great,” says Crutchley. “We’d start off our set with ‘Hold On I’m Comin’ ’ by Sam & Dave, and Robert would dance across the stage like he was floating. We rehearsed at my parents’ house, which was an old corner shop. My dad would ask me, ‘Is the Rubber Man coming tonight?’
“Rob gave us all an extra confidence. He was ambitious, but not so as it was in your face. He was a bit more relaxed off the stage. But once he got on it he would go into a different mode. He had a great stage presence and the voice was very much there from the start. For sure, he was very popular with the ladies, too.”
Bill Bonham, no relation of John’s, was then a fourteen-year-old schoolboy playing keyboards in a covers group called Prim and Proper. They shared a bill with Listen at one of these early shows. “I remember going ‘Whoa’ when they started the first song, and the next thing they’d finished and I breathed out again,” he says. “To me, Robert was a star and I was mesmerised by him. He’d already got a big female following. We became friends but you couldn’t trust him with your girlfriend for two seconds, that’s for sure.”
That May, Bob Dylan and his new backing band, the Hawks, played the Birmingham Odeon. On this same tour a member of the audience at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall shouted “Judas!” at Dylan for the perceived crime of plugging in his guitar. Yet Dylan was instrumental in whipping up the storm clouds of cultural change that were billowing across the Atlantic. In all its speed-fuelled wonder, that year’s Blonde on Blonde , a double album no less, cemented the idea of the rock album as an art form.
By the summer Dylan had crashed his motorbike in Woodstock and retired from view, but all that he had set in motion had begun to fly. The Beatles made Revolver ; Brian Wilson went to the edge and brought back Pet Sounds for the Beach Boys; and the Byrds soared through “Eight Miles High.” It was this latter track, and the album upon which it featured, Fifth Dimension , that announced the arrival of the psychedelic movement. It was to be a fitting soundtrack to a decade of social and civil upheaval in the U.S., one filtered through the new perspective of the hallucinogenic drug LSD.
These sounds coming out of America would soon enough have a profound effect on Plant. It would be another year, however, before Britain basked in the Summer of Love. Yet the sands were shifting even in the Midlands, where people are traditionally cautious of such radicalism, as if wanting first to weigh up its substance. The boom in venues opening up to music continued unabated, the classifieds pages of the local newspapers filled each night with ads for gigs in pubs, clubs and dancehalls.
In Birmingham, the Elbow Room and the Cedar Club were the places to be and to be seen. The latter club, it was said, attracted the drinkers, while the clientele at the former preferred to smoke dope and intellectualise about jazz. It was through such sessions at the Elbow Room that Stevie Winwood’s Traffic would come together the following year. Out of the Cedar Club, in the first weeks of 1966, came the Move, who at a stroke raised the bar for the other local acts, Plant’s Listen among them.
Bringing together the pick of Birmingham’s musicians, the Move consisted of singer Carl Wayne, guitarists Trevor Burton and Roy Wood, bassist Ace “The Face” Kefford and drummer Bev Bevan, each of whom had served a beat-group apprenticeship. To begin with they covered the same tunes as every other band in town but added songs by the Byrds and other blossoming West Coast acts to the mix. Their own songs came later, although from the start the Move’s multipart harmonies were one of two things setting them apart. The other was their image. At the insistence of their manager, Tony Secunda, a former merchant seaman, the Move kitted themselves out in gangster-style suits. Securing his band a residency at London’s Marquee
“Rob gave us all an extra confidence. He was ambitious, but not so as it was in your face. He was a bit more relaxed off the stage. But once he got on it he would go into a different mode. He had a great stage presence and the voice was very much there from the start. For sure, he was very popular with the ladies, too.”
Bill Bonham, no relation of John’s, was then a fourteen-year-old schoolboy playing keyboards in a covers group called Prim and Proper. They shared a bill with Listen at one of these early shows. “I remember going ‘Whoa’ when they started the first song, and the next thing they’d finished and I breathed out again,” he says. “To me, Robert was a star and I was mesmerised by him. He’d already got a big female following. We became friends but you couldn’t trust him with your girlfriend for two seconds, that’s for sure.”
That May, Bob Dylan and his new backing band, the Hawks, played the Birmingham Odeon. On this same tour a member of the audience at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall shouted “Judas!” at Dylan for the perceived crime of plugging in his guitar. Yet Dylan was instrumental in whipping up the storm clouds of cultural change that were billowing across the Atlantic. In all its speed-fuelled wonder, that year’s Blonde on Blonde , a double album no less, cemented the idea of the rock album as an art form.
By the summer Dylan had crashed his motorbike in Woodstock and retired from view, but all that he had set in motion had begun to fly. The Beatles made Revolver ; Brian Wilson went to the edge and brought back Pet Sounds for the Beach Boys; and the Byrds soared through “Eight Miles High.” It was this latter track, and the album upon which it featured, Fifth Dimension , that announced the arrival of the psychedelic movement. It was to be a fitting soundtrack to a decade of social and civil upheaval in the U.S., one filtered through the new perspective of the hallucinogenic drug LSD.
These sounds coming out of America would soon enough have a profound effect on Plant. It would be another year, however, before Britain basked in the Summer of Love. Yet the sands were shifting even in the Midlands, where people are traditionally cautious of such radicalism, as if wanting first to weigh up its substance. The boom in venues opening up to music continued unabated, the classifieds pages of the local newspapers filled each night with ads for gigs in pubs, clubs and dancehalls.
In Birmingham, the Elbow Room and the Cedar Club were the places to be and to be seen. The latter club, it was said, attracted the drinkers, while the clientele at the former preferred to smoke dope and intellectualise about jazz. It was through such sessions at the Elbow Room that Stevie Winwood’s Traffic would come together the following year. Out of the Cedar Club, in the first weeks of 1966, came the Move, who at a stroke raised the bar for the other local acts, Plant’s Listen among them.
Bringing together the pick of Birmingham’s musicians, the Move consisted of singer Carl Wayne, guitarists Trevor Burton and Roy Wood, bassist Ace “The Face” Kefford and drummer Bev Bevan, each of whom had served a beat-group apprenticeship. To begin with they covered the same tunes as every other band in town but added songs by the Byrds and other blossoming West Coast acts to the mix. Their own songs came later, although from the start the Move’s multipart harmonies were one of two things setting them apart. The other was their image. At the insistence of their manager, Tony Secunda, a former merchant seaman, the Move kitted themselves out in gangster-style suits. Securing his band a residency at London’s Marquee
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