Robert Plant: A Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 U.S. 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 reinterpreting 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 U.K. on January 11, 1963, beginning a month-long run to the top of the British charts.
    On January 13 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