John Henry Bonham was bom on May 31, 1948, at Redditch, Worcestershire. The
son of a carpenter, he grew up near Robert in Kidderminster, hammering things.
His first drum was a bath salts can with wires on the bottom and a coffee tin
that his dad rigged with a loose wire for a snare effect, plus his mother's
cooking pots. When he was ten, his mother bought him a snare drum. Five years
later his father got him a used, slightly rusted drum kit. When Bonzo was
sixteen he left school and went to work with his father, carrying hods around
building sites. Bonzo actually liked to work: It built him up and left him
free to play at night. He started off with Terry Webb and the Spiders, wearing
purple jackets with velveteen lapels. The singer wore gold lame. There was
another band, the Nicky James Movement, that had its gear repossessed after a
gig. When he was seventeen he went on to another group called A Way of Life
and married his sweetheart, an English rose he'd met at a dance at Kidderminster.
Pat Bonham wasn't keen to be married to a musician so poor that they had to
live in a fifteen-foot trailer and her husband had to give up smoking
cigarettes in order to pay the rent. Bonzo had sworn to Pat that he'd give
up drumming if she married him. But soon Bonzo looked up Robert Plant, who
lived nearby, and joined his band. Bonzo of course couldn't afford a car,
and at first it was debatable whether Robert and the Crawling King Snakes
could actually afford the gas money to pick him up and get him home. But
Bonzo already had a great reputation as a drummer around Birmingham; he
played the strongest, loudest drums in the Midlands and would occasionally
break his bass drum head when he really got excited. Some bands wouldn't
hire Bonzo, since local clubs often wouldn't even book bands that Bonzo
played with. They said he played too loud. But Bonzo gradually developed a
lighter touch as well; he stopped breaking drum heads when he learned to play
louder without hitting as hard-when he learned how to swing. He was one of
the first drummers to line his bass drum with aluminum foil, and was already
playing drum solos with his hands when he started out with Robert. His only
acknowledged influences were early soul records, the raucous Keith Moon, and
the "astonishing" Ginger Baker, who with Cream in 1966 became the first rock
drummer to step out as a featured instrument, co-equal with the mighty lead
guitar. Baker's sometimes mesmerizing (and sometimes excruciating) drum
solo, "Toad," became a paradigm for Bonzo. Like most drummers, he had an
aggressive streak. He liked to drink and give a little aggro now and then.
He didn't go looking for fights, but he didn't run either.
Eventually Bonzo left the Snakes and went back to A Way of Life, closer to
Kidderminster. Later he and Robert played together in the Band of Joy until
that collapsed in 1968, and Bonzo accepted the offer to tour with Tim Rose
which is where Robert found him in Oxford one night that summer in 1968.
It had been three months since Bonzo had last heard from Robert, and the
drummer listened to his friend's breathless spiel about Jimmy and Pangbourne
and the new band, which ended up with, "Mate, you've got to join the New
Yardbirds." But Bonzo was unimpressed. He was making forty pounds a week
with Tim Rose, more than he'd ever earned in his life, and had even gotten
noticed by the music press when Tim Rose had last played in London. He told
Robert, "Well, I'm all right here, aren't I?" Robert pleaded that they
could make a lot of money with the New Yardbirds, but Bonzo still wasn't
sure. To him, the Yardbirds was a name from the past with no future.
Shortly after, Jimmy saw Bonzo for the first time, playing the Country Club
in north London with Tim Rose. At the time Jimmy was still considering
making the new band sound something like Pentangle, the acoustic band that
featured guitarist Bert Jansch. But when he heard Bonzo's merciless attack,
he knew what his new band would sound like. There followed an intensive
Superhype campaign to snare John Bonham. (Grant said he knew Page was serious
about Bonham because it was the first time Page hadn't called Grant collect.)
The problem was that Bonzo was too poor to afford a phone. Robert sent eight
telegrams to Bonzo's pub, the Three Men in a Boat, in Walsall. These were
followed by forty telegrams from Peter Grant. Still, Bonzo wouldn't join.
The success of the Tim Rose gigs had brought in other offers. Joe Cocker
wanted him, and Chris Farlowe offered him a job. It was a hard decision.
Farlowe was well established and had a new album produced by Mick Jagger.
Everybody in London was sure that Cocker, the spastic blues belter from
Sheffield, was going to be very big. But as Bonzo later recalled, "It wasn't
a question of who had the best prospects, but also which music was going to
be right. When I first got offered the job, I thought the Yardbirds were
finished, because in England they had been forgotten. Still I thought,
'Well, I've got nothing anyway so anything is really better than nothing.'
I knew that Jimmy was a good guitarist and that Robert was a good singer, so
even if we didn't have any success, at least it would be a pleasure to play
in a good group.... So I decided I liked their music better than Cocker's or
Farlowe's." Finally Bonzo wired Peter Grant, accepting the drummer's chair
with the New Yardbirds. Jimmy got back to John Paul Jones, who agreed to come
to the first rehearsal and, if it worked out, to invest in the band. Jimmy
himself plowed in almost every penny left over from his sessions and Yardbird
days. John Paul was the last to join the band, which was due to leave for
Scandinavia, as the New Yardbirds, the following week. Chris Dreja retired
from music when Jones joined the band, and became a photographer.
All four musicians have since used the same word to describe their first
rehearsal in a crowded little room below a record store on Gerard Street:
magic. As Jones later recounted, "The first time, we all met in this little
room to see if we could stand each other." Bonzo was in awe of the brainy,
wizardish Page and didn't say much. "It was wall to wall amplifiers,
terrible, all old. Robert had heard I was a session man, and he was wondering
what was going to turn up-some old bloke with a pipe? So Jimmy said, 'Well,
we're all here, what are we going to play?' And I said, 'I don't know. What
do you know?' And Jimmy said, 'Do you know "Train Kept A-Rollin' "?' I told
him no. And he said, 'It's easy, just G to A.' He counted it out, and the
room just exploded. And we said, 'Right, we're on, this is it, this is going
to work!!!' " In another interview, seven years later, Robert was equally
effusive about that first meeting. "I've never been so turned on in my life,"
he said. "Although we were all steeped in blues and R&B, we found out in the
first hour and a half that we had our own identity." They played old Yardbirds
war-horses like "Smokestack Lightning," old Band of Joy numbers like Garnet
Mimms's "As Long As I Have You," and all sorts of blues and R&B classics.
Jimmy tried to teach the band "Dazed and Confused," but John Paul kept getting
the chords wrong. The unspoken assumption was that Jimmy was the soloist, he
had all the talent, and what he needed was a good backing band with a singer.
But now Page realized he had more than that. He remembered the initial
shock: "Four of us got together in this room and started playing. Then we
knew. We started laughing at each other. Maybe it was from relief or from
the knowledge that we could groove together."
