Free Robert Plant: A Life by Paul Rees Page A

a show called The Perfumed Garden. He filled this with the records he had bought back from the U.S., exposing the bands behind them to a British audience for the first time. Coming out of LA and San Francisco, they included the Doors, the Grateful Dead, Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. These were rock groups born out of blues, folk, country and jazz traditions, but which pushed further out there through their consumption of the newly available psychedelic drugs and an uncontrolled urge to freak out.
    “We’d never heard any of this music till John started playing it,” says Peel’s fellow DJ Bob Harris. “It changed my perception of things and I’m sure Robert was listening in the same way.”
    Plant was indeed enraptured by it, digesting this American music with an appetite the equal of that he had first shown for its black blues. Of the bands then emerging from San Francisco’s psychedelic scene the two that hit him hardest were Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape. The Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow album of that year gave rise to a brace of acid-rock anthems, “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love,” singer Grace Slick’s spooked vocals haunting her band’s lysergic drone. Released that summer, Moby Grape’s eponymous début LP fused rock, blues, country and pop into a sound that oozed heady adventurism and a sense of unbridled joy.
    From LA he embraced a further two bands in particular. Buffalo Springfield brought together two gifted Canadian-born songwriters, Neil Young and Stephen Stills, whose woozy folk-rock was setting as much of a template for the era as the Byrds, the same tensions destined to pull both bands apart. Then there was Love and their ornate psych-pop symphonies conjured up by another singular talent, Arthur Lee. Love put out two albums in 1967, Da Capo and then Forever Changes , their masterpiece. Although neither of these records would make stars of Lee or his band, each served up a kaleidoscopic musical tableau for others to feast from.
    “All that music from the West Coast just went ‘Bang!’—and there was nothing else there for me after that,” Plant told Melody Maker ’s Richard Williams in 1970. “Three years before I had been shuddering listening to Sonny Boy Williamson. Now I was sobbing to Arthur Lee.”
    Soon John Peel brought this music to his front door. The DJ began hosting a regular Sunday evening session at Frank’s Ballroom in Kidderminster, often appealing on air for a lift up to the Midlands.
    “It was fantastic,” enthuses Kevyn Gammond, like Plant a champion of these shows. “Peel would bring up people like Captain Beefheart and Ry Cooder, but also the first incarnation of T-Rex. There was a great story about Captain Beefheart’s band being sat in the dressing room, rolling up these big joints, and Peel offering them cups of tea and cucumber sandwiches. Peel hipped us to this whole great scene and Rob especially got so into it.”
    The first incarnation of the Band of Joy began to gig in the spring of 1967, playing both of Birmingham’s hippest clubs, the Elbow Room and the Cedar Club, the latter as warm-up to former Moody Blues man Denny Laine’s Electric String Band. It was still a covers band but one heading gingerly for the acid-rock frontiers.
    Local music historian Laurie Hornsby recalls the group he was then playing guitar for doing a show with the Band of Joy at the city’s Cofton Club on April 25.
    “The club was an old roller rink,” he says. “I remember the place was packed. Drugs hadn’t yet become a part of the scene. It was all about going out for a pint and to pull a bird. The mod look had gone by then—Robert and his band were all wearing Afghan coats, buckskins and things like that.
    “Because they were far superior to us, we went on and did forty-five minutes and then they did an hour. I watched the Band of Joy’s set but I only remember Robert. He sold himself so well, knew exactly how to