a bear of a man who stood six foot two, his head crowned by a bowler hat, turned and fixed the young interloper with a cold stare. ‘Fuck off,’ he snarled.

Beating a retreat, Plant stopped by Williamson’s dressing room and pilfered a harmonica. This might have been a chastening experience but Plant had also fixated upon three younger acts that played that night. Each was part of the erupting British blues boom, and each sent out a message that all this could be his, too.

There were the Yardbirds, powered by the fresh-faced Eric Clapton’s guitar; Long John Baldry and his Hoochie Coochie Men, featuring a cocksure twenty-year-old singer by the name of Rod Stewart (although he was advertised as being ‘Rod Stuart’); and the Spencer Davis Group, with little Stevie Winwood on lead vocals and organ from a couple of miles up the road in Handsworth and in the same school year as Plant, a challenge to him to get a move on if ever there was one.

He was back at the Town Hall again the following month, taking his friend John Dudley along with him to see ‘The Killer’, Jerry Lee Lewis. As was the practice then, the show had finished by 9.30 pm, leaving an unsated Plant looking for further adventure. He dragged Dudley along to a city-centre pub, the Golden Eagle, telling him he knew of a crack new blues band playing there.

‘We wangled our way in and went up the stairs to the second floor,’ recalls Dudley. ‘It was a typical dive, full of smoke, a low ceiling. There were four young guys on stage. It was the Spencer Davis Group. The impression they made on us! I can still remember what they were playing: Ampeg amps, Hofner guitars, Premier drums. The whole band was superb but Stevie Winwood was something else. He was a real influence on Rob in those early days.’

Back home in Hayley Green, Plant had acquired a washboard and begun making his own kazoos, empowered by the inspiration of both skiffle and all he was now seeing. He took a keen interest in clothes and fashion, and had started to grow his hair out, having noted how mop-tops and Mick Jagger’s modish mane made the girls scream. He had also found a venue of his own. A blues and folk club had opened at the Seven Stars pub in Stourbridge and Plant became a regular, taking along his washboard and Sonny Boy Williamson’s harmonica.

The Seven Stars modelled itself on the great Chicago blues dens and a crowd of aficionados began gathering there to drink, smoke and play. Chief among them was Perry Foster, a local character who had hung out with the Yardbirds in London and chauffeured Sonny Boy Williamson around Birmingham. Foster, who always dressed in a blue suit with a porkpie hat perched on his head, played mean slide on a customised nine-string Hofner guitar. He had also recently put together a half-decent blues combo, the Delta Blues Band.

To Plant and his wide-eyed school friends Foster was a man to know, since to them he was a real musician. One night Plant approached him and asked if he could get up and sing with his band.

‘He told me his name was Bob Plant and whipped out a washboard,’ says Foster, remembering that first encounter. ‘I’m nine years older than him but he was a cocky little bleeder, I’ll tell you that much. He had to be educated. Being older, I knew a lot more about the blues. I told him who was who and what was what, showed him how to do the twelve-bar. But then, when you’d told him once, you didn’t need to again.’

With the Delta Blues Band, Plant began performing at the Seven Stars and other local venues. He, Foster and their rhythm guitarist, Peter Groom – soon christened ‘Gobsy’ on account of his unfeasibly large mouth – would also get up as a trio at folk nights such as the weekly one at Stourbridge Conservative Club. Their staple set featured such blues standards as Lightnin’ Hopkins’s ‘Ain’t Nothing Like Whiskey’ and assorted Robert Johnson songs.

The band were earning £16 a night, split five ways between them and with a pound spare for petrol. Often as not, beery audiences greeted the fifteen-year-old grammar-school boy with shouts of ‘Get your hair cut!’ and worse, but these seemed not to ruffle him.

‘Not everyone wanted the blues but he’d got what it took all right,’ says Foster. ‘I was always saying to people, “If that kid ain’t a millionaire by the time he’s twenty-five, my name’s not Perry.” I’d growl at the band if they weren’t doing things right, and I was a bit of a tough nut at times, so as Robert would say I was a terrible man but I got on with him smashing.

‘He was a great big, gawky teenager, all knees and elbows. We used to drive around in a little MG sports car and make him sit in the back. He said to us his father wanted him to be an accountant. Coming to the Seven Stars was seen as taboo – he always used to tell his parents he was going off somewhere else.’

For Plant this was another new world opened up to him. He was playing with older guys but treated as an equal, begging cigarettes off them and drinking beer before he was legally allowed to do so. It did not sit well with his parents or his schoolmasters when he rolled in each morning, often late and usually bleary-eyed. But he could not – and would not – turn back. His path was set.

He began to hang out and jam with some of the other ambitious young musicians who had started turning up at the Seven Stars. There was twenty-year-old Chris Wood, quiet, withdrawn and greatly accomplished on multiple instruments, and a bassist named Andy Silvester. Both were in a band called Sounds of Blue, which was led by singer David Yeats and also featured a hotshot guitarist, Stan Webb, and pianist Christine Perfect. Sounds of Blue eventually mutated into blues rockers Chicken Shack, by which time Wood had hooked up with Stevie Winwood in Traffic. Later still, Christine Perfect married Fleetwood Mac’s bassist John McVie and joined that band.

‘It was at the Seven Stars that I met Robert for the first time,’ says Stan Webb. ‘He was with Perry Foster. He didn’t say much but I remember he had a very mod haircut and was wearing a fur coat. From the word go he had that thing about him. I guess you’d call it arrogance or an ego.’

Yet the Delta Blues Band was not to last. With little money being made and no sign of progress beyond a handful of staple gigs their singer upped and left.

Says Foster: ‘Robert just suddenly disappeared. Though he did leave me with his washboard.’

As 1964 progressed, so the music coming out of, and passing through, the Midlands began to evolve. A strong R&B movement had taken root in Birmingham, one fired by the release of the Rolling Stones’ cover of Buddy Holly’s ‘Not Fade Away’ that February and with the Spencer Davis Group at its apex. It was this scene that gave rise to the Moody Blues in April 1964.

Mod truly arrived in the city at the end of the year. Taking their inspiration from the black American sounds of Stax and Tamla Motown, a glut of bands sprung up on the pub circuit, each as sharp-dressed as the next, practically every one of them having Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Dancing in the Street’ in their repertoire. Earlier in 1964 a compilation album titled Brum Beat had been released (‘Birmingham’s 14 greatest groups’, it erroneously trumpeted), featuring a band called the Senators performing ‘She’s a Mod’. The sixteen-year-old drummer on that track was named John Bonham.

Plant was not impervious to such things. He had resolved to get himself onto the local ballroom circuit, albeit still playing his beloved blues. The names of the bands he would flit through during the next year or so spoke for themselves: New Memphis Bluesbreakers, Black Snake Moan, so called after a Blind Lemon Jefferson song, and after a John Lee Hooker track, the Crawling King Snakes. All but the latter were to be short-lived and soon forgotten.

‘I went to see Black Snake Moan play in a pub near Stourbridge,’ says school friend Gary Tolley. ‘We all just thought the stuff he was doing would never catch on. We were very much still in the pop idiom while Robert was off doing something on his own.’

One song Plant had begun performing by now was Robert Johnson’s ‘Travelling Riverside Blues’, more commonly referred to as ‘The Lemon Song’ on account of its suggestive lyrics – Johnson lasciviously leering, ‘You can squeeze my lemon ’til the juice run down my leg.’ Before the decade was out it would become a calling card of Plant’s, although there was no suggestion of that then.

‘That was probably his favourite one to do,’ says Tolley. ‘I’m sure he used to sing it sometimes just to watch the reaction on people’s faces when he got to the bit about squeezing his lemon. The rest of us hadn’t got the nerve to do it, but he had. Because he was different, people in authority reacted quite strongly against him. One or two of the nastier pieces of work at school didn’t like him either, because he never seemed to have any problem picking up girls.’

He was having other troubles at King Edward VI. His studies were coming a distant second in his priorities to rehearsals and gigs. He had often struggled to get to school on time in the morning, but now his late arrival, and a subsequent dressing-down from the prefects who manned the gates, were a daily occurrence.

‘The prefects had their own little room,’ says Tolley. ‘If they didn’t particularly like you, you’d have to go there and be made to stand on a table while they all sat around looking up at you. I suppose it was designed to humiliate and embarrass, but Robert just thought it was stupid. But for all of us who were playing in a band, our academic work suffered. We were rehearsing one night a week, and playing most Wednesdays and Thursdays, and certainly every Friday. You’d get home from school, have your tea and rush through your homework, then the van would pick you up.’

At the end of each term, students filed into the school library to be confronted by Headmaster Chambers, who would summon them up one at a time and pass comment on their grades. Chambers would have told the errant Plant to pull his socks up in no uncertain terms.

With external exams looming and the pressures of his father’s expectations upon him Plant suffered a period of anxiety about his falling grades. But this passed and with it any chance he might catch up. Instead he spent the remainder of that school year skipping off the school premises and into Stourbridge town centre with his clique of budding musicians.

‘We would bunk off school and go and sit in the railway station café,’ remembers Tolley. ‘Or there was a place called the Chicken Run, which was down a side street next to the town hall. We used to go in there for the bacon rolls, which you could eat down in the cellar and feel more grown up. Robert never seemed to have any money in those days. He was always cadging cigarettes. Four of us would take our school lunch money down to the station café and each get a cup of coffee and beans on toast, and we’d all have to share with Rob.’

That summer Plant and his friends sat their O-level exams. Of the Jurymen, Tolley, Dudley and Baggott scraped a handful of passes between them and left school, off to find jobs. Plant managed but a single pass, in history. His parents intended for him to remain at King Edward VI for another year and to re-sit his exams.

At least things had taken a turn for the better outside of the school. Plant was singing and blowing harmonica in the Crawling King Snakes, a band that had grown up in Kidderminster, the nearest town immediately south-west of Stourbridge. From messy beginnings at such places as the local YWCA they had gradually improved enough to get themselves on the Ma Reagan circuit, and were playing twenty-minute slots at her venues as a warm-up act.

‘By the time I was capable of stepping in front of a microphone the Midlands scene was full of beat groups and I was a bit late getting on the bandwagon,’ Plant told me. ‘But I’d gotten a really good schooling playing with people quite a bit older than me. I’d already been getting up in the blues clubs for more than a year before I even thought about going to places where women danced.’

In many respects 1965 was to be a pivotal year. The first rumblings of dark and crazy days ahead were felt in the US that summer as Los Angeles burnt during the Watts Riots. In October, with the number of troops being drafted to Vietnam doubling, anti-war protests swept through American cities. That same month in Britain, police in Manchester arrested Ian Brady and his girlfriend Myra Hindley, charging them with the murder of five children, three of whose bodies had been discovered on nearby Saddleworth Moor.

This was also to be the year that pop music came of age. The Beatles made Rubber Soul; Bob Dylan went electric and released his first masterpiece, ‘Highway 61 Revisited’; the Byrds emerged on America’s West Coast; and the Who crashed out of London shouting ‘My Generation’. And as rock grew up out of pop, the notion that this was all to be a flash in the pan receded into the distance.

In Stourbridge, the town hall became a hub of activity, hosting weekly ‘Big Beat Sessions’ that brought both the Who and the Small Faces to town. Each found an especially enthusiastic supporter in sixteen-year-old Plant, by now a fully fledged mod. He got a taste of this action closer to home, too. Out of Wolverhampton came the N’Betweens, later to change their name to Slade and then cranking out fuzzbox-heavy Tamla Motown covers. There were also the Shakedown Sound, formed – like Crawling King Snakes – in Kidderminster, but steps ahead of Plant’s band, bagging opening spots with the likes of the Who and local heroes the Spencer Davis Group.

Plant was especially taken with the Shakedown Sound’s singer, Jess Roden. A year older than him, Roden had, like Stevie Winwood, a freakishly soulful voice. His band were gigging most nights of the week on the Reagan circuit and beyond, performing powerful versions of blues staples such as ‘Smokestack Lightning’ and ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’. The Crawling King Snakes and the Shakedown Sound became close, hanging out and copping songs off each other.

‘I suppose Robert was King Mod,’ says Kevyn Gammond, then guitarist in the Shakedown Sound. ‘He had a good eye for fashion, so he’d always have the latest Ben Sherman shirt on and the right hairstyle. I think the N’Betweens and the Shakedowns had a big influence on him, because we were all little mods, and our band had played with the Who.

‘Rob was really impressed by Jess. They’d both come round to my parents’ house and ask me to work out all the chords to songs like “I Go Crazy” by James Brown. That’s the way you learnt then, by putting the records on. I’d be left to sit there and get on with it while they went off to play pinball at the Flamingo Café down the road.’