(1961–1965)
The British blues scene of the early 1960s, even after the Rolling Stones embarked upon their conquest of the world, was insular, intense, and ruthlessly competitive. It was a world in which dedicated fans thought little of standing in line all night, waiting for their favorite record store to unpack the latest delivery of American imports; one in which friendships were forged over a shared love of the blues—famously, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards first bonded over a Muddy Waters LP spotted across a crowded train, and they were not the only ones.
Owning a new release was special; being first to hear one was even more so. Word of mouth was as much a part of a record becoming a legend as any evidence of the ears, with singer Long John Baldry once admitting, “I got burned so many times. Somebody would tell me, ‘Oh you have to hear this,’ and I’d trot out and buy a copy, only to discover it was dreadful.”
But Phil May, soon to find fame as frontman with the Pretty Things, continues, “People didn’t have big record collections . . . big R&B record collections. You’d have a handful of albums and a few reel-to-reel tapes; someone else would have a handful more. The trick was never to buy a record that someone else had, because it wasn’t about owning as many different records as you could, it was about hearing as many. So these records and tapes would just be passed around, and if you wanted to hear something that someone else had, but they weren’t sitting in the room with you with the record, you tried to play it yourself, as close as you could get to the original.”
Every urban sprawl possessed its own die-hard blues scene, but the port towns and industrial regions were by far the most dedicated. And among them, Birmingham’s was especially febrile. While the vast majority of the music’s English adherents were unquestionably middle class, the blues themselves were the sound of the American worker; what better soundtrack could there be to the fires and factories, sweat and labor, of the Black Country?
At thirteen years of age, Plant was younger than many of the blues’ most dedicated followers, but nobody looked down on him because of it. Rather, older collectors and shop owners too would take him under their wings—encouraging and inculcating his passion, steering him toward the records that would further his education, and inching him, too, toward making the transition from passive listener to active performer.
Bands were forming constantly, for no more reason than because they could. There were no hopes of record deals, stardom, and lifelong careers; a blues band was a vocation, not a job—a handful of likeminded friends distributing the instrumental workload as the fancy took them, and then playing the songs they best agreed they loved. Few of them called themselves a “group”; fewer still went on to become one. They just got together where they could, with or without an audience of friends, and played for the love of playing.
Blues clubs began to grow up, and again the majority of them were casual, barely organized. Just a place where people could gather to talk about, listen to, and play the music, some drifting to the microphone to sing a favorite song, others content to listen. Even among those musicians who went on to greater things—and that includes the Rolling Stones, the Pretty Things, Manfred Mann, and the Yardbirds—their earliest efforts were played out as simply half-familiar faces amidst a pool of countless hopefuls.
And so it was around Birmingham. As befits its status as England’s second city (behind London, of course), Birmingham and its environs were alive with live music. The legendary British TV show Thank Your Lucky Stars was already broadcasting out of the area, and its studio audience, if not necessarily its performers, were frequently drawn from the local musical ferment. But it was only as 1961 drifted into 1962 and beyond that things truly began to coalesce, by which time the emergence of the Beatles, in early ’63, was already signaling a shift in the musical preoccupations of a generation. The sound that they spearheaded, forged around the dockyards of their native Liverpool, was called Merseybeat. So the race was on for every other city in the country to develop its own similar scene.
Brumbeat, derived from the local term for the city itself, was Birmingham’s contribution to this craze, at least after Cliff Richard’s producer, Norrie Paramor, arrived in town to audition regional talent for possible recording contracts. In fact, it was Paramor himself who came up with the term, once he had returned to London with six bands in his pocket and set about alerting the rest of the nation to their existence.
Jimmy Powell and the Dimensions, signed to Decca in early 1962, led the Brumbeat boom, swiftly followed by the Redcaps, one of the half dozen bands plucked from the manifold hopefuls that filed into the Old Moat House Club in Digbeth to strut their stuff for the watching Paramor. And while not one of Paramor’s discoveries truly amounted to anything on a national level, the very fact they had risen far enough to cut a record for Columbia was sufficient to ignite local passions.
By early 1964, Birmingham had placed its first beat group in the British Top 10, when the Applejacks’ “Tell Me When” made No. 7. The Rockin’ Berries followed, and when Radio Caroline launched its pirate radio service, it looked to Birmingham for its theme tune: the Fortunes’ sing-along “Caroline.”
At the age of thirteen, fourteen, Plant was a witness, not a participant to all that was developing around him. Even after a few of his closest friends set out in a band of their own, Andy Long and the Jurymen, Plant seemed content merely to attend their shows, help shift equipment, and ensure that at least one pair of hands would be clapping as the band ran through its repertoire of top pop–cover versions, resplendent in the matching maroon suits and black velvet collars that conformed to the pop industry’s then-established need for a band uniform.
Even the Rolling Stones took that route as they sent their first two singles into the British chart, although when Plant saw them play for the first time—at the Gaumont, Wolverhampton, on October 20, 1963—it was not the five youthful Londoners with their diet of revved-up American R&B that shook him. Nor was it the Everly Brothers or Little Richard, who also rattled the bill. Plant’s attention was focused firmly on the least-known, but largest-lived, name on the stage that night, Bo Diddley. An American legend who was already past his peak by the time he arrived in the UK that fall, but whose repertoire remained the meat and potatoes of every blues band around.
Half a century on, memories of Diddley’s performances remained burned vibrantly into the minds of everyone who caught them: the squat, bespectacled (and shockingly un-cool-looking) Diddley flanked on one side by Jerome Green, whacking his maracas and looking so mean; and on the other by the Duchess, Norma-Jean Wofford, in figure-hugging black and gold, a bouffant piled as high as her heels, and a Gretsch guitar that chased Bo’s round the block. They had time to play just a couple of numbers, “Bring It to Jerome” and “Pretty Thing,” but their effect on Robert Plant was the same as their effect on almost everyone else who saw them. It was time to say “goodbye to white music.”
“Bo Diddley,” “I’m a Man,” “Pretty Thing,” “Cops and Robbers,” “Hey Bo Diddley,” “Mona,” “Road Runner,” “Who Do You Love”—Bo was, as another of his most self-aggrandizing songs insisted, the “Diddley Daddy” to an entire generation, a Mississippi-born guitarist who moved to Chicago at age six but never let his birthplace leave his musical dreams. The guitar sound he developed was the sound of the swamps, the whack of the hambone, the percussive thwack that recalled the days when Southern slaves made prohibited music by slapping their bodies and dancing to the resultant rhythm.
“I worked on this rhythm of mine,” Diddley once explained to George R. White, author of Bo Diddley: Living Legend. “I’d say it was a mixed-up rhythm, blues and Latin American and some hillbilly, a little spiritual, a little African, and a little West Indian calypso. And if I want to start yodeling in the middle of it, I can do that, too. I like gumbo, you dig?” It was this, though the fifteen-year-old onlooker could not yet put it into words, that made the greatest impression upon Plant. The knowledge that, behind the driving guitars and the braggadocious lyrics, Diddley never lost his sense of self.
Plant took his first step onto the stage shortly after that show, late in 1963. Andy Long and the Jurymen were now playing several shows a week, much to the chagrin of Headmaster Chambers, and to the bemusement of the local Express & Star newspaper, which ran a small piece on the band that noted not only the fact that they were Grammar School boys, but also that they were playing venues they would not legally be permitted to enter were they not the evening’s entertainment.
Their problem right now was that Long had just been diagnosed with appendicitis and was about to go under the surgeon’s knife. Six long weeks would elapse before he could return to the stage, six weeks that the band had already littered with further engagements. When Plant suggested he fill in, his bandmates didn’t need to be asked twice. He knew their repertoire, he’d attended every show, he was around at rehearsals, he was practically a member of the band already. And when he stepped out on the stage at the Bull’s Head in Lye, a pub owned by drummer John Dudley’s grandfather, it was as if he’d been fronting the band all along. He even moved like he knew what he was doing.
All those years spent rehearsing in his bedroom had paid off.
In 2008, receiving an award from the British music magazine Q, Plant reflected upon this era as a part of his acceptance speech. “In 1963, most bands passing through . . . town worked off the same sheet—Chicago R&B and early Motown identikit-packed with mail order arrogance and a taste for our local girls. No social commentary, just cash and penicillin.
“One day, the singer in a school beat group got sick and I stepped in. Singing the songs was OK‚ [but] what do you do with yourself during the guitar solos? Stare at your shoes and think of Elvis, or preen? What a blast. I was in heaven and ignored with a vengeance.”
True, the harmonica that he’d taken up playing earlier in the year did sound a little alien within the band’s established sound, but it was an intriguing alien, a splash of bluesy authenticity that took the tried-and-tested covers away from the realms of familiarity and into some quite fascinating pastures of their own. At least, Plant thought they were fascinating. His bandmates, although they enjoyed working with him, were also keenly awaiting Andy Long’s return—so much so that when Plant suggested he should become the band’s new singer, they politely but very firmly turned him down.
His schooldays marched on, and gloriously so, at least for the moment. In November 1963, Plant was even presented with a prize for finishing top of his class in the end-of-year exams, a sure sign to all that behind the brash exterior and the apparent obsession with music there beat the heart of a keen scholar. Later in his school career, he would react violently against such expectations, by apparently, willfully, abandoning the path to academic glory in favor of slumming it with sundry musicians. But for now, the worlds of music and matriculation remained exquisitely balanced.
More shows hit town, and Plant made it his business to attend them. But the one that he was most excited about was on February 28, when the Birmingham Town Hall hosted the first-ever Birmingham R&B Festival. The opening acts alone were worth the price of admission: London’s newly fledged Yardbirds, Birmingham’s own fast-rising Spencer Davis Group, and Long John Baldry’s Hoochie Coochie men—whose backup singer, though few people cared at the time, was a young man named Rod Stewart. But Plant’s eyes were firmly on the headliner, an American bluesman named Sonny Boy Williamson II.
Williamson II was not, as the designation of “the second” makes clear, the first bluesman to ply his trade under that name. In fact, the original Sonny Boy, John Lee Williamson, was still active around the Chicago area when Howling Wolf’s brother-in-law, Aleck “Rice” Miller, hijacked his name in the early 1940s and began gigging around the Mississippi Delta, insisting that he, and not the northern-based artist, was the genuine Sonny Boy.
It was a duplicitous feat, but he got away with it. By the end of the 1940s, Williamson II was a regular on regional radio, and an advertising icon for King Biscuit Flour, the unmistakable face of the company’s Sonny Boy brand of white corn meal. He landed a recording contract and was soon pumping out the future classics: “Eyesight to the Blind,” “Don’t Start Me Talkin’,” “Bring It On Home,” “Nine Below Zero,” and more. Dave Walker, another Birmingham musician who caught that same show (and who recorded his own album-length tribute to Williamson II in 2004, Mostly Sonny), explains, “There was a simplicity to Sonny Boy . . . the same as Jimmy Reed, it was just a shuffle, but it was a beautiful shuffle. Some of those old guys, you listen to the records and they’re out of tune, or you can’t understand them. But Sonny Boy’s records were so warm, and so exciting.”
Williamson II originally arrived in the UK simply to perform halfway up the bill at the 1963 American Folk Blues Festival in Croydon, on the outskirts of London. But audience and media alike established him as the runaway star of the show, and promoter Giorgio Gomelsky promptly set about booking him his own British tour, with almost every show introducing him to a new clutch of backing musicians. In Newcastle on New Year’s Eve, Williamson was accompanied by the still-unknown Animals; other shows saw Williamson paired with the Brian Auger Trinity, to cement a relationship that grew so strong that finally, shortly before Williamson’s return to the US, Gomelsky put the team (plus a teenaged session guitarist named Jimmy Page) in the studio to cut what became the Don’t Send No Flowers album.
Williamson’s most incendiary partnership, however, was with the Yardbirds, and that despite the notoriously prickly Williamson dismissing their efforts very early on: “These British want to play the blues so bad, and they play the blues so bad!”
“He wasn’t very tolerant,” Yardbirds guitarist Eric Clapton told Rolling Stone twenty years later. “He put us through some bloody hard paces. In the first place, he expected us to know his tunes. He’d say ‘we’re gonna do . . . “Fattening Frogs for Snakes,”’ and then he’d kick it off and, of course, some of the members of . . . the band had never heard these songs.”
The fifteen-year-old Robert Plant, too, found himself on the rough end of Williamson’s infamously caustic tongue. Making his way backstage at the Town Hall, he knocked on Williamson’s dressing room door and shyly said hello. “Fuck off,” replied the star, and that was the end of the meeting. Plant consoled himself by pocketing one of Williamson’s harmonicas as he walked away, but his admiration for the man remained undamaged.
Plant caught the Spencer Davis Group again, a few weeks after the Birmingham R&B Festival, at the Golden Eagle, a local Birmingham pub. The same evening, he’d been to see Jerry Lee Lewis play, but the veteran American was a far cry from the fiery killer of his earliest Sun sides. It was Davis and Co. that set Plant’s pulse racing this evening, not only for the ferocity with which they performed, but also for the presence in their ranks of vocalist Steve Winwood.
A mere matter of months older than Plant (he was born on May 12, 1948), Winwood already possessed a voice as seasoned and raw as any classic bluesman, yet one that was also uniquely and distinctly his own. Until now, Plant’s own attempts at singing—usually alone in his bedroom, but onstage with the Jurymen too—had seen him simply ensuring that a reasonably pleasant and hopefully tuneful sound came out whenever he opened his mouth. Winwood showed him that there was a lot more to it than that. At least, there was if you wanted to make an impression. You needed to forge your own style as well, a sound that was instantly recognizable as your own. And to do that, you needed to make yourself heard.
Plant knew just the place to make that happen.
Every night after school, he would hurry home and slam through the re-quisite three hours’ homework as swiftly (and probably carelessly) as he dared, then dress and leave the house. Invariably his destination was the same, retracing his footsteps back to Stourbridge, to the folk and blues club that had recently opened just a short distance from the school, at the Seven Stars pub.
“Everything was opening up,” Plant told Record Collector in 2007. “New Orleans music was pumping through . . . with Jessie Hill and Allen Toussaint, they were pumping out Frankie Ford and Hughie ‘Piano’ Smith and the Clowns, and all of that stuff, and I’m going ‘fucking hell. I’m 15—what is this music? It’s got nothing to do with the youth club, it’s got nothing to do with Stourbridge Grammar School.’ . . . I was on fire.”
The Seven Stars was one of the places where he could burn.
It is a sad truth that the passing of time has rendered the sheer variety and preponderance of British folk clubs all but indistinguishable from one another. There were hundreds of them, operating out of pubs, church halls, and youth clubs all over the country, some existing for a matter of weeks, others flaring brightly for years. Yet even among their most loyal denizens, their memory has blurred into a composite whole.
A few London venues are remembered for the ever-lengthening line of future stars who cut their hopeful teeth on those stages; Glasgow’s, a few years earlier, from the presence of entrepreneur Roy Guest and the very young Bert Jansch. Others, however, are occasionally noted for birthing a future star (if they did so) and then passed over. Yet without them, the face of British folk and blues would have been unrecognizable, an informal but tightly intertwined network of venues, all reliant upon the experiences of another when it came to booking unknown talent, each dependent upon the discernment of its own loyal audience and the fairness of its organizers to maintain the ability to attract the right names.
Even Sandy Denny, by decade’s end the Queen of English folk, once described her early career as time spent flitting around the country by herself, trying to find her way to one obscure pub after another, while the kind of characters that members of one club recall with such affection were also to be found in every other one.
“Folk clubs were stunning places in those days,” says Richard Byers, whose Suffolk Punch harmony group was a staple of the Kent folk-club circuit. “You could go and see Bert Lloyd one Sunday, singing hard-core traditional stuff, then you’d get Roy Harper or the Alexis Korner Blues Band the next week—amazing.” In and around these headline players, there would also be a slot for the club’s own organizer, him- or herself usually being a musician—and then there were the floor singers, who took turns, week by week, doing songs of their own.
Byers continues:
Floor singers could be a mixed bunch. In the ’60s, there was a good deal of unaccompanied singing, solo or in groups. Most singers had some chorus songs in their repertoires, so good clubs featured plenty of full-throated ensemble singing that the whole audience joined in with, often in harmony.
Some singers might specialize in sea songs and shanties, which offered loads of opportunities for audience participation. And clubs would have their own favorite songs (bawdy ones, lyrical ones, sentimental ones) that they got really good at singing because they were sung regularly. On a good night, these could take the roof off.
But there would be other kinds of floor singers too: the politically committed (singing Irish republican songs), the sleek and suave (imitators of Peter, Paul and Mary or Nina and Frederick), the wildly creative (people who wanted to read their own poems or sing songs they had written), and sometimes the downright awful. Folk clubs provided an outlet for it all.
Plant quickly plunged into this way of life. With a guitar-playing friend in tow, “[we] would go around the local folk clubs playing ‘Corinna Corinna.’ The first music which really appealed to me—even when I was still at school—was stuff like Bob Dylan’s ‘Corinna Corinna.’ When you look deeper into that kind of music, you find that it has a lot of the feelings that exist in blues. Then, of course, you realize that the blues field is a very wide one.”
Few of the clubs were more than part-time affairs, a night or two a week, operating, Byers continues, out of “back rooms or rooms upstairs, often lovely old wood-paneled rooms with a nice acoustic. And they were also places where more or less everyone smoked, so the ambience was beery, a bit dusty, and wreathed in tobacco smoke.” But the dedication of staff, resident performers, and audience alike could rarely be faulted, and within their own local circle, as Ray Davies once sang, “Everybody’s a star.”
Plant certainly saw himself as one, descending upon the Seven Stars every week that he could, usually accompanied by the eye-catching array of kazoos that he had taken to making and the washboard with which he scratched out percussion, again in the privacy of his own bedroom.
Neither instrument would strike the modern reader as especially awe-inspiring; music history has effectively consigned both to the age of skiffle, which, by 1964, had long since had its day. But they were also integral to the British blues, particularly for would-be musicians who had no other outlet for their musical talents. So when Plant approached another of the Seven Stars regulars, the Delta Blues Band, to ask whether he could sing with them, and was asked in reply whether he played any instruments, he had no hesitation in producing his washboard. And they had no hesitation about letting him join in.
Plant did not remain with the Delta Blues Band for long. A small local circuit that included both the Seven Stars and the Stourbridge Conservative Club, but not much else, paid very little money and offered little hope of advancement. But it was a learning experience all the same, Plant spending more time jamming with other local musicians, as Chris Wood, a member at that time of the Sounds of Blue (but later to go on to form Traffic with Steve Winwood) recalled.
Interviewed in the early 1980s, Wood remembered, “He was just this big grammar school kid who was always hanging around. Very enthusiastic, very keen to play with everyone, but also very untutored; I think we all took turns with him, talking about music, just trying to educate him” (the collective we including the Delta Blues Band’s Perry Foster; another member of Sounds of Blue, guitarist Stan Webb; and Wood himself).
All joined the chorus that counseled Plant to find his own voice and direction, but all nudged him, too, toward trying to sound at least halfway contemporary. At a time when the blues had firmly mutated into the electric soup of the Stones- and Yardbirds-style R&B, with players trying ever more inventively to bring a modern sheen to songs that were thirty, forty, even fifty years old at the time, Plant was striving not, perhaps, for authenticity, but at least for something as Spartan and scratchy as the original recordings.
And so he drifted through a succession of short-lived bands, acts whose very names were lifted directly from favorite songs—Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Black Snake Moan” (with drummer Rob Elcock) and John Lee Hooker’s “Crawling King Snake”—or nudged audaciously into other people’s nomenclatural territory; the New Memphis Bluesbreakers had nothing in common with John Mayall’s band of the same name, beyond of course their milieu, but Plant didn’t care.
Of them all, the Crawling Kingsnakes alone packed some staying power. Founded in 1963 by guitarist Johnny Pasternak, a renowned local troublemaker known for slicing cinema seats with his switchblade before he turned his attention to music; singer Al King; and drummer Nigel Knowles, they were originally known as the Javelins, becoming the Crawling Kingsnakes the following year. Based out of the Thurston Hotel in nearby Bewdlay, they swiftly established themselves among their own area’s prime R&B bands, before losing Pasternak to one of Birmingham’s, the Shakedown Sound. Al King quit for the Money Jungle around the same time, but the group—drummer Knowles, bassist Terry Edwards, and rhythm guitarist Roy Price—swiftly rebuilt. Ian “Inky” Watts came in on guitar; Rob Plant became the new frontman.
The Crawling Kingsnakes, by Plant’s own admission, were considerably more commercial sounding than any of his previous bands, and he adapted his stage presence accordingly. No longer a weary bluesman, now he was more prone to leaping around the stage with his microphone stand held high above his head.
Not that he noticed this while it was happening. He was already a natural extrovert, and he only grew more showy once he realized how audiences responded to him: the girls were impressed, their boyfriends were jealous. For him, it was sufficient simply to be up onstage, singing his favorite songs to audiences that might have numbered in single figures, might have been calling out all night for Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley numbers, might even have laughed at the gawky school kid up on the stage. But he didn’t care.
In fact, he began tailoring his repertoire toward getting even more of a reaction from the onlookers, working up a version of Robert Johnson’s “Traveling Riverside Blues,” in which the line about squeezing lemons and getting wet legs became a focal point for fans and foes alike. Fifteen-year-olds in the early 1960s simply didn’t talk like that.
Plant’s burgeoning vision of himself as some kind of outlaw bluesman extended to his schoolwork as well. He was habitually late for school now, a natural consequence of the hours he was devoting to performing and rehearsing. His homework was suffering, and his visits to either the school prefects’ room or the headmaster’s study were becoming more regular.
His parents, too, were growing increasingly exasperated, especially after Plant sat his end-of-school O Levels and failed every subject bar history. There was but one solution. He would stay on at school for another year, then resit his exams at the end.
Not that he had any higher hopes this time around. Time that he should have devoted to study continued to be spent circulating the clubs and pubs of the Black Country, checking out the continued explosion of new talent that was erupting onto the scene: bands like the N’Betweens, led by a raucous shouter named Noddy Holder and destined to emerge a few years later as Slade; Mike Sheridan and the Night Riders; Carl Wayne and the Vikings; the Shakedown Sound, featuring Johnny Pasternak and a young Jess Roden; Danny King and the Mayfair Set; and the Uglys, a tumultuous combo whose ever-shifting lineup constantly glittered with some of the finest players in the city, and through whose auspices Plant would meet a man destined to become another of his oldest friends, bassist Dave Pegg.
A new venue hove into view. The Ritz, in the Birmingham suburb of King’s Heath, was a part of the so-called “Regan Circuit,” a network of clubs owned and operated by Mary “Ma” Regan, a former schoolteacher who launched her entertainment empire with a small chain of tea shops, which led her to staging tea dances, and then, ultimately, operating full-fledged dance halls. The Plaza Ballroom in Old Hill, out on the road to Dudley; the Handsworth Plaza; the Ritz Ballroom in King’s Heath; the Brum Kavern in Birmingham—all were staples of the Regan Circuit, and Ma was always on the lookout for keen young men to work as disc jockeys and emcees to warm up the evening crowd.
She hired Plant the moment she met him. Not only were the Crawling Kingsnakes regulars on her circuit, often sharing the bill with the Shakedown Sound; they were also reaching out toward a new tribe of listeners, the Mods, both musically and, though Plant’s eye for fashion, visually.
With bands like the Who and the Small Faces already established as that particular movement’s figureheads, the Crawling Kingsnakes were never going to be much more than a local substitute for the real thing. But Plant dressed the part anyway, seizing upon the Mod credo of smart clothes, short hair, and a frenetic dance style; pillaging songs from the Motown and James Brown catalogs; and hanging out at the Swiss Cafe, drinking coffee and playing his harp. He even changed musical direction for a time as he started moonlighting with the Banned, another KEGS-based combo, jazz-tinged firmly in the mold of the Graham Bond Organization, sweaty-keyboard and Stax-horn heavy.
He played a handful of gigs with them in between his Kingsnake obligations, although it was not only their music that appealed to him. Deteriorating relations with his parents saw Plant as often as not in need of a place to sleep so he did not have to go home and face his father’s “Where’ve you been until this time of night”–shaped wrath. The Banned’s distinctively lipstick-and-nail-varnish-graffitied van increasingly became a home away from home.
But contrary to everyone’s expectations, possibly even his own, Plant’s second round of O Levels landed him acceptable results in English, English Literature, Geography, and Mathematics, and while later legend (encouraged by Plant) insisted that he was rewarded for his efforts by being expelled from the school, in fact he seemed set for a most respectable future as he entered training for a career in accountancy.