(1948–1961)
Robert Anthony Plant was born on August 20, 1948, in the town of West Bromwich, in the midst of the English Midlands—so named because they sit more or less in the middle of the country.
It is a lie, perpetrated by the ease with which a few dropped aitches can transform the plummiest tones into working-class roughage, to claim that British rock ’n’ roll was the sound of the streets. Well, it was, but they tended to be nice streets. Where nice people lived. The kind of people who would look upon rock music with a sneer of disgust and then scrape it off the sole of their shoe. Which might explain why their children loved the music so much. Because it annoyed their parents.
Or it might not. Either way, with so few exceptions that the real things really needed to work at it, the vast majority of rock ’n’ rollers who arose out of the British 1960s and beyond came from comfortably middle-class or better environments. Who else could afford all the gear, for a start? They may not have been born with the proverbial silver spoons in their mouths. But they weren’t queuing up for the workhouse either.
Robert Plant was no exception. His mother, Annie Celia Cain, claimed a Romany bloodline. But father Robert left nobody in doubt of either his background or his aspirations. A talented violinist and a member of the local cycling club, he was a civil engineer who had served in the Royal Air Force during the recent World War II. Peace broke out just three years before Robert A. was born, and much of the elder Plant’s time now was spent on projects aimed at repairing the damage that his counterparts in the German air force, the Luftwaffe, had wrought upon his hometown and its surroundings.
West Bromwich lies in the heart of England’s Black Country, an area so-called for the preponderance of industry that made its home in the environs. The black in Black Country refers to the smoke that hangs like a permanent pall over everything, the soot that adheres to every surface, the industrial dirt that is worn like a second skin. The city of Birmingham, just five miles down the road, was very much the center of the entire country’s industrial output, but its manifold operations were largely fed by the vast coal deposits that had been discovered beneath West Bromwich during the nineteenth century.
Everything from staples and nails to guns and aircraft had their origins in the grim and grimy brick factories of the Black Country, and as early as June 25, 1940, more than three months before the London Blitz began, Birmingham heard its first air-raid siren. It would be almost exactly four years before the last, by which time Birmingham had been bombed seventy-seven times, including one ten-day period in November 1940 when almost eight hundred people were killed and over twenty-three hundred injured.
The bombs did more than devastate the region. They also undid much of the work that the local authorities had been engaged upon in the years since the end of the last war, in 1918. Like its neighbors, West Bromwich had grown quickly during the Industrial Revolution two centuries before—so quickly that much of the accommodation built to handle the earliest influx of settlers had been thrown up as hastily as possible, and then maintained with nothing more than quick fixes for major problems.
By the early 1920s, great swathes of West Bromwich had been condemned as unfit for human habitation, leading to a major boom in replacement-house building—much of which was then flattened during World War II. Robert Plant Sr. was one of the many men employed in rebuilding the shattered town and country as swiftly as possible—and his son was one of the many children for whom the bomb sites that lay all around were the earliest playground they knew.
The Plants were fortunate. Their own house, built before the bombs rained down, survived the war intact, and it would remain their home until 1957, when little Robert was nine. By which time, three lifelong passions had already infiltrated his soul: music, engendered not only by his violin-playing father but also by a grandfather (also named Robert) and great-grandfather who themselves were accomplished musicians; football (soccer), inculcated into him by his father, a staunch supporter of the Wolverhampton Wanderers side (the Wolves, as they were popularly known); and storytelling, in the shape of the myths and legends with which the Black Country abounds.
Holy rocks and ancient stones, haunted mines and phantom beasts—all stalk the region, and the young Robert voraciously devoured their stories. The Night of the Dead, when the townspeople of Bilston kept a vigil in the churchyard; the derring-do of Aynuch and Ayli, rebel colliers who rose up against the dire working conditions of the early nineteenth century and who were said to be responsible for every misfortune that struck the pit and factory owners; the sacred well in Endon; the Wych Elm in Hagley Woods, scene of one of Britain’s most baffling ritual murders; the fairies who still called the Clent Hills their home.
Mother Celia (few people called her Annie) fed further fuel to this juvenile fire. As a Romany, a gypsy, her own upbringing was itself alive with ancient traditions and beliefs that seemed all the more precious for their links with a past that had long since been swept away by modernity and industry, but lived on regardless, in the very landscape that surrounded her.
At night, standing gazing into the darkened sky, the factories and workshops belching their smoke and flames into the atmosphere, it was as if the entire world was afire—afire, or poised teetering on the very precipice of hell. By day, the air simply hung thick and heavy, alive with the myriad particles and pollutants thrown out by manufactories that had never even dreamed of “clean air acts.” The darkness, however, was the preserve of the flames, by whose bloody red glow it was possible to imagine all manner of demons and devils cavorting through the night.
Football, too, seemed the preserve of the superhuman, if not the supernatural. When his father took young Robert to his first-ever game, at Wolves’ stately Molineux stadium in 1952, it was to witness a team that was on the brink of establishing itself as the predominant power in the English game. Captained by Billy Wright, a player whose gifts are still spoken of in hushed tones today; managed by Stan Cullis, a former Wolves player and a master tactician; and with names like Bert Williams, Ron Flowers, Roy Swinbourne and Johnny Hancocks already established as household names around the country, the Wanderers had already given notice of their intention by finishing second in the First Division in 1950.
That first game has remained with Plant ever since. In 2010 he recalled for the Express & Star, “Billy Wright waved at me. Honest he did! And that was it. I was hooked from that moment.” As he told FourFourTwo in 2002, “I met him later. Nice bloke, liked a G&T, told me his daughter was making a record. But I couldn’t get over the fact that here I was talking to Billy Wright.”
Soon, Wolves were pushing even harder for the game’s premier English honors, and the season after Robert’s first game—by which time he was firmly established as a regular on the terraces, where upwards of forty-five thousand people gathered every game—they took the first of the three League Championships they would collect that decade.
Wolves were not the only top team in the area. West Bromwich had the Albion; Birmingham had its City, and Aston Villa too. But Wolves were the biggest and the best, and with the press declaring them to be the best team on the planet after a string of victories against the cream of European soccer, the 1950s were a great time to be a Wolves supporter. The Plants relished every fresh success, particularly those that delivered more silverware to the Molineux trophy room, and every Saturday evening, Robert would pore over the pages of the local “pink ’un,” the weekly newspaper dedicated to bringing the day’s results into every home, committing the results and the scorers to memory and still able to recollect them years, even decades, later. The 8–1 demolition of Chelsea in September, 1953, and the 5–0 defeat of Charlton in April the following year. The team parading the Championship trophy through the town at the end of the month. The 103 goals they scored four seasons later, as they brought the trophy back to the Black Country, and the night they played the German side Schalke in their first-ever European Cup match.
Home or away, the Wolves devoured their foes with net-bursting ruthlessness. Six goals against Bolton one week, five against Sunderland the next. Four against Tottenham, five against Birmingham, and then another five a few weeks later, just to rub their local rivals’ noses in it. Nobody was safe against the marauding Wolves, and their invincibility was contagious. Ten years old now, and taking Wolves’ success for granted, Plant learned courage and confidence from the best masters imaginable. The eleven men (and in those days, there was just eleven; no substitutes or squad rotation to rest tired legs) whose own courage and confidence was on display every weekend.
It didn’t last, at least for Wolves. A new decade brought change to both the dressing room and management, and through the 1960s, Wolves’ once unchallenged omnipotence first faltered, then failed. In 1965, they succumbed to relegation to the second division, and although they bounced back up in 1968, things could never be the same.
Nevertheless, by the time Plant reached adolescence, the black and gold colors of Wolves were firmly, and irrevocably, in his blood. He couldn’t have stopped supporting them, no matter how low they sank, and when the 1970s saw him jetting off to all four corners of the world, instead of filing his way through the crowds to watch Wolves, he even arranged to have British newspapers flown out to wherever he might be so he could keep up with their results. Finally, in August 2009, Plant’s devotion to the side was rewarded by his being elected one of the club’s vice presidents.
In 1957, the Plant family, soon to be swollen by the arrival of Robert’s sister Allison, finally escaped the choking environs of West Bromwich for Hayley Green, one of the up-and-coming suburban communities to which white-collar England was then being enticed. A modern development on the southern reaches of the ancient town of Lutley, on the road to Kidderminster and Stourbridge, the town was surrounded by farmland, and the new family home, 64 Causey Farm Road, had its own magical view.
“When I was little, I dreamed heroic dreams,” Plant reflected later. “Most of the time I was the hero . . . the odds were always pretty much against me. Sort of like . . . Robin Hood.”
Sherwood Forest, Robin Hood’s famous haunt, was too far away. But Uffmoor Wood was a mere walk away, an ancient woodland that houses not only the source of the river Stour but also one of England’s oldest Christian legends, that of the spring that gushed miraculously forth when Kenelm, the boy king of the Anglo-Saxon tribal kingdom of the Hwicce, was beheaded by his sister in 821 AD. The waters swiftly became known for their curative powers, a church was erected to the newly canonized Saint Kenelm, and the wood became a focal point of medieval pilgrimage.
This was also Tolkien country. The author of Lord of the Rings and so forth had grown up in these parts, and students of the fantasy writings that would establish his genius would recognize so many local landscapes and features when they stepped out onto Clent Hills. Looking out from his bedroom window, the young Robert could pause in his own voracious consumption of Tolkien’s books, and it was as if he could actually see the places he was reading about. And maybe he could.
The story cycle, when Plant discovered it, was still some years away from the cultural all-encompassment with which it met the late 1960s and early 1970s; indeed, the publishing world was still chuckling at the possibly (but hopefully not) apocryphal tale of the day Tolkien read passages from the then-work-in-progress to his fellow members of the Inkling Club, a society of fantasy authors who regularly met at the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford. Tolkien had barely begun to read when C. S. Lewis loudly declaimed, “Dear God, not another fucking story about elves.” Neither he nor even Tolkien could ever have imagined a day when The Lord of the Rings might inspire rock and pop lyrics—and neither, though he would be writing some of the best of them, could Robert Plant.
Plant hiked to the summit of the hill to visit the Four Stones, a seventeenth-century folly designed to replicate the ancient standing stones of elsewhere, and positioned so that each stone stood in a different county. Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Stafford, and Shropshire all met in this spot, and the stones marked each one. Yet the stones were not without their mystery, for local legend still insists that come Midsummer Eve, the four will uproot themselves and make their ways to nearby Walton Pool to drink. But no man has ever been foolish enough to wait and watch, for to see the stones walk is to invite a ghastly death before another year has passed.
An Iron Age fort stands on Wychbury Hill, surrounded by rings and ditches and the folk memory of a battle fought here between invading Romans and woad-clad Britons. Harry-Ca-Nab, the Devil’s own huntsman, leads a wild hunt across the hills, astride a ghostly white bull.
Plant read of, and watched for (almost) each of these mystic sites, but other haunts captured the boy’s imagination, too. The Welsh borders were not so far from home, with their own panoply of history and heritage, centuries of conflict between the warring tribes that left both physical and psychic scars on the landscape. The Britons, pushed into what is now Wales, first by the Romans and then by the Angles and Saxons, fought ferociously to protect their lands, and the history of the era is littered with the names of the battles fought—even though many of the actual battlefields have long been forgotten.
It was these histories, in years to come, that Plant would draw from as he composed “The Battle of Evermore,” a highlight of the fourth Led Zeppelin album and still one of the most impressive lyrics he has ever written, despite Plant himself admitting that perhaps “it suffered from naïveté and tweeness.” There was no historical battle of this name; rather, Plant drew his imagery from Tolkien and his account of the Battle of Pelennor (“The drums will shake the castle wall/The ring wraiths ride in black”); from the Arthurian legends, and their encapsulation of pre-Christian belief and practice; and from another period of British history, the Anglo-Scottish wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A mishmash, then, but—as lullaby’s “Up on the Hollow Hill” reminded us in 2014—an insight into youthful fascinations that still impinge upon his lyricism today.
Further inspiration was drawn from the family’s regular summer holidays in Snowdonia, the craggy, mountainous corner of Wales from which any number of legends come tumbling. At home, Plant would bury his nose in collections of Welsh mythology; on holiday, he was forever in search of those places from whence the myths emerged in the first place.
Frequently, the family would holiday in Machynlleth, the medieval town poised in the shadows of the mountain Cadair Idris, named for a giant who used to lie on its slopes and gaze up at the stars. The town itself has a long and proud history; the self-proclaimed “ancient capital of Wales,” it was here that the Welsh leader Glyndŵr established his Parliament in 1404, at the height of his rebellion against the English King Henry IV—here, too, that he was crowned Prince of Wales, in the presence of dignitaries from Scotland, France, and Spain. His rebellion was eventually crushed, and the Prince went into hiding; local legend abounds with tales of his escape and even his immortality. No matter how great the rewards that were offered for his capture or the hardships imposed on the people by his vengeful enemies, Owain Glyndŵr was never betrayed, never captured. The history books say he died around 1415, but mythology places him alongside King Arthur as a deathless figure and the personification of Welsh nationalism.
He became a hero, too, to Robert Plant, and in 2004, now a permanent resident of Machynlleth, the singer contributed generously toward the erection of a £5,500 bronze statue of Owain Glyndŵr in the churchyard of St. Peter ad Vincula (St. Peter in Chains) in nearby Pennal, the village where Glyndŵr raised his final parliament. (Plant would also work with singer Julie Murphy, of the Welsh traditional band Fernhill, after hearing her perform the ballad “Marwnad Yr Ehedydd” [The Lark’s Elegy], a recounting of Glyndŵr’s final battle.) Likewise, Plant has raised funds for other historical projects and commemorations in the area, including a slate carving of Glyndŵr’s coat of arms at the Celtica museum in Machynlleth.
A fascination born in childhood remains a consuming passion today, and no matter what other interests would take root in the growing boy’s mind—and as the 1950s progressed and he approached his teens, there were plenty—his love of Welsh mythology would never be shaken. In 1972, he would even name his first son after two of the great legends of the land: Karac Pendragon was so-called for the warrior king Caradoc (more familiarly Anglicized as Caractacus), who led the Celtic tribes against the invading Romans around 50 AD, and for the father of King Arthur, Uther Pendragon.
The quiet study of legend, myth, and history was not, however, the young Plant’s sole outlet. Indeed, by the time his family moved to the neatly ordered suburbia of Hayley Green, with its red brick homes and manicured backyards, another obsession had taken hold—one that might initially appear wholly opposed to the dreams of his reading, but which, in the young boy’s heart, seemed inextricably linked regardless.
Rock ’n’ roll hit Britain in 1955, in the forms of Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, Little Richard and so forth—howling, yowling, absurdly costumed imps sent to shatter the calm reserve and gentle politeness of what had hitherto passed as the local music scene.
Their impact was necessarily profound. Britain, ten years out of the Second World War but just a few beyond the strictures of wartime rationing and privation, was still a country desperate to relocate its place in the world. Victory in the war had come at a hefty price: a shattered economy needed rebuilding, a battered people needed rewarding, and of course, both things cost money. Money the country did not have.
Successive political and military shocks knocked the national morale back further, culminating in the embarrassment of the Suez campaign, when British attempts to prevent Egypt’s takeover of the Suez Canal ended in ignominious defeat. For the generation of kids brought up in the aftermath of the Second World War, raised on tales of their parents’ wartime exploits and heroism, there was a growing sense of disbelief and betrayal. So what if you won the war? You didn’t win the peace.
Rock ’n’ roll was not a solution to that. But it was a distraction. For the first time, a cultural force had emerged that was not beholden for its thrills on pomp and circumstance, hope and glory, flags and monarchy. Instead, like a horde of invading barbarians, it swept in from over the ocean, from the American land of plenty, to demolish all that the old guard held holy.
The BBC, sole repository of Britain’s cultural education, reeled in horror. Rock ’n’ roll was never banned outright by the country’s only broadcaster, but it wasn’t given much airtime either. Listeners tuning in to the Light Programme, as the BBC’s “pop” arm was called, were more likely to hear refined orchestral renderings of popular parental favorites than anything as subversive as rock ’n’ roll, and when a new song did make it onto the airwaves, likely as not it was a pallid cover version, recorded by a middle-aged English singing star or again rendered Muzak by light-orchestral sessionmen.
Still, parents shivered, revolted; newspaper editorials shrieked in dire warning. A lot of the people who most loudly opposed rock ’n’ roll, therefore, had never actually heard it. But they read about it in the tabloid newspapers, quaked at the imagery that the songs seemed to advocate, and swore that they would fight it till their last dying breath. Rock ’n’ roll was degenerate, disgusting, debilitating. It sapped moral fiber and it crushed obedience. Prolonged exposure to the music not only aroused criminal tendencies, it encouraged them.
And the more the oldies complained, the tighter the music grasped the hearts and minds of the country’s youth. The more the media insisted that rock ’n’ roll was just a passing phase, the more it began to look like a permanent revolution. Because it was more than a mere musical happenstance. Rock ’n’ roll was the voice of the people—young people, anyway—raising itself above the tumultuous hubbub of everyday mundanities in precisely the same manner as folklore and mythology cling on in the heart, even as the head becomes absorbed by the preoccupations of the modern world.
Mythologies are the beliefs that politics and religion try to suppress; folklore is the story of the people, not their leaders. Rock ’n’ roll filled that same space and served that same purpose. Beyond the guitars and the clothes and the haircuts and the often-meaningless lyrics, it was an insurgence of independent thought and action, shrugging off the strictures and structures that “society” erected around its youth, and demanding freedom on its own terms.
Not, of course, that many of its adherents actually thought of it in those terms. Nine or ten years old when he discovered Elvis Presley, Robert Plant simply enjoyed the sound, was enslaved by the excitement. “When I was a kid I used to hide behind the curtains at home at Christmas and I used to try and be Elvis,” he once said. But Elvis was quickly followed, for Plant and for every other kid of his generation, by Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent—wave upon wave of American invaders hurling themselves through Britain’s increasingly fragile cultural defenses to sweep up the hearts and minds of youth. And slowly, the authorities came to recognize that not all of it was as bad as it was painted.
In 1958, a visiting Buddy Holly—a bespectacled singer-songwriter who really could sing, really could write songs—became a star turn on television’s weekly ritual of Sunday Night at the London Palladium. By the following year, both BBC radio and television were devoting precious weekly air time to shows aimed directly at teenagers. The British music industry, caught completely off guard by the American explosion, had even commenced the hunt for its own rock ’n’ rollers, and 1958 also saw the emergence of Cliff Richard, Britain’s first truly credible rock idol—and almost sixty years on, still going strong today.
Neither was rock ’n’ roll the only game in town. Dig deep enough into teenaged culture, and all manner of musical currents were beginning to swirl. Trad jazz was making a comeback, a blues boom was taking its first uncertain steps, and the skiffle movement—homemade instruments pounding American blues and folk songs—was in full swing, and this time, it was readily available via radio and television.
It is true. The majority of the kids who listened and sung along with Lonnie Donegan, Wally Whyton, and Chas McDevitt as they told of the “Rock Island Line,” “Cumberland Gap,” and the murderous occupant of the fast rolling “Freight Train” had no idea whatsoever of the musical lineage that lay behind such hit records as these. Few of them, even in London, were making a beeline for Collett’s record shop on the Charing Cross Road, seeking out the original renderings of the skifflers’ smashes. But their elders were beginning to, and so, with that evangelical fire that lay at the heart and soul of rock ’n’ roll’s early years, an entire generation slowly found itself being educated into the history of the blues, folk, and R&B. And a couple of years later, the resultant hybrid would come sweeping out of the underground, as fiercely and unstoppably as the original rock ’n’ roll in the first place.
• • •
In September 1959, just three weeks after his eleventh birthday, Plant took up his place at King Edward VI Grammar School for Boys, on the Lower High Street in Stourbridge—an indication of just how comfortably well-off the Plant family now was.
Perhaps King Edward VI lacks the cultural gravitas of some of England’s other “great” seats of learning: Eton, Charterhouse, and so forth. But in terms of its own sense of self, and its confidence in its place within the fabric of upper-class British culture, it compares with any of them.
KEGS, as it was known, could trace its origins back over five hundred years, to the foundation of the Chantry School of Holy Trinity in 1430. A century later, in 1552, the reigning King Edward VI granted it a charter as a grammar school, and since that time, KEGS had been firmly in the business of turning out smart, prepared, and most of all, responsible young men.
Doctor Samuel Johnson—creator of the English language’s first-ever dictionary, among so many other literary achievements—was a schoolboy there in the early 1700s, and according to legend, the autograph that he carved into one of the classroom desks was still there to be found. Robert Plant, on the other hand, carved Dion DiMucci’s name into the headboard of his bed. Different times. . . .
More recently, KEGS had been responsible for supplying the British Empire with Squadron Leader Mike Cooper-Slipper DFC, one of the Battle of Britain’s most distinguished pilots; the justice Sir Michael Davies; politicians Sir Ian Kennedy and Terry Davis; scientist Basil Lythall CB; mathematician Professor David Trotman; aeronautical engineer Dr. Richard Stanton Jones; and many more. A roster within which an aspiring rock ’n’ roll singer stands out like the proverbial sore thumb.
The very fabric of the place breathed history and tradition, centuries that permeated the ancient buildings with their fine stained-glass windows, the schoolrooms that would have still been recognizable to students of one hundred years before (Johnson’s desk was not the only survivor from antiquity), the standards of discipline and cleanliness that were ingrained into the pupils from the moment they first donned their regulation uniform of gray shorts, green blazers, green caps, and red and green ties.
The school had its mysteries and its secrets, too, including the network of seventeenth-century English Civil War–era tunnels that spread out from beneath the school to become a labyrinth of passageways and hidey-holes honeycombing the streets beneath the town. Although they were out of bounds to the pupils, and indeed to the general public, a few lads knew of their existence nevertheless, and knew how to infiltrate them as well. Particularly the one, or so a whispered rumor insisted, that led in the direction of the girls’ school on the other side of the town.
Indeed, amidst all this finery and class, there was just one major drawback. Immediately behind the school, some careless past planner had permitted the erection of an abattoir and a tanners’ yard. When the wind was in the right direction—which, for the boys and staff, meant the wrong direction—the entire KEGS campus was choked in the thick stench of sliced meat, old blood, and fresh death. There was no use complaining about it, though. More than one past master simply shrugged that the cloying odor was character forming—probably as he held a scented handkerchief to his own olfactory organ.
KEGS demanded discipline, and meted it out, too. Saturday-morning attendance was compulsory through Plant’s first year at the school. Latin was on the curriculum, and sports were mandatory too: cricket in the summer, rugby in the winter, both played on Saturday afternoons. Plant’s beloved soccer was prohibited from the grounds, and soccer balls were outlawed altogether. Maybe the masters would tolerate the occasional scratch match at break time, blazers for goalposts, and a tennis ball for kicking as an outlet for any stray high spirits, but even conversations about the game were perforcedly conducted in whispered tones.
Girls, too, were verboten; hence the allure of the tunnels. A boys-only school, KEGS’s gown-and-mortar-clad masters kept a ferocious eye out for any indication whatsoever that their charges were mixing with the female of the species, with detention the least of the punishments in store for any lad caught breaking the rule.
Rob Plant, as he styled himself in those days, passed with comparative anonymity through those revered halls of learning, at least for his first few years. He was seldom one of the boys held back after school. Neither did he often come to the attentions of the headmaster, the fiercely accoutered Richard Chambers, all horn-rimmed glasses and viciously hooked nose, a man who was perfectly aware that his charges mocked his inability to pronounce the letter R, but was content to allow them that little victory in the knowledge that it kept them from greater mischief.
As did the cane that he was wont to introduce to the most incautious behinds. In those glorious days before political correctness (and maybe a touch of humanitarian mercy) decreed that corporal punishment had no place in the halls of education, a summons to Old Beaky’s office, every former pupil remembers, was divided into three very separate acts.
First, there was the punishment for the crime, in the form of an early-morning lecture, followed by four sharp swishes of the beating instrument. Then there were the hours spent contemplating both the pain and the foolishness of the original transaction. And then there was a second visit to the office, where another whacking would be administered, to make sure that the lesson had sunk in all the way.
Small wonder, then, that Plant kept his head down. His love of history, a keen eye for English, and the general politeness inculcated into him by his parents kept him firmly within that middle rank of boys who were neither so gifted nor so delinquent that they were constantly coming to the attention of the authorities. He threw himself into rugby and relaxed with his stamp collection, and the only thing that really marked him out was the gentle quiff haircut that he styled after Eddie Cochran, but managed to train to remain just the right side of the school dress code. That and his penchant for turning up his shirt collar in emulation of old Elvis photos, a look that gave him enough of a swagger to draw all eyes in his direction, but again, not enough to merit more than a disapproving glare. By his second year as a KEGS student, he had even been raised to the giddy heights of class monitor, charged with cleaning the blackboard, refilling the ink wells, and generally serving as the tutor’s eyes and ears when he had need of an extra pair.
It was a position that a boy could use to either his own advantage or that of his classmates. A monitor who fulfills all the requirements of the job, and ensures that the masters are kept fully apprised of all that takes place behind their backs, might be rewarded with the approval of the faculty, but will swiftly find his classmates turning against him. Whereas one whose own behavior could occasionally be as reproachable as that he was meant to be informing on—well, he would become something of a hero to his peers, and that is the direction in which Plant chose to move. Even after his mother finally tired of the quiff and demanded its removal.
His closest friends, hardy surprisingly, were those who shared his love of music, who would have the radio on from the moment they woke up to the moment they left for school and then turn it on once again when they got home, no matter how daunting the daily routine of three hours’ homework might be. With Paul Baggott, John Dudley, and Gary Tolley, Plant could while away hours talking either about old favorites or new discoveries, and once they discovered that the BBC was not the only broadcaster in the world, every night would be devoted to listening to Radio Luxembourg, the all-pop station that beamed across the English Channel on waves of static, hiss, and interference, for the enterprising ear to then decode into the latest releases by a host of heroes.
Years later, in a 2010 interview with Showbizspy.com, Plant would declare, “I was looking for a way out [of] grammar school. . . . You had Elvis telling us of another world. I don’t know how much more expressive you can get than being a rock and roll singer.” In reality, however, he was scarcely any different from any other thirteen- or fourteen-year-old kid whose love of music exceeded his love of learning; who schemed imaginary bands in class with his friends, assigning the instruments they intended to play—regardless of whether or not they could actually play them—and fashioning set lists of the songs they most wanted to perform.
Besides, music didn’t take up all of their time. Twice-monthly visits to Molineux remained a consuming passion, even as Wolves commenced their downhill spiral. Inheriting his father’s love of cycling, Plant stripped down his racing bike and took off on marathon treks around the local countryside or hurtling around the local velodrome, his mind’s eye mapping out a career as a professional racing cyclist. 1960 was the year that the Italian cycling teams swept the golds at the Rome Olympics, and the names of Livio Trape and Sante Gaiardoni were on every tongue. Their example gave cycling an enormous boost that year, and with his father’s involvement in the local cycling club to further his ambitions, the adolescent Plant found another possible future beckoning to him.
His world continued to expand. He began making regular journeys into Birmingham, just to look around the shops, hang around the streets—all the things that kids enjoyed doing in those days when, as the old cliché puts it, you had to make your own entertainment. Stamp collecting was a major hobby in those days, and Birmingham boasted several stores where he could browse through albums of unaffordable treasures and pick up cheaper specimens for his collections. There were book shops, too, where he could at least look at the volumes he wanted to read before ordering copies from his local library. And there were record shops, where he could commence delving into the American roots of the music that he found himself increasingly drawn to.
The early 1960s—1961, 1962—saw Britain moving into a period of avid fascination with the blues. It was the era in which performers like the Rolling Stones, John Mayall, and the Yardbirds took their first steps into something approaching daylight, although their existence would have been no more than rumor to a thirteen-year-old boy in Stourbridge. His education remained the radio, and whatever music the elder brothers of his school friends might be playing when he went round to visit. But slowly and surely, he found himself growing curious to learn more.
It wasn’t all the blues. “Cathy’s Clown” by the Everly Brothers was a juvenile favorite; Billy Fury, another of England’s primal rockers, another. The youthful Bob Dylan, just an album old on the Columbia label. But one day a book dropped into Plant’s lap, which he still cites as perhaps the most formative of all his early influences. Blues Fell This Morning: Meaning in the Blues was published in 1960, a study of American blues written by an Englishman, Paul Oliver, and concerned not with the lives of the bluesmen themselves but with the existence that they detailed in their songs.
It was a scholarly tome, as the literary stands of the day demanded. Beyond its capacity to be listened to and enjoyed, music in the 1950s and early 1960s was there to be analyzed as a cultural and societal force, and Oliver fulfilled that brief. But he wrote with a rare, contagious passion, and while it probably isn’t true to say that everybody who read his book went on to form a blues band, the converse is very likely: everyone who formed a blues band had read his book. And having done so, set about putting sounds to the names that they gleaned from its pages.
For Plant, that entailed making regular pilgrimages to the Diskery, his favorite record store in Birmingham, just around the corner from main railway station. There, as was the case with a host of similarly minded record stores elsewhere around the country, the very act of opening the door immediately exposed the listener to a nonstop soundtrack of blues and R&B, while the racks were stuffed not with the standard fare of the other record shops in town—the latest releases by Cliff, Alma, Eden, and Adam—but with impossibly glamorous-looking American imports, stack upon stack that would devour a lifetime just to listen to.
Plant got a job delivering newspapers, up at the crack of dawn every morning and cycling around his sleeping town, dropping newspapers and comics through the letterboxes, just to feed his growing vinyl habit. When his birthday or Christmas saw him come into extra money, even his stamp collection was starved as he instead took his cash up to the Diskery. Then, back in his room, he would painstakingly catalog his latest purchases before sitting down to transcribe the lyrics of every song into a series of notebooks.
He did not fall in love with every record he heard, or even every one purchased. As in every other genre, there is good blues and there is bad blues; as with every other artist, there are good songs and there are bad ones. So he learned which performers to avoid, which labels to eschew, and as his appreciation of certain artists increased, he slipped free of the early dilettantism from which all young listeners forge their musical taste and began racking up his favorites.
Sonny Boy Williamson was one, but it was Robert Johnson, perhaps the epitome of the live fast, die young ethos that rock ’n’ roll itself would subsequently hijack, who swiftly moved to the top of the pile. “When I first heard ‘Preaching Blues’ and ‘Last Fair Deal Gone Down,’ I went ‘this is it!’” Plant told the Guardian newspaper.
There’s a moment in Mick Jagger’s movie debut, Performance, that probably says all you need to know about Robert Johnson. It’s short, just a couple of minutes long, and it’s essentially a throwaway when compared to some of the other scenes in the movie. It didn’t even make the soundtrack album, and there’s probably nobody who would rate it among Jagger’s most memorable performances. But the whispered, fractured medley of “Come On in My Kitchen” and “Me and the Devil Blues” that the reclusive pop star Turner scratches out of his acoustic guitar is as dangerously dark as any mood in the movie, a sibilant, shivered hiss of malevolence that transports the listener away from even the half-life reality of Performance and out to the same desolate midnight crossroads where Johnson himself is said to have met with the devil. And then bartered away his soul, in return for the ability to play guitar and write songs.
Johnson was not the first person to make that deal, not even in the annals of the blues. Almost ten years earlier, in 1924, Clara Smith was singing “Done Sold My Soul to the Devil (And My Heart’s Done Turned to Stone),” while a browse through the writings of folklorist Harry M. Hyatt, writing around the same time as Johnson was singing his songs, makes you wonder how the devil had the wherewithal to make any mischief anywhere else in the world, so much time did he spend hanging around the American South, signing contracts with itinerant blacks. He certainly lived up to his side of the bargain with Robert Johnson, though. Over the next two years, the last of his life, Johnson recorded a total of twenty-nine songs for release across a dozen 78s—and every one of them destined to become a blues archetype.
Plant first encountered Johnson on a various-artists compilation album, one of the many that were being released on both sides of the Atlantic at that time. But he quickly graduated to Johnson alone, the 1961 King of the Delta Blues Singers collection of sixteen songs that the Diskery imported from the United States.
All of Johnson’s best-known compositions were there. “Preaching Blues” and “Last Fair Deal Gone Down,” “Crossroads Blues” and “Me and the Devil Blues,” “Hellhound on My Trail” and “Come On in My Kitchen.” And “Traveling Riverside Blues,” a song so raw, so primal, so down-and-dirty disgusting, that the first time Plant heard it, he could not believe his ears. And he prayed that his parents, downstairs in the living room, wouldn’t believe theirs either. “Squeeze my lemon ’til the juice runs down my leg,” sang Johnson. “Squeeze it so hard, I’ll fall right out of bed . . .” and then, so lascivious, lewd, and crude, “I wonder if you know what I’m talkin’ about?”
Plant’s parents probably knew, but for now they kept their own counsel. They had already lived through their son’s rock ’n’ roll phase, confident that passing time and changing fashions would swiftly sweep him into more mature musical pastures. The blues, they assumed, would prove to be another such passing craze. Their own tastes were firmly in the classical realm, and they were of a generation that firmly believed everybody came around to the classics eventually. They started with pop, flirted with fads, and then one day Beethoven captured their hearts.
Still it is ironic that the night Robert Sr. finally cracked and declared the boy’s tastes had gone too far off the rails, it wasn’t Johnson’s deals with the devil that did it, or his sinister welcome into his kitchen; it wasn’t even him getting a hand job from a long-ago blues babe. It was the night Junior came home with a London records pressing of Chris Kenner’s pounding knockabout boogie “I Like It Like That,” and proceeded to play it seventeen times without even a break for the B-side.
Scissors in hand, the elder Robert Plant marched up the stairs, threw open the bedroom door, and snipped the plug off the Dansette record player. Then, without a word, he walked out again, leaving his son staring wide-eyed in shocked disbelief.
If he had been just a few years older, Plant told his friends at school the next day, he’d have packed his bags and left home that night. Instead, it simply strengthened his resolve to get out as soon as he could.