change the time signature. Let kids hear it and
realise that we’re in trouble.Going back to your own folk club days
around Birmingham in the sixties, was it
a healthy scene?
It depends where folk and blues become two
different things. I would say that Alexis Korner
singing Rock Me Baby may not be traditional
English folk, but it can still run in the same climate.
The folk thing was only really in the very early
days for me. It was a very prolific scene around
where I was at school, and there was a
folk club there that had Alex Campbell,
Ian Campbell and various people
coming through who were singing
songs about ships going down the
Northumbrian coast or wherever it was.
But the blues scene was more evocative
for me, because it had that sort of
minor-key, blue-note misery thing going
on, which I love.Did you take the usual route to
music via doing a succession of
workaday jobs?
I was working at Lewis’s in
Birmingham, measuring gentlemen’s
inside legs. The great phrase that went
with that task was: “Which side do you
dress, sir?” In other words, where are
your bollocks? And if those guys were
a little bit springy, they’d tell you the
wrong side, just so you would give it
a quick tweak!I believe your dad played violin, but did your
parents still have that attitude of: “Go and get
a proper job”?
Well, I was bound for a proper job, and I’ve got one.
Yeah, I had my moment of professional potential,
and because I didn’t accept it I had to leave home
when I was seventeen. So I toughened up pretty
quickly. I made my peace with my parents a couple
of years later. But it was good, it was what it should
be. I know so many guys from my time at school,
who I still see and who are very funny and love life,
but they did the wrong thing. They stuck witha family or whatever you were supposed to be
doing, and they really rue the fact that it never
really kicked in. They didn’t live their life, they lived
the life that was required.So you knew early on that you didn’t want to
do that?
I didn’t know what I wanted to be, but I wasn’t
going to push a pen for two quid a week and train
to be an accountant.Pre-Zeppelin, you and John Bonham played in
Band Of Joy around the Midlands.
But is it fair to say that at that time
your spiritual home was the West
Coast of America?
Yeah, I think so. It was more like there
was something being said there. We
didn’t have the Vietnam phenomena
and we didn’t really have the same
knee-jerk racial tension – although
there was racial tension, but we didn’t
have the marches. The whole deal of
being over here was old Empire.
America has always been reeling and
yawning and growling and having
internal conflict, so the youth culture
was dealing with its own problems. So
on the West Coast, the people out there
were vanguards for their own
generation of musicians, bringing it
through. If you think of Buffalo
Springfield’s For What It’s Worth, it’s all
about what they were dealing with
themselves on the street with the“I didn’t know what I wanted to be,
but I wasn’t going to push a pen
for two quid a week.”
GET
TY
x 2Plant and Jimmie Vaughan
performing at a benefit concert in
New York City on March 7, 2019.Plant and Charlie
Sexton at the Austin
Music Awards in
Texas, 2016.32 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM