Free Robert Plant: A Life by Paul Rees Page B

make people watch him.”
    “In the Midlands, there were two schools of thought about Robert at that time,” says John Ogden. “People either liked him or hated him. All the women loved him. You could see them eyeing him up from the audience. Because of that the blokes most often didn’t.”
    This antipathy toward their singer extended to the band’s de facto manager, “Pop” Brown, father of their organist Chris Brown. Following a heated altercation between the two, Plant conspired to get himself fired from the Band of Joy.
    “Robert had his own ideas and ‘Pop’ Brown didn’t like it,” suggests Ogden. “Robert’s always known his own mind and what he wanted, which was, basically, to be a star.”
    That June the Beatles presented Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to the world and with it Britain was launched into its Summer of Love—one founded upon sounds, fashions and a predilection for mind-bending drugs that were all directly imported from California. The suggestion that this amounted to a sweeping cultural revolution has been exaggerated—the preposterous Humperdinck, Tom Jones and a crooner of even greater vintage, Frankie Vaughan, fronted four of Britain’s ten bestselling singles that year. Yet there could be no denying the extent of its impact.
    This much was fast apparent to Plant. Within weeks of Sgt. Pepper’s emergence both his beloved Small Faces and Stevie Winwood’s new band Traffic scored hits with songs that mined the same seam of psychedelic whimsy, “Itchycoo Park” and “Hole in My Shoe.” The Traffic song would have jarred him most. Again he was confronted by the stark fact of how far his contemporary Winwood had traveled, and the distance he trailed behind.
    By the time “Hole in My Shoe” had risen to Number Two in the U.K. charts Plant was working as a laborer for the construction company Wimpey, laying Tarmac on West Bromwich High Street. Turning up for his first day on site, his new workmates took one look at his long, blond hair and began calling him “The Pop Singer.”
    It would not be long before Plant hauled himself up from this latest low ebb, since he was never lacking in resolve or self-assurance. He soon gathered about him another group of musicians, announcing them as Robert Plant and the Band of Joy. “Pop” Brown howled in protest and for a time there were two Band of Joys hustling for gigs, but the others blinked first, changing their name to the Good Egg and drifting to obscurity. The following year Plant would marry into their guitarist Vernon Pereira’s family—Pereira was Maureen’s cousin—although the two of them never played together again. Pereira died in a car crash in 1976 at a time when Plant was consumed by other troubles.
    To manage his latest band Plant called on an old contact, Mike Dolan, who had stewarded Listen. Dolan had an immediate effect, although not perhaps a considered one. Plant had an impending court date to answer a motoring charge and Dolan convinced him this could be used to drum up publicity. Dolan hatched a plan to stage a “Legalise Pot” march on the same day. He contacted the local press, suggesting that his singer was going to lead a crowd of young disciples to the courthouse steps, protesting their civil rights.
    In the event Plant arrived at Wednesbury Court on the morning of August 10, 1967 accompanied by a supporting group that numbered just seven, one of whom was his girlfriend’s younger sister Shirley. This ragged band carried placards daubed with slogans such as “Happiness Is Pot Shaped” and “Don’t Plant It . . . Smoke It.”
    A report in that evening’s edition of the Express & Star described the scene: “Police peered curiously from the windows of the police station and some even came out to photograph the strangely assorted bunch, which included two girls in miniskirts.” Dolan denied that the whole farrago had been stage-managed, telling the paper: “It was a completely spontaneous