The Crawling King Snakes and the Shakedown covered for each other. “We’d do similar gigs,” Gammond recalls, “so if their guitarist, Bruce Oats, didn’t make it into the van, they’d knock on the door where I lived and call out, ‘Kev!’ Because we all had the same repertoire, and all the groups from the Midlands would be on the same bills—Rob and the King Snakes, Jim Capaldi in the Hellions, Dave Mason, Stevie Winwood, Rod Stewart in the Five Dimensions, Noddy Holder in the ’N Betweens, Steve Gibbons in the Uglys, even Bryan Ferry & the Gas Board from Newcastle.”

  Birmingham was their path to the big time, and nowhere in Birmingham meant more to a nascent rock ’n roll band than landing a thirty-minute set with its £13 payday on the Ma Regan circuit. No one launched more careers than Mary “Ma” Regan, a no-nonsense former schoolteacher and tea-dance impresario whose four ballrooms—the Brum Kavern, the Plaza Old Hill, the Ritz King’s Heath, and the Plaza Handsworth—were the Fillmores of their day. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, The Who, and the Animals all put in appearances there in the early 1960s, and the Brum bands who opened for them took their first steps toward success. The M&Bs, a Ma Regan mainstay sponsored by the Mitchells & Butlers brewery, evolved into the Moody Blues. Denny Laine and the Diplomats played behind practically every headliner. Bev Bevan, the Diplomats drummer at the time, recalled a night in 1963 when they opened for “an absurdly talented thirteen-year-old singer, pianist, and harmonica player who was promoting his USA hit, ‘Fingertips.’ ”

  The Crawling King Snakes, with Robert on board, eventually cracked into the Ma Regan circuit on the way up the rock ’n roll food chain. This presented problems for sixteen-year-old Robert Plant, who had landed a position, apprenticing as an accountant, at a little firm in Stourport. A respectable job, as his parents regarded it. Working nine to five, however, was a drag on the soul. Nights were late, the scene got headier. After gigs, bands from all over the Midlands would meet up in the Elbow Room or the Cedar Club, places where one could drink after the pubs closed at ten thirty, to exchange war stories. It became impossible to hold down a day job while keeping up this routine.

  The decision was an easy one, though nothing Robert’s parents would countenance. He quit his job to give his full attention to music. It was indisputable. Nothing could compete with the pull of music, though it caused a serious—irreparable—rift at home. “He’d sleep in the back of the van some nights when his parents locked him out,” says Kevyn Gammond, who faced a similar dilemma. Gammond worked days at the local TSB Bank. “Friday nights I’d leave the bank (without locking up, which was my job) in my tailored suit and rush out to do a gig on the back of Robert’s Lambretta scooter. After a few weeks of that, the bank manager determined I wasn’t cut out to work in a bank.”

  Robert continued to try on different styles and images, but in 1967, the music was changing fast and so was he. “I never really knew where I wanted to end up,” he acknowledged. For a time, he’d flirted with country blues—then a tighter, more urban, Chicago-style take on it. “The first time I heard Fleetwood Mac, they were the very straight blues band that I wanted to be.” It was one thing to broaden his musical horizons, but the inconstancy and wavering was digging him into a rut. Nothing quite had the right feel, the right fit.

  Instead of playing the field, he started his own band from the ground up. The first incarnation of the Band of Joy mirrored the uncertain direction Robert was feeling. It was a ragtag outfit from the West Brum club scene, where the Jamaican influence was especially strong. They played a little of everything, mostly R&B with a loping ska beat—a medley of Otis Clay songs, something fiery and impassioned by ex–Swan Silvertones member Vernon Garrett, James Carr’s “Pouring Water (on a Drowning Man),” and the soul tearjerker “Open the Door to Your Heart,” one of the most arresting gems from the slight but brilliant canon of Darrell Banks. These weren’t mainstream R&B numbers that were integrated on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. They were gritty, regional hits from regions that didn’t cater to sock hops and surf bars. You had to dig to find them on small, independent labels like Revilot, Goldwax, Kent, Gator, and Modern. With a tight set of such pure soul crowd-pleasers, the Band of Joy eked out a nice little groove. Robert attempted to interpret the songs without polishing their edges, but the band’s manager, “Pop” Brown, the father of the organ player, found Robert’s voice intolerable and sacked him after a few weeks.

  Disheartened but not defeated, he bounced back in 1967 with a second Band of Joy that he steered in a completely different direction. “All that music from the West Coast [of the U.S.] just went bang,” Robert said. “I loved good blues, but all of a sudden I couldn’t listen to any old blues anymore and say it’s okay.” He got blindsided by the profusion of music flooding out of San Francisco and Los Angeles that captured all the energy and enchantment of the hippie counterculture. Three albums, in particular, did a number on his head: Moby Grape, the eponymous debut album of the San Francisco band with its catchy, well-structured songs, airtight harmonies, and three red-hot guitarists whose instruments seemed to talk to each other; Love’s Forever Changes, one of the most influential albums to come out of the sixties, which mashed folk, rock, blues jazz, and flamenco into a kind of midtempo psychedelic casserole; and Buffalo Springfield, which combined folk and country with rock ’n roll and, along with the Byrds, set the table for Crosby, Stills & Nash, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, Poco, Loggins & Messina, and the Eagles. “I thought, this is what an audience wants, this is what I want to listen to.”

  The songs on those albums grabbed hold of Robert Plant, not only for the music but also for the spirit they conveyed—the essence of flower power, free love, psychedelics, and the besotted optimism of youth. To a teenager from the Black Country, the music was exotic. “There was a romance about it that was so far away from British pop-rock,” he recalled. “It had a social conscience and a sense of responsibility.” If he was going to play these songs with all the fervor and joy they exuded, he wanted to make sure his bandmates had the same taste in music and were on the same page.

  Robert already had his ideal backup band in mind. He got them together one night to discuss it over pints of Ansells Brown Mild in a pub opposite New Street Station in Birmingham. Kevyn Gammond was a lock. He was the best lead guitarist on that scene, and he and Robert had been in each other’s wheelhouse for the better part of two years. Attracting Dave Pegg to play bass was something of a coup. Peggy had sealed his status in seminal Brum bands—a hard-rock outfit called the Way of Life, the Exception, and the Uglys with Steve Gibbons.

  Finding a decent drummer was more difficult. Pete “Plug” Robinson, who’d played in the first Band of Joy, tended to slow the beat down in the middle of songs and needed too much goading from Robert to recover. No, he needed someone more dynamic, someone who could generate the same level of energy—or more. He remembered a guy in a freaky orange ostrich-skin bomber who had approached him during a gig at the Plaza Ballroom in Oldhill, saying, “Yer all roit, but yer no good without me.” Cheeky bastard. He joined the Crawling King Snakes for a few dates while still working with another band, and the band’s sound “moved away from the blue-eyed soul circuit into the underground movement.” Peggy had also played with John in Way of Life and knew “there was no better drummer in the Midlands—if anywhere.” Unfortunately, the guy had a reputation to live down; he was a certifiable bad boy who “wanted to fight the world.” Often there was no separating an unpredictable violent streak from the fury he unleashed on the drums. If only there were some way to harness it, Peggy thought, but he knew there was no controlling John Bonham.

  [3]

  There was good reason that everyone called John Bonham “Bonzo.” Green’s Dictionary of Slang, the go-to source, lists bonzo as an adjective for “skillful,” but also for “eccentric, crazy.” Few musicians in the world of rock ’n roll have been as succinctly defined by a nickname.

  John Bonham’s skill as a drummer was indisputable. “He could have walked into any band in the world and felt comfortable,” said Jim Simpson, who’d played with John in a group called Locomotive. Another early group, the Senators, had burned through run-of-the-mill drummers until he sat in and, according to Bill Ford, the bass player, “it was as if someone had stuck rocket fuel in our drinks.” The guy was a monster, he kicked out triplets on his bass drum.

  It was either a colossal mistake or an act of divine inspiration when John’s parents gave him a pair of drumsticks when he was just old enough to walk. Everything in his path, inorganic or otherwise, was fair game for those hickory weapons. His younger brother Mick took quite a drubbing until something more percussive came along. The loo or kitchen provided a great source of gear. “I used to play on a bath salt container with wires on the bottom, and on a round coffee tin with a loose wire fixed to it to give it a snare drum effect,” John recalled. “Plus, there were always my mum’s pots and pans.”

  A bona fide snare drum kept him occupied for a while, but when he was fifteen, his father bought him a junky secondhand Premier kit on which he got the lay of the land.

  There wasn’t a lot of opportunity to study drum technique in Redditch, where John Bonham grew up in the early 1950s. The snug Worcestershire enclave, about fifteen miles south of Birmingham, was a bedroom community of the surging Brum sprawl but stingy in providing the means to musical instruction. “I never had any drum lessons,” he said. “I just played the way I wanted.” John’s training was limited to his parents’ big-band 78 rpm records, in particular those of Harry James with his red-hot drummer Buddy Rich, and Benny Goodman, whose superstar drummer, Gene Krupa, practically wrote the textbook on swing. There was plenty to glean from listening to those master craftsmen. The beat jumped off those records. To bolster his development, John depended on the radio, especially tuning in to hear Edmundo Ros and his band, whose two-bar Latin rhythm patterns exemplified the rhumba and guaracha drum beats he coveted. “We would sit in front of the ‘wireless’ every Saturday and listen to Edmundo’s show,” Mick Bonham recalled.

  Everything registered. Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, also Louie Bellson in Duke Ellington’s band, the Jazz Messengers’ Art Blakey: “It was from drummers like them that I learned how to develop speed on the bass drum and perform clearly defined solos that hopefully make sense,” John explained.

  At age fifteen, John’s first opportunity to test his chops came in the summer of 1963, when he joined a local band, the Blue Star Trio, that enjoyed a Wednesday-night residency at the Redditch Youth Club. Until that time, the band had relied on the kind of decorous, ballroom-style numbers that prevailed at teenage dances. But everything had changed that year; the influence of the Merseybeat was too strong to ignore, and with John Bonham behind the drums the youth club exploded into a proper rave-up. Rock ’n roll was a strong cup of tea; he delivered it black, strong, no milk or sugar.

  John never learned how to play with anything but power. He had what drummers refer to as heavy hands, “a bricklayer vibe,” as a fellow musician described it. Every downstroke was delivered as if his life depended on it, with a force that registered in seismic proportions. Part of it could be attributed to might—his enormous strength, meaty hands that operated on their own frequency, excessive, without restraint; and part was his lack of discipline. He was a big kid to begin with, built like a linebacker, all his torque and thrust concentrated from the neck down. Because he’d never been socialized as a musician, because he’d never played in a structured situation under the prerogative of a leader, he played his way, which was aggressive, vehement, without regard for anything else.

  That was the good news—and the bad news. Rock ’n roll demanded a heavy beat. And it was getting heavier as the months pushed on. The Beatles had changed the sound of pop music with the assistance of their Liverpool and Manchester compatriots, but it was evolving in other ways that delivered more juice. Amps and speakers were getting more powerful, as were sound systems in general, and drummers had to keep up, to compete. John never had a problem in that department. With Terry Webb & the Spiders, the Senators, and Locomotive—bands that succeeded the Blue Star Trio—he raised the heat to complement their sweaty, up-tempo sets. His problem arose with where he played, the Birmingham pubs and halls that weren’t used to the level of volume he put out.

  At the time, Bev Bevan, who played with Denny Laine, was regarded as the loudest drummer in the Midlands. “John used to watch me and the Diplomats at the Wednesbury Youth Center,” Bevan recalled. When he was in peak form, the band rose up to meet him. It was instructive how the guitarist who stood next to the drummer absorbed the intensity of the beat and cranked his amp in order to go head to head. The drummer acted as the engine, created the energy that drove the band.

  John immediately raised his game, but it came at a price. His Locomotive bandmate Jim Simpson recalled, “We got banned from several places because of him.” A club owner from Kidderminster summed up the situation, saying, “You were very good tonight, Jim, but we’re never going to book you again with that drummer.” Tony Iommi, who played with Rest and would later form Black Sabbath, recalled, “We used to see [John] every other week at this place called the Midland Red Club in Birmingham, and he’d be there one week, and the week after that he wouldn’t be there. ‘What happened?’ ‘Oh, he was too loud, we fired him.’ ”

  He was loud, yes—but also “boisterous” and “utterly outrageous.” He might strip off his shirt and stand on his drum kit, chest heaving like one of the heavies from the cast of Demetrius and the Gladiators, or spark a punch-up if someone happened to look at him the wrong way. His temperament was erratic, a powder keg; you never knew what might touch it off. Trouble was, John Bonham liked to drink, and he could put it away like the best—or the worst—of them. The more he drank, the more unpredictable he became. “You could be sitting there, enjoying a pint or four with him,” says a longtime friend, “and the next thing you knew, you’d be on your ass with your nose broken or a tooth missing.” Alcohol and Bonham didn’t mix. One always had to be vigilant in those situations. It was like stepping on a land mine. Bands dreaded John’s volatility. He spun through groups—Pat Wayne & the Beachcombers, the Nicky James Movement, Steve Brett & the Mavericks, and Denny King & the Mayfair Set—in slightly under a year and a half. There are classic stories about how John left bands. “Suddenly the drum kit wouldn’t be there,” says a Birmingham veteran. “A band would turn up for rehearsal a week or two after forming, and he’d be gone, already playing with another band.”

  * * *

  • • •

  In 1966, just after he’d turned seventeen, John found a bit more stability with a band called Way of Life, which was better suited to his high-spirited style. The music was changing, getting louder, steadily more progressive. “We played Cream-type songs, stuff by Vanilla Fudge, ‘So You Want to be a Rock ’n Roll Star’ by the Byrds, a couple of Hendrix things like ‘Hey Joe’ that everybody did,” says Dave Pegg, who handled bass chores for the band. “It was a really powerful group, despite the fact we ran everything through a single four-by-twelve speaker in a fifty-watt amplifier.”

  John immediately put his stamp on their sound. “You guys have got to buy bigger amplifiers,” he insisted.

  No one had money to spare, least of all John, who had gotten married when he was seventeen and lived with his wife, Pat, in a trailer parked in the garden behind his mother’s convenience store. Moreover, the young couple was expecting a child in July. John supplemented the spare change he made from playing music with a series of odd jobs—working part time in a clothing shop, carrying supplies to bricklayers on a building site, and moonlighting as a carpenter at his father’s construction business. Gigs didn’t provide enough to support a family—at most a skimpy £15 that was split five ways. And the routine was inhuman. You’d have to work six nights a week to come out ahead.

  “There were some dreadful trips where we’d go from Birmingham to Bangor on the west coast of Wales, which was a five-hour van ride,” recalled Dave Pegg. “Coming back, there were no garages; even if you wanted to buy petrol, it was impossible. So we’d stop and siphon.”

  There were also nights the pay disappeared altogether. Way of Life was often booked to play at pubs or little clubs that weren’t used to the sound they put out. It was ridiculously loud. After the first set, the owner would beg: “Please—please—you have to turn it down. I’m getting complaints from the houses next door.” But John couldn’t play quietly, and they’d be shown the door. One old ballroom, the Top Spot in Ross-on-Wye, had a traffic-light system that started on green, change to amber when the music got louder, and automatically cut the power when it soared into the red. “When we were setting up the gear,” Pegg recalls, “Bonzo hit the bass drum and it went straight to red before anything else had been touched. That was the end of our night.”

  No matter how well they played, Way of Life never got rebooked. They were just too damn loud; club owners fended off too many complaints.

  John fared better with the Band of Joy. It suited his take-no-prisoners style of playing. The songs—“White Rabbit,” “Hey Joe,” “Baby, Please Don’t Go,” “Bluebird,” “Alone Again”—demanded power, and the band didn’t shy from volume. “We played with the amps turned up as loud as we could get them,” says Paul Lockey, who’d switched from guitar to bass to accommodate Kevyn Gammond. Robert Plant wailed away on a harmonica, eyes closed. John had no trouble keeping pace with the others. “He’d bang away like he was slamming cupboards,” Gammond says.

  The Band of Joy picked up a nice head of steam. They were making a name for themselves, supporting bands like Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames and the Graham Bond Organization on a tour of Midlands clubs. In London, they’d brought down the house at the Middle Earth, on a bill with Fairport Convention and Ten Years After. It felt like they were going places. That demo they cut at IBC Studios was the perfect calling card to attract a record deal.