It’s a sunny day in Birmingham, and puzzled old folks in flat caps look on at a hippie being paraded through the streets like a counterculture Christ. Pickets say “legalise pot”, and “Robert Plant must go free”. The times have certainly changed.
Who was this martyr? Well, he was, frankly, an 18-year-old nobody who wasn’t even facing a drug charge. The whole thing was a drummed-up stunt looking to launch the name of a would-be singer who had recently decided he might like to be a rock ‘n’ roll hero.
Turned out to be quite a clever stunt, really. The issue is that at 18, you don’t really know your arse from your elbow. While the blues might have already inspired him, and he was awed by Bob Dylan’s intelligent brilliance, Plant wasn’t all that certain what sort of singer he wanted to be when he took to the streets with his buddies in 1966.
However, it wouldn’t take long for a fierce band to come along and signpost the direction in which he should point his lauded pipes. “I never really knew where I wanted to end up,” he said of his early days before Jimmy Page offered him the chance of a lifetime in Led Zeppelin. He knew he could sing, and he knew his grit probably suited the blues, but he was from Wolverhampton, not Waynesboro, Mississippi.
Then a new force elucidated a new brand of the blues. “For a long time I thought I just wanted to do country blues,” he told The Guardian, “Maybe only two people, or a very straight blues band. The first time I heard Fleetwood Mac they were the very straight blues band that I wanted to be. That sort of Chicago tightness.”
With Peter Green at the helm, a guitarist and songwriter who Plant would later say Britain should be very “proud to call our own”, the group embodied the bridge between British invasion rock and the original source from whence it drew its spirit. And this bridge was so perfectly constructed that even BB King said it caused him to “sweat”.
Well, from the outset, that seemed like a good thing to be part of for Plant. So, he studied their ways. And soon enough, he formed a band with a truly terrible name that somewhat followed in Fleetwood’s esteemed footsteps. Hobbstweedl,e what have to have been better than The Beatles by a magnitude of 100x if they were ever going to make it anywhere.
However, if you put that to one side when you entered the pubs of Birmingham, you couldn’t help but be impressed by Plant’s vocals. His unique sound emboldened the best of the blues with the crack and thunder of rock. So, when Terry Ried turned down Jimmy Page’s approach to be in a band, but recommended a young whippersnapper gigging in the Midlands, the guitarist knew instantly that he had found someone on the same page, excuse the pun, when he went to watch him play.
All in all, this tale goes to show the seismic influence that early Mac actually had. While retrospectively, their lower chart positions in comparison to the Rumours era might overshadow their bluesier beginnings, much of what Green laid down proved mightily inspiring to the likes of Led Zeppelin, who followed.
Carlos Santana once said, “I used to go see the original Fleetwood Mac, and they used to kill me, just knock me out… To me they were the best blues band.” Being the ‘best’ mattered – it showed there were miles left to run in honing the blues – but they were also the freshest, and that proved that even at its purest, it could still be blended into a new, heavier alloy.