When my old man found out I was trying to join a band, he offered to help me buy a PA system. To this day, I’ve no idea why: he could hardly afford to put food on the table, never mind take out a ?250 loan on an amplifier and two speakers. But in those days you couldn’t call yourself a singer without your own PA. You might as well have tried to get a gig as a drummer without a kit. Even my old man knew that. So he took me down to George Clay’s music shop by the Rum Runner nightclub in Birmingham and we picked out this fifty-watt Vox system. I hope my father knew how grateful I was for him doing that. I mean, he didn’t even like the music I spent my whole time listening to.
He’d say to me, ‘Let me tell you something about the Beatles, son. They won’t last five minutes. They ain’t got no tunes. You can’t sing that bleedin’ racket down the pub.’
It killed me that he thought the Beatles had ‘no tunes’. ‘Taxman’? ‘When I’m Sixty-four’?
You’d have to be deaf not to appreciate those melodies.
I just couldn’t understand what was wrong with him. Still, I wasn’t going to argue—not after he’d forked out ?250.
Sure enough, as soon as people found out I had my own PA, I was Mr Fucking Popular.
The first band that invited me to join was called Music Machine, and it was led by a bloke named Mickey Breeze.
‘Ambitious’ wasn’t a word you would have used to describe us. Our big dream was to play in a pub so we could earn some beer money. The trouble was, to play in a pub you needed to be able to play. And we never got around to learning how to do that, because we were always in the pub, talking about how one day we could play in a pub and earn some beer money. Music Machine never played a single gig, as far as I can remember.
Then, after a few months of going nowhere, we finally got something done: we changed our name. From then on, Music Machine was The Approach. Didn’t make any difference, though. All we’d ever do is have these endless tune-ups, then I’d sing in this high-pitched voice as the others tried to remember the chords to some hokey cover version. I used to joke that you could tell I’d worked in a slaughterhouse, ’cos I did such a good job at slaughtering songs like ‘(Sitting on the) Dock of the Bay’. Mind you, at least I was able to keep a tune and reach the high notes without windows breaking and the local tomcats trying to mate with me, which was a start. And what I lacked in technique, I made up for in enthusiasm. I knew from my classroom stunts at Birchfield Road that I could entertain people, but to do that I needed gigs. But The Approach could barely get a rehearsal together, never mind a show.
So that’s why I put up the ad in Ringway Music. The shop was in the Bull Ring, a concrete mega-mall they’d just finished building in the middle of Birmingham. It was a fucking eyesore from day one, that place. The only way you could get to it was through these subway tunnels that stank of piss and had muggers and dealers and bums hanging around all the time.
But no one cared: the Bull Ring was a new place to meet your mates, so people went there.
And Ringway Music—which basically sold the same kind of stuff as George Clay’s—was the best thing about it. All the cool-looking kids would hang around outside, smoking fags, eating chips, arguing about the records they were listening to at the time. All I needed was to get in with that crowd, I thought, and I’d be fucking set. So I wrote the ad and, sure enough, a few weeks later, Geezer came knocking.
Now, he’s not your average bloke, Geezer. For a start, he never uses foul language. He always has his nose in a book about Chinese poetry or ancient Greek warfare or some other heavy-duty shit. Doesn’t eat meat, either. The only time I ever saw him touch the stuff was when we were stranded in Belgium one time and almost dying of hunger, and someone gave him a hot dog. He was in hospital the next day. Meat just doesn’t agree with him—he’s not one for a good old bacon sarnie. When I first met him he was also smoking a lot of dope.
You’d be out with him at a club, say, and he’d start talking about wormholes in the vibration of consciousness, or some other fucking loony shit. But he also had a very dry sense of humour.
I’d always be clowning around with him, just trying to get him to lose his cool and crack up laughing, which would set me off, then we’d be fucking sniggering away for hours.
Geezer played rhythm guitar in Rare Breed, and he wasn’t bad at all. But more important than that, he looked the part, with his Jesus hair and his Guy Fawkes moustache. He could afford all the very latest stitches too, could Geezer. He’d been to grammar school, so he had a real job as a trainee accountant at one of the factories. They paid him fuck-all, but he was still probably earning more dough than me, even though he was a year younger. And he must have blown almost all of it on clothes. Style-wise, nothing was too out-there for Geezer. He’d turn up to rehearsals in lime green bell bottoms and silver platform boots. I’d just look at him and say, ‘Why the fuck would you ever want to wear that?’
I wasn’t exactly a conservative dresser myself, mind you. I’d walk around in an old pyjama top for a shirt with a hot-water tap on a piece of string for a necklace. I tell you, it wasn’t easy trying to look like a rock star with no fucking dough. You had to use your imagination. And I never wore shoes—not even in winter. People would ask me where I got my ‘fashion inspiration’ from and I’d tell them: ‘By being a dirty broke bastard and never taking a bath.’
Most people reckoned I’d walked straight out of the funny farm. But they’d look at Geezer and think: I bet he’s in a band. He had it all. He’s such a clever guy, he probably could have had his own company with his name above the door: Geezer & Geezer Ltd. But the most impressive thing he could do was write lyrics: really fucking intense lyrics about wars and super-heroes and black magic and a load of other mind-blowing stuff. The first time he showed me them I just said, ‘Geezer, we’ve gotta start writing our own songs so we can use these words. They’re amazing.’
We became pretty tight, me and Geezer. I’ll always remember when we were walking around the Bull Ring in the spring or early summer of 1968, and all of a sudden this bloke with long, frizzy blond hair and the tightest trousers you’ve ever seen pops out of nowhere and slaps Geezer on the back.
‘Geezer fucking Butler!’
Geezer turned around and said, ‘Rob! How are you, man?’
‘Oh, y’know… could be worse.’
‘Rob, this is Ozzy Zig,’ said Geezer. ‘Ozzy, this is Robert Plant—he used to sing with the Band of Joy.’
‘Oh yeah,’ I said, recognising the face. ‘I went to one of your shows. Fucking awesome voice, man.’
‘Thanks,’ said Plant, flashing me this big, charming smile.
‘So, what you been up to?’ asked Geezer.
‘Well, since you mention it, I’ve been offered a job.’
‘Nice. What’s the gig?’
‘The Yardbirds.’
‘Whoah! Congratulations, man. That’s huge. But didn’t they split up?’
‘Yeah, but Jimmy—y’know the guitarist, Jimmy Page—he’s still around. So is the bass player. And they’ve got contractual obligations in Scandinavia, so they want to put something together.’
‘That’s great,’ said Geezer.
‘Well, I’m not sure I’m gonna to be taking the gig, to be honest,’ said Plant, shrugging. ‘I’ve got some pretty good stuff going on here, y’know? Matter of fact, I’ve just put a new band together.’
‘Oh, er… cool,’ said Geezer. ‘What’s the name?’
‘Hobbstweedle,’ said Plant.
Later, when Plant was gone, I asked Geezer if the bloke was out of his fucking mind. ‘Is he seriously going to pass up a gig with Jimmy Page for that Hobbsbollocks thing?’ I asked.
Geezer shrugged. ‘I think he’s just worried it won’t work out,’ he said. ‘But he’ll do it, as long as they change the name. They can’t go around calling themselves the “New Yardbirds” for long.’
‘It’s better than fucking Hobbstweedle.’
‘Good point.’
Bumping into someone like Robert Plant wasn’t unusual when you were with the Geezer.
He seemed to know everyone. He was part of the cool crowd, so he went to the right parties, took the right drugs, hung out with the right movers and shakers. It was a real eye-opener, and I loved being part of it. Still, there was a big problem hanging over us: our band, Rare Breed, was shit. We made Hobbstweedle look like The fucking Who. When I joined they were set on being ‘experimental’: they had all these trippy stage props and a strobe light, like they were trying to be the next Pink Floyd. Now, there was nothing wrong with trying to be the next Pink Floyd—later on, I would enjoy dropping a few tabs of mind detergent while listening to
