Robert Plant: A Life (7 page)

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.

“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.”

Carole Williams was then the receptionist at Astra. It was her job to hand out the wages to the agency’s bands each week.

“The lads would all come and get their money on a Friday morning,” she says. “Robert was living with Roger Beamer and neither of them was very good at getting up. One of my little jobs every Friday was to call them at 10 am to wake them. They were on £15 a night for two forty-five-minute slots, which was quite good in those days.

“Robert had an aura about him and stood out from the other guys in his band. He was drop-dead gorgeous, too. One time, a band I liked called the Roulettes were doing a show in Shrewsbury, a couple of hours away. Robert offered to take me. It was on a Friday night and he picked me up after work. He turned up in this really old, black car—a Ford Poplar, I think.

“We trundled along to Shrewsbury, saw the band and had a lovely night. We got home, and that’s when he told me he didn’t have a driving license. To him that was a mere technicality. At least it was a straight road.”

For all this roaming, the highest-profile gig Listen played was back in the Black Country on October 20. That night they and the N’Betweens opened up for Eric Clapton’s heavyweight new blues-rock trio, Cream. It was to be an inauspicious occasion for them.

“At the end of their set Plant and John Crutchley started their fake fight, and Crutch ended up falling off the stage,” says Jim Lea. “He broke his ankle, as I recall. Plant told me later that they really were fighting. He said they argued a lot, so the fake thing was just an excuse to bash seven shades of shit out of each other.”

Listen’s last roll of the dice was to record a three-track demo tape that Dolan shopped to various London labels. He secured a deal with CBS. Yet unbeknown to the others, the label’s talent scout, Danny Kessler, had been taken in by Plant’s voice, and it was the singer that CBS signed up and not his band.

As such, when the time came to record Listen’s first single, a cover of a song called “You Better Run” originally by the American pop-rock band the Rascals, it was Plant alone who was required to travel down to London for the day.

“CBS said they wanted to have session guys on it to make it more commercial,” says Crutchley. “We were a little bit upset but it was one of those things. We were trying to get a hit record, so we were led.”

Even at this distance the power of Plant’s voice on the track is striking but Kessler’s own overfussy production smothers it in strings, brass and backing singers, one of whom was future Elton John sidekick, Kiki Dee.

By unfortunate coincidence the N’Betweens had also chosen “You Better Run” to be their first single, albeit in a more stripped-down form. Both versions were released on the same day in November 1966. To boost sales, Dolan directed his charges to go into every record shop in the area and order their own song. In the event it crept into the Top 50 for just one week and then vanished.

“At one point I had Robert on one phone line and Noddy Holder on the other, both of them asking me which version I liked best,” says Carole Williams. “My loyalties were with the N’Betweens, but I told Robert a little white lie.”

“After that, things started to peter out for us,” says Crutchley. “A lot of money had gone into publicizing the record. We more or less sat down together and admitted it wasn’t working out. We were really broke, too.”

With no band or money coming in, Plant moved in with his girlfriend and her parents. The couple were living off Maureen’s wages from working as a shop assistant at Marks & Spencer, which were £7 a week. Plant, who had just turned eighteen, made her a promise: if he had not realized his dream by the time he was twenty he would give it up and get a proper job.

5

THE REAL DESPERATION SCENE

I howled so much that I couldn’t do anything at all.

There remained something for Plant to hold on to: he was still signed to CBS Records. He was broke and had again been shoved back to the margins, but so long as he kept his foot in the door his dream would not die. He just had to find a way—any way—to kick that door open. If that meant abandoning himself to the whims of others then so be it.

As it happened, CBS did have a vision for their young singer. They had decided to mold him into a crooner. With that voice and those looks of his he could surely make the ladies’ hearts flutter and soar. Their rivals Decca had done just the same with two of their own singers, and with great success. The first was a strapping bloke they had plucked from the Welsh valleys named Tom Jones. Then there was the still more unlikely Gerry Dorsey, an Indian-born club singer the label had rechristened Engelbert Humperdinck. As 1967 began, Humperdinck was enjoying a smash hit on both sides of the Atlantic with “Release Me,” a corny ballad Decca had found for him.