How John Bonham tricked early audiences
There was no way to know what you were getting with early Led Zeppelin shows. Sometimes you wouldn’t even get ‘Led Zeppelin’, given that the band staged their first tour as ‘The New Yardbirds’, fulfilling a contract that Jimmy Page had been chained to after the original Yardbirds fell apart in 1968. The group found their sound slowly but surely, propelled forward by the monstrous drumming of John Bonham.
Bonham wasn’t the only drummer in his town. As a youth, Bonham befriended Bill Harvey, a fellow drummer who would end up being a longtime friend. “When John was 16, he worked in a clothes shop; Wednesday afternoon used to be half-day closing, and so I used to go up to John’s house,” Harvey recalled in the Bonham biography A Thunder of Drums. “His dad had a caravan parked in the garden, and he kept his drums in there, a Ludwig green sparkle kit. We used to practice, and his dad used to go mad. He’d say: ‘Oh, it’s you two at it again. Clear off – get out!'”
Harvey was aware of Bonham’s talents from the very beginning, even becoming the victim of Bonham’s willingness to sit in with bands after Harvey had a skirmish with his group, the Blue Star Trio. “They were a bit lazy about helping to load the equipment, and I said, ‘Sod it, if that’s your attitude’… and that’s how John sat in for me,” Harvey remembered. “I had the van, and I had to load and unload the gear every night. I just got fed up and blew my top.”
He added: “When I went along to the club, I was sick in my stomach to see John playing my gig. But he said, ‘Come on, let’s do a solo together; I’m only sitting in for you.’ So we both got up on the same kit. I played the two tom-toms, and John played the snare drum. Afterwards, John said, ‘How the ‘ell did you know what I was going to do?’ I pointed out that every night he tended to play the same tricks. ‘Oh, I see…'”
Eventually, Harvey and Bonham worked up a double act that involved playing drum duets together. “John would pull me up out of the audience or the other way around, and we’d do this great drum routine together,” Harvey added. “Everybody used to say, ‘How did they do that?’ They didn’t realise we had rehearsed it for hours. And it seemed like we were rivals, playing against each other.”
“Even though John was a far better rock drummer than me, I had been brought up as a big-band fan and could play some things he couldn’t do,” Harvey said. “People would come up to me and say, ‘I saw John Bonham play last night. He was better than you.’ Or it was vice versa because we both had our fans, and they never realised we were the best of mates.”
Harvey wound up being an important influence on a specific part of Bonham’s style. “I spent hours copying him and eventually got somewhere near good,” he claimed. “I thought I’d put it into my 150-minute drum solo with the Blue Star Trio. So John came along one night and heard me playing with my fingers. He said, ‘Bloody hell, how’d you do that? You’ve gotta show me.'”
“Two days later, I saw him with Elastoplast bandages all over his fingers. I said, ‘John, what have you done?’ He’d cut his hands by hitting the edge of the cymbals,” Harvey explained. “I told him not to hit them so hard. But he used that technique on ‘Moby Dick’, which was one of the first drum solos he did on record with Led Zeppelin.”
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Led Zeppelin Newsletter
All the latest stories about Led Zeppelin from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.