News The wild times of Robert Plant and John Bonham before Led Zeppelin
On reflection, putting together Led Zeppelin feels like capturing lightning in a bottle. In the wake of The Yardbirds falling apart, Jimmy Page developed a symbiotic relationship working with every band member, playing off Robert Plant perfectly with John Paul Jones and John Bonham ploughed through the rhythm section like a herd of wildebeest. Even though Plant and Page are seen as the main contributors to the songwriting, the chemistry began with Plant and Bonham getting together.
Before Zeppelin had crossed his mind, both Page and Jones had been fixtures of the studio musician scene. Before Page even got the call to be in The Yardbirds, he had already lent his skills to artists like Donovan, even scoring a hit when playing guitar on an early version of The Who’s ‘I Can’t Explain’.
On the other side of England, Plant cut his teeth in the Band of Joy, taking the crux of older songs and adding his distinct English howl around them. Even though most of Plant’s music fit into the same psychedelic mould as the music from the time, he got the shock of a lifetime when a young ‘Bonzo’ saw him playing onstage.
As Plant described it in The John Bonham Story: “There was a guy with quite an arrogant air to himself, very cocky. And he came up to me after the show, and he said, ‘You’re pretty good. But you’d be a lot better with a drummer like me.’” While Bonham may have talked a big game, the band turned into a completely different animal when he stepped behind the kit.
Rather than the traditional drummers known to keep time, Bonham practically turned his kit into the lead instrument every time he played, with everyone transfixed by the massive endurance behind him. While the songs from the time were mainly covers, they would signal what Zeppelin would be once Page got ahold of them.
Taking a stab at songs like ‘Hey Joe’, Bonham is annihilating his kit throughout the song, almost treating the track more like an exercise in the power of his drumming while still keeping within the confines of the groove. While Plant may be looked at as a standard singer by comparison, one can detect the faintest whiffs of what Zeppelin would be doing just a little bit later, especially in the high notes that signal tracks like ‘Dazed and Confused’.
Once Page’s plan to work with Keith Moon of The Who fell through, his decision to draft in Bonham alongside Plant made for musical ecstasy when they went into the studio for the first time. Despite having many covers, the pairing of Page’s demonic licks with Bonham’s sense of precision set the stage for what would become hard rock.
Even when making acoustically-driven music on songs like ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’, Bonham made sure to make every single strike count, responding more to what Page was doing on guitar than the bass. Although Bonham and Plant may have only been two pieces of the puzzle, the sound of Led Zeppelin at half capacity still made for one of the most exciting bands on the British blues scene in the 1960s.
