Robert Plant: A Life (14 page)

The Rolling Stones’ mobile studio was again parked out on the lawn and the laid-back vibe of the previous summer also returned. The prevailing sound among the band was of laughter. Bonham, a habitual late riser, often as not came down to find his drums had been hidden, the day’s work developing to his ranting and raving about the place. This playful mood filtered through to the sessions. There was an instinctive spontaneity to them—the best of things happening on the hoof and seized from out of the ether.

This was the case with “Black Dog” and “Rock and Roll,” the songs that would open the album with such a gleeful flurry. These morphed out of impromptu studio jams, the jumping-off point for both being a couple of Little Richard tunes the band kicked around to let off steam, “Good Golly Miss Molly” and “Keep A-Knockin’.” Each of these informed Page’s propulsive riffs, the latter song giving up the drumbeat with which Bonham cracked open “Rock and Roll.” Ian Stewart, the Stones’ road manager and sometime pianist, sat in as that song unfolded, his boogie-woogie piano winding through the track like a vein. Plant scat the lyrics to “Black Dog” on the spot, leering and lecherous and unapologetic for it.

One night Bonham arrived back at the Grange from a jaunt into London worse for wear and of a mind to set about his drums. He did so armed with a pair of sticks in each hand, summoning up both the dense rhythmic grumble upon which “Four Sticks” was built and the song’s title. It was Bonham again who was the key ingredient of “When the Levee Breaks.” Written by Memphis Minnie to document the Mississippi River flood of 1927 that left 600,000 people destitute, the original song was a sparse acoustic lament. Zeppelin transformed it into a thrilling, monstrous surge. It was swung into being by Bonham’s resounding volleys, Page recording his cavernous drum track in the Grange’s high-ceilinged entrance hall.

On this song, and elsewhere on the record, Plant sang with as much assurance and conviction as he ever would with Zeppelin. The escape to Bron-Yr-Aur with Page had energised him and now he was further emboldened by the newly rich variety of the band’s palette. For the first time there was as much evidence of him in the material as there was of the guitarist. He fed into the record his hippy ideals and passions for ancient history and mythology. “Going to California” was shaped by his appreciation for the gentler musings of Neil Young, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and, most pointedly, Joni Mitchell—the “girl with the flower in her hair” in Plant’s love letter to both the sunshine state and a state of mind. To the band’s rolling gait on “Misty Mountain Hop” he recounted the tale of London police busting up a love-in, burnishing it with the sense of a mystic quest.

Drawing the inspiration for “The Battle of Evermore” from a book he had been reading about border wars between the armies of Albion and the ancient Celts, Plant peppered the narrative with references to Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings
—from here came the song’s “Dark Lord,” Sauron, and its Ringwraiths riding in black. Just as they had done so often at Bron-Yr-Aur, he and Page sketched out the song one night while sitting in front of an open fire, Page picking at a mandolin that Jones had left lying about, the first time he had played the instrument. For all their differences as people, at times such as these the two of them were joined at the hip.

“I think Jimmy and Robert now are far more opposite to each other than they ever were back then,” considers Cole, an observer of these sessions. “They’ve gone in such different directions. You wouldn’t have thought of them as that if you’d seen them in Zeppelin, at least not when it came to the music. They were a unit when they were working.”

To sing the song’s ethereal countermelody they brought in Sandy Denny, who had known Page since his art-school days and had not long left Fairport Convention. Set against the keening of Plant, Denny’s enchantments evoked an arcane atmosphere alive with mystery and wonder—one that suggested tendrils of mist snaking around towering battlements at morning’s first light.

Later that year Denny would produce a solo record almost as evocative,
The North Star Grassman and the Ravens.
It was to be her artistic swansong. Soon, a ruined marriage and the ravages of alcoholism would consume her, and she died on April 21, 1978, aged thirty-one, from injuries sustained in a fall.

Yet it was the song that came to define Zeppelin’s fourth album, and to a great extent the band itself, that most conflicted Plant. Filling in the outline he had first set down at Bron-Yr-Aur, Page determined that “Stairway to Heaven” would be an epic, the ultimate welding of Zeppelin’s acoustic–electric dynamic. From the lilting melody Page had hit upon in North Wales, it rose up through a series of escalating movements, concluding with a roaring finale. As Page worked through the arrangement with Jones and Bonham, Plant began to improvise the lyrics.

“We were channelling a lot of energy,” Page told the writer Brad Tolinski. “My sharpest memory of ‘Stairway’ is of Robert writing the lyrics while we were hammering away. It was really intense. By the time we had the fanfare at the end and could play it all the way through, Robert had 80 percent of the words down.

“I’d contributed to the lyrics on the first three albums but I was always hoping that Robert would take care of that aspect of the band. By the fourth album he was coming up with fantastic stuff. I remember asking him about the phrase ‘bustle in your hedgerow’ and him saying, ‘Well, that’ll get people thinking.’ ”

“Bonzo and Jonesy had gone off to the Speakeasy Club in London—to relax, I think that’s a good term for it,” Plant told
Rolling Stone
writer David Fricke. “Jimmy and I stayed in, and we got the theme and the thread of it there and then. It was some cynical aside about a woman getting everything she wanted all the time without giving back any thought or consideration. And then it softened up. I think it was the Moroccan dope. It’s a nice, pleasant, well-meaning and naïve little song, very English.”

As proud as Page was of their new creation, Plant was ambivalent about it. Later, when he came to crave distance from Zeppelin and also critical approbation, his attitude toward the song hardened. Its overwhelming presence made it his millstone. He was self-conscious about its hippy-dippy lyrics and made to flinch as it spawned one portentous rock ballad after the next.

Yet for all that it has been overexposed, “Stairway to Heaven” has retained its power. Neither Zeppelin’s finest song nor perhaps even the best on their fourth album, it is a great one nonetheless.

However good the feeling within the camp at Headley Grange, little of it translated to outsiders once Zeppelin moved on. Finishing off “Stairway to Heaven” was foremost in Page’s mind, since he had still to cut his guitar solo. For a couple of weeks he and the band retired to the Island Records studios on London’s Basing Street, intending to complete the final mixes of both it and “Four Sticks.”

It was a cramped, windowless room, oppressive enough before Zeppelin, Grant and a couple of their crew crowded into it. Engineering the session was Phill Brown, who had first encountered the band at Olympic Studios during the making of their début album. From then to now Brown sensed about them something darker and more menacing, and this emanating from Page and Grant.

“It was really rough,” Brown says. “Peter Grant was there pretty much all the time. He used to sit either with me at the mixing desk or on this big settee behind. He unnerved me. He was like an East End hood. He was about 350 pounds then—big, sweaty and aggressive. Having him sat there with a couple of 220-pound minders, it wasn’t the usual way we did things at Island.

“At that point Jimmy Page seemed really messed up. There were obviously a lot of drugs around but he was also into this Aleister Crowley thing. It just put an edge to the session. There was something unpleasant about the whole thing.

“The rest of the band was OK. Robert seemed very polite. He’d make the odd comment but more to Page than anyone else. John Paul Jones was a bit of a sweetheart, very clever musically. Bonham could be full-on and aggressive, though I didn’t see him that much because he wasn’t needed.”

Unlike at the Grange the pace of work was slow and laborious. Time and again Page took a pass at his “Stairway to Heaven” solo.

“The track was still in something of a skeletal state,” recalls Brown. “We did take after take with Page and for days on end. Robert later told me that Jimmy does a lot of experimenting, and out of all the best bits he molds a solo. Nothing was explained to me at the time, though. I was just left to wonder what the hell was going on.

“Page was all over the shop, too. Out of tune a lot of the time. He didn’t communicate with me at all. A lot of it was done in the control room, through an amp in the studio and with him sat right next to me. He would just go: ‘Again . . . Again . . . Again.’ It was all very aggressive. He seemed a dark character, that’s the only way I can explain it.”

To test out the new material the band undertook a series of low-key dates around the U.K. that March. Dubbed “Back to the Clubs,” the tour found Zeppelin as energised as at any time since their first charge through the U.S., performing stripped-down and hellishly loud sets, often up to three hours in length. They previewed “Black Dog,” “Going to California” and also “Stairway to Heaven.” On the opening night at Belfast’s Ulster Hall on March 5 Plant introduced their new epic as “A thing off the fourth album—I hope you like it.” He later claimed that people had nodded off the first few times it was played.

On April 1 they recorded a session for the DJ John Peel’s BBC radio show in front of 400 people at the Paris Theater in London. Peel, who had been instrumental in introducing Plant to America’s psychedelic music and was then one of the few representatives of the British media to champion the band, broadcast their set to the nation three nights later.

“The atmosphere at the Paris Theater was quite formal, very austere,” recalls Bob Harris, a colleague of Peel’s. “Everyone was sitting down. It wasn’t a show where you’d got a band whipping the audience to a wild frenzy, quite the opposite. Yet the music was sensational and Robert had become the definitive cock-rock god.

“By that time Peter Grant had got this idea of trying to make Zeppelin untouchable, of removing them from access so that a mystique began to build up around the band. I think his template was Tom Parker with Elvis, but it meant there began to be this fist of iron thing in terms of the environment in which they operated.”

Life went on outside of the Zeppelin bubble. That March Page had become a father for the first time, Charlotte Martin having born him a daughter, Scarlet. There was, though, never much time afforded for such things. Come the summer, Zeppelin were back on the road, first in the U.S., where the lack of a new album did not stop them from selling out twenty-one arena shows, and on then to Japan for the first time.

It was a relentless schedule and one through which cracks were beginning to show. Bonham’s drinking was getting heavier, and with it his behavior became more erratic and unpredictable. Yet it also let Plant satisfy the wanderlust that had grown inside him since childhood, when his parents had first whisked him off to the Welsh mountains. Its pull was as great as that of his family. Rather than head home direct from Tokyo, he and Page wound their way back via Thailand and India, accompanied by Cole. They visited the great Buddhist temples in Bangkok and stayed at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay, shopping for trinkets and antiques.

“They took me along because they needed someone to look after them and pay for everything,” Cole says. “We had a fantastic time. I managed to get a couple of good local drivers who took us everywhere we wanted to go and even to places we didn’t know about. We didn’t want to go to the same spots as everyone else. In those days that mostly involved heading out to shops where you could buy old artifacts.

“Robert loves traveling. He likes eating different foods, meeting different people, and hearing all kinds of music. How would I describe being with him? Um . . . It depends on the mood I was in. He was quite sweet, actually. He’s harmless, certainly not malicious.

“You worked in a field where anything could happen. I mean, Bonzo . . . Sometimes you’d go to his house and he’d be dressed up as a country squire, then he’d come on tour and be decked out in a white suit. He was a real chameleon, always changing. Robert basically stayed the same. He was always a hippy. A golden god.”

Plant and Page continued to explore, absorbing the music they heard on their travels and filtering it back into Zeppelin. Early the next year they returned to Bombay. Here, through a contact of Page’s, they set up a recording date with the city’s symphony orchestra. At this, they reworked “Four Sticks” and “Friends” with the local musicians, setting a precedent that Plant, in particular, would follow time and again.

A second trip the pair took together in 1972 left an even more marked impression on Plant. This was to Morocco, sitting on the northwest tip of Africa, just across the sea from Europe but a world away. In Marrakech, a centuries-old city of low, red-brick buildings to the south of the country, Plant first heard the music of the indigenous peoples, the Berber and the Gnaoua—these were enticing and trancelike drones, rhythmic and hypnotic.

He and Page took a tape recorder and drove up into the Atlas Mountains, the great range that runs east to west across the country for 1,600 miles, recording this music in villages and farmers’ markets. Back in Marrakech and wandering its teeming network of souks, Plant also came across Oum Kalsoum, an Egyptian by birth and then the greatest living Arab singer. Her remarkable, soaring voice haunted the city’s radios, an instrument in itself.

“I think my thing with North Africa actually began in North Wales,” he told me. “That whole thing about the mountains and remoteness was a great alternative to my days as a grammar-school kid. I went to Morocco in 1972 looking for clues and they were all around me.

“Marrakech then was a far different place to what it is now. We stayed in a hotel that was surrounded by barbed wire and these guys with Royal Enfield rifles—they looked as if they were guarding us from an impending attack. But basically, it was another world. I remember going into town the next day. It was almost as if I’d just got over a huge loss in my life and found everything again. Yet I’d never been there before. I could speak enough French to get by but up until the last ten years or so I was always a tourist there.