Robert Anthony Plant was born August 20, 1948, at West Bromwich, Staffordshire.
His father was an engineer and the Plants lived in Kidderminster, a rural
Worcestershire suburb of Birmingham. Enrolled at King Edward VII Grammar
in stolid, four-square Stourbridge, the heart of the "Black Country" of the
English west Midlands, Robert was well read and a good student until he
discovered girls and Elvis at age thirteen. He spent hours in front of a
mirror, trying to copy every Presley move. By this point Elvis was in the
army and past his peak as a fifties rock and roll star, but his earlier
rockabilly songs really got to Robert. By the time he was fifteen, his
disapproving father would drive Robert to the Seven Stars Blues Club in
Stourbridge every week, where Robert jammed with the Delta Blues Band,
murdering Muddy Waters, bleating out "Got My Mojo Working" and other
bucket-of-blood blues tunes with all the beery, extroverted soul of the
Midlands working class. They had an eight-string guitarist named Terry
Foster who could sound like Big Joe Williams. Another of Robert's bands,
Sounds of Blue, included Chris Wood, who would later play in Traffic.
But if blues musicians were taboo in their own Mississippi Delta communities,
they were abominated in middleclass Kidderminster, especially when young Robert
first went Mod-the French crew hairdo, the parka, the tight jacket and Chelsea
boots, the chrome side panels for the scooter-after seeing the Who and Small
Faces as they passed through Birmingham. Robert was the only member
of Led Zeppelin (and one of the few English pop musicians of his generation)
to be musically discouraged at home. His parents were adamant that he study
accounting, and when Robert left school at sixteen he was apprenticed at two
pounds a week to a doddering chartered accountant who was to train Robert for
a life of balance sheets and ledgers. But all Robert did was make tea for the
old man and dream about Robert Johnson, who could make his darkling, nasal
voice sound so much like his guitar. "It almost seemed to me as if the guitar
strings were really his vocal chords," Robert later recalled. At night he
jammed with various forgotten Birmingham blues combos - the New Memphis
Bluesbreakers, Black Snake Moan (after Blind Lemon Jefferson), and the Banned.
He participated in every conceivable English youth subculture of the sixties,
beginning as a beatnik blues geek blowing a kazoo and thrashing a washboard
with thimbles, then fighting Rockers at Margate with the Mods, then going
over to the Rockers for a while, before returning to beat-dom and eventually
apotheosizing as a premature hippie. His blond mane was now so long that he
could only go home at night. Finally he left home at sixteen for the life of
a blues musician. Later he would reflect on the decision: "I decided that if
I didn't get anywhere by the time I was twenty, I would pack it in. Of course
it didn't really matter what happened because I wouldn't have packed it in
anyway. The whole scene was amazement, enlightenment, a total tripout.
You just cannot reproduce those moments.... You can't give up something you
really believe in for financial reasons. If you die by the roadside then you
die by the roadside - so be it. But at least you know you've tried. Ten
minutes in the music scene was the equal of one hundred years outside of it."
In 1965 Sonny Boy Williamson played in Birmingham and Robert went backstage
and stole one of his harmonicas, which put him in physical contact with one
of his idols. Years later he was quoted: "I always got a shiver ever
time I saw Sonny Boy Williamson - the way he would strut out on stage....
He was everything I wanted to be at the age of 70." He also tried to mimic
the gravel-coarse, nasal blues delivery of Bukka White.
Later that year Robert joined another blues band, The Crawling King Snakes,
named for the John Lee Hooker boogie tune. They played twenty-minute sets at
clubs and dance halls bursting with young Mods who'd come to see main acts
like Solomon Burke and Wilson Pickett, or Birmingham area bands like the
Spencer Davis Group or the Shakedown Sounds with singer Jess Rhoden.
For a while, the Snakes were joined by a big long-haired drummer whom everyone
called Bonzo. He was a sweet, generally quiet guy with the same goofy
affability as Bonzo, the old British cartoon dog. His idol was Keith Moon of
the Who, and he used to line the inside of his bass drum with aluminum foil to
make the thing rattle off like cannon fire. Bonzo and Robert became fast
friends. Years later Robert would tell a Zeppelin employee about how he used
to hang around Bonzo's house (having no real home of his own), so horny he'd
start playing with himself until Bonzo would go, "Hsssst! Hey! Stop that!
Me mum's comin'."
Robert's next band was called the Tennessee Teens, a three-piece, Tamla-style
soul band who asked Robert to join. The group changed its name to Listen and
their style to basic Young Rascals. They even cut a single, Robert Plant's
first record, a cover of the Rascals' "You Better Run." Backed by horns and a
female chorus, Robert was produced to sound like a younger, even more
overwrought Tom Jones. The single was released by CBS in 1966 and disappeared.
The B side was called "Everybody's Gonna Say," co-written by Plant.
CBS released two other singles under Robert's name later that year and early
in 1967: "Our Song"/"Laughin', Cryin', Laughin' " and "Long Time Coming"/"I've
Got a Secret." Neither single was successful but the latter (on which Bonzo
played) got Robert his picture (light beard, mustache, velvet caftan, garlands
of love beads) in New Musical E-xpress. Robert was described as eighteen,
Birmingham-born, with A levels in English, history, and math and the ability to
play violin, piano, organ, and guitar. "Now he works all over the country with
his backing group, The Band of Joy. Already the disk has hit the Birmingham
Top Twenty, which is at least planting the seeds of his talent."
By this time Robert had found a new home in the extended, communal
Anglo-Indian family of his girl friend Maureen, whom he had met at a Georgie
Fame concert in 1966. They lived in a crowded house in Walsall that was full
of hard-working first generation immigrants from India. It was a soulful
scene of hot curries and great people, the first real home the earnest urban
bluesman Robert Plant had found since his bitter departure from his father's
house.
There were actually three versions of the Band of Joy. Robert was fired from
the first in early 1967 when the group's manager told him he couldn't sing.
Defiantly, Robert formed a different Band of Joy, whose act was to paint their
faces and perform in hippie regalia. This was the beginning of the influence
of the San Francisco Sound, and Robert plunged right in. "I got hold of a
copy of a Buffalo Springfield album," he said. "It was great because it was
the kind of music you could leap around to, or you could sit down and just dig
it. Then I got the first Moby Grape album, which was a knockout.... I had
loved good blues, but all of a sudden I couldn't listen to old blues
anymore. . . . Now I was sobbing to Arthur Lee and Love doing 'Forever
Changes.' " The second Band of Joy disintegrated, and the third rose on the
strength of its new drummer, John "Bonzo" Bonham. Riding the San Francisco
Sound, singing Jefferson Airplane songs, this band broke out of Birmingham and
played London clubs like Middle Earth and the Speakeasy. After that they
backed American singer Tim Rose on an English tour. Singer Terry Reid was the
other act. Robert and
Bonzo loved playing together, but by the spring of 1968 the Band of Joy had
run its course. Bonzo joined Tim Rose's new band and Robert was left at loose
ends.
It took some time for Robert to find another band. Many musicians in
the Wolverhampton area considered Plant more of a dancer than a singer and
thought that he was in bands to dance around and look good as much as to sing.
He was almost invited to join the Wolverhampton band Slade, whose guitarist,
Noddy Holder, had been a roadie for the Band of Joy. But the other members of
Slade hated Robert's flamboyant posing, and he wasn't hired.
For a while he let Maureen support him, and then joined a road paving crew to
earn a few quid. He made six shillings tuppance per hour, laying hot asphalt.
The other workers called him "the pop singer." For a time he had a duo with
Alexis Komer, the London bluesman, and they played a few gigs around Birmingham
and cut a record that was released years later as a Korner album track. Then
Robert failed an audition with Denny Cordell, Joe Cocker's manager. Somewhat
dispirited, Robert joined a band called Hobbstweedle, named after the J. R. R.
Tolkien trilogy The Lord of the Rings, which every good hippie had read by
then. That was when he got the first telegram from Peter Grant.
The following weekend Jimmy, Peter Grant, and Chris Dreja turned up at the
Hobbstweedle gig at a dismal teachers college in Birmingham. They were let in
the back door by a "big, rug-headed kern" whom they assumed was the bouncer.
But when they saw him onstage in his caftan and beads, doing "Somebody to Love"
in this bluesy, sirenesque soprano, they gave each other the look. "It
unnerved me just to listen," Jimmy said later. "It still does, like a
primeval wail." There were twenty-five kids at the dance. After finishing
his set of Moby Grape and Buffalo Spring
field songs, Robert approached Jimmy to see what the star of the Yardbirds
thought of the show. But Jimmy and the others were low-key and vague. Jimmy
only said, "I'll call you within a week." But on the way back to London, Jimmy
was intrigued. That voice ... it had it, that distinctive, highly charged
sexual quality that Jimmy needed. It was as good a white man's blues voice as
Rod Stewart's, but it was even wilder, even a little crazy-sounding. Jimmy
wasn't sure. He couldn't believe that Robert was still scuffling, undiscovered,
in Birmingham. "When I auditioned him and heard him sing, I immediately
thought there must be something wrong with him personality-wise, or that he had
to be impossible to work with, because I just could not understand why, after
he told me he'd been singing for a few years already, he hadn't become a big
name yet." So Jimmy called Robert back and invited him down to Pangbourne for
a few days to suss him out. Robert called Alexis Korner and asked for advice.
Komer said, by all means, go.
In the boathouse on the Thames, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page played records and
made friends. Fortunately, Califonia bands excluded (Jimmy had appeared with
all of them in the Yardbirds era and was sick of them), the two shared many
musical tastes. Early on, when Jimmy had walked down to the village for a
newspaper, Robert picked through Page's pile of records and pulled some out to
play. When Jimmy returned he told Robert they were the exact records he would
have played to him. There was much lifting of eyebrows at this instance of
synchronicity. Jimmy played Robert some soft things, like Joan Baez doing
Annie Bredon's "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You" and Robin Williamson's Incredible
String Band, updated English folk airs that poured down like honey. He played
rock and roll tunes, like Chuck Berry doing "No Money Down." He played Little
Walter's harmonica blues, and explained to Robert his idea for a new kind of
"heavy music" with slower and lighter touches, music with dynamics, light and
shade, chiaroscuro. They talked about a band where the singer and guitar might
play in unison. Jimmy played Robert "You Shook Me" from an old EP by Muddy
Waters, with Earl Hooker playing the melody on electric guitar behind Muddy's
voice. Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart had done the same thing with the same song
on Beck's new album, but that didn't matter. It was the sound Jimmy wanted.
After a few days of this, Robert was almost beside himself. It was all
so-heady. Here was this attractive, mysterious, soft-spoken rock star offering
vistas of stardom in America, brocaded with vague intimations of immense riches.
It was all so new. For the first time, Robert had found somebody who might know
what to do with his boundless reservoir of adrenaline.
So excited was Robert that, when he left Pangbourne, he hitchhiked up to Oxford to
find Bonzo, playing somewhere that night with Tim Rose, to recruit him for the New Yardbirds.
