(1980–1981)
After John Bonham, there was nothing.
After John Bonham, there was a void.
After John Bonham, there was no going back.
The rumor mill was already grinding. Cozy Powell, the powerhouse force behind Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow and, before that, the beast that was Bedlam, was one of the first names pushed forward as a suitable replacement for the recently deceased percussionist.
So were Phil Collins, Carmine Appice, Queen’s Roger Taylor, Jethro Tull’s Barriemore Barlow, Bad Company’s Simon Kirke, and ELO’s Bev Bevan. While Zeppelin grieved, without even a thought for the future, the music press and the media grapevine positively hummed with suggestions, rumors, and I-heard-this-from-someone-who’s-really-close-to-whoevers—not one of which emanated from the Zeppelin camp, not one of which had any chance of happening.
A great band is not simply four people in a van. It is four spirits in tandem, a unique chemistry that demands they create the music they make and that will never be swayed from that course. It is why the fans of a band that has undergone a significant membership change will assign to it a “classic line-up”: a golden age whose musical output can never be eclipsed.
The Stones without Jones, the Who without Moon, 10cc without Godley-Creme. All continued on, all continued having hits. Sometimes, they even became bigger. But the music they made when they were together was derived from a chemistry that can never be duplicated.
Genesis without Gabriel, Roxy without Eno, Bowie without the Spiders from Mars . . . Led Zeppelin without John Bonham. It was unthinkable.
So, of course, it became all that a lot of people did think about.
It is insulting to say that Robert Plant felt Bonham’s loss the most. Bandmates Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, manager Peter Grant—everybody in the extended Zeppelin family was reeling too. But from the moment Plant’s personal assistant, Benji LeFevre, discovered the drummer’s lifeless body in its bed on September 25, 1980, the singer had not simply lost a bandmate. He had lost one of the oldest and closest friends he had ever known.
Both were just sixteen when they first met: Robert Anthony Plant was a former grammar school boy slumming it in a blues band called the Crawling Kingsnakes; John Henry Bonham was a working class lad, already married to a girl named Pat, already drinking, and already possessed of a ferocious reputation around their native Black Country.
At school, Bonham’s headmaster predicted that the boy would end up becoming either a garbageman or a millionaire. The bands he’d played with so far suggested the former: local club and pub acts that were most comfortable opening someone else’s show, and that only once bothered the world at large, when the Senators cut a single called “She’s a Mod.”
But Bonham had ambitions far beyond that, a point he proved when he buttonholed Plant as the singer came offstage that day in 1966. A vision resplendent in an orange ostrich-skin bomber jacket, echoing precisely the same sentiment as Keith Moon declared when he first pitched to join the Who, Bonham didn’t even bother introducing himself. He just announced that the Crawling Kingsnakes’ drummer was crap, and that he could do better himself.
Plant responded in the same way Pete Townshend had: “Okay then, prove it.” But first he asked where the interloper was from.
“Redditch,” replied Bonham, naming a town that lay fifteen miles away.
Plant laughed. “I don’t care if you’re Buddy Rich, I’m not picking you up from Redditch.”
But he would.
Bonham did not remain with the Crawling Kingsnakes for long. Pat was expecting the couple’s first child, and his previous band, the Way of Life, had earned far more money than his new group ever could. He quit, but he and Plant remained in close contact. So close, says Bonham’s sister Deborah, that Robert used to describe Bonham’s mom as his own “second mother.” And years later, when the pair met up, “they were just engrossed in stories: mum holding court, [telling] stories of Robert and John when they were young.” When, three years and a few more groups later, the singer’s latest band found itself in need of a drummer who could offer the bulldozering barrage that their first discussions demanded, “Bonzo” Bonham was the first name he called.
And the only name Led Zeppelin would ever consider.
It is ironic, then, that Bonham’s last days should also have been the first days of a whole new phase in that band’s existence. On September 24, 1980, the quartet convened to commence rehearsals for their first American tour in three years, on the heels of their first new LP in almost four.
It was a tighter, more economical band than before. A recent tour of Germany saw Led Zeppelin perform without any of the bombast that had hitherto been their stock-in-trade. No extended solos, no thirty-minute noodle fests. Just the tightest, hardest-hitting rock ’n’ roll you could imagine, as played by the tightest, hardest-hitting rock ’n’ roll band there was. It should have been a whole new beginning, the dawn of another decade-long dominance of the music scene.
The drummer was already in poor shape, though. He had recently abandoned a heroin habit, and was still taking drugs to fight the anxiety and depression that accompanied his withdrawal. He was also drinking heavily, hitting the vodka that he had specifically been warned against because it would only counteract the pills. Still, when he told Plant that he really didn’t want to be rehearsing—that the singer should play drums and Bonham would handle the singing—it was easy to think he was kidding. Until the rehearsals got underway and Bonham continued drinking, pushing himself toward unconsciousness. Finally, the session was abandoned, and everyone went back to Jimmy Page’s house in Windsor, where Bonham continued sinking the Russian potato. Finally he did pass out, and someone carried him up to one of the spare rooms, tucked him into bed, and left him to sleep it off.
By morning he was dead, suffocated by his own vomit.
The band broke up there and then. Nobody said as much; they were all too numb. But Plant spoke for everyone when he reflected, years later, “It was so . . . final. I never even thought about the future of the band or music.”
Jimmy Page, the workaholic whose vision Led Zeppelin had been in the first place, was the first to recover—or at least, the first to consider moving on. Shortly before Christmas, just three months after Bonzo’s death, Page was at a Christmas party when he bumped into Chris Squire, bassist with Yes. The pair got talking, and by the new year had convened what can only be described as a supergroup—the first of a decade that would ultimately creak beneath the weight of such conceits. With Squire’s fellow Yesman Alan White sitting in on drums and Greenslade’s Dave Lawson on keyboards, the quartet was named by Squire’s father: ex-Yes and Zeppelin; XYZ.
They had already recorded a handful of songs by the time Page called Plant into the situation. With the bassist on vocals, two Squire compositions titled “Telephone Secrets” and “Can You See” had been joined by a couple of instrumentals—one of which, “Mind Drive,” would later be recorded by Yes. None of which impressed Plant in the slightest when he heard them at an XYZ rehearsal on the last day of February 1981. Complex slabs of unabashed prog, they might indeed, as Page explained, have been immeasurably improved by a stronger vocal. But Plant wanted nothing to do with the project, either musically or personally.
Because after Bonham, there was nothing.
Until the day he ventured out to that rehearsal, Plant had more or less spent the last six months at Jennings Farm, his secluded property in Blakeshall, a small community out in the fields near Wolverley and Kidderminster. It had been his home for the past ten years but a part of his landscape for even longer, overlooking the same range of hills that he had stared at from his bedroom at his parents’ home in nearby Hayley Green.
The farm had been all but derelict when he purchased it for £6,000 in 1969, an abandoned shell that had not even been hooked up to the electricity. He, wife Maureen, and daughter Carmen stayed with Maureen’s parents while the workmen labored to render Jennings Farm livable; Plant himself worked to transform an old barn into a music room, and when John Bonham purchased a similar property just a couple of miles away, the local pub frequently found itself hosting one half of the biggest rock band in the world. Although neither of the pair ever gave much evidence of that. For both, their farms were where they went when they needed to escape their day jobs, and where they turned to escape their nightmares as well.
Three years earlier, on July 26, 1977, Plant was in New Orleans with Led Zeppelin when he learned that his five-year-old son, Karac, had died from a viral infection. It was John Bonham who sat next to him on the hastily arranged flight back to London, and then for the drive up to the farm. There the boy was buried, at a funeral where Bonham was the only one of the singer’s bandmates or management to even bother attending. There, too, Plant came as close as he ever had to swearing off rock ’n’ roll forever.
His lifestyle, he knew, had already placed his marriage under incredible strain—the months he spent away touring, leaving Maureen to raise two children on her own. Now there was just one, and Plant could not help but wonder whether things might have been different if he had been at home.
Friends speak of the stygian darkness that engulfed Plant then, how he even considered applying for a teacher training college. Almost a year would pass before he met again with his bandmates, in May 1978 at Clearwell Castle, a gorgeous mock-Gothic manor house in the heart of the Forest of Dean on the fringe of the Welsh borders. Longer than that would elapse before he forgave them for not attending Karac’s funeral.
But slowly he pieced himself back together. By August, vacationing in Spain, he was even feeling good enough to join Dr. Feelgood onstage, a band with whom he’d been friends since the mid-1970s. Now, the very person who had stood alongside him throughout that terrible night, providing much of the glue with which he repaired his shattered psyche, had himself been taken away.
Interviewed in the mid-1980s, Peter Grant made it clear that he had no intention of trying to put the band together again. Their last album, In Through the Out Door, had been a struggle from the outset, recorded with Plant still mourning Karac and Page apparently undergoing some form of writer’s block; the singer, said Grant, was astonished to discover that Page had barely written a note of new music throughout the band’s layoff. Even before Bonham’s death, all four members were in desperate need of new challenges, be they musical or personal, and now the surviving three needed a fresh start even more. Beyond the occasional call just to check in and say hi, Grant said, he barely spoke to Plant for another year.
Nor did Plant call him. Instead, he lost himself in a life stationed somewhere between a gentleman farmer and a wealthy recluse. Both of which he was. His assistant Benji LeFevre, a permanent resident of the farm, was put to work around the place—everything from clearing up outbuildings to handling the mail—and when LeFevre got it into his head to start building a four-track studio in the music room/barn, Plant just let him get on with it.
Later, with Plant back in action, it became common belief that the outfitting of this modest little studio was the biggest of the tiny steps that pulled the singer out of his funk, and so it probably was. At the time, however, LeFevre was doing it as much for his own amusement as any hope of repotting Plant.
A couple of years before, during the terrible months following Karac’s death, the pair of them had taken a local band, Dansette Damage, under their wing, producing a single for them at the Old Smithy Studios in Worcester. In keeping with the punk-drunk spirit of the times, Dansette Damage were very much rooted in the Mach 10 province of the one-chord wonders, in an age when punk rock itself was seen as both the antidote to the rocking dinosaurs of the past and the waste-disposal unit that would suck them into oblivion. The session was fast and furious: two songs—“The Only Sound” and “New Musical Express”—cut for release on the equally local Shoestring label.
Posting a video of “New Musical Express” on YouTube, keyboard player Eddie Blower recalled, “We made this record in early 1978 and were lucky enough to get Robert . . . and Benji . . . to twiddle the knobs in the studio for us. Robert put all needles in the red, which is why it sounds so raw! Also, we couldn’t sing and you can hear Robert’s high falsetto at the top end, trying to keep us lot in tune!”
It was all low budget, low expectation, low profile—Plant did not even demand a credit on the record, insisting instead that his contributions be assigned to the mysterious Wolverhampton Wanderer. As he worked on the new studio, LeFevre could only wonder if the Wanderer might one day venture out again.
Friends dropped around—old friends, from long before Plant became a star, some from a time before he even started to perform. Robbie Blunt had been an aspiring guitarist at the same time as Plant was an aspiring singer, and although they had never really placed those aspirations together on the same stage, they frequented one another’s homes, disappearing to the bedroom to listen to records and talk. Since that time, Blunt had carved his own career in music, alongside other local lads made good—Jess Roden and past-and-future-Robert-Plant-bandmate Kevyn Gammond in Bronco, and Stan Webb in Chicken Shack—and had even had a stab at glam-rock superstardom as one-fifth of showman supreme Michael Des Barres’s Silverhead.
But now he was back to being plain old Robbie, an anchor from the early days, as Plant decided that that was what he needed most. He’d been a superstar, he’d toured the world, he’d made his million dollars and then some. But the things he’d lost were far more precious, and these were not only his son and his best friend. He’d lost sight of the reason he was in the music industry in the first place. The simple joy of making music.
Andy Sylvester went way back too, a friend from the Seven Stars blues club in Stourbridge, where the band he’d formed with Chris Wood and Stan Webb, Sounds of Blue, was one of the attractions that drew Plant through the door in the first place. A few years later, Sylvester and Webb formed Chicken Shack, and Wood was a co-founder of Traffic—sterling indications of the sheer tumult and fervor with which the towns and cities that surrounded Jennings Farm embraced rock, the blues, and folk, and of the careless, wild enthusiasm that Plant now found himself reaching back toward. A time when he was unknown, a time when he was happy. A time when his friends and family didn’t die.
Other players dropped by, local guys, nobody anyone outside of the area would have heard of. A sax player named Keith Evans, a harmonica player called Ricky Cool, drummer Kevin O’Neil, bassist Jim Hickman. And together, they just played. Their diet was oldies, precisely the same kinds of songs they’d all grown up with. Pop numbers, blues belters, R&B shakers. “Got My Mojo Working,” “Born Under a Bad Sign,” “Just Can’t Be Satisfied”—songs that were the staple diet of every British blues band of their youth, from Alexis Korner to John Mayall, from the Rolling Stones to Cream.
At first, they were content simply to play in the barn to an audience of whoever else might have dropped by. But just as the young Plant had quickly grown out of singing along with his record player with a hairbrush for a microphone, so the band started looking across at one another and wondering whether they were ready for the big time. The local pub. A nearby university. An occasional club.
Plant gave the band a name. The Honeydripper was boogie-woogie blues pianist Roosevelt Sykes’s nickname and the title of one his albums, purchased by the teenaged Plant from the Diskery record shop on Hurst Street, Birmingham. It had a great cover, too, white with a partial checkerboard of photographs; King Curtis on sax and Robert Banks on organ; and a love song to Sputnik, “Satellite Baby.” The Honeydripper was one of the records that had set Robert Plant on his way. The Honeydrippers would be the band that put him back on course.
Plant took his lead from Paul McCartney. A decade earlier, on the run from the Beatles, Fab Macca had bought a van, gathered a band, and then piled in with his wife and kids and set off up the motorway, stopping off at every college they passed to ask if they could play. Wings took flight from those first guerrilla workouts, and Plant intended to follow a similar path.
Of course the nature of the industry had changed somewhat since then, so he did need to involve a few outsiders. Promoter Roy Williams was one, instructed to book the Honeydrippers a handful of local shows, with just two unbreachable conditions. First, that they should stay as far from London as possible (Plant pinpointed Watford as the furthest south he would countenance playing), and second, that Plant’s own name be kept firmly out of the public eye. Anybody going along to see the Honeydrippers should expect nothing more than they conjured from that name, an unknown R&B band adrift amid a sea of such things. Bands like Dr. Feelgood, Nine Below Zero, the Inmates, the Dirty Strangers, and S.A.L.T. had done much in recent years to revitalize the old R&B circuit, playing hard and nasty with old and new material alike, and when Williams was asked by bookers what to expect from this latest name, that’s the direction he pointed them in. And he was telling the truth.
On March 3, 1981, the Honeydrippers made their official live debut at Keele University, a few miles from the midlands city of Newcastle-Under-Lyme, and nobody could have failed to be impressed. Down and dirty, gritty and grimy, the Honeydrippers dripped with conviction and authenticity.
They put on a great show, sets extending to eighteen songs long, marching through a virtual crash course in primal blues, rock, and R&B. Elvis, Gene Vincent, Muddy Waters, Albert King, Otis Rush, Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins . . . classic stuff! Maybe their singer did go a little over the top, raising his voice toward the occasional scream, especially when they hit into Sonny Boy’s “Bring It On Home.” But a lot of singers sounded like Robert Plant in those days, and this guy even looked a bit like him. Shorter hair, maybe. Less of a showoff, but a cock-of-the-walk all the same. But, you know? Catch him in the right light . . . watch him from the right angle . . . and slowly the whisper went around. You do know who that is, don’t you?
With Roy Williams operating as the band’s driver, further shows followed. Few went too far afield; Sheffield’s Limit Club, Derby’s Blue Note, and Bradford University were all close enough that the band could be back in their own beds that same evening, or at least home for the following morning. Once they journeyed as far as Kirklevington Country Club, in Yarm, near Middlesbrough, right up on England’s northeasternmost shore. Other nights they were so close to home they could have used their own kitchens as dressing rooms. The Porterhouse in Retford, the Club Lafayette in Wolverhampton, and naturally, Birmingham—all of them venues that were most accustomed to hosting unknowns, or at least bands still awaiting their first minor hit; few of them the kind of place where even local journalists trod too often.
Precisely the environment the Honeydrippers were looking for.
Offstage and on, things were kept simple. Plant traveled in the Transit van with the rest of the band, their gear trailing behind them in a three tonner piloted by Benji LeFevre, the band’s road crew and sound guy all in one. There was no private jet, no limousine, no vast entourage—nothing whatsoever to compare with any of the tours Plant had undertaken across the previous thirteen years. Except for one thing. Like Peter Grant before him, he still demanded 90 percent of the door money. He had always had a sharp eye for money.
The band didn’t even book hotels ahead of time, preferring just to park themselves wherever they could find the room—or if they were close enough, driving back home once the show was over. Which is what they did on June 15, 1981, following what would prove to be the Honeydrippers’ final show, at the Golden Lion in Birmingham. No end-of-tour party, no Bacchanalian bean-feast in an unsuspecting hotel room. Just home to the telly and bed.
The Honeydrippers’ anonymity had long been blown by then, of course. The moment Plant appeared on stage at the Keele University show, those members of the audience who did recognize him gave a collective sigh of disbelief that was as loud as their applause for the gig. When they played Manchester Polytechnic on May 11, Plant even walked past the queue of people waiting to get in, resplendent in Hawaiian shirt and newly shorn locks, unrecognized by almost all who saw him until he hit the stage, still clad in that same garish shirt.
But everyone who was there would have told a friend what they’d witnessed; those friends would tell others; and soon, even the most secretly staged show was cluttered by the growing coterie of in-the-know onlookers, hoping against hope that tonight would be the night when Plant might play “Stairway to Heaven,” “Whole Lotta Love.” Something they recognized, anything they knew, anything from his back catalog at all. Sometimes they even shouted out requests, but Plant ignored every call, cry, or demand. And afterwards, when those same fans filed up with Led Zeppelin covers for him to autograph, he’d turn them away as well. Occasionally, though, he would catch a glimpse of an old photograph of the band or a magazine cover being thrust forward by a fan, and he would have a moment’s pause.
“Who is that guy?”
On August 20, 1981, Robert Plant would be turning thirty-three. For just a few weeks that spring, however, he felt as though he’d shed fifteen years, to a time when he was just another unknown singer in another unknown band. And further back than that, to a time before he even had band.
But he was singing, even then.