Robert Plant: A Life (12 page)

The music was honed to Zeppelin’s base elements: the relentless chop and chug of Page’s electric riffs and his acoustic shadings; the elasticity of Jones’s booming bass lines; Bonham’s deafening cannon fire. Then there was Plant, his range now fully opened up, his libido seemingly unchecked.

It was an album of great songs, too, with such swaggering beasts as “Whole Lotta Love” and “Heartbreaker,” the panoramic sweep of “What Is and What Should Never Be” and the honeyed jangle of “Thank You.” Even accounting for “The Lemon Song” ’s tiresome plod or the needless indulgence of “Moby Dick,” it conveyed a singular vision and sense of purpose.

Plant was credited as co-writer on each of the nine tracks, although with mixed results. He saddled “Ramble On” with ham-fisted
Lord of the Rings
references. On “Thank You” he articulated a more dignified declaration to his wife. Yet it was “What Is and What Should Never Be” that would continue to prompt conjecture. There was a popular strand of gossip within the Zeppelin camp that claimed Plant had been at one time fixated on his wife’s younger sister, Shirley. This, it was said, was the “should never be” referred to in the song’s title. Subsequent events did nothing to dampen this speculation, although such rumors were unsubstantiated at the time and Plant has never commented on them.

As with their first album,
Led Zeppelin II
was scorned by the critics and became the butt of plagiarism claims, on this occasion regarding its abundant—and originally unaccredited—references to old blues songs. None of which halted its relentless momentum when it was released in October. It sped to Number One in the US, knocking the Beatles’
Abbey Road
off the top spot, and also reached the top of the charts in the U.K., selling five million copies worldwide within six months.

By then the ’60s were over, although the spirit of the times had died at Altamont Raceway on December 6, 1969. It was there, at a free concert given by the Rolling Stones, that a Hells Angel had stabbed the black teenager Meredith Hunter to death.

As the hippy idyll went up in flames, what better soundtrack to the conflagration than Robert Plant’s banshee wail and the squall of Jimmy Page’s guitar?

7

VALHALLA

If I’d been in Zeppelin, I’m sure I wouldn’t be alive now.

The money from
Led Zeppelin II
had not yet begun to pour in, but even still Plant was flush enough to buy a first home for his new family. He had found a rambling farmhouse a few miles up the road from his parental home but further into the countryside.

Set within acres of open fields and looking out on to the same Clent Hills he had walked as a boy, Jennings Farm was a pastoral sanctuary far removed from the world he inhabited in Led Zeppelin. This was where he could escape from that to normality, however briefly, as soon as the farm gates clanged shut behind him. It would also keep him bolted to his roots. Here he would be held fast to old friends and familiar haunts.

“I was incredibly fortunate to have the decompression chamber of that and my family,” he told me. “Because whatever was happening to me out there with Zeppelin, I couldn’t explain it when I got back. It wouldn’t have been right for anybody and I’d have lost all connection with where I came from. I had to keep quiet about everything.”

He paid £6,000 for the place but it would be months before he could move his family in since it was almost derelict. While this great ruined shell was being renovated, Plant, Maureen and their daughter Carmen continued to lodge with his wife’s family.

John Crutchley, guitarist in Plant’s old band Listen, recalls catching up with him during this lull. “We went off to Mothers in Birmingham in Robert’s Jag. He’d dressed up in a suit, with a shirt and tie. Because we were with him we didn’t have to queue to get in. The club was packed and after about half an hour Robert said he was getting hot. Being Robert, he drove five miles home to West Bromwich just to change into jeans and a T-shirt, and then drove back.

“We went out to Jennings Farm, too. It seemed massive to me. It was dark, run down. There was a big duck pond, but no electricity. We spent a few candlelit nights out there. Then it all went crazy for him and we lost contact.”

This first year of a new decade claimed some of the best and brightest stars of the ’60s, rendering several to ashes and dust. The Beatles would announce their breakup in April, and before winter had bitten, both Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin were dead, twenty-seven years old the pair of them, he choking on his own vomit and she overdosed on heroin. The ’70s were harsher and less innocent times than the preceding decade, and Led Zeppelin were made for them.

They were up and running again in the first week of 1970, beginning a two-month-long tour of the U.K. and Europe at Birmingham Town Hall—the very place from which the sixteen-year-old Plant had pilfered Sonny Boy Williamson’s harmonica. He was well practiced in stealing from the old blues masters.

Two nights later, on January 9, they headlined London’s Royal Albert Hall. A grand old Victorian building crowned by a glazed, wrought-iron dome, the Albert Hall conferred a sense of recognition upon all those who played it. Emphatically, their being there meant that Zeppelin had arrived in their homeland.

Their Albert Hall set is preserved on film and even now is astonishing for its raw power. As at most of their shows during the first half of that year they kicked off with a titanic reading of soul man Ben E. King’s “We’re Gonna Groove,” not so much covering the song as rolling over it like a juggernaut. Page, bearded and slight, summoned up one juddering riff after the next, the skipping gait of the original repurposed by Jones and Bonham into a mighty crunch.

Yet for all the musical fireworks, watching the show today one’s attention is drawn most to Plant as he pouts, preens and prances, basking in the spotlight. The West Midlands giraffe had gone into a cocoon and emerged as the blueprint rock god. He and Zeppelin stomped and rumbled on for more than two hours that night, and when they were done the Albert Hall stood and roared.

When compared with the theaters and city halls the band had filled in the U.K., the North American tour that began on March 21 took place on an epic scale. It comprised twenty-six shows in large sports arenas, commencing in front of a 19,000-strong crowd at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver. Billing the tour “An Evening with Led Zeppelin,” Grant dispensed with the need for an opening act. His band upped their game accordingly.

There was a well-practiced ebb and flow to Zeppelin’s set. It began with a barrage, “We’re Gonna Groove,” “Dazed and Confused” and “Heartbreaker” rushing into each other, before easing down, first into Page’s showpiece “White Summer/Black Mountainside” and then “Thank You.” After this they cranked the tension up again, releasing it like a tight-coiled spring on the last climactic surge, “Communication Breakdown” snapping at the heels of “Whole Lotta Love.”

Page had long since used a violin bow to scrape unholy sounds from his guitar during “Dazed and Confused,” and the song now became a piece of theater as he wielded his bow like an impish ringmaster, milking the moment. Yet on this tour it was Plant who was most enhanced. No longer uncertain of his place in the scheme of things, with no trace of awkwardness left, he paraded front and center, becoming at last the band’s focal point. Offstage the atmosphere had also changed and become more charged. Limousines glided the band about and they took over entire floors of plush hotels. Booze and cannabis had sustained Zeppelin on their first trips through the U.S. but by the time of their going back in 1970 cocaine had become the touring rock musician’s drug of choice. The post-show carousing no longer had a warm, fuzzy afterglow to it, but a sharp-edged rush, heightened and inflamed. Bonham, who needed little encouragement where such things were concerned, gave himself up most to whatever mayhem ensued.

“Sadly, as we got more famous, the whole precocious aspect of Zeppelin became more of an issue for the media,” Plant told me. “People backed off, not wanting to be associated with this supposed enormous quantity of hedonism. But that’s what happens. You lose people along the way.”

Arriving in Los Angeles in late March, the band took over an upper floor of the Continental Hyatt House—right on the pulse of Sunset Strip. The lobby of the hotel began to crowd with groupies and hangers-on. This was nothing new, but the numbers were growing and with it the sense of rapaciousness.

“The first white girl groupie arrived in Hollywood in 1964,” recalls Kim Fowley, an old hand on the scene. “Her name was Liz, she had red hair and looked like a miniature version of Maureen O’Hara. She showed up at the Hyatt House and demanded I take her to see Manfred Mann, because she wanted to have sex with their singer. I’d never before seen an American girl who’d gone along expressly to fuck a member of a British group.”

Writing in her memoir
I’m with the Band
, Pamela Des Barres, who as Miss Pamela was perhaps the most famous of the L.A. groupies, described the frenzy stirred by Zeppelin’s coming to town. “The groupie section went into the highest gear imaginable,” she stated. “You could hear garter belts sliding up young thighs all over Hollywood. Led Zeppelin was a formidable bunch. Robert Plant . . . tossing his gorgeous lion’s mane into the faces of enslaved sycophants. He walked like royalty, his shoulders thrown back, declaring his mighty status.”

Page was among the rock stars bedded by Des Barres. He would normally dispatch a minion to do his bidding, having them escort his chosen girl, the younger the better, up to his hotel room, where the blinds were drawn and a state of permanent night existed. Plant, it was said among the crew, preferred to romance his tour girlfriends with flowers and poetry. He was twenty-one years old, and within the suspended reality Zeppelin occupied home and all that went with it might as well have been on another planet.

“It would have changed anyone, all of that,” says Cole. “Because of all the money and success and everything else, you develop another way of living. The whole package is changing. But did they become a bunch of egomaniacs? Not from what I saw, no.

“After the shows, the band all went out together, all the time. They’d pretty much go to the clubs. All the things that were said about our behavior . . . Of course, a lot of it is true but some of it’s not. Basically, it was the same four blokes, having the same in-jokes.”

The heat of the tour, however, took its toll. Constant travel, lack of sleep, too many highs both natural and artificial—all these exhausted the band. Battling a fever, one day blurring into the next, Plant struggled on. His voice finally gave out during the penultimate gig in Phoenix on April 18. The last scheduled date in Las Vegas was cancelled and Zeppelin flew home.

The comedown from the tour lasted no more than a couple of months but this was a pivotal point for the band. For it was now that the seeds were sown not just for their next album, but also the three that followed—and these were their zenith. With Plant emerging alongside Page at the head of Zeppelin’s creative power base, their inspirations were located in the rich musical stew then swirling around both men.

Specifically, this was music of a kind rooted in the past, but otherworldly, too. It was informed and brought about through escape and a sense of glorious isolation, both figurative and literal. In the U.S., Dylan’s old backing group, the Hawks, took themselves off to a rural retreat at Woodstock in upstate New York. There, as the Band, they made a brace of wonderfully evocative albums,
Music from Big Pink
and
The Band
, bathing each in a sepia-tinted aspect of Americana.

The splintering of the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield gave rise to Crosby, Stills and Nash, their imperious harmonies captivating Plant in particular. The latter band also cut loose Neil Young, who mixed a more potent folk-rock brew on
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
. Plant and Page were both as taken with Joni Mitchell who, like Stills and Young, was Canadian by birth and had taken the same route out West. Mitchell’s songs were hushed and haunting, unfolding across two spectral records,
Clouds
and
Ladies of the Canyon.

Closer to home, a pugnacious Irishman, Van Morrison, had served up a pair of entrancing albums of his own,
Astral Weeks
and
Moondance
, their bucolic landscapes peppered with folk, jazz and blues textures. With regard to Zeppelin, there were two significant native folk bands, too. The Incredible String Band was the brainchild of a couple of itinerant eccentrics, Robin Williamson and Mike Heron. Williamson had traveled through North Africa and brought back with him exotic-sounding instruments, adding these to his band’s whimsical folk songs and stirring a singularly esoteric cocktail.

Fairport Convention had formed in London and, like Plant, been captivated by the sounds coming from America’s West Coast. They had found their feet on the same club circuit as the Band of Joy but by 1969 had cast their net further back, to traditional English and Celtic folk songs. Decamping to a 17th-century house in rural Hampshire, they there assembled
Liege & Lief
, the album that set the benchmark for British folk-rock.

Plant also had a mind to get away from it all. He remembered an old stone cottage in North Wales his parents had taken him to one summer. It was named Bron-Yr-Aur, Welsh for “golden hill.” Close by was the mountain Cadair Idris, legendary seat of King Arthur’s kingdom, and also Valle Crucis Abbey, where the Holy Grail was reputed to have been hidden. Folklore and remoteness—if ever there was a place to light Plant’s creative fires, this was it.

He sold Page on the idea, too. The first warmth of spring was in the air when they set off, Plant bringing along his family and dog, Page his new girlfriend, a French model named Charlotte Martin. To take care of their domestic needs, a couple of Zeppelin’s roadies, Clive Coulson and Sandy Macgregor, were commandeered for the trip.

To get to Bron-Yr-Aur, one must first head out from the town of Machynlleth on the road to Pennal village. A mile down and just off this road a steep track winds up the hillside. Walking along it, the only sounds to be heard are those of birdsong and the babble of a brook. Soon the track levels out, following the line of the brook through an avenue of trees, fields and moor to each side, the crest of Snowdonia’s peaks on the horizon. At its furthest point is the cottage, quaint but hardy, set in the “V” between two looming hills and with the broad sweep of the Dyfi Valley ahead of it.