John Bonham and Robert Plant in September 1971
Photo: Getty Images, Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music. All rights reserved.
In a recent interview, Robert Plant spoke about how he met Led Zeppelin bandmate John Bonham and how it even got him in trouble with the law.
Both were active in the music scene around Birmingham, England in the early 1960s. Plant was fronting the band Crawling King Snakes at the time when Bonham introduced himself to him.
“He said, ‘You’re OK … but you’d be a lot better if you had the best drummer in the world behind you,'” Plant recalled. “And I said, ‘Okay, I know you’re good — but where do you live?’ He told me and I said, ‘Oh you can’t join our group because we can’t afford the gas to pick you up and drop you off!’”
When John Bonham got bored on stage…
The solution to the problem “had a little bit to do with theft,” Plant added. He illegally filled petrol from a pump at the gas station to make the new group possible. Apparently he was caught by the police.
Plant also said drummer Bonham sometimes caused trouble when he got bored on stage. “If he got tired of the language in a song, he’d go into waltz time for a minute and just look at me and laugh!” Plant continued.
“I remember he got fed up somewhere in New York. He just got up from his drum kit. ‘I don’t want to do that!’ And we quickly switched to ‘Going to California’ or some acoustic song while someone lured him back onto the riser!”
When asked if there were any plans to continue the band after Bonham’s death in 1980, Plant explained, “What would you do as a four-piece band? I don’t know how any band – any group of people – could go on without 25 percent of the driving force.”
With over 300 million records sold, Led Zeppelin is one of the most successful bands of all time.