Why John Bonham’s dad tried to have him arrested before a gig: “John was yelling”
Even by the standards set by drummers of the same era, John Bonham was mental. An absolutely astonishing drummer, to be clear. One who could thread the needle between wild man chaos and sheer technical ability like few before him. However, there’s a reason why every classic Led Zeppelin story could conceivably feature the line “…and then Bonzo made it worse.”
This may sound like I’m speaking ill of the dead, but considering the sheer pride he took in those stories, along with the fact that those stories start a long time before he joined Led Zeppelin, I think I’m alright here.
Born and raised in Worcestershire, the Bonham household was one alive with music at all times. His parents, Joan and Jack, were jazz fans who introduced the young John to the likes of Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa at a young age. By the time Bonham was five, he’d made his own makeshift drumkit out of coffee tins and containers. Craftily enough, he also fashioned his own snare drum, fitting strands of metal wire to a bath salts container. God only knows what his parents must have felt. It’s bad enough when your kid wants to take up violin, let alone drums.
Whatever they felt, they were keen to encourage their eldest son. Joan replaced John’s makeshift snare with an actual one when he was ten, and when he was 15, John’s dad got him a full kit. By now, it was clear that this desire to play the drums for a living was by no means a phase, and this way, they could move him from the house into the garden shed whenever he needed to practise. Considering this was Bonzo himself, I can’t imagine it made much of a difference.
Bonham had passion and talent in spades. He was entirely self-taught and never took a formal drum lesson in his life. However, when you live in a relatively rural part of the black country, gigs aren’t easy to come by if you can Adam and Eve it. Bonham was out of work for weeks at a time so his father got him to work at his construction firm. This shows the scope of Jack Bonham’s patience because his eldest son wasn’t exactly the most reliable of souls.
Now, the same can be said for most teenage boys, but most teenage boys don’t crash their families car. Multiple times. So, as a way of teaching him a lesson, Bonham Senior padlocked the shed door for a week. No drums for John. Tragically, he decided to do that on a day that Bonzo had a gig, so he and his bandmate Nicky James decided to take matters into their own hands. C M Kushin’s biography Beast interviews James about the incident, who says “We had this black and maroon Bedford van with side-loading doors, so I pulled up outside the alleyway that led to the garden and met John ’round the corner.”
James then climbed to the top of the van and physically lifted the roof of the shed for Bonham to get in. James continues, saying, “John was yelling, ‘Quick! Grab this,’ and started passing the gear to me. As we were piling everything into the van, we heard a cry of, ‘Call the police!’” On hearing that, they jumped into the van and shot off down the road for the gig. If the fuzz ever bothered to look, they didn’t find them as they arrived at the gig soon afterwards, at which point they realized they’d left most of the kit and all of John’s sticks behind.
If I’ve made John Bonham sound like a man who gave up on anything, though, then I haven’t done my job. Bonham completed the gig with nothing but a bass drum and a snare he hit with his hands. Perhaps he got a kick out of it, too, as he’d continue to do just that at Zeppelin’s pomp, showing that while he may have been a madman, there was at least a method to it. If only when it came to drums!
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