Robert Plant: A Life (31 page)

They approached a thirty-four-year-old American, Steve Albini, to record them. An iconoclast, Albini was a musician himself, fronting such confrontational groups as Big Black, Rapeman and Shellac. He had engineered records for hundreds of punk, hardcore and alt-rock bands, working fast and with no frills. He had made a rare excursion into the mainstream in 1993 when working on Nirvana’s
In Utero
album, alarming their record company with the harshness of its sound.

Toward the end of 1997 Albini joined Plant and Page at London’s famous Abbey Road Studios, scene of the Beatles’ greatest artistic flights, the record being completed in just thirty-five days. Plant and Page had not done an album this fast since Zeppelin’s debut.

“You can’t go waffling on about the whys and wherefores,” Plant told me soon after. “We just had a good time. Not too glossy, more of a live situation. We were all in the same room at the same time and it turned out nice. Much better than the last one we did together,
In Through the Out Door.
”

“I don’t remember much of that one, to be honest,” Page interjected dolefully.

“But the thing is,” Plant continued, brain rushing on, “who the bloody hell are we playing to now? The generation we first started playing for have all but gone, because the intensity and lust for music disappears. So we’re playing to and for ourselves.

“Truth to tell, it would be nice to be up there with the big boys of today. I don’t think it’s within the psyche of youth culture to consider us extreme any more, though, no matter what. And yet I’ve a strange feeling that we might be—in a clandestine fashion.”

Released in the spring of 1998, the record was titled
Walking into Clarksdale
, a reference to the great Mississippi blues town to which Plant had made a number of pilgrimages. Like the best blues it was spare-sounding and unadorned. There was a new warmth to Plant’s voice, especially so on more reflective songs such as “Blue Train,” a further poignant hymn to his late son Karac, and “Please Read the Letter,” one of several songs in which he pored over the ruins of broken relationships. Page, too, sometimes played beautifully, his solo on “Upon a Golden Horse” like drops of rain after a storm.

I met up with the two of them in London shortly before it came out. Dressed in black, Page was quiet and diffident, perfectly pleasant but never seeming to be entirely there, keeping something held back. Plant was much more demonstrative, a 49-year-old man still resplendent in leather trousers and a satin bomber jacket, although he was hard to pin down. All in the same sentence he could be friendly and charming, then prickly and detached. It had the effect of keeping one’s attention on him.

He was least aroused whenever the conversation turned to Led Zeppelin, whereas Page at such times seemed childlike in his enthusiasm. Plant came to life in the present, enthusing about the music of the British techno band the Prodigy and in particular that of Jeff Buckley, the son of American folk singer Tim Buckley. Like his father, the younger Buckley’s flowering was brilliant but tragically brief, 1994’s wonderful
Grace
being the only album he completed before his death in 1997 aged thirty. Most of all that day Plant railed against the notion that he might belong to a rock aristocracy alongside such peers of his as McCartney, Jagger and Clapton.

“The testiest work of most people of our age is long gone,” he told me, gimlet-eyed. “Without bragging, I think we’re quite capable of doing something extraordinary one minute and maybe something tedious the next, but at least we’ll push. There’s no better bloke to work with on an imaginative guitar level than Jimmy. But if we’d gone back and done it the other way, re-forming Zeppelin, doing the stadiums and all that shit, we’d be friends with the Royals by now.

“The rock aristocracy? That’s for people who haven’t got anything else to do, people who have found a successful formula and clung on to it. Look at Sting. He was in a serious punk band. Now . . . I don’t know what’s happened there. I will not be kissing Albanian women onstage at the Royal Albert Hall. Though I would do in a doorway somewhere in Soho if it were dark.”

Yet try as he might this was a circle he could not square with Page. For as long as they were together, people would come along wanting and expecting to see and hear a version of Led Zeppelin. He would soon feel the weight of this pushing down upon him again.

Prior to the release of
Walking into Clarksdale
he and Page did a handful of shows in Eastern Europe in the spring of 1998, just them and Jones and Lee. They played in Croatia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. To make things more interesting for themselves Plant and Page hired a car and drove from show to show, breaking off from the main touring party. Less than a decade earlier Zeppelin’s records had been banned by the former Communist regime in Bulgaria.

“People would club together to buy one album between them on the black market, facing imprisonment if they were caught,” explains Anton Brookes, Plant and Page’s publicist on the tour. “All these guys in their mid-forties came to the show in Sofia with their original records. They were telling Jimmy and Robert the stories of how they’d hidden and preserved them. Both of them were overcome by that and it ended up being the wildest show I’ve ever seen.”

I caught up with the tour in the Turkish city of Istanbul. The show was taking place in a circus tent in the Asian half of the city. Since Plant and Page were staying in Istanbul’s European sector across the River Bosphorus they elected to catch a public ferry to get to it. They sat side by side on the boat’s upper deck, curious onlookers staring at them, Plant with a black hat pulled down over his long hair but still unmistakable. “This,” he said, smiling, “is very weird indeed.”

The gig was electrifying but it was a Zeppelin one in all but name and absent friends. Their old band’s songs filled the set and they performed them straight, “What Is and What Should Never Be” and “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” bringing the house down. Plant prowled the lip of the stage tossing his mane of hair to the mighty crunch of Page’s guitar, the years rolling back.

Finishing with a rollicking “Rock and Roll” they fled the venue before the last notes had died away, Plant climbing into a waiting saloon car, Page and everyone else boarding a minibus. Even then the Zeppelin echoes persisted. As Plant was sped away the bus was left idling, the driver having nipped off to smoke a cigarette. He was fast spotted sauntering back through the crowd that had begun to throng around the vehicle.

“Oi! Get in here and fucking drive,” Plant and Page’s manager Bill Curbishley snarled through an open window, eyes blazing. When we did set off it was haltingly, since the streets around the venue were now swarming with people. Jabbing a finger at the hapless driver, Curbishley turned to tour manager Rex King and said, “Fire this cunt.”

On the drive back to the hotel Page looked to have been drained by the gig but he was chattier than he had been in London. He told me that he was intending to take a short holiday in Egypt before he and Plant toured North America, and that he wanted to see the tombs of the pharaohs. When we got back to the hotel he said he fancied a nightcap and made for the bar. Plant was nowhere to be seen.

“I always got the impression with Robert and Jimmy that it was like little brother and big brother,” says Anton Brookes. “When they’re together Robert’s kind of in Jimmy’s shadow a bit, and he’s prone to being a bit disruptive because of that and the fact that he’s not in control. That element was always there when I was with them. But then Robert was also very protective toward Jimmy. If Jimmy ever appeared uncomfortable in an interview or unsure of what to say Robert would take the lead. He’d always look out for him.

“Jimmy keeps to himself and Robert’s very flamboyant, though I think that’s partly a defense mechanism. He seems very open but Robert doesn’t actually give anything away. He’s engaging and very much a people person but he’s quite guarded, too. His face lights up when he’s talking about music or football, things he’s passionate about. But if you tried to talk to him about Zeppelin or himself he’d blank you.”

As ever the tour of North America was a bigger deal. The album had sold steadily but not remarkably there, but Plant and Page’s reputations—and the promise of Zeppelin—still filled arenas and left audiences baying for more. It was the same story for fifty shows and Plant began to tire of the routine, the endless act of dipping back into his past. By the time of the final dates in Europe at the end of that year he was spent.

Page wanted to carry on, to make another record and try again to talk Plant around to having Jones on it, but Plant would hear none of it.

“I needed to go off and do something that was the very anti-thesis of playing huge buildings in places like Mannheim in Germany,” he later told me, “to people who wanted Led Zeppelin and the two of us were the nearest thing they could get to it.”

Plant bailing on him did not stop Page from keeping the Zeppelin flag flying. The following year he joined the Black Crowes for a series of well-received shows in the U.S., playing mostly Zeppelin songs, carbon copies of the originals. After that tour had finished, the Black Crowes’ drummer, Steve Gorman, ran into Plant while both of them were on holiday on Nevis Island in the Caribbean.

“My wife and I were having lunch at the hotel bar one day and Robert was right across the way from us, drinking a daiquiri,” he recalls. “He came over and he couldn’t have been sweeter. He told me he’d heard what we’d done with Jimmy and thought it was great. He said, ‘Yeah, he plays better with you guys than he’s done with me for the last few years.’ I told him there was no pressure on us, and he just laughed and said something about how nice that must be.”

18

DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAIN

Robert described it to me as like hearing a voice from another planet.

As 1999 stretched into a new millennium Plant was playing in pubs around the English Midlands with a covers band. The beginnings of this dated back to 1997, during the time he took off between projects with Page. Back then he had agreed to perform at his local tennis club’s annual charity bash.

Scrabbling around for musicians to help him out Plant roped in Kevyn Gammond, his next-door neighbor and former guitarist with his old group the Band of Joy, and a drummer, Andy Edwards, who was running a music course with Gammond at a nearby college. Playing at Bewdley Tennis Club, this makeshift band did a cover set that included Donovan’s “Season of the Witch” and the folk-rock standard “Morning Dew,” Plant’s village doctor among the couple of hundred people in attendance that night.

By the middle of 1999 Plant had told Page that he would not be making another record with him. He had suggested to Gammond that they revive their covers band, calling it Priory of Brion, the name inspired by Plant’s love of both Arthurian legend and also the Monty Python film
Life of Brian
. Andy Edwards also returned and brought with him two friends with whom he had been playing in a jazz trio, bassist Paul Wetton and a keyboard player, Paul “Tim” Timothy. They began rehearsing in the large garage of Plant’s house, the walls of which were decorated with the gold and platinum discs he had been presented with. The songs they worked up were drawn from his record collection.

“I never think about the journey that I’m having, I just do things,” Plant later told me by way of explanation for this latest diversion. “There are very few things that I need to go back to. I couldn’t do Priory of Brion again, for instance, but to form a band and vow never to play east of Offa’s Dyke was a fantastic moment. I should have it tattooed in Welsh on my arm.”

“Paul, ‘Tim’ and I were getting a musical education,” says Andy Edwards. “Robert would pull out all these records to play to us, everything from ’60s garage bands to ’80s techno. We heard a lot of Moby Grape and Buffalo Springfield, Arthur Lee and Stephen Stills. Robert listens to absolutely everything. He’s got a room at the house with a beautiful old stereo and his choice records in it. I’m sure he’s got a vast amount of vinyl stored elsewhere. He once told me he had a million records.

“Most of our rehearsals, he had a guitar round his neck. He’s a good, solid guitarist. He loves musicians jamming and improvising, and he really responds to that. He is a control freak, though. He oversees every aspect of what’s going on, down to the snare drum I was using and what it sounded like. If I had a criticism of him, it’s that on occasion he would try and pull everything apart. Working with him is a pressure situation and I found it difficult at times.”

Edwards was using an old Ludwig drum kit that Plant had set up in his garage. Plant eventually gave it to him, although it would be months before Edwards discovered its significance.

“After we’d done a couple of gigs, I asked Robert if he’d got any cases for the drums,” he recalls. “He took me into this room just off from the garage and began pulling stuff down from the shelves. The first case he brought down had ‘John Bonham—Led Zeppelin’ written across it. That Ludwig kit was the first one John had been given when he’d joined Zeppelin.

“That’s when I realized what I was stepping into. You’re dealing with something that’s monumental. In my life that band will always be the thing that defines me, even though for Robert it was just one little thing that he did.”

The first gig the Priory of Brion played was on July 23, 1999 at the Three Tuns Inn in Bishop’s Castle, a small town in Shropshire on the English–Welsh border. They performed improvised versions of the Beatles’ “Something” and Love’s “Bummer in the Summer,” Elvis songs and old blues numbers such as “Baby, Please Don’t Go.”

“It was a pub that was local to us and we’d expected to get a hundred or so people there,” says Edwards. “I remember Robert saying, “We can’t use my name at all—there’ll be helicopters landing in the car park if they know it’s me.” That’s why it became the Priory, because we had to keep its identity a secret. Everybody still knew. Chinese whispers were enough to have 300 people turn up.