Robert Plant: A Life (27 page)

“Tony had become a local celebrity,” Plant informed Fricke. “He was in a minicab with five other people one night. They took a corner too fast, went off the road and ended up in somebody’s basement. I was called at five in the morning from Bath Royal Infirmary by a rather short-tempered matron saying, ‘We have your Mr. Thompson here—he states you, Mr. Plant, as his next of kin.’ I said, ‘But he’s black.’ So that was the end of him.

“One of the roadies then played drums. He was quite good, too, but the whole thing dematerialised. Jimmy had to change the battery of his wah-wah pedal every one and a half songs,” he explained, perhaps using a euphemism. “And I said, ‘I’m going home.’ Jonesy asked why. ‘Because I can’t put up with this and I don’t need the money.’ For it to succeed in Bath, I would need to have been far more patient than I have been for years. It wasn’t to be.”

For all that, Plant would soon enough reach out to Page again. In the meantime he veered off once more. That autumn he started working with a songwriter named Robert Crash, who had produced the second album by the British electro-pop duo Eurythmics—1983’s
Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)
. At the same time, his music publisher passed him a demo tape by a young British band called The Rest Is History. One track on it caught his ear, “Heaven Knows,” a sleek pop-rock song.

Plant got in touch with the band’s main songwriter, keyboardist Phil Johnstone, and they began batting ideas back and forth. The two of them hit it off, and since Johnstone was almost as forceful a personality as Plant, he brought in drummer Chris Blackwell, who had also played on the demo. In turn, Blackwell recommended guitarist Doug Boyle and bassist Phil Scragg to Plant, both of whom had been scratching out a living on the London club and session circuit.

“I first met Robert at a studio near Tower Bridge in London,” recalls Blackwell. “He asked me if I wanted a cup of tea and a bun. Any nerves that I’d had just disappeared. He’s a nice guy, very down to earth, though he has his moments.”

“The first impression I had of him was that he was very tall and also larger than life in every way,” says Boyle. “There’s a certain aura around him. He’s unmistakably charismatic.”

Together with this fresh young group of cohorts, Plant worked up ten songs. He also took on a new manager, appointing Bill Curbishley, a formidable Londoner who had steered the Who for more than a decade and was also looking after the British heavy metal band Judas Priest. Although he still had not told his latest band that they would be doing an album with him he was ready to make another beginning.

Work began on the record at the start of 1987 and in two London studios, Marcus and Swanyard. Plant wanted to marry up the modern technology he had used on
Shaken ’n’ Stirred
with more traditional song-craft. He appointed Phil Johnstone his unofficial musical director. It was Johnstone’s job to manage the battery of electronic effects that Plant had ordered up—drum machines, sequencers and samples—and also to translate Plant’s more abstract instructions to the rest of the band. Since he was not a musician, Plant tended to communicate an idea by humming it or evoking a feeling, leaving Johnstone to turn such utterances into chords and notes.

Plant had retained Tim Palmer from the
Shaken ’n’ Stirred
sessions and he remembers a certain amount of friction in the studio as Plant put his new charges through their paces. This was exacerbated by the fact that Plant was just then trying to quit smoking.

“I would sometimes argue for more guitars but that’s not the right way to approach it with Robert because he doesn’t want to be held back,” says Palmer. “It was a little bit of a battle but we ended up finding a good compromise.

“Robert was his usual self with the band, prodding and poking, sometimes to good effect and many times not. I think Doug Boyle really struggled with Robert’s constant harassing of him to play more and different styles, and to learn some of the roots of the stuff Robert was doing.”

“I remember Doug getting quite a hard time,” agrees Chris Blackwell. “Absolutely, Robert can be a taskmaster and that’s mainly aimed at the guitars and drums, for obvious reasons. Doug is very reserved. He could do the gig but to begin with it wasn’t a good fit for him—he’s really a jazz guitarist. He caught a lot off Robert, and much of it I felt was unnecessary and unwelcome.”

A talented musician, but a quiet, nervy man, Boyle now describes the experience of working with Plant as character-building but also emotionally draining. Like Robbie Blunt before him, the biggest problem he had was that he was not Jimmy Page.

“I felt a lot of pressure,” he admits. “There were definitely fraught moments, some of which might have been nicotine related. There were some aspects of my playing that Robert didn’t care for, some that he did. He was trying to eke out the parts he didn’t like and introduce me to some more rootsy, rock ’n’ roll type of stuff, which wasn’t my natural domain.

“Maybe that tension also gave Robert the extra bit of grit he wanted to get on to that record. I definitely felt as if he was goading me to see how I’d respond. I think he must have noted that I played with a little more intention if I felt got at.”

Boyle’s confidence was bruised and it took a further battering when he found out Plant had asked Page to guest on the record. Plant sent Page tapes of two songs, “Heaven Knows” and “Tall Cool One,” the latter sounding like a reupholstered Gene Vincent track, and asked him to work out solos for each of them. Both were intended to be singles.

“The way Jimmy played was a bit like a cartoon caricature of himself,” recalls Palmer. “He strapped on his guitar, had a cigarette and a beer, and he pulled those faces. I wasn’t going to start telling Jimmy Page what to play, so we just gave him some open tracks and asked him to do what he felt was right. I picked through it afterward and made up composite solos.

“If you were lucky in a studio you’d get an assistant to make the tea. The day that Jimmy arrived I suddenly had two assistants and a roomful of techs, all hoping to get just a glimpse of him and Robert together. There was a lot of laughter and joking around between the two of them. It felt very relaxed, no tension.”

Page got a shock when he heard the finished version of “Tall Cool One.” The track ended with a burst of sampled Zeppelin riffs, snatches of “The Wanton Song” and “Custard Pie” among them. Plant claimed that he had been prompted to do this by the Beastie Boys, the New York rappers having lifted the riff from “The Ocean” for their “She’s Crafty” single of the previous year. He had not forewarned Page.

“As I recall, Jimmy’s reaction was one of puzzlement,” says Doug Boyle. “He gave Robert a very oblique look.”

“It was a bad thing to do, really,” Plant told me, chuckling. “Yet at the time it seemed a bit of a hoot. Silly. They did sound fucking good as well, though.”

This same combination of the high-tech and the more organic defined the finished album,
Now and Zen
. It was a no less modern-sounding record than its immediate predecessor, the difference being that on this occasion the technology was used in support of the songs rather than the other way around. In this respect it was Plant’s most accessible album to date.

“It was the record that kind of broke Robert back as a solo artist, in no small part because Jimmy was on ‘Heaven Knows,’ ” says Blackwell. “People rushed out to buy that. Jimmy later joined us onstage a couple of times, which again was brilliant, though it must have been very difficult from Doug’s point of view. It was almost like trying to second-guess what was going on.”

Yet for all that he had pushed Boyle, it was bassist Phil Scragg whom Plant dispensed with as soon as the record was finished. He replaced him with Charlie Jones, a friend of Tim Palmer from Bath who had been playing in a local group called Violent Blue. Plant had decided to tour with this young band, but before that he had a further distraction to occupy him.

“Robert liked to take care of all the contracts himself and he had a reputation for being stingy,” explains Tim Palmer. “There was some money that hadn’t been paid out to Swanyard, and there were letters going back and forth between Robert and the lady that owned the studio, Margarita Hamilton. When Robert finally cut the check, he sent it with a male stripper and a note informing Margarita that if she wanted the money she’d have to remove it from his underwear with her teeth.”

Not that Plant couldn’t surprise with acts of generosity. That Christmas he had a large hamper sent around to Boyle’s flat. He recalls, “I opened it up and there was a card from Robert inside that said, ‘Thanks for all your work, you were brilliant.’ Robert had been so hard to please. It was the first time that I’d known what he’d felt about my contribution to the whole thing.”

That December of 1987, Plant and his band started tour rehearsals. Before breaking for Christmas, they also did two low-key warm-up gigs in the seaside town of Folkestone and a return for Plant to Stourbridge Town Hall. These served to unveil his new group but they were also the first shows at which Plant played Zeppelin songs as a solo artist. “Misty Mountain Hop,” “Rock and Roll” and “The Lemon Song” were all included in the set lists.

Chris Blackwell claims it was the band that coaxed Plant into this, recalling how he had walked in on them bashing through “Immigrant Song” one afternoon and joined in. Yet it was more likely an entirely practical decision and one made at the instigation of his manager Bill Curbishley. An old hand, Curbishley knew even the whisper of Zeppelin songs was enough to shift tickets in America and it was there that Plant had most to gain.

During the first month of shows in the U.K. that spring he strutted like a peacock once more, closing in on 40 but starting over.

“Last night, I was wiggling around like some aging big girl’s blouse and I realize how stupid it all looks,” he admitted to Tom Hibbert of
Q
after one of these gigs. “It was like self-parody, but that’s what I’m good at, that’s what I know. What else am I going to do? Sleep with the board of directors at Coca-Cola and make an ad for them?

“I don’t want to end up playing in the back room of some pub in Wolverhampton. It’s a bit of a naff old game, life.”

Now and Zen
had been released that February, charting in the Top 10 on both sides of the Atlantic. The North American tour, which began that summer and stretched to fifty dates, exploited this, with Zeppelin songs packing the sets and Plant in his pomp. It was among the biggest draws on the road in America that year, filling arena after arena, the audience responses echoing the frenzy Zeppelin had once induced, although some things in the background were very different.

“When we first hit the States a choreographer became involved, which was hilarious,” recalls Blackwell. “He came out on the road with us for two weeks to show mainly Doug and Charlie how to move and what to do—when to run across the stage, when to spin around. I remember them not being at all happy about it.

“For 99 percent of the time, Robert was lovely. Once a week, though, he’d have one of his weird days. I’d know we were getting one because on those occasions he’d always come down to the hotel reception in the same clothes, these baggy surfer pants tucked into cowboy boots. Whenever he dressed like that, he was a bit off and he’d give you the run around, becoming the taskmaster again. I don’t know what it was, whether it was hormonal or something.”

“There was always a feeling that you were replaceable,” continues Boyle. “If I wasn’t delivering what he wanted, I knew that I could be gone in five minutes, though I didn’t think that was a bad thing. It kept everyone on their toes.”

The sixth night of the tour, May 14, was the Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary Concert at Madison Square Garden. Plant had been asked to perform a solo set. The label’s chief, Ahmet Ertegun, had also begged for a Zeppelin reunion to close the show. Plant agreed to both. Coming onstage after performances by Crosby, Stills and Nash, the Bee Gees and Yes, his solo band’s set was assured and well drilled, everything that Zeppelin’s finale was not.

Plant had clashed with Page in the build-up to it. He wanted to have Blackwell on drums but Page held out for Jason Bonham. Plant was also unwilling to sing “Stairway to Heaven,” with Page again winning the day. It was a Pyrrhic victory. In the event Plant forgot the words to Zeppelin’s best-loved song, most probably less by accident than design, although it was nothing if not in keeping with the general mayhem that unfolded around him.

If anything, Zeppelin’s performance at this concert was an even worse mess than Live Aid had been three years earlier. It was like hearing four people playing independently of each other, Page looking troubled and going at a different speed to the others, Plant’s voice sounding shot. By the time “Stairway to Heaven” ground to a painful halt only Jones was left unruffled. Plant had the air of a man who had endured half an hour of root-canal work.

“That show was never mentioned again,” says Blackwell. “Phil Johnstone used to have a dig at Robert about all sorts of things but that was never a topic of conversation. A reunion tour was never on the cards after that. Robert used to get all these offers and he’d be like, ‘Oh, fuck off!’ ”

“I had a strong feeling that the way the Atlantic thing went put a Zeppelin reunion on the back burner for him,” says Doug Boyle. “Before it I thought there might have been something happening a couple of years down the line. I don’t know what went down but that gig was a very tense time between Robert and Jimmy.

“I think there was a part of Robert that missed Jimmy an awful lot. He’d often say to me, ‘Jimmy would have done this’ or ‘Jimmy would have done that.’ It would always make me want to say, ‘Look, I’m not Jimmy. If you want him, go and get him.’ The two of them are like brothers. There’s something very, very deep there.”

That summer Page had put out his first solo album,
Outrider
. It was heavy on bluesy guitar workouts but lacked memorable songs. Plant co-wrote and sang on one of them, a breezy rocker titled “The Only One” that came and went and left little impression.