Delta Blues Singers. This last record had a profound effect on him.
Born in Mississippi in 1911, Robert Johnson, more than any other bluesman, is surrounded by myth and mystery. It was said that his mercurial talents as a guitarist, singer and songwriter came to him overnight. The legend grew that one night he had gone down to the crossroads on Highway 49 and 61, outside the town of Clarksdale, and there made a Faustian pact with the Devil. Johnson’s early death at the age of 27 fuelled such speculation, although he was probably poisoned by the jealous husband of a woman he had been seeing.
Decades later Plant would tell the Guardian newspaper: ‘When I first heard “Preaching Blues” and “Last Fair Deal Gone Down” by Robert Johnson, I went, “This is it!”’
He had, he would also add, never heard anything quite so seductive as Johnson’s voice – a wounded howl that spoke of pain and lust all at the same time. Propelled deeper into the blues by Johnson, Plant began expanding his record collection as fast as the money he got from his paper round would allow.
Coming home from school he would go up to his room and play these records over and over again. He catalogued and carefully filed each of them, having first pored over the sleeve notes and recording credits. It had become an obsession, one that his parents found increasingly difficult to understand. Staunch Catholics, they began to refer to the songs blasting out from their son’s room as ‘the Devil’s music’.
‘My dad really didn’t get much bluer than Johnny Mathis,’ Plant suggested to the Guardian. ‘I think he found Robert Johnson too dark.’
One evening, when Plant had played a Chris Kenner song, ‘I Like It Like That’, seventeen times in a row, his father came up to his room and cut the plug off his son’s record player.
As Plant was embarking upon his journey through the blues a beat-group scene was bubbling up in and around Birmingham. By 1962 scores of suited-and-booted bands had begun playing the local pubs and clubs. Some of these had grown out of schoolboy skiffle groups but all were inspired more by the Shadows. Backing band for the British rocker Cliff Richard, a sort of virginal Eddie Cochran, the Shadows had struck out on their own in 1960 when their tremulous instrumental ‘Apache’ topped the British charts. Their bespectacled lead guitarist, Hank Marvin, was the Eric Clapton of his day, compelling fleets of callow boys to take up the guitar.
These were covers bands, their members scouring record shops in the city to find songs from the US they could learn to play. Jimmy Powell was credited with the first recording to emerge from this scene, his cover of Buster Brown’s R&B tune ‘Sugar Babe’ being released as a single on Decca that year. Later it was claimed that an eighteen-year-old named Jimmy Page had played guitar on this session, although in Birmingham it was also said by some that if bullshit were an Olympic sport Powell would have a home filled with gold medals.
As 1962 turned to 1963 Britain was in the grip of its coldest winter on record, snow blizzards and freezing temperatures bringing the country to a virtual standstill for two months. 1963 would be the year in which President Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas and a war in Vietnam began to escalate – it was also the year when the Beatles came to Birmingham in the middle of the big freeze. Like so many of the local bands, the Beatles had been born out of a skiffle group that had first been gripped by Elvis and Buddy Holly; they, too, cut their chops re-interpreting songs that had been flown across the Atlantic. The Beatles, however, had their own songs as well. Their second single, ‘Please Please Me’, was one of these and it was released in the UK on 11 January 1963, beginning a month-long run to the top of the British charts.
On 13 January the Beatles arrived at the ATV studios in Birmingham to perform ‘Please Please Me’ for that night’s Thank Your Lucky Stars variety show. Police were forced to seal off the streets around the studios as thousands of kids turned out to catch a glimpse of them. Six days later the Beatles returned to play a gig at the Plaza in Old Hill, two miles from Plant’s family home.
Promoting this show was Mary Reagan, who would come to play a significant role in Plant’s early musical career. A formidable Irishwoman known to one and all as Ma Reagan, she and her husband Joe, who stood less than five foot tall, had established a dancehall business in the Midlands in 1947. By 1963 the Reagans were running four ballroom-sized venues in the area, the Plaza at Old Hill being seen as the most prestigious on account of its revolving stage.
In the wake of the Beatles’ visit the Midlands music scene took off. By the end of that year there would be an estimated 250 groups operating around the city. It was said that half of these still wanted to be the Shadows, the other half the Beatles. These bands were made up of kids in – or just out of – school. They were playing up to twenty shows a week in the hundreds of city pubs and clubs that nightly put on live music, earning more than their fathers did for going to work in the factories. Each of these bands aspired to get on the Reagan circuit, as it came to be known. The local acts that passed an audition for Ma Reagan could expect to perform regularly at all of her venues, often in a single night and for good money.
In July 1963 the Shadows’ producer Norrie Paramor pitched up at Birmingham’s Old Moat House Club to audition local bands for EMI, which was by then desperate to unearth another Fab Four, and he subsequently signed six Birmingham acts to the label. Although none came close to being the next Beatles, he did at least give the Midlands scene a name, christening it ‘Brumbeat’, a knowing adaptation of Liverpool’s then reigning Merseybeat sound.
One band just then starting out on the Brumbeat scene was to have a direct influence on Plant. The Spencer Davis Group had debuted at a Birmingham University student dance in April 1963, performing a set of blues and R&B covers. The band was a tight one and the undisputed star was their singer, Stevie Winwood, a white schoolboy with the voice of a black soul man. Like Plant, Winwood was then fourteen years old but he was moving faster.
In September 1963, at the start of the academic year, King Edward VI’s students were gathered together for a school photograph. In this picture Plant can be seen standing towards the centre of the group, six rows back. He alone among the many hundred students looks as if he is posing for the camera – his curly hair is rustled up into its habitual quiff, a look of practised insouciance on his face. To his right stands Gary Tolley, appearing to be somehow much younger and less worldly-wise.
Yet it was Tolley, not Plant, who by then had formed a first band with two more of their friends, Paul Baggott and John Dudley. Tolley played lead guitar, Baggott was on bass and Dudley on drums. A further pair of boys from their school year completed the line-up: Derek Price on guitar and the singer Andy Long. This school group had begun playing in pubs and youth clubs, calling themselves Andy Long and the Jurymen. They performed contemporary pop and rock ’n’ roll covers and dressed up in maroon suits with black velvet collars. Plant would often accompany them to these gigs.
‘He sort of followed us around for a long time,’ says Tolley. ‘He’d come to see us play but he’d carry our gear as well. Derek Price’s dad would drive our van and he lived just up the road from Robert. He’d pick Rob up first and then the rest of us.’
‘It sounds daft but he was more of a hanger-on than anything at that stage,’ adds Dudley. ‘It only slowly dawned on us that what he wanted to do was sing.’
The Jurymen’s nightly engagements soon brought them to the attention of Headmaster Chambers. He saw a piece on the fledgling band that ran in the local newspaper, the Express & Star, one that made much of the fact that they were playing in places in which they were too young to drink.
‘Because of the way things were for kids then, if you had hair an inch too long and were playing in a band, the figures in authority did look down on you,’ says Dudley. ‘Chambers had us all up before him. He pulled Robert in for that, too, because he knew that he would have been with us. He told us we were nothing more than a rabble – but because he couldn’t pronounce his “r”s, it came out as a “wabble”. That may have been the start of the masters disapproving of Robert.’
For Plant, however, the world was now expanding beyond the gates of his grammar school and 64 Causey Farm Road. Down the road in Stourbridge something was stirring.