LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

meeting place for local teenagers. Later, a local singer named David Yeats opened the Groove record shop, catering for R&B enthusiasts like Plant.

      In the pubs and clubs one could hear everything from Woody Guthrie songs to Dixieland jazz being performed. It was a movement largely driven by Stourbridge College, a technical and art institution that in the ’60s had begun attracting students from all over the country and across Europe, and it was one into which Plant threw himself.

      ‘It was a huge, amazing, subterranean moment,’ he told me. ‘There was poetry and jazz, there was unaccompanied Gallic singing. There were off-duty policemen standing up in folk clubs, holding their pints and singing “Santy Anna”.

      ‘There were hard drugs. There were registered junkies mixing with beautiful art students. And there was us lot at the grammar school down the road, academic whiz kids in total freefall. I was just mincing about with my Dawes Double Blue bike, with my winklepicker shoes in the saddlebag, listening to all this stuff.’

      Plant had by now also bought a cheap harmonica that he taught himself to play by blowing along to records on his repaired Dansette turntable. He began to take this harmonica with him wherever he went, delighting in pulling it out from his back pocket and blowing away, to entertain himself more than anyone else. On one occasion at school, Headmaster Chambers, fast becoming Plant’s nemesis, spied him doing as much in the playground. Chambers loudly informed him that he would get nowhere in life messing around with such nonsense.

      ‘Rob was so much into the kind of music that we weren’t,’ says Dudley. ‘I mean, where on earth he got the knowledge that he had of the blues from I don’t know. He was forever going on about people like Sonny Boy Williamson, and from that age. For God’s sake, in those days you wouldn’t hear anything like that on the radio.’

      Plant got to see a physical manifestation of the blues for the first time on 10 October 1963 when his aunt and uncle took him along to the Gaumont cinema in Wolverhampton to see one of the new package tours that had begun travelling around the UK. This one featured the young Rolling Stones, the Everly Brothers, Little Richard, and a Mississippi bluesman, Bo Diddley. It was Diddley who transfixed him.

      ‘I was sweating with excitement,’ he told Q magazine in 1990, reflecting back on that night. ‘Though the Stones were great, they were really crap in comparison with Diddley. All his rhythms were so sexual – just oozing, even in a twenty-minute slot. Now that’s an evening.’

      Before the year was out Plant had also stepped onto the stage himself. His opportunity came when Andy Long was struck down with appendicitis, which at the time required a six-week period of convalescence. Long’s Jurymen were by now playing several nights a week and did not want to turn down the work, so who better to fill in for their singer than their friend Robert Plant, given that he already knew their set inside out?

      Plant’s début live performance came at the Bull’s Head pub in Lye, a regular haunt of the Jurymen since it was run by John Dudley’s grandfather. On this night one might imagine that he would have been stricken with nerves as he looked out from the small, low stage and into the eyes of an audience for the first time. That here, in this smoky bar, he would wilt before such judging looks and when standing next to his then more experienced schoolmates.

      ‘When he first got up there, he was full of it – absolutely full of confidence,’ says Dudley, laughing at the memory. ‘He played more than half-decent harmonica even then and so he transformed our set into something a lot more bluesy. We had to busk it but we went down okay. I can’t remember how many gigs we eventually did with Rob but people always reacted favourably. Even then he sang in this blues wail. He used to like to take it down to a low rumble and then build back up to a crescendo.’

      His stint as the Jurymen’s singer took Plant as far away as the East Midlands city of Leicester, a two-hour drive from home in the band’s old van. It also brought what he wanted to do with his life into clear perspective. Before Andy Long returned Plant began to go to work on his fellow Jurymen, attempting to persuade them that he should now become their permanent singer. He was to be frustrated in his efforts, just as he would be many times during the next few years.

      ‘We told him Andy was our singer and thanks very much,’ says Tolley. ‘We were all a bit mercenary. To be honest, we all had our stage uniforms and there wasn’t anything that would fit Robert.’

      He was a cocky little bleeder, I’ll tell you that much.

      Plant entered his sixteenth year able both to follow the pull of music and all that it offered, and keep up his school work. In November 1963 he won a school prize for finishing top of his form in the end-of-year exams. Yet it was a precarious balance he had struck and one he was not destined to maintain.

      The scales started to tip from academic achievement almost as soon as 1964 began. At 6.36 pm on New Year’s Day the BBC launched Top of the Pops, a new weekly music TV show. Beaming the pop hits of the day into British households, it brought to the nation’s teenagers the promise of something out there other than the drab and everyday. For his part Plant felt ambivalent about the British beat groups, but even he must have stirred at the sight of the fledgling Rolling Stones opening that first show – the young Mick Jagger pouting and preening through Lennon and McCartney’s ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ as if in celebration of his own beautiful youth.

      On 28 February Plant hopped onto a bus to Birmingham, his parents allowing him to go off into the city on his own for the first time to see a gig. It was at the Town Hall, with Sonny Boy Williamson topping the bill. Plant snuck backstage afterwards and attempted to introduce himself to the venerable black American bluesman, happening across him in the urinal. Williamson, a bear of a man who stood six foot two, his head crowned by a bowler hat, turned and fixed the young interloper with a cold stare. ‘Fuck off,’ he snarled.

      Beating a retreat, Plant stopped by Williamson’s dressing room and pilfered a harmonica. This might have been a chastening experience but Plant had also fixated upon three younger acts that played that night. Each was part of the erupting British blues boom, and each sent out a message that all this could be his, too.

      There were the Yardbirds, powered by the fresh-faced Eric Clapton’s guitar; Long John Baldry and his Hoochie Coochie Men, featuring a cocksure twenty-year-old singer by the name of Rod Stewart (although he was advertised as being ‘Rod Stuart’); and the Spencer Davis Group, with little Stevie Winwood on lead vocals and organ from a couple of miles up the road in Handsworth and in the same school year as Plant, a challenge to him to get a move on if ever there was one.

      He was back at the Town Hall again the following month, taking his friend John Dudley along with him to see ‘The Killer’, Jerry Lee Lewis. As was the practice then, the show had finished by 9.30 pm, leaving an unsated Plant looking for further adventure. He dragged Dudley along to a city-centre pub, the Golden Eagle, telling him he knew of a crack new blues band playing there.

      ‘We wangled our way in and went up the stairs to the second floor,’ recalls Dudley. ‘It was a typical dive, full of smoke, a low ceiling. There were four young guys on stage. It was the Spencer Davis Group. The impression they made on us! I can still remember what they were playing: Ampeg amps, Hofner guitars, Premier drums. The whole band was superb but Stevie Winwood was something else. He was a real influence on Rob in those early days.’

      Back home in Hayley Green, Plant had acquired a washboard and begun making his own kazoos, empowered by the inspiration of both skiffle and all he was now seeing. He took a keen interest in clothes and fashion, and had started to grow his hair out, having noted how mop-tops and Mick Jagger’s modish mane made the girls scream. He had also found a venue of his own. A blues and folk club had opened at the Seven Stars pub in Stourbridge and Plant became a regular, taking along his washboard and Sonny Boy Williamson’s harmonica.

      The Seven Stars modelled itself on the great Chicago blues dens and

Скачать книгу