Free Stairway To Heaven by Richard Cole Page A

isn’t this guy a star yet?” Jimmy thought to himself. “Something’s gotta be wrong with him. Maybe he has one of those obnoxious personalities and no one can get along with him.”
    Jimmy figured he’d need to get to know Robert Plant better before offering him a place in the band. In the meantime, however, he couldn’t get Robert off his mind. Overnight, he forgot about the others he had once considered—Reid, Winwood, Marriott. Unless Robert turned out to be some kind of social pariah, this was the singer he wanted.
    On Robert’s end, he was both excited and anxious at being contacted by Pagey. To the struggling rock singer, Jimmy Page was one of the stars in the rock stratosphere to which Robert aspired. When Jimmy told him that he was searching for a singer for a new Page-led band, Robert realized that this could finally become his ticket to fame. When Jimmy invited him to visit his Pangbourne home, Robert vowed, “I’m not going to blow this chance. This kind of opportunity may never come again.”
    On his way to Pangbourne, already edgy and nervous, Robert was accosted in the train station by an elderly woman offended by the singer’s long hair. “Cut it! Cut your hair!” she screamed. “Don’t you have any sense of decency at all?”
    Before Robert could react, she slapped his cheek.
    Robert was shaken by the incident. Maybe this is an omen, he thought, trying to regain his composure. Maybe this isn’t meant to be. Maybe I should just turn around and go home.
    But once he was at Jimmy’s house, Robert’s anxieties eased. The Page-Plant meeting simply couldn’t have gone any better. They spent the afternoon talking about their respective musical tastes. They swapped stories. They laughed together. At one point, Jimmy said, “I want you to hear something.” He walked to his stereo and put on a Joan Baez album on which she was singing “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You.”
    â€œWhat do you think of this?” Jimmy asked. “Can you see us playing it?”
    Robert listened. Less than midway through the tune, he nodded. When thesong had ended, he picked up Jimmy’s acoustic guitar and started strumming an arrangement of the song. “This might work,” he said.
    The chemistry was there. Robert was on board. The young singer was so happy he wanted to scream for joy, but restrained himself, at least until he was out of earshot of Pagey.
    Â 
    Just before Robert left for home, he put in a good word for Bonham, his old friend. Plant and Bonham lived not far from one another, and they still spent time together now and then. But they hadn’t performed onstage with each other since the Band of Joy dissolved. Even so, Robert could already picture Bonzo as part of the new band, and the idea excited him. “Don’t make any decisions about your drummer until you’ve seen him play,” Plant told Page. “It’s hard to describe. I don’t think anyone plays the drums like him. I know no one plays them any better.”
    Bonzo, however, was touring with Tim Rose and seemed quite content to stay just where he was. After all, he was making about forty pounds a week, which was the most money that he had ever earned. It would have been tough for him to give up his steady income.
    â€œWhen you’ve got a good thing going, you don’t throw it out the window,” Bonzo told Jimmy on the phone. “I’m content right now. Things seem to be working for me.”
    Nevertheless, based on the high praise from Robert, Jimmy wanted to hear Bonham perform. He traveled to the Country Club in West Hampstead where Bonzo was performing with Rose. The show began rather routinely, but about twenty-five minutes into the set, Bonham took the spotlight. Jimmy’s eyes widened as Bonzo attacked the drums like a kamikaze pilot. He bombed and strafed. He blitzed and blasted. He even put his sticks