They might have gone that route, too, had egos not intruded. At gigs, John began setting up his kit at the front of the stage, forcing Robert and Kevyn into the shadows behind him. During performances, all sorts of maneuvers arose as everyone angled to gain his share of the spotlight. There was always a lot of elbowing for position. The same with billing. “Rob insisted on putting his name out front on our posters,” Gammond says. “Robert Plant and the Band of Joy.” Over the objections of the others. The only time he yielded were those occasions when the band hit a clinic for benzoate as an antidote for the scabies they’d picked up sleeping in cheap B&Bs. “When we parked outside, he’d take a marker and blacken out his name on the poster attached to the back of our van.”

  These were issues that could be overcome. Still, the money wasn’t enough to put food on the table, and John Bonham, ever restless, began looking around.

  Sometime in the spring of 1968, he got a call from Tim Rose, who had played a few dates on a bill with the Band of Joy and Terry Reid. Rose needed a drummer and bass player for two upcoming gigs: in Upper Heyford at an American air force base and the RAF Bicester. “I was shocked how Bonzo controlled himself playing behind Tim,” says Dave Pegg, who filled in on bass at those shows. “I’m sure it was because of the money, which was quite good.”

  Better than good. Rose was so impressed with John’s playing that he offered him a full-time position on a tour beginning in June 1968 that would pay £40 a week—three times what he was making with the Band of Joy. It was the answer to his problems. A guaranteed salary with a genuine recording artist. He accepted on the spot.

  You couldn’t argue with security. For the first time, John Bonham was pulling his own weight financially. The work was steady. He was earning a living playing rock ’n roll. The music wasn’t all that demanding, the accommodations a cut above the norm. It seemed idyllic. He might even have re-upped for the next Tim Rose tour, had Robert Plant not blown in with this Yardbirds business.

  Chapter Six

  DON’T TREAD ON ME

  [1]

  Jimmy Page was running out of patience.

  He was that close to getting his dream band off the ground. The vocalist and bass player were both squared away, but the damn drummer he wanted was dragging his feet. What was it with this guy Bonham? Tim Rose was small potatoes; he’d be playing clubs for the rest of his career. What Jimmy had in mind was a colossus—a supergroup on the order of Cream, but not Cream. Bigger . . . louder, that “powerhouse sound,” as he called it . . . more versatile in every respect, with a range of material that defied genre.

  “Ultimately, I wanted the group to be a marriage of blues, hard rock, and acoustic music with heavy choruses—a combination that hadn’t been explored before, lots of light and shade in the music,” he said. He already had a nice little tour, ten bookings in Scandinavia, left over from the Yardbirds, that would kick off on September 7, 1968. Here it was, already the first week in August, and—no drummer. Time was running out. They had to put the squeeze on this guy.

  Jimmy instructed Peter Grant to nail it down. Unfortunately, the Bonhams had no telephone. Grant claimed he sent “at least thirty telegrams” to John in care of the Three Men in a Boat club in Walsall, where he was playing that week. Finally, Robert Plant was dispatched to John’s home in the Midlands to make another pitch. For support, he took along Bill Bonham (no relation to John), who’d played the organ in Obs-Tweedle and was friendly with John and his wife.

  “Pat was not happy to see Robert,” Bill Bonham recalled, “because John had a good job with Tim Rose.”

  “Don’t you even think about it!” Pat warned her husband. “You’re not going off with Planty again. Every time you do anything with him you come back at five in the morning with half a crown.”

  Robert laid it on thick, but John was complacent; he remained on the fence. “I was doing okay, and I was getting offers,” he acknowledged. Word drifted around Birmingham that the Move considered recruiting him. “Joe Cocker was interested, so was Chris Farlowe, and Robert and Jimmy. It was baffling. I had to consider so much. It wasn’t just a question of who had the best prospects, but which was going to be the right kind of stuff.”

  It was time to send in the cavalry. Jimmy and Grant took John to a pub lunch, where Jimmy said they “basically spelled out the whole deal, that it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing.” They also sweetened the pitch by offering Bonzo a fixed salary—£25 a gig for anyplace they played in the UK, £50 in Europe, and £100 in America. With the Scandinavian tour already on the books and a U.S. tour in the works, that would guarantee him a hefty chunk of change.

  The money was good. He could live with that. What attracted him most, however, was the musical fit. This wasn’t going to be Tim Rose songs or Joe Cocker songs but a band’s songs where he would have an equal voice. He knew Robert was a singer par excellence, Jimmy had real chops, and they assured him that John Paul Jones was a multitalented musician and all-around good guy. “Even if we didn’t have any success,” John reasoned, “it at least would be a pleasure to play in a good group.”

  He was in—at least for the time being. He agreed to attend a rehearsal in London on August 12, 1968, and play drums on the tour in Scandinavia. After that—he’d see how he felt. John had been in so many bands that failed to live up to his expectations. If this turned out to be another letdown, he’d pack up his kit and move on.

  He’d promised Tim Rose that he’d finish out his tour. There were a few shows left in Middlesbrough in North Yorkshire, but as luck would have it, they overlapped with the Yardbirds’ Scandinavia gigs. There was only one solution. In typical John Bonham fashion, he simply didn’t show for the Rose dates. He did a runner. A man couldn’t be in two places at once.

  * * *

  • • •

  You couldn’t say as much for John Paul Jones. Like Jimmy Page, Jones was a session musician, but an amoeba—he seemed to be able to split himself into parts and be in several places at the same time. The guy was a chameleon. One minute he could be playing bass or keyboards for a philharmonic orchestra, the next minute scratching out an arrangement for Donovan or Cat Stevens. “You name it, I’ve done it,” he said. “I played weddings, I’ve played bar mitzvahs, I’ve done Irish weddings, Jewish weddings, Greek weddings, Italian weddings.” He had tentacles in every idiom—classical, jazz, pop, and rock. He’d even sat in with the Yardbirds on sessions.

  He wasn’t even John Paul Jones. He started life in 1946 as John Baldwin in Kent, in the southwestern corner of London, where his parents occasionally dropped anchor when they weren’t on the road. Kent was an idyllic place to grow up, the “Garden of England,” with its copious orchards and two legendary abbeys, Canterbury and St. Augustine’s. But John’s upbringing was anything but ideal. His father, Joe, had played piano for the Ambrose Orchestra, a popular big band, featuring vocalists like Vera Lynn and Ann Shelton, that appeared in all the snazzy hotel ballrooms of the day. When the orchestra disbanded in 1947, Joe swapped piano for the British age-old love of variety and went on tour with his wife. “They had a double act,” John Paul recalled, “a musical-comedy thing.” He joined them on the stage whenever it suited the act. And for a few years, it was convenient to drag their young son along with them from city to city, town to town, as they toured the provinces.

  And then it wasn’t. They shipped off John, as he was still called then, to boarding school, where he immersed himself in the three Rs of music—reading, writing, and rhythmiticking. He found it so intuitive. His instincts were already well honed. It was in his genes. “My dad bought a record player and let me go out and buy records by Jerry Lee Lewis and the Everly Brothers, Little Richard, Ray Charles,” he said. It wasn’t Brother Ray’s voice that especially spoke to John but that organ. The way he played the Hammond B-3 sent a message to somewhere deep inside. Fortunately, John’s school had a pipe organ in the chapel that he bent over like the phantom of the opera. What a sound! The way it filled that space sent chills. You could play Poulenc’s Organ Concerto in G Minor or Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor but cool it down with a little Jimmy Smith. The Sermon, House Party, Home Cookin’—those albums with the slinky B-3 sound were like catnip to John, who could imitate the single-line passages and the way Jimmy played bass with the foot pedals.

  Keyboards were interesting, but so were stringed instruments. “My father had a little ukulele, a little one, and I had that strung up like a bass,” he recalled. A Phil Upchurch record, “You Can’t Sit Down,” drove John into bass-guitar ecstasy; Mingus, Ray Brown, and Scott LaFaro pushed him over the edge. His father wasn’t particularly thrilled. “Don’t bother with a bass guitar,” Joe advised his son. “Take up tenor saxophone. It’ll take two years, and the bass guitar will never be heard of again.”

  The advice went in one ear and out the other. Somehow, John persuaded his father to underwrite a bass, a Dallas Tuxedo solidbody “with a neck like a tree trunk” and an amplifier that “made all kinds of farting noises.” Be that as it may, it gave him enough status to join a school band of his own, the Deltas, who played Light Programme hits of the day, sneaking in “Shadows, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis stuff.” But Motown spun his head in a different direction, hearing how the bass shaped that trademark sound.

  “Motown was a bass player’s paradise,” John said. “Their bass players were just unbelievable. Some of the Motown records used to end up as sort of concertos for bass guitar.” James Jamerson, especially, was a four-string god whose migratory technique on the frets mentored John’s education.

  The Deltas lathered up a decent reputation, playing private gigs and the U.S. Army base circuit, but by the time John was seventeen he craved a more challenging situation. Everything changed for him in early 1963, when he was seventeen years old. Jet Harris and Tony Meehan, both late of Cliff Richard’s Shadows, had a hit single with “Diamonds”—the same record that gave Jimmy Page his first major session—and were putting together a touring band called the Jet Blacks. There was an audition in a pub near the Warren Street Tube station. “John Paul heard about it and showed up,” Meehan recalled. “He was just out of school, very young, and a bit nervous. Despite the nerves, he was a good musician and knew his shit. He was cocky, too, in a certain way, and I liked that.”

  Everything about the Jet Blacks was a huge step up, beginning with the level of musicianship. Harris and Meehan were pros, but there was nothing shabby about their sidemen: John McLaughlin, who would go on to jazz-fusion greatness, on lead guitar and Glenn Hughes the jazz saxophone diva. This was no Brit-pop boy band. They played some of the earliest examples of the progressive rock that would come into vogue years later. Even the gear was progressive. Suddenly, John (still not yet John Paul) found himself cradling a 1961 Fender Jazz bass, a sleek surfboard cutaway polished to a high-gloss sheen. This was the genuine article, a guitar he would play for the next dozen years. The bread wasn’t bad, either. He began earning £30 a week, a king’s ransom in 1963.

  But the Jet Blacks were ahead of their time, and audiences weren’t yet ready to absorb sophisticated rock ’n roll. When the band broke up in 1964, John pivoted to keep his place in the music business.

  “I wanted to make a solo record, I wanted to be the new Jet Harris,” he said.

  He hitched his wagon to another rising star—Andrew Loog Oldham, the cheeky rock ’n roll impresario who had started Immediate Records, where Jimmy Page worked. Oldham established John as a musical arranger and allowed him to record as an artist. According to John, “We made a single at Regent Sound called ‘Baja,’ a Jack Nitzsche surf-type sound,” which was released on Pye in early 1964. “It was quite a session. We used a ten-piece orchestra . . . we even had a choir on it later on.” The label credited it to “John Paul Jones.”

  “John Baldwin,” for some reason, just didn’t cut it. Baldwin was nondescript, much like John’s personality. He was cultured and unassuming, more like background music, with the kind of flat, ordinary features that would be hard to pick out of a police lineup. And wry, observant, as opposed to feisty. Something spicier, more character-building, was in order. Andrew Oldham claimed to have cribbed “John Paul Jones” from a poster of the 1959 Warner Bros. movie of the same name, starring Robert Stack as the American Revolutionary War hero. “I just knew that John looked the part,” Oldham said, “and that I didn’t want my arranger to be named after a piano.” That may be so, but Roy Moseley, who managed the Jet Blacks, insisted, “I gave him his name,” as a result of Moseley’s relationship with Bette Davis, who had an uncredited cameo in the Warner Bros. film. Whatever the case, it stuck. Forever after, John Baldwin was John Paul Jones.

  That was the name that suddenly lit up call sheets at sessions in every studio in the city. “I was always in demand because I was one of the only bassists in England that knew how to play a Motown feel convincingly in those days,” John Paul recalled. But he was also looking for a more creative role.

  “Somebody came up to me and said, ‘Can you arrange?’ ” he recalled. He assured them he could, then rushed out and bought Cecil Forsyth’s classic book, Orchestration, in order to teach himself the ropes. Thereafter, he began building a reputation as an arranger, writing charts, which had previously been the bailiwick of ancient, stooped-over notators. “I discovered that musical arranging and general studio directing were much better than just sitting there and being told what to do,” he said.

  John Paul did a few tracks with Marianne Faithfull and auditioned Nico for Immediate Records, which was churning out sessions one after another (many with Jimmy Page in the producer’s role). “I was immediately hired as an arranger by Mickie Most, who I loved working with,” Jonesy recalled. Then a tsunami hit: he worked on the Rolling Stones’ “She’s a Rainbow”; “A Kind of Hush” and “No Milk Today” for Herman’s Hermits; “Sunshine Superman,” “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” and “Mellow Yellow” for Donovan; “Beck’s Bolero” and “Hi Ho Silver Lining” with Jimmy Page; “To Sir with Love” for Lulu. The sessions were like revolving-door mysteries; you never knew beforehand which artist would be in the studio. “You walk through that door, and you don’t know—it could really be anything,” John Paul said. Sessions with Tom Jones, Freddie & the Dreamers, the Everly Brothers, Etta James, Marc Bolan, Shirley Bassey, Wayne Fontana & the Mindbenders, Dusty Springfield, Jimmy Cliff, big bands, philharmonics, TV commercials, anything—he did hundreds of sessions.

  “It was a twenty-four-hour job, composing the individual scores for horns and strings the night before, handing them out the next day, and knocking out the finished product,” John Paul said. “I was arranging fifty or sixty things a month, and it was starting to kill me.”

  He and Jimmy Page were on the same collision course. The strings were tuned high for them in those years. They encountered each other often, sometimes daily, sometimes thrice daily at sessions, and the evidence was in their eyes: they were fried.

  “So many sessions were run-of-the-mill, banal, mundane, very boring,” John Paul said. “You couldn’t wait to get out of them.” He and Jimmy had been doing it too long and it wasn’t fulfilling or fun anymore. In 1968, both men happened to turn up at Olympic Sound for a passion project—a superstar session called “No Introduction Necessary” with Big Jim Sullivan, Nicky Hopkins, Albert Lee, and Keith De Groot. It was a lark playing with such talented musicians in a band-like situation.

  For days afterward, John Paul ruminated at home. He wasn’t rushing to accept more session work. He was pacing, contemplating his future, wringing his hands. His wife, Mo, eventually lost patience. “Will you stop moping around the house?” she implored him. “Why don’t you join a band or something?”

  “There’s no bands I want to join,” he responded. “What are you talking about?”

  She flashed a copy of Disc. “Jimmy Page is forming a group. Why don’t you give him a ring?”

  John Paul called Jimmy to ask about the rumor and offered his services. “If you want a bass player, give me a ring.”

  According to John Paul, Jimmy said, “I’m going up to the Midlands to see a singer Terry Reid told me about, and we think he knows a drummer. I’ll tell you what they’re like when I get back.’ ”

  Peter Grant, he learned, was already involved. Their paths had crossed when John Paul toured with the Jet Blacks and Peter was on the road with Gene Vincent and Chuck Berry. Jimmy promised to keep John Paul posted. The next time he heard from him, a rehearsal had been scheduled.

  * * *

  —

  Monday, August 12, 1968, was a sweltering summer day. The swampy air felt as thick as porridge, especially in London’s Chinatown, whose narrow streets and ancient, squat buildings seemed to press in on the humidity and intensify the heat. Peter Grant had answered an ad in Melody Maker for a rehearsal room below a record store at 39 Gerrard Street, which was no bigger than a large closet, making it hotter still. How the four musicians managed to wedge themselves in there was anyone’s guess, what with the wall-to-wall amplifiers and John Bonham’s drums. “There was a space for the door, and that was it,” John Paul Jones recalled. The equipment was ragged, second-rate, the acoustics terrible. For a brief moment, the whole affair seemed ludicrous, doomed. The Midlands contingent hadn’t even met John Paul before. They’d been introduced, somewhat awkwardly, only minutes earlier. There was no time to get comfortable, to bond, to feel each other out. How were they expected to rehearse a set of songs?

  “I was absolutely convinced that all that was needed was for us all to get in a room,” Jimmy said. He had a sound in his head that he knew would inspire, would make them feel as though they were onto something new and amazing. “It was nothing that they’d ever really played before.” But . . . how to start?