6
If It’s Really Got to Be This Way

(1965–1968)

Unlike Birmingham, the town of Kidderminster, seventeen miles to the west in the far side of the Clent Hills, never made much of an impact on the national music scene. Roger Lavern, a member of Joe Meek’s chart-topping Tornadoes, was a native; so was Peter Wynne, a short-lived star in the Larry Parnes stable and part of the package on Eddie Cochran’s final tour—and so, the locals liked to joke, were the Rolling Stones. Not those Rolling Stones, though. This was a purely local, and defiantly short-haired, combo that sprang up around 1962 but changed their name the following year when a bunch of London stones rolled in.

So, no major, or future, rock ’n’ roll stars. At its mid-’60s height, however, Kidderminster was no less fertile a breeding ground—and in some ways, even more so. Far enough from any spotlight that its most ambitious artists could develop at their own pace, but close enough to Brum that their fingers were always on the pulse, a town best known for its carpet-manufacturing industry was littered with welcoming venues.

The Black Horse, the Black Bull, the Lion Hotel, the Playhouse, the Florence Ballroom, the Playhouse, the Worcester Cross Youth Club—they all rose on the streets that led out from the central Bull Ring (which had nothing to do with fighting bulls, by the way), while Frank Freeman’s Dance Club, on Mill Street, remains one of the best-remembered venues in the entire region, as Fairport Convention’s Judy Dyble reflects: “It was a fantastic place, was Uncle Frank’s Sunday Club.”

Certainly Kidderminster was an integral part of every Birmingham band’s local itinerary, and the rest of the Black Country’s too, while the Town Hall was firmly established on the schedule of every national band of importance—often to the local bands’ advantage. When Donovan arrived for a gig and found his backing band hadn’t made it, he quickly coopted the Huskies to stand in for them, and the Crawling Kingsnakes earned serious local bragging rights when they opened for the Yardbirds there and Eric Clapton caught Inky Watts playing his guitar. The man whom the fans were already calling God listened, and then pronounced himself impressed. There were not many local guitarists who could boast an endorsement like that.

Robbie Blunt’s Accelerators were a punchy schoolboy trio that got their start on the Kidderminster circuit; the Raiders were a reformed skiffle band that launched Jess Roden on his way; Strangers Incorporated was transplanted Londoner Stan Webb’s first group, which played a residency at the Central Cinema, opening not for another artist but for a movie: Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday.

Big Dave and the Hangmen, fronted by the contrarily diminutive Dave Deakin, brought a taste of theatrical ghoul rock to the beat circuit; Al King’s Money Jungle inadvertently introduced disaster: Performing at the Adelphi in West Bromwich one night, the band underestimated the nature of the venue’s revolving stage. It spun round, and their drum kit fell off.

Shades Five grasped a moment of national fame when they appeared as the band in a cornflakes commercial; Martin Raynor and the Secrets knocked the Beatles off the No. 1 spot with their debut single “Candy to Me,” at least as far as the Kidderminster charts were concerned; and the Sunsetters were a very young Kevyn Gammond’s first regular gig, all cavalry trousers and V-necked jumpers, performing classic rockers, doo-wop favorites, and Duane Eddy–style instrumentals.

Robert Plant plunged into this ferment in the summer of 1965, when he enrolled at Kidderminster College of Further Education to pursue a business studies course. He was no stranger to the town, of course, but now it became a home base of sorts, even after he took a temp job in Stourbridge, whiling away the weeks before term began by stocking shelves at Stringers department store and salting away his pay to purchase a moddish Lambretta scooter and a parka coat emblazoned with a Union Jack. Then, every night after work, it was back to Kidderminster to hang with his friends on the ever-burgeoning mod scene. Following in the footsteps of the audiences that the Crawling Kingsnakes were beginning to attract, the pill-chomping mods that represented teendom’s latest fashionable surge, he even trimmed his hair. He might never have become an Ace Face (as the kings of mod were termed), but his devotion to the lifestyle, for a short while, was complete.

He was spending time at one of “Ma” Regan’s venues, the Plaza Ballroom in Old Hill, spinning records as a prelude to shows by Little Stevie Wonder, the Walker Brothers, the soaring Spencer Davis Group, and many more. Some nights, too, the Crawling Kingsnakes found themselves on the bill, playing a twenty-minute warm-up spot before the headliners appeared. It was after one of these that Plant met John Bonham, the night the drummer declared that he was better than the hapless soul currently occupying the drum stool. The Kingsnakes took him at his word, and for the few weeks that Bonham remained on board, he was as good as his word as well.

Inky Watts quit in September 1965, to be replaced by one of the band’s old bassists, Maverick Oates, and with the formidable Bonzo on drums, Kingsnakes rehearsals at the village hall in Clows Top became a barrage of sound and energy. Gigs were drying up, though—or at least, not materializing as fast as Bonham would have liked. One show did pass into local folklore: the night at the Ritz in King’s Heath when Bonham decided the fastest way to get his drum kit down the stairs to the van was to throw it. And he was correct, as well.

But the group wasn’t working enough for Bonham’s tastes, or for his budget. He quit to return to his last band, Way of Life, while the Crawling Kingsnakes ground to a halt. (Plant would not forget them. Casting around for a band name to credit with his 1985 contribution to the Porky’s Revenge! soundtrack, and now accompanied by Paul Martinez, Dave Edmunds, and Phil Collins, Plant resurrected the Crawling Kingsnakes for a stupendous “Philadelphia Baby.”)

Like Bonham’s tenure with the Crawling Kingsnakes, Plant’s college days proved brief. On the “60s Memories” page of the Stourbridge.com website, fellow student Hilary Whitlock recalled, “I was at Kidderminster College when Robert Plant was there—he used to strum his guitar in the Common Room but, unfortunately, he didn’t impress most people and was often told to ‘shut up.’ . . . He was also on the periphery of the Kidderminster ‘in crowd’—we used to go to all-nighters in Birmingham. My one and only claim to fame is that I once fell off the back of his scooter (he was driving) in a Kidderminster car park.”

Plant quit college after just a few months. But another job, working as a trainee chartered accountant for a firm in nearby Stourport, lasted no more than two weeks. He left when the Crawling Kingsnakes announced they were turning professional, and now that the band was no more, he needed to find another gig quickly.

The Tennessee Teens fit the bill. Guitarist John Crutchley, bassist Roger Beamer, and drummer Geoff Thompson were a three-piece whose renown and stamina had already earned them a residency at the Palette Club in Fulda, near Frankfurt in Germany—just one of the myriad British bands that followed in the footsteps of the Beatles and hightailed it across to the continent to play exhausting all-nighters for voracious local listeners. Sadly, that was as far as they were able to follow the Beatles, but back home their experience amplified their renown, and now they, too, were regulars at the Old Hill Plaza. Meaning, they were as familiar with Plant’s style as he was with theirs.

Plant joined, and a short time later the Teens became Listen—around the same time as Plant’s parents finally kicked him out of the house, figuring that if nothing else brought the boy to his senses, a spot of homelessness would. They were wrong. He simply moved into the bed and breakfast owned by his new bass player Roger Beamer’s parents.

For all their foreign experience—which itself was not unusual at that time—back home, Listen were playing around the same live circuit as every other small band and drawing their repertoire from the same places, too: Frank Freeman’s on Easter Sunday 1966, the Elbow Room, the Cedar Club, and opening slots on Ma Regan’s circuit. Plant introduced Chuck Berry and Solomon Burke (the ubiquitous “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love”) to their set, while their mod credentials were slammed home right from the start, with Sam and Dave’s “Hold On I’m Coming” opening the show, grabbing the audience from the outset.

Listen learned another lesson as well. Every band needs a gimmick, something that will draw people’s attention to them in the first place and keep it focused thereafter. The quartet started out by rechristening themselves: bassist Beamer adopted the name “Chalky,” drummer Thompson was “Jumbo,” guitarist Crutchley, somewhat unimaginatively, became “Crutch,” and Plant became “Plonky.” For good measure, Plant announced that he had recently won a dance competition in which Cathy McGowan was one of the judges—McGowan being the fabulously coiffured hostess of television’s Ready Steady Go! and, as such, the focal point for an entire generation of youthful attention. If Cathy said something was good, the chances were that it would be. Even if it was just Plonky’s dance steps.

But there was more. When the local Express and Star newspaper caught wind of the rumor and sent columnist John Ogden out to meet the band, Plonky told him that Listen had already been invited to appear on Ready Steady Go! but turned it down because it clashed with another engagement. As tall stories go, that was a colossus, but there it was in black and white, and even that was just the start.

Eyeing up another local band, the Move—whose stage show had recently evolved to include such niceties as smoke bombs, axes, and the demolition of a television set—Listen choreographed a short fight scene into their performance, Plonky and Crutch going hammer and tongs until the bouncers stepped in to break it up. They borrowed the bigger band’s sartorial style too: double-breasted suits that loaned a certain gangster chic to their look. And soon, they’d fix their aim on the Move’s manager as well. But not just yet.

Other bands on the circuit, too, were paying attention. The N’Betweens, the Wolverhampton crew that would soon become Slade, even considered asking Plant to become their own singer, and that despite the presence already in their ranks of Noddy Holder—destined to become the growling, gravelly bellow of ’70s UK chart fame. Slade would rack up five years of unstoppable British hits once the new decade got underway, all of them powered by Holder’s distinctive holler. It seems incredible that his bandmates ever considered retiring that voice, but they did, and Robert Plant was their chosen successor.

How the history of rock would have changed had this happened. But it didn’t. “We were just four young kids with a local following in the Black Country,” Holder told the teenybop magazine Petticoat in the early 1970s. “I remember one gig at the City Hall where we played with a local group called Listen, who had as their lead vocalist a certain Robert Plant. At that time, I used to help out Robert and the band by getting my old man to lend them his window cleaning van when their transport broke down.”

Writing his autobiography decades later, remembering the palace coup that considered relegating him to backing vocals, Holder continued, “There weren’t many good singers around at the time who would have suited our style of music. Robert . . . was one of the names mentioned. The others didn’t know him, but I did. I don’t know if anyone ever actually approached [him], but he was certainly one of only two or three names in the frame.”

Had Plant been asked, he’d probably have said yes. With no disrespect whatsoever to his bandmates, his eye was always focused on the next rung of the ladder; he was always searching for the next chance to improve himself. He had no choice. Among the promises he made to Maureen once they started dating seriously was the pledge to remain in the music business until his twentieth birthday. If he hadn’t made it by then, he’d give up.

Plus, he had a lot of balls. On May 5, 1966, the Who appeared at Kidderminster Town Hall as a three-piece, with guitarist Pete Townshend handling lead vocals. Quickly, the word went around that Roger Daltrey had quit the band—circulating the venue without the necessary caveat that someone was always quitting the band, and tonight was simply Daltrey’s turn. He’d be back the following day, for a show in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, and a couple of weeks later, somebody else would walk out—drummer Keith Moon, on this occasion, to discuss forming a band with his friends Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. They jokingly declared they would name it “Lead Zeppelin”—because that is what it would go down like.

Neither Plant nor another local frontman, Steve Gibbons, were at all familiar with the innermost workings and dynamics of the Who, however; they didn’t understand that one of the things that kept the group going was the knowledge that it could all come to a halt at any moment. As Townshend discovered when the stage door opened at the end of the show. He recalled a few years later what followed, in an interview with Musician magazine: “Robert Plant talks about the fact that when he first saw us, I was the singer. He came to see us and offered himself for the job, as did Steve Gibbons when he came to see us. Obviously, none of them thought I was any good.”

Politely, Townshend declined the offers, and so Listen gigged on, their ambitions still soaring, and occasionally snatching a golden ring of sorts.

On October 20, 1966, Listen were booked to open for Cream at the Youth Club in Willenhall St. Giles. The N’Betweens and the Factotums, a Manchester band that had already come to the attention of Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, were also on the bill, and history now stares open-mouthed at the menu. Even Live Aid, twenty years later, could scarcely compete with a bill that placed Robert Plant, Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker, Noddy Holder, Jimmy Lea, Dave Hill, and Don Powell all on the same stage.

Which doesn’t alter the fact that most people present really only wanted to see Cream.

The supergroup trio of Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker had only launched a few months earlier; they were touring now on the back of a debut single, “Wrapping Paper,” that all three admitted had little to do with what the band was all about. A low-key tour of even lower-key venues was their opportunity to explain what they meant by that.

Noddy Holder: “We were all on the same bill as the Cream that night, who apart from Clapton were unknown. Robert [Plant] used to like to move about the stage a lot even in those days before he joined Led Zeppelin. Unfortunately, Ginger Baker had a huge drum kit which was spread all over the stage—drums everywhere—I remember Robert very timidly going up to Ginger and asking him if he would mind moving some of his kit off the stage.”

Baker refused, and he doubtless cracked a smile when Plant and Crutchley went into their fight routine and disappeared over the edge of the tightly packed stage. When Plant reappeared, he had sustained a broken ankle.

By now Listen had a manager, Mike Dolan. Owner of a local tailoring concern, in an age when, for many bands, a manager simply meant somebody who had the money to keep them on the road, music-business experience not essential, Dolan did succeed in landing the band an agency deal. Their horizons expanded accordingly. No longer were they confined to the Black Country gig circuit. Packed into a van they got from Ma Regan, Listen played venues all over the UK, deep into the South West, far into the North East, and all points in between. Their average fee of £15 a night, to be spread between four band members and their driver, Eddie, wasn’t spectacular, particularly once fuel and food entered the equation, but it wasn’t bad for the time, and the band was happy enough. Even happier after Dolan financed a trip to a local recording studio, where Listen banged out a three-song demo, which Dolan duly mailed around the record labels—and was rewarded with a three-single deal with CBS.

Again in keeping with the mood of the times, the powers that be cared only for making the best record possible. The feelings of the musicians whose names may or may not have been on that record were utterly immaterial. Playing the demo, producer Danny Kessler decided that the only truly remarkable thing about Listen was their singer. Therefore, Plant alone was required in the studio; his bandmates would be replaced with session men; and again, no matter how mistreated Crutch, Jumbo, and Chalky may have felt, no way had they been personally singled out for the ignominy.

Even the Love Affair, “Everlasting Love” hitmakers a couple of years later, were left at home while frontman Steve Ellis alone voiced the song that would make them stars. Other top acts of the day, Herman’s Hermits included, essentially existed as two separate bands: there were the four guys who accompanied singer Peter Noone on stage and promo photographs, and there was the coterie of session men, unknown names like Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, who played on the actual records. You could make a tidy living from session work in those days, and a lot of players did. And they didn’t care whose name was on the label.

No record seems to exist of who accompanied Robert Plant on his first-ever vinyl sojourn, although he did recall singers Lesley Duncan and Kiki Dee being among the backing chorus, and drummer Clem Cattini was certainly there as well. None of which served to deaden the growing sense of nervousness that was suddenly consuming the young singer. His entire career, he suddenly realized, had so far been devoted to convincing people that he had something to offer. Now, walking into the studio, seeing the musicians, singers, and engineers who had been gathered in his name, he knew that it was time to deliver. “To squawk my way through these things was incredibly tense,” he told Tracks magazine in 2004.

Not that it mattered how he felt. Listen’s debut single was a Young Rascals song called “You Better Run,” and all concerned made a decent stab at it. Unfortunately, on the other side of London at more or less the exact same time, the N’Betweens were doing an equally good job of the same song themselves, for release as their first single. And when their respective labels, CBS and Columbia, got wind of the coincidence, they did the only thing they could. They scheduled the two singles for release on the same day, then sat back to await a Black Country civil war.

The N’Betweens won, at least according to Noddy Holder. “It actually went to number one in the midlands, because we had a name there and our fans knew the song from our live show.” And possibly because it was the superior version, the combination of the full N’Betweens line-up and maverick American producer Kim Fowley was always going to sound more alive than a nervous Plonky in a room full of strangers, singing to an arrangement he’d only just been played. Listen’s single scraped the local Top 50 for a week and then disappeared.

As did Listen. Manager Dolan had spent a considerable sum of money on them, not least of all in his attempts to win the Battle of the Covers, and the band was both deep in debt and out of breath. Only Plant had the wherewithal to carry on; moving out of the bed and breakfast and into the spare room at Maureen’s parents’ house, he also had the CBS deal to fall back on, as it became apparent that A&R man Danny Kessler had only wanted the singer in the first place. He had no interest in Plant the bluesman, Plant the soul singer, or Plant the mod either. As 1966 turned into 1967, and the youth of the day started turning onto the psychedelic sounds of the London and San Francisco undergrounds, Britain’s record industry knew precisely what they needed to hear next: good, old fashioned, big-voiced balladeers.

Tom Jones was already soaring; Scott Walker of the Walker Brothers was preparing to do likewise. Even the extraordinarily unlikely name of Engelbert Humperdinck was girding his loins for stardom, not only climbing to No. 1 with the impassioned bellow of “Release Me,” but also becoming the first person since 1962 to prevent a new Beatles single, “Strawberry Fields Forever,” from topping the chart.

So yeah. The kids might pretend they liked all this far-out hippy music. But when it came to buying records, they wanted something with class and gravitas. Something like “La Musica è Finita,” a recent Italian chart topper that would most logically have been retitled “The Music Is Finished” for an English-language release, but instead became “Our Song,” a strings-and-syrup-laden production over which Plant draped his most impassioned (and surprisingly pleasing) vocal. Plant’s personal choice for his sophomore single, a cover of “Incense” by the Anglos, was thrown unconsidered (and unrecorded) to one side.

By the standards of the time, and the ilk to which it conformed, “Our Song” really isn’t a bad record—or a bad performance. But the Express & Star review condemned it as “a waste of a fine soul singer,” and Plant is alleged to have claimed it took him ninety takes, and at least one bout of tears, before he delivered a vocal that met publisher Eddie Kassner and producer Kessler’s satisfaction. And after all that, “Our Song” sold less than a thousand copies, and disappeared even faster than “You Better Run.”

For all his studied disdain for this new musical direction, however, and despite his own suspicion that maybe the labels were wrong about the way the musical wind was blowing, Plant did indeed see some sense to Kessler’s insistence that he was born a balladeer. There was, after all, very little call for rock ’n’ roll styled soloists at that time; from Cliff Richard to Barry Ryan, from Scott Walker to P. J. Proby, and onto the Joneses and Humperdincks, the image of the successful solo singer was that of a besuited gentleman, trendy but respectable, aching and breaking his heart across lovelorn tearjerker after soul-baring confessional.

Even if we employ great lashings of hindsight and look at the solo singers who emerged in the early 1970s at the helm of the glam rock explosion, we find David Bowie, David Essex, and even the primal stomp of Gary Glitter wrapping their late ’60s tonsils around the majestic swell of big ballad pop.

Farewell, then, Robert A. Plant. Hello, Robert “The E Is Silent” Lee, cabaret hopeful extraordinaire. Next stop, the Tony Billingham Big Band.

It didn’t last. Plant would cut one final single for CBS, “Long Time Coming,” which was a very short time going, and he played a handful of live shows with the Big Band, taking the stage in his suit and bouffant and really trying to squeeze himself into the respectable confines of a jazzy dance band.

Even his parents applauded his efforts; in fact, it was Plant Sr. who made the introductions in the first place, after being commissioned to do some work on Billingham’s home. But neither audiences nor Plant’s newfound bandmates ever took to the rocking square peg in their well-oiled round hole, and by spring 1967, even before his final CBS single was released, Plant was letting his hair grow down and out once more and putting together a new band.

One of Maureen’s cousins, Vernon Pereira, came in on guitar; organist Chris Brown introduced both keyboards and a band manager, his father; and Robert Plant and the Band of Joy set sail on the lysergic seas of the Summer of Love. For Plant had been right and the record labels wrong. The freaks and hippies were taking over, dividing the pop charts between their sounds and the oldsters but making statements that traveled far beyond the “farewell my lovelies” of the Engelbert set.

Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, the Move, Cream—and Traffic, spawned from the self-same Black Country clubs that Plant frequented, bringing psychedelic stardom to Chris Wood and Steve Winwood—these bands were the vanguard now, while across the seas a similar wave was building: Jefferson Airplane, Buffalo Springfield, the Grateful Dead, Moby Grape, Love. And Plant fell for it big time. “All that music from the West Coast just went bang!” he told Melody Maker three years later, “and there was nothing else there for me after that. Three years before I had been shuddering listening to Sonny Boy Williamson. Now I was sobbing to Arthur Lee.”

Kidderminster College student Abdul Benson, keyboard player with another local band, Custard Tree, pieced together a psychedelic light show for the band, the first in the town. Every rehearsal found them getting to grips with a host of favorite covers, delving into albums that all their audience seemed to know by artists who might never visit the Black Country in person, and piecing together a set that doubled as the American West Coast’s greatest hits. Moby Grape, Love, and the Airplane were firm Plant favorites, and when the band wasn’t gigging, he’d be back home on Trinity Road with Maureen, listening to DJ John Peel’s Perfumed Garden hissing over the waters from pirate Radio London, and educating a devoted late-night listenership in the best of the psychedelic underground.

Soon Peel himself was appearing in Kidderminster, playing Sunday-night DJ shows at Frank Freeman’s, and often accompanied by some artist or other whom he had taken under his wing: Tyrannosaurus Rex on Easter Sunday 1968; Captain Beefheart on May 19, an evening immortalized by a snatch of conversation between the DJ and the Captain. Peel was asked what the venue was called.

“Frank Freeman’s Dance Club,” answered Peel.

“What a groovy name!” said Beefheart.

“No, it’s not groovy at all,” replied Peel. “It’s a dance club run by a man named Frank Freeman.”

Plant was there every night he could be, or sending friends along if he was gigging elsewhere, with instructions to report back on every record Peel played.

Meanwhile, the Band of Joy was working regularly, graduating from opening slots behind Denny Laine’s Electric String Band to headlining appearances of their own, the band coming out onstage in kaftans and beads, bangles and flowers—archetypal hippies playing the music that all believed would one day change the world.

But Plant was also warring with the band’s manager (the keyboard player’s dad), and Band of Joy was clearly not long for the world. The group sacked its singer, much to his utter bemusement, and the only people who thought of Rob Plant as a rock star were the guys on the construction team that he now found himself working with, laying tarmac on West Bromwich High Street. They rechristened him “The Pop Singer.”

He was not going to give up, though. Plant formed a new Band of Joy even as the old one continued on through its death throes, brought Listen’s old manager Mike Dolan in to handle their affairs, and immediately found himself involved in a stunt that would make everybody in the region sit up and play attention. Or so they thought.

Tootling around in his old Ford Popular one day, Plant was hauled over by the police on a charge of dangerous driving. A court date was set, August 10 at Wednesbury Court, and Dolan thought it would be a great idea for Plant to arrive at the court not as a contrite motorist come to take his medicine but as the focal point of a massive Legalize Pot rally.

The wheels were set in motion immediately, the pair of them speculating upon how many hundreds of like-minded hairies they could rely upon to follow Plant to the halls of justice. Upon the signs they would carry and the slogans they would chant. Upon the shock and awe that would register on the faces of the straights who sat in judgment on a generation, in court and on the high street.

Then the great day dawned . . . and seven people showed up. Including, mused a brief passage in the Express & Star, “two girls in mini skirts,” a nurse named Dorette, and Maureen’s younger sister Shirley. And just to hammer in one final ignominious nail, any thoughts Plant and Dolan might have entertained of the judiciary cracking down hard on the dope-smoking cancer in their midst were shattered when Plant was cleared of the motoring charge as well.

Home for Plant now was a crumbling house on Hill Road in the small town of Lye, near Stourbridge. There, he and a small crowd of other waifs and strays, many of them impoverished students from the college down the road, lived in a state of communal disrepair, every room given over to whichever pleasures its occupant deemed most suitable, while the basement was converted to a rehearsal studio for the Band of Joy. Wherein a not-yet-permanent lineup of musicians would experiment both musically and visually, transforming the old Band of Joy imagery into full-blown tribal performance art by painting their faces and unleashing wild choreography.

“It frightened everybody to death,” Plant told Melody Maker. “This big, fat bass player would come running on, wearing a kaftan and bells, and dive straight off the stage and into the audience. I howled so much that I couldn’t do anything at all.” Not even object as that bassist left, to be replaced by the original group’s Paul Lockey.

Chris Brown, presumably free of his managerial parent, was likewise lured back; so was Bonzo Bonham. But the real coup was when Plant recruited Kevyn Gammond, once of the Sunsetters, but more recently playing with Shakedown Sound, and gigging with reggae star Jimmy Cliff too. As much as Plant’s vocals and Bonham’s already-characteristic bombardment, Gammond’s guitar would become a Band of Joy trademark, while his local renown exceeded that of any of his bandmates.

Jimmy Cliff was still a few years away from chart success at the time; brought to the UK in mid-1966 by Island Records’ Chris Blackwell, his greatest renown was among the West Indian community—one of whose prime focal points was the Birmingham suburb of Handsworth. Gammond and Shakedown Sound drummer Sean Jenkins were both recruited to his band on the strength of an audition in summer 1966, but it turned out that Cliff had already seen them play, at a Shakedown Sound show in Birmingham, and author John Combe declares, “Kevyn’s rasping, chopping guitar style worked well” with Cliff’s own music.

Somewhat mischievously, Chris Townson, drummer with the London band John’s Children, recalled Cliff’s stage act. The two bands gigged together at the Bus Pavilion in Paris in May 1967. “His act used to start with him coming onto a totally darkened stage, the only light would be an ultraviolet one stuck up on the ceiling. And he used to dress completely in black, apart from these white plimsolls, so all you could see would be these plimsolls come hopping across the stage. We [John’s Children] always used to sit up the front and kill ourselves laughing at it; we wanted to run on and introduce the ‘Fabulous Dancing Plimsolls,’ but we’d be laughing so much that we couldn’t move by the time they appeared.”

Plant first encountered Cliff, Gammond, and Co. when the original Band of Joy opened for them at the Black Horse that same month, May 1967—and again at the Adelphi in West Bromwich a couple of months later. Where his enthusiasm for a fresh lineup of the band, and what Gammond recalls as his “dreams of utopia,” were enough to convince the guitarist to quit Jimmy Cliff in October 1967 and throw in with this new band as soon as they returned from a short Scottish tour.

The new-look Band of Joy launched into a spell of vivid visibility. Locally, they were regulars at the Chateau Impney in Droitwich and the Black Horse in Kidderminster.

Christmas saw Band of Joy play the end-of-term dance at Kidderminster College, opening for Plant’s old friends Tony Billingham’s Dance Band, although neither act seemed to impress the students too much, at least if the local paper’s “On The Inside” column’s review was anything to judge by. As John Combe recollected, “Nobody wanted to know” about Billingham’s set, while Band of Joy “were hardly the kind of group you wanted to dance to with their West Coast ‘progressive rock.’”

They visited London, playing the legendary Middle Earth in Covent Garden on January 26, 1968, and experiencing for themselves one of the centers of the city’s psychedelic scene, and back in Kidderminster they became regulars at Frank Freeman’s Dance Club, where the nightly diet of soul and blue-beat deejaying kept Plant entertained even when he wasn’t gigging.

In late February 1968, Band of Joy auditioned as the backup band for Tim Rose, the American folkie whose song “Morning Dew” was in the repertoire of seemingly every blues band in the country, and who had also popularized “Hey Joe,” the song that gave Jimi Hendrix his first hit and that likewise was ubiquitous around the UK live scene. A countrywide tour followed, and an even more prestigious London show; on February 23, 1968, the Marquee shook, first to Rose’s Band of Joy–fueled set, and then to the heavy blues majesty of Aynsley Dunbar’s Retaliation. Another of those nights for future historians to conjure with, two of the era’s greatest drummers playing together in the same tiny room. “Live performances were at once magical and disastrous,” Plant reflected later, in the liner notes for Sixty Six to Timbuktu. “Always edgy and far out.” The group would have been far better suited to the streets of Haight-Ashbury, he insisted, “than the Top Rank Ballroom in Sunderland.”

“Hey Joe” was also one of the songs that Band of Joy took into the studio when Mike Dolan booked them a session at London’s Regent Sound Studios to cut a demo tape. It was joined by another of their live staples, Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” and a couple of the band’s own compositions, “Memory Lane” and “Adriatic Seaview.” Both of which were so unremarkable that when Plant returned to the demo for his Sixty Six to Timbuktu anthology in 2003, he completely ignored their existence.

So did CBS, to whom Plant was still nominally contracted, and the remainder of the music business was likewise nonplussed. There was just one ray of sunshine. Dolan wrangled the band a residency at the Speakeasy, one of the industry’s prime late-night watering holes, knowing that if Band of Joy were ever to be “discovered,” that was where it was likely to happen.

And so it transpired. One evening as the band cooled down in the dressing room following their set, the door opened and in strode Alexis Korner, one of that select handful of British bluesmen who could truly claim to have midwifed the national scene. He’d never broken through himself; rather, he existed in the shadows, a name that everybody seemed to know and admire but who was neither destined for nor especially interested in stardom. Tonight, all he wanted to do was say hello, to let the band know how much he enjoyed their performance, and he told them to return the favor the next time he played in Birmingham. They said they would, and off he went.

That was the extent of Band of Joy’s big-city exposure. They went back to Birmingham, no better off than when they left, and when Tim Rose came calling once again, asking if he could borrow Bonham for his next set of dates, the band knew it could only speed downhill from there. John Trickett, drummer with the Walsall-based band the Answer, replaced him on a “when available” basis, but clearly the joy had leaked out of the band.

The final straw came on the road. Throughout the band’s career, booker Barry Dickens at the Malcolm Rose Agency thought nothing of scheduling shows at completely opposite ends of the country—Exeter one night, somewhere in Scotland the next. The band thought nothing of fulfilling them either. At least until the night Gammond quit, midway through that very same journey, simply getting out of the van as it passed through Kidderminster and going home.

Gammond went onto a new band, Mad Dog, which ultimately morphed into Bronco, a virtual Shakedown Sound reunion with Jess Roden and Johnny Pasternak plus the Accelerators’ Robbie Blunt. The Band of Joy, meanwhile, played out their scheduled Scottish show without him, replaced him with Mickey Strode for a handful more gigs, and then folded.

Again, Plant returned to civilian life. He picked up another job in the construction industry, Maureen was pregnant, and his twentieth birthday was just three months away. His time was almost up.