Robert Plant: A Life (28 page)

In the winter of 1988 Plant and his band went back out on the road in North America, doing a further thirty-seven sell-out shows. At the start of this run bassist Charlie Jones told Plant that he had begun dating his daughter Carmen. The couple would eventually marry and make Plant a grandfather. Right then, however, the effect on Plant of his daughter’s presence on the tour was a source of great amusement to the rest of his band. Up to that point Plant had been enjoying life much as he had on Zeppelin’s treks through America.

“Certainly from Robert’s point of view, Carmen being on the road changed things,” says Blackwell. “Everything after that had to be more above-board or swept under the carpet, and it was quite amusing to watch that happening. Not that Carmen wasn’t cool and didn’t know what was going on anyway.

“Especially in America, being on a tour of that size with someone like Robert, it did kind of mean that you were given a ticket to do what you wanted. You could take it to whatever extreme you wished.”

Plant wanted to keep the momentum from the tour running. After a short Christmas break he summoned the band to his home in Wales to begin work on his next record. Deciding that
Now and Zen
had been too glossy, he intended to make a more straightforward rock album, guitars taking precedence over electronic effects.

Recording began at Olympic Studios in London, where two decades earlier Zeppelin had made their first album. At the end of the first day Plant pulled aside his new producer, Mark “Spike” Stent. He told Stent he had already cost him more of his money than had been spent on the whole of Zeppelin’s début.

“He’s a tight old bastard,” Stent recalls, laughing. “That’s just part of his personality as well. He likes to give you a little dig now and then. He was an interesting chap. He’s a very striking man. I remember him walking into the studio reception on that first day and thinking, ‘OK, that’s a Rock God for you.’

“Making the record, he was a bit of a tyrant. I’d use that word in more of a comical way. I mean, he runs the ship and he knows precisely what he wants. He was always cracking the whip but it was never personal—it was just out of pure frustration. At the same time he had a way of inspiring and getting great performances.”

Once again it was guitarist Doug Boyle who was at Plant’s sharpest end. Still exhausted from the tour, Boyle found this record even more testing to make than its predecessor had been. He compares the way Plant approached it to that of Stanley Kubrick, the notoriously demanding film director.

“It was a very intense process,” he explains. “Robert will go to extreme lengths to get what he wants and I drove myself to the edge of insanity. We had a couple of stand-up rows, squaring up to each other, although they were forgotten in a couple of days.

“Robert’s biggest problem was with my reference points. He had this great fear that I’d been in a jazz-funk band, which is his biggest nightmare in music. He was always asking me if I’d been listening to Level 42.”

Although even the hint of jazz-funk on
Manic Nirvana
might have offered light relief. In essence it was a hard rock record and an unappealing one at that. Plant had not only let go of his old band’s anchor to the blues but also their lighter touches, the pastoral shadings and folk roots. He seemed to have lost his way.

In November of that year he reunited again with Page and Jones, but this time only before a couple of hundred people in the West Midlands. The occasion was his daughter Carmen’s 21st birthday party, which was held in the Hen & Chickens pub in the Black Country town of Oldbury. There, the three of them, backed again by Jason Bonham on drums, ran through a selection of Zeppelin tunes including “Trampled Underfoot” and “Rock and Roll.” Following the trials of the Atlantic Records concert this was like letting off steam.

“All of us who’d worked on the album got invited to that,” recalls “Spike” Stent. “That impromptu thing was an amazing moment.

“Robert, of course, also had this very interesting and convoluted web involving his ex-wife and her sister. I’ve got a feeling that at Carmen’s party he may have also met someone else—some young girl. He was sat chatting with her at our table and I subsequently heard that they’d been seeing each other. That’s Robert. He had the gift, for sure.”

Released in March 1990,
Manic Nirvana
did not repeat the success of
Now and Zen
. Later that year Neil Young, a grizzled touchstone of Plant’s, released his
Ragged Glory
album, on which he and his backing band Crazy Horse raged at the dying of the light. By contrast, Plant had not seemed so out of touch.

Again, he toured the album for most of a year. The shows were much better than the record had been, although some members of his band enjoyed this latest excursion more than others.

“There was a little bit more tension starting to come in,” says Boyle. “At that point I think Robert was starting to think ahead and he was particularly looking at me. He couldn’t move on with the same people around him. I thought the actual shows were magnificent but I had a strong sense it would be my last tour with him.”

“Travelling together, you really do see all sides of a person and there isn’t a dark side to Robert at all,” says Blackwell. “Sometimes there’s a bit of bravado, when he puts the mask on, but you know it’ll come off. I’d sit next to him on the plane and we’d be talking about wall colors or carpets. Those were my favorite times with him, when I got to see the real person.

“I met his dad a few times. He was a really down-to-earth Black Country bloke who wore a flat cap. I remember Logan being backstage on a skateboard, crashing into people. Both Shirley and Maureen were lovely, too. I guess we all thought that situation was odd but there were odder things happening. Nothing we were doing seemed to be very real, anyway.”

By the end of this period Plant’s relationship with Shirley Wilson seems to have run its course. He never commented on this, nor on rumors linking him with the Canadian singer and former model Alannah Myles, one of his support acts on the tour. Then promoting their début album, the retro-rock band the Black Crowes also opened for Plant on these American dates. Their drummer, Steve Gorman, remembers Plant taking them to a blues club in Chicago.

“It was just him and us, and we drove down to the Checkerboard, this legendary hole-in-the-wall club on the South Side,” Gorman recounts. “We went in and the house band was cooking. Then the MC got up on the mike, this old black dude. He goes, ‘There’s a very special guest in the house tonight. He came from England and brought the blues back over here. Everyone needs to give him a round of applause. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Led Zeppelin! Stand up, Led!’

“Robert was laughing so hard he could barely get up. He stood up and took a bow. For the rest of the tour we called him Led. He’s very self-deprecating. He clearly loves and respects what Zeppelin did but he’s the first guy to puncture the air around it.”

The tour wound down that December in the U.K. Plant brought his band to Wolverhampton for a more intimate date at the town’s Civic Hall. It was a fine show and he appeared in his element, basking in the audience’s adulation. That night he sang a poignant version of Zeppelin’s “Going to California.” Though no one but he knew it, his next move would return him to the sounds of that song, and also of that time and place.

Around this time I found myself sitting next to him at a James Brown concert at Birmingham’s NEC arena. He looked tanned and relaxed, and was accompanied by a young blonde in a short, figure-hugging dress. I related this encounter to Plant’s old friend, LeFevre. “Oh, her,” he responded, smirking. “She was his niece.”

16

CROSSROADS

My feeling of vulnerability is as acute as my power is.

The
Manic Nirvana
tour concluded in January 1991 and Plant took off on the longest break he had had since leaving Led Zeppelin. More than two years would pass between now and his next record—and even longer before he toured again. He was occupied with becoming a parent for the fourth time and also in attempting to rediscover his musical place in the world.

That September he celebrated the birth of a son, Jesse Lee Plant. The identity of the child’s mother has been a source of speculation ever since but Plant has never revealed it. However complex their ties might be, Jesse Lee and Plant’s two older children, Carmen and Logan, established a close bond. Plant adored them, being a doting if unconventional father.

Through the span of time he was out of public view the great sea change in music came from America. R.E.M. broke open the mainstream for alternative rock, the critical darlings from Athens, Georgia, releasing two classic albums in the space of eighteen months,
Out of Time
and
Automatic for the People
. Grunge was born in the U.S. Northwest. In September 1991 Nirvana, originally from the unremarkable logging town of Aberdeen in Washington State, put out their second album,
Nevermind
. Within four months it had knocked Michael Jackson’s
Dangerous
off the top of the Billboard chart and sparked a short, sharp cultural tremor.

Nirvana kicked down the doors for other “Seattle bands” like Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains and Screaming Trees. Although these groups espoused a punk rock ethos, they were indebted as much to the bigger beasts of the ’70s, such as Neil Young, Black Sabbath and also Led Zeppelin.

Plant also looked back for inspiration, honing in on this occasion on the records from the ’60s that had captivated him, marking out the path he has followed from then to now. He dug out his old Buffalo Springfield albums and also reabsorbed the music that had swept out from San Francisco during that time, the psych-rock of Moby Grape, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service.

In the summer of 1993 he collected his band together at his Monmouth home to begin writing his next record. Though the songs came, Plant was restless, dissatisfied, like a man with an itch he could not scratch.

The record was supposed to signal a fresh start. Plant had a new record label, having left Atlantic after more than twenty years with the company and signed to one of its rivals, Mercury Records. He had also brought in a new producer, Chris Hughes, a former drummer with Adam and the Ants who had made his name working with the pop group Tears for Fears.

What Plant did not have yet was a new band and his mood wasn’t improved when recording began. The operation shifted between two studios, RAK in London and Sawmills, located in an idyllic spot in Cornwall on the English south coast. The atmosphere was tense and soon reached breaking point.

“We started at RAK and I felt very comfortable until I began doing first takes,” recalls Blackwell. “Then it all got a bit strange. Chris Hughes was telling me all this stuff that I knew was wrong, all these weird criticisms, but it felt as if it was coming from someone else. At the end of one session I was told not to go in the next day but I did. There was another drummer there, Pete Thompson, who I knew from way back. No one had said anything about it to me.

“We were residential at Sawmills, which kind of amplified the fact that something was brewing. I had to pop back to London for a couple of days, and again, when I returned it turned out there’d been another drummer in doing stuff. There was also another guitarist present, and I was told not to tell Doug Boyle about that.

“The breakup of that band was very messy and nothing was resolved. I was asked to take some time off from the sessions and Robert said he’d call, but never did. The next thing I knew, the album was finished. I went to listen to it and I was on one track. I wasn’t called in for the tour and that was that.”

“Robert’s head had completely changed and it was like we didn’t know each other any more,” continues Boyle. “I played on two tracks and went home. Eventually, Phil Johnstone phoned me and told me that Robert wanted to work with a different guitarist. To be honest it was something of a relief. I didn’t have anything left to give.

“Robert was like a tank. He always needs to have new stimulation and territory to explore, and he won’t do anything unless he’s 100 percent into it. I think it pains him to be like that. I’ve never known someone be so obsessed with music. It’s bursting out of him and he has to vent it, otherwise I’d imagine he’d end up running out of the house screaming. He pushed me as far as I could be taken. It was a joyous experience but at the same time I got broken by it.”

In the end Plant made his sixth solo album,
Fate of Nations
, with a sprawling cast of musicians. His most recent right-hand man, Phil Johnstone, like Doug Boyle and Chris Blackwell, cowrote a number of the songs that appeared on the record but played on just a handful. Bassist Charlie Jones, now Plant’s son-in-law, was kept on. Among those trooping in and out were the classical violinist Nigel Kennedy and a folk musician, Nigel Eaton, who specialized in a Medieval English stringed instrument, the hurdy gurdy. Four drummers were used and also six different guitarists.

“You have to praise the guy, because he’s always questing to find new ideas and people to work with,” says the album’s producer, Chris Hughes. “He’s not the sort of bloke to sit around waiting for things to happen, and in that sense he’s not just a rock singer but a real artist.

“I don’t think he’s a born bandleader, though. There’s two types: tyrants like Buddy Rich and James Brown, where you miss half a note and you get ridiculed or fired; and others that are much more concerned about getting the best out of the players and making sure everyone has a good time. He wasn’t either of those. He kind of picked out guys and hoped that they would fit in with what he was doing. He lives his life liking and not liking, favoring and not favoring a huge number of people.”

As usual Plant paid particular to attention to the guitar parts on the record. Doug Boyle’s time being over, he called in the great folk guitarist Richard Thompson, a former member of Fairport Convention, and a younger British whiz kid, Francis Dunnery, whose prog-rock band It Bites had been a support act on his last U.K. tour.