Читать книгу Robert Plant: A Life: The Biography - Paul Rees - Страница 11

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 mould 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 re-christened 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.

For their charge CBS had earmarked an Italian ballad, ‘La Musica è Finita’, which had been a Number One in its country of origin. For Plant the track was re-titled ‘Our Song’ and he was once more paired with CBS’s in-house producer, Danny Kessler, to record it. Kessler was as unstinting in his use of strings and brass as he had been on Listen’s ill-starred ‘You Better Run’, but such a backdrop was better suited to ‘Our Song’ since it was the most saccharine of confections. Not that the same could be said for Plant, who sang it as if straitjacketed. He told his friend Kevyn Gammond that it took him ninety takes to get a finished track, the process reducing him to tears.

Plant’s first solo single was released in March 1967, the same month that Pink Floyd’s ‘Arnold Layne’ and ‘Purple Haze’ by Jimi Hendrix came out. It was an abject failure, selling fewer than 800 copies. Even one of his first champions, the Express & Star newspaper’s pop columnist John Ogden, dismissed it as ‘a waste of a fine soul singer’.

‘I got a phone call from Robert’s mother soon after,’ says Ogden. ‘She wanted to know if I really thought her son was any good or not. I told her that while you could never guarantee anything, he stood as much of a chance as anyone of making it. She must have been terribly disappointed over the next year or so because it just didn’t happen for him.’

Plant was not yet deterred from throwing himself into this radical transformation. Back in the Midlands, he crimped his hair into a bouffant, bought a dark suit and told anyone who asked that he was going to have a career in cabaret. He reasoned to himself that there was nothing not worth trying. He even had business cards printed up that unveiled a new identity, advertising ‘Robert – The E Is Silent – Lee, now available for bookings’.

And he found an unexpected ally in his father. A local big-band leader, Tony Billingham, had hired Robert Plant Sr to design and build an extension to his home.

‘Robert’s father noticed the coming and going of musicians, and one day told me that all his son wanted to do was sing and asked if I could take him on,’ recalls Billingham. ‘I said that I would give him a go. We were called the Tony Billingham Band, and it was a traditional dance band.

‘I couldn’t say how many jobs Robert did with us but I remember one of them being at Kidderminster College. He sang some Beatles songs that night. We usually wore evening dress for functions in those days although we wouldn’t have contemplated doing so for a college date. For that we’d have worn black shirts, something like that. Robert had got his long hair and his shirt open right down to the last button. Dance people didn’t do that kind of thing.’

Five months after ‘Our Song’ had sunk, CBS tried again with a second single, ‘Long Time Coming’. This was better tailored to fit Plant’s voice, being R&B-based, but it was no less aimed at the middle of the road than its predecessor had been. It was also no more successful. But by then Plant had headed off in yet another direction, this one moving closer to the spirit of the time.

He had put together a new group, calling it Robert Plant and the Band of Joy. The guitarist, Vernon Pereira, was a relative of his girlfriend Maureen. Although the Band of Joy’s line-up would be fluid for as long as it lasted, Plant’s inspiration remained the same – the new American music he had by now picked up on.

The catalyst for this was John Peel, a twenty-seven-year-old DJ born into a well-to-do family in Liverpool and boarding-school educated. Peel’s father was a cotton merchant who in 1961 had packed his son off to the US to work for one of his suppliers. He remained in the country for six years, during which time he got his first job as a DJ – an unpaid stint at a radio station in Dallas – and also acquired a stack of records emanating from America’s West Coast.

Returning home in 1967, Peel was taken on by the pirate station Radio London, creating for it a show called The Perfumed Garden. He filled this with the records he had bought back from the US, exposing the bands behind them to a British audience for the first time. Coming out of LA and San Francisco, they included the Doors, the Grateful Dead, Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. These were rock groups born out of blues, folk, country and jazz traditions, but which pushed further out there through their consumption of the newly available psychedelic drugs and an uncontrolled urge to freak out.

‘We’d never heard any of this music till John started playing it,’ says Peel’s fellow DJ Bob Harris. ‘It changed my perception of things and I’m sure Robert was listening in the same way.’

Plant was indeed enraptured by it, digesting this American music with an appetite the equal of that he had first shown for its black blues. Of the bands then emerging from San Francisco’s psychedelic scene the two that hit him hardest were Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape. The Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow album of that year gave rise to a brace of acid-rock anthems, ‘White Rabbit’ and ‘Somebody to Love’, singer Grace Slick’s spooked vocals haunting her band’s lysergic drone. Released that summer, Moby Grape’s eponymous début LP fused rock, blues, country and pop into a sound that oozed heady adventurism and a sense of unbridled joy.

From LA he embraced a further two bands in particular. Buffalo Springfield brought together two gifted songwriters, Neil Young and Stephen Stills, whose woozy folk-rock was setting as much of a template for the era as the Byrds, the same tensions destined to pull both bands apart. Then there was Love and their ornate psych-pop symphonies conjured up by another singular talent, Arthur Lee. Love put out two albums in 1967, Da Capo and then Forever Changes, their masterpiece. Although neither of these records would make stars of Lee or his band, each served up a kaleidoscopic musical tableau for others to feast from.

‘All that music from the West Coast just went “Bang!” – and there was nothing else there for me after that,’ Plant told Melody Maker’s Richard Williams in 1970. ‘Three years before I had been shuddering listening to Sonny Boy Williamson. Now I was sobbing to Arthur Lee.’

Soon John Peel brought this music to his front door. The DJ began hosting a regular Sunday evening session at Frank’s Ballroom in Kidderminster, often appealing on air for a lift up to the Midlands.

‘It was fantastic,’ enthuses Kevyn Gammond, like Plant a champion of these shows. ‘Peel would bring up people like Captain Beefheart and Ry Cooder, but also the first incarnation of T-Rex. There was a great story about Captain Beefheart’s band being sat in the dressing room, rolling up these big joints, and Peel offering them cups of tea and cucumber sandwiches. Peel hipped us to this whole great scene and Rob especially got so into it.’

The first incarnation of the Band of Joy began to gig in the spring of 1967, playing both of Birmingham’s hippest clubs, the Elbow Room and the Cedar Club, the latter as warm-up to former Moody Blues man Denny Laine’s Electric String Band. It was still a covers band but one heading gingerly for the acid-rock frontiers.

Local music historian Laurie Hornsby recalls the group he was then playing guitar for doing a show with the Band of Joy at the city’s Cofton Club on 25 April.

‘The club was an old roller rink,’ he says. ‘I remember the place was packed. Drugs hadn’t yet become a part of the scene. It was all about going out for a pint and to pull a bird. The mod look had gone by then – Robert and his band were all wearing Afghan coats, buckskins and things like that.

‘Because they were far superior to us, we went on and did forty-five minutes and then they did an hour. I watched the Band of Joy’s set but I only remember Robert. He sold himself so well, knew exactly how to make people watch him.’

‘In the Midlands, there were two schools of thought about Robert at that time,’ says John Ogden. ‘People either liked him or hated him. All the women loved him. You could see them eyeing him up from the audience. Because of that the blokes most often didn’t.’

This antipathy towards their singer extended to the band’s de facto manager, ‘Pop’ Brown, father of their organist Chris Brown. Following a heated altercation between the two, Plant conspired to get himself fired from the Band of Joy.

‘Robert had his own ideas and “Pop” Brown didn’t like it,’ suggests Ogden. ‘Robert’s always known his own mind and what he wanted, which was, basically, to be a star.’

That June the Beatles presented Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to the world and with it Britain was launched into its Summer of Love – one founded upon sounds, fashions and a predilection for mind-bending drugs that were all directly imported from California. The suggestion that this amounted to a sweeping cultural revolution has been exaggerated – the preposterous Humperdinck, Tom Jones and a crooner of even greater vintage, Frankie Vaughan, fronted four of Britain’s ten bestselling singles that year. Yet there could be no denying the extent of its impact.

This much was fast apparent to Plant. Within weeks of Sgt. Pepper’s emergence both his beloved Small Faces and Stevie Winwood’s new band Traffic scored hits with songs that mined the same seam of psychedelic whimsy, ‘Itchycoo Park’ and ‘Hole in My Shoe’. The Traffic song would have jarred him most. Again he was confronted by the stark fact of how far his contemporary Winwood had travelled, and the distance he trailed behind.

By the time ‘Hole in My Shoe’ had risen to Number Two in the UK charts Plant was working as a labourer for the construction company Wimpey, laying Tarmac on West Bromwich High Street. Turning up for his first day on site, his new workmates took one look at his long, blond hair and began calling him ‘The Pop Singer’.

It would not be long before Plant hauled himself up from this latest low ebb, since he was never lacking in resolve or self-assurance. He soon gathered about him another group of musicians, announcing them as Robert Plant and the Band of Joy. ‘Pop’ Brown howled in protest and for a time there were two Band of Joys hustling for gigs, but the others blinked first, changing their name to the Good Egg and drifting to obscurity. The following year Plant would marry into their guitarist Vernon Pereira’s family – Pereira was Maureen’s cousin – although the two of them never played together again. Pereira died in a car crash in 1976 at a time when Plant was consumed by other troubles.

To manage his latest band Plant called on an old contact, Mike Dolan, who had stewarded Listen. Dolan had an immediate effect, although not perhaps a considered one. Plant had an impending court date to answer a motoring charge and Dolan convinced him this could be used to drum up publicity. Dolan hatched a plan to stage a ‘Legalise Pot’ march on the same day. He contacted the local press, suggesting that his singer was going to lead a crowd of young disciples to the courthouse steps, protesting their civil rights.

In the event Plant arrived at Wednesbury Court on the morning of 10 August 1967 accompanied by a supporting group that numbered just seven, one of whom was his girlfriend’s younger sister Shirley. This ragged band carried placards daubed with slogans such as ‘Happiness Is Pot Shaped’ and ‘Don’t Plant It … Smoke It’.

A report in that evening’s edition of the Express & Star described the scene: ‘Police peered curiously from the windows of the police station and some even came out to photograph the strangely assorted bunch, which included two girls in miniskirts.’ Dolan denied that the whole farrago had been stage-managed, telling the paper: ‘It was a completely spontaneous act on the part of these youngsters, who regard Bob as a kind of leader.’

Although Plant was cleared of the charge of dangerous driving, a fellow protestor, a nurse named Dorette Thompson, was less fortunate, losing her job for her part in the march.

‘That pantomime was Robert’s scuffling side,’ says John Ogden. ‘He didn’t need to do it, but he tried everything. He actually defended himself in court attired in the costume of an Indian bridegroom. Now, I’d been in court once to give a character reference and gotten cross-examined by this snotty lawyer. It’s an intimidating experience. Yet he did that when he was still just eighteen.’

Plant’s domestic arrangements at the time were no less haphazard than the march had been. He lived on and off with Maureen and her family in West Bromwich but crashed with friends, too. That summer he also moved in to a house at 1 Hill Road, Lye, close to his Stourbridge stomping grounds. One of his new housemates was Andrew Hewkin, an aspiring painter then in his final year at Stourbridge College.

‘I can’t imagine that house is still standing – it would be in need of serious renovation after what we did to it,’ Hewkin tells me. ‘People came and went all the time. It was hard to know who was living there and who wasn’t because you’d bump into a different girl or guy every morning. We were all paying virtually nothing in rent.

‘There were lots of rooms, each one with a different colour and smell, all sorts of music blaring out from them. I don’t remember seeing much of Robert’s room but then I don’t recall seeing much of Robert either. The big dormitory up at the college was called West Hill; that’s where all the action happened and where Robert was most of the time. He wasn’t a student but he knew that all the best-looking birds hung out there.’

The house in Lye soon doubled up as a rehearsal space for the Band of Joy. The band set their gear up in the cellar, which was cramped, windowless and feverishly hot.

‘It was seriously loud down there and Robert would drip with sweat,’ says Hewkin. ‘I saw them perform a lot, too. He was very much the same on stage then as he is now, the chest puffed out, but even more so. I think he probably learnt quite a bit off Mick Jagger because Robert strutted, too, though he was more of a cockerel.

‘Otherwise, he was very down to earth, and charming, too, although he was heavily into his hobbits and underworlds. Sad, isn’t it? He bought a car, an old Morris Minor, and parked it in the garden of the house, which was completely overgrown. It never moved in all the time he was living there. I heard later that the police eventually came and took it away.’

This second incarnation of the Band of Joy was no more durable than the first. Their cause wasn’t necessarily strengthened by the image they adopted – daubing their faces in war paint. In particular, this look did nothing for bassist Peter Bowen.

‘It frightened everybody to death,’ Plant told Richard Williams. ‘This big, fat bass player would come running on, wearing a kaftan and bells, and dive straight off the stage and into the audience. I howled so much that I couldn’t do anything at all.’

By the end of the year Bowen and the others had gone, leaving Plant to pick up the pieces once more. This he did with great zest, persuading both Bonham to join him again and Kevyn Gammond to walk out on reggae singer Jimmy Cliff’s backing band. With typical chutzpah, he next turned to the Good Egg, bringing in their bassist Paul Lockey and organist Chris Brown, doubtless to the considerable ire of his father.

With this line-up, the Band of Joy gelled at last. Bonham’s hulking drums giving them added weight, they were all heft and power, indulging themselves on sprawling instrumental workouts. This was a precursor to all that would soon enough change the lives of Plant and his hooligan drummer, although at the time neither could have known it. Yet it was all too much for the Midlands audiences of the time.

‘I used to run a club at the Ship and Rainbow pub in Wolverhampton and booked them for a gig,’ says John Ogden. ‘It wasn’t really a success because a lot of the audience were still blues freaks and Robert wasn’t doing that then.

‘I do remember him singing Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” and it being bloody great. We had a chat afterwards and he was disappointed with the response. He was saying people ought to listen, that he couldn’t keep doing the same thing. But back then if you were unusual, and especially if you were loud, you couldn’t get gigs around here.’

Mike Dolan took the band outside of the area to the Middle Earth and Marquee clubs in London, and up north to Club A’GoGo in Newcastle. That March they did a handful of dates around the country with an expat American folk singer, Tim Rose. Such gigs were intermittent and paid less than the covers circuit they had each started out on but to begin with a shared purpose spurred them on.

‘You couldn’t call what we were doing freak rock but it had that spirit to it,’ says Kevyn Gammond. ‘It was exciting and it set us apart from all the twelve-bar stuff that we’d grown up with. A number could go on for ten, fifteen minutes ­ – God help the poor audience. There was also a battle going on between John and Rob, because Bonzo was such a showman. He’d set up his drums in such a way that Rob and I could be pushed a bit to the side or behind him.’

Just as he had done with Listen, Dolan got the band to record a demo tape. It was done at Regent Sound Studios in London and featured versions of Buffalo Springfield’s ‘For What It’s Worth’ and the murder ballad ‘Hey Joe’, plus two self-penned songs, ‘Memory Lane’ and ‘Adriatic Seaview’. Both covers suggest the potency of this Band of Joy, although little room was afforded for subtleties and even less for restraint. Plant embodied their full-on assault, his voice pitched lower than it would later be, attacking ‘Hey Joe’ as if by doing so he could rid himself of all his doubts and demons.

Yet each of the Band of Joy’s own songs was as unremarkable as the next and the tape generated no great interest, Plant not even being able to rustle up enthusiasm at CBS, who retained his contract. Dolan managed to secure the band a residency at the Speakeasy Club in London but by then the game was up. Bonham accepted the princely sum of £40 a week to join Tim Rose’s backing band and the Band of Joy crumbled.

It had become an all-too-familiar scenario to Plant, this act of coming so far and then falling short. He had other, more pressing matters on his mind now, too. Maureen was pregnant. And he was just a few months from turning twenty, the point at which he had promised her he would give all this up.

He went back to labouring and got engaged to Maureen. One can imagine the pressure exerted on them by their parents to do the right thing and uphold traditional values, however belatedly. He had come to appreciate the true worth of money, how helpless he was without it, how to treasure it and not to waste it. But still he would not quit. Still he kept on seeking that elusive break.

Meanwhile, the Move’s guitarist, Trevor Burton, had passed on the Band of Joy’s demo to his manager, Tony Secunda. Eventually, having listened to it, Secunda invited Plant down to London to audition for him and his business partner, Denny Cordell. Plant asked Kevyn Gammond to go with him.

‘We had no money so we hitched down there,’ Gammond remembers. ‘They put us up in the shittiest, run-down hotel – the Madison. The next day, we went to Marquee Studios, just Robert and myself and those guys. They said, “OK, write us a song.” We made something up, demoed it … I don’t know what happened to it.

‘On the way back we couldn’t get a lift. We met this girl hitchhiker at the start of the M1. We asked her to pull her skirt up, and we ran and hid behind a hedge. A car pulled up, the door opened, and we leapt out of the hedge and jumped in as well. Got us back as far as Birmingham.’

During the Band of Joy’s Speakeasy residency the blues musician Alexis Korner had popped his head round the dressing door to say hello. Then forty years old, Korner was the son of an Austrian-Jewish father and a half-Greek, half-Turkish mother, and had come to England via France, Switzerland and North Africa. Proficient on guitar and piano, he had joined Chris Barber’s jazz band in the ’50s, putting together his own blues collective in 1961. He named it Blues Incorporated and the band became a finishing school for a generation of young British blues players. At one time or other Charlie Watts, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce passed through the Blues Incorporated ranks. And Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Rod Stewart and an angel-faced guitarist named Jimmy Page each got up to jam with Korner at his band’s regular Marquee Club residencies.

Plant went along to see Korner perform at the Cannon Hill Arts Centre in Birmingham, re-introducing himself to Korner with his usual boldness. He told me: ‘Alexis was up there playing away. He had this guy called Steve Miller on piano, a great player. I had a harmonica in my pocket and I started playing along, looking up at Alexis as he stood there on the stage. I just had that audacity, couldn’t get enough of anything.

‘He finished the song and looked down at me. I said, “Can I get up and play harp with you on one song?” He told me to come by the dressing room in the break. I ended up doing some eight-bar blues with him. He was a very charming and regal man.’

Korner asked Plant back down to London, putting him up in his flat in Queensway. He told his guest the sofa he was sleeping on was the same one Muddy Waters bunked down on whenever he was in town. Together with Steve Miller, Korner and Plant did a handful of club shows and began writing songs.

The trio cut two of these tunes – ‘Operator’ and ‘Steal Away’ – at a recording session. Both were solid but unspectacular blues numbers. Plant, however, sang each as if for his life, baying, howling and desperate sounding, here at last able to show he had the measure of Jagger, Rod Stewart and all the others ahead of him in the queue. The idea that the three of them might make an album was left hanging in the air.

Back in the Black Country he went to see his old friend Bill Bonham’s new band and asked if he could join. They had the truly awful name of Obs-Tweedle but he would be able to earn some beer money and, since Bonham’s parents ran a pub in Walsall called the Three Men and a Boat, have a place to lodge when he was not staying with Maureen’s family.

Billed as Robert Plant plus Obs-Tweedle, the band did a bunch of local gigs during June and July of 1968. They were on at the Three Men and a Boat each Wednesday and most Saturday nights. There were dates at the Connaught Hotel and Woolpack pub in Wolverhampton, the sort of places Plant must have thought he had seen the back of. He taught them the same Buffalo Springfield and Moby Grape songs he had first done with the Band of Joy, although there was now no Bonham to make them sound murderous.

‘I went along with anything he said, all of his ideas,’ says Bill Bonham. ‘He was great to be in a band with; hard-working, constructive in his criticism. People have often said to me that Robert is aloof or cold but I never experienced that from him.’

On 20 July Obs-Tweedle were booked to do a gig at the West Midlands College of Education in Walsall. It was a Saturday night and Bill Bonham recalls it being a typical student audience: ‘They just stood there and watched, trying to be cool.’

There were three interested members of the small crowd that night, though. One was Jimmy Page, now guitarist in the Yardbirds, and a second was that band’s bassist, Chris Dreja. The third was also the most conspicuous, their manager Peter Grant. A great, looming lump of a man, Grant had once worked as a bouncer – and as a wrestler, too – before breaking into the music business as minder to Gene Vincent and Little Richard. He shepherded the visiting American rockers around Britain, sucking it up and cracking skulls. The reason each of them found themselves in Walsall on this particular evening was Robert Plant.

The Yardbirds were then going through their death throes – wunderkind guitarists Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck were gone, the blues-boom hits long since dried up. On their most recent, wretched tour Page had confided in Grant his concept for a new band, one of all talents that could use the blues like heavy artillery and do much more besides. He would be its general, with Grant at his right hand.

Page had reached out first to the Who’s drummer Keith Moon and their bassist John Entwistle but this had come to nothing. For a singer, he thought of Steve Marriott of the Small Faces, until their manager, the notorious Don Arden, asked him how he would like to play in a band with broken fingers. He next approached Terry Reid, an eighteen-year-old British blues singer then tipped to be the next big thing. Reid was working on his first solo album and declined but he tipped Page off to Plant, recalling a gig he had done earlier in the year with the Band of Joy.

So here, to Walsall, Page and the others had come, and there they stood watching Obs-Tweedle load their gear onto the stage. The initial omens were not good.

‘They mistook me for a roadie,’ Plant told me. ‘Makes perfect sense – I’m a big guy. Terry Reid had told me that he’d mentioned me to Jimmy and I knew the Yardbirds had cut some great records – I’d seen them play with Eric. I didn’t have anything to lose.’

Obs-Tweedle did nothing to impress Page that night. But their singer was something else. Page left the Midlands wondering how Plant had remained undiscovered, fearing it must be the result of some defect in his personality or a fault he had yet to spot. He decided to give the matter further thought.

Plant was left to carry on as before. That summer, a club opened up in an old ballroom in Birmingham. It was called Mothers and it fast became a magnet for the growing band of local ‘heads’ and hippies. Plant began to hold court there, a king still looking for his kingdom.

Recalling first seeing Plant at Mothers, the English folk singer Roy Harper says: ‘I was twenty-six and he was nineteen. He was accompanied – or being followed, I don’t know which – by four women. He automatically struck a light in my estimation. My clearest memory is seeing him waft away into the middle distance, surrounded by this coterie of chickpeas, and thinking, “That guy’s got something very attractive going on.”’

Returning to his lodgings at the Three Men and a Boat one night, Plant found a telegram from Grant waiting for him. It read: ‘Priority – Robert Plant. Tried phoning you several times. Please call if you are interested in joining the Yardbirds.’

A month shy of his twentieth birthday, Plant’s moment had come at last. Not that it seemed this way to him at first. He had, after all, grown used to having his hopes raised and then dashed. And anyway, the Yardbirds were no longer anyone’s idea of a sure thing.

‘I ran into him one night at the Queen Mary Ballroom in Dudley and he told me that he’d had this offer to join the Yardbirds,’ says Jim Lea of the N’Betweens. ‘He’d got Maureen with him and he said he wasn’t sure about it, didn’t know if it’d work out. He told me he’d rather be playing the blues with Alexis Korner.

‘We were doing quite well at the time and I’d bought myself a sports car, an MG Midget. Planty had this green Ford Prefect. I was just getting into my car and he shouted over, “Nice car – I guess I’ll have to start playing pop!”’

Plant went and picked up the phone to Grant. What else was he going to do? Speaking a year later to Mark Williams of the International Times he said, ‘It was the real desperation scene, man. I had nowhere else to go.’