The drummer Robert Plant stood in awe of: “A carefree, poignant nature”
Having spent numerous years performing alongside John Bonham, one of the greatest rock and roll drummers to ever grace the airwaves with his presence, it is fair to say that former Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant knows a gifted percussionist when he hears one, even if his own output has always been further towards the forefront of the stage.
Given that it is difficult to mention Plant’s name without conjuring up images of him belting out the likes of ‘Immigrant Song’ or ‘Stairway to Heaven’, it is similarly difficult to remember that the vocalist’s musical experiences didn’t begin and end with the tenure of Led Zeppelin. During his early years, though, the future rockstar was desperate to immerse himself in the fledgling blues scenes of the Midlands.
Like virtually every city and provincial town across the United Kingdom of the 1960s, the musical youth of the Midlands – Plant included – were infatuated with the blues, R&B, and rock ‘n’ roll sounds emanating from the other side of the Atlantic, being smuggled onto the British airwaves via pirate radio stations.
As Plant put it, per Ultimate Classic Rock, “We were just trying to become like, Black Americans or whatever it was, rhythm-and-bluesers.”
Those R&B dreams quickly led Plant to cross paths with similarly-minded young musicians, including a pre-Traffic Jim Capaldi. From his roots in Evesham, the budding drummer worshipped the rock sounds travelling over from the United States, eventually incorporating those influences into his own distinctive proto-prog sound when he formed Traffic back in 1967.
Particularly during those early years in the Midlands, Plant was utterly in awe of the drummer, telling Classic Rock, “There was a carefree, poignant nature to what he was singing about.”
It was that same atmosphere which made early Traffic such a revelatory group, unlike anything else in Britain at that time; it was also one of the things that helped them to influence the entirety of the progressive rock scene that would arrive during the early 1970s, by which time Plant was already established as the definitive hard rock frontman.
Reportedly, the pair shared a connection as soon as they first crossed paths. “When I saw him, he was just joyous,” Plant recalled. “We were surrounded by all these celebrated figures who … the spark wasn’t there. But he had the spark. And I’ve got the spark. [So when we saw each other it was like] ‘OK, I get it.'” Perhaps, without that common spark, neither of the pair would have ever made it out of the Midlands blues scene.
Even if, admittedly, the two musicians went their separate ways in the years that followed their initial meeting, each pursuing their own version of rock excellence with Led Zeppelin and Traffic, respectively, neither ever lost that early spark of admiration for one another.
Throughout his illustrious career, even during those legendary years providing vocal accompaniment to John Bonham, Plant always felt a sense of awe in the presence of Jim Capaldi, and rightly so.
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