His 4⁄ 4 timing could vary between 3 and 3⁄ 4 and 4 and 1⁄ 4.” When John started with me his timing was a bit erratic. “The sad thing about it,” says Tim today, “was that we never managed to record anything together. The drummer quit again in May 1968 to back visiting American singer Tim Rose on a UK tour, performing songs including Morning Dew and Hey Joe and earning £50 a week. It proved too much for Bonham’s mother Joan, who strode to the front of the venue demanding at the top of her voice: “John, you get off those drums now! You’re not playing with that boy, he’s a pervert!” Plant and Bonham were then reunited in the third and final line-up of Plant’s group Band Of Joy in January 1967, wearing the new hippy fashion of kaftan, beads and bells.Īt one memorable gig at the Queen Mary Ballroom in Dudley, as the Band Of Joy encored with Tim Hardin’s If I Were A Carpenter, Plant performed a blueprint of what would become his trademark libidinous performance of Whole Lotta Love, wrapping his leg around the mic stand and simulating a sexual act. Bonham left the Snakes after a few months to rejoin A Way Of Life. Despite much banter and rivalry the two of them became firm friends. In 1965 he joined the Crawling King Snakes, where he met Robert Plant, who thought Bonham was a flash whiz-kid. Some years later he sent the manager of that studio a Led Zeppelin gold disc with a note saying: ‘Thanks for your advice.’ He was also told there was no future in playing so loud. Bonham played so loudly that he was told he was “unrecordable”. The band also included Dave Pegg, who would later go on to play with Fairport Convention. He joined A Way Of Life, who recorded some demos in a Birmingham studio. Later they moved into a high-rise flat in Dudley (where they were actually still living when the first Led Zeppelin album was released). As money was tight they lived in a caravan that was owned by John’s father.
In 1965, at the age of 17, he married his girlfriend Pat Phillips. I’ll show you.” He would then take over the hapless drummer’s kit, pound it to bits, and take the guy’s gig. I had to explain to them why! What a night.”Īs he gained confidence he would go up to a bandleader and say: “Your drummer’s not much good, is he? Let me have a go. “That was after he’d played with Jeff at the Singer Bowl and had taken all his clothes off while playing, which was really wild as my parents were backstage watching the gig. “It was John who told Tim and I that Jeff Beck wanted to form a band with us,” Appice recalls. He also developed a fast bass-drum pedal technique inspired by Carmine Appice, with whom he would form a strong friendship, helping hook Appice and bassist Tim Bogert up with Jeff Beck in Beck, Bogert & Appice.
He began playing with his bare hands (a technique he would use on his showpiece Zep song Moby Dick). If there were no gigs, there was no money.” When I was 16 I went into full-time music, but I’d have to go back to the building sites to earn money to live. “Drumming was the only thing I was any good at and so I stuck at it,” he said later. He took lessons, but developed his own hard-hitting rock’n’roll style. The Beatles era was dawning, but Bonham had a taste for jazz drummers like Gene Krupa, Joe Morello and Sonny Payne he loved their stick-twirling showmanship. As well as working for his dad as a builder, John drummed with local bands. After adding pots and pans to his armoury, when he was 10 his mother got him a real snare drum. At home he began drumming on a bath salt container fitted with strands of wire on the bottom to make a crude snare drum. Aged five John began to show interest in music. His father Jack ran a building company and employed both of his sons, John and Michael. John Henry Bonham was born in Redditch, Worcestershire, on May 31, 1948.
Hard at it: John Bonham at the Inglewood Forum in 1973
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