Robert Plant: A Life (34 page)

The chemistry between them was instant, Plant and Krauss nailing three master tracks on the first day in Nashville. For Plant, who had rarely sung harmony vocals before, the experience was a new and testing one.

“The thing I remember most from that session was that Robert was confounded and then delighted with what Alison was teaching him about harmony singing,” recalls Flanagan. “As he said, in Zeppelin and his previous solo work harmonies were things that’d be addressed if there were a couple of hours spare at the end of the session. He’d never been in a group like the Beatles or the Band, where they were such an important component.

“Alison really showed him a lot of ways to go. As a great singer, that excited his ear. That’s got to be interesting to one of the great vocalists, doing something with his voice that he hadn’t done before.”

“Before I met Alison I’d never known how beautifully eerie and evocative white American mountain music is,” Plant told me. “I don’t mean country music or bluegrass but the things from which a lot of that contemporary stuff has developed. Stuff that guys like Clarence Ashley were churning around at the start of the last century. Guys that worked in the lumber mills and made this spectacular music.”

The record, its title
Raising Sand
plucked from a lyric on
Mighty ReArranger
, was Plant and Krauss’s very own
Wrecking Ball
. In common with that Emmylou Harris album it had a unique and timeless atmosphere to it, hushed and whispering. The sound of it was spare and spacious, the texture dry and with the snap of old bones. The sense of darkness that T-Bone Burnett spoke of was there, too, like shadows at the edges of a sepia-tinted photograph or a chill breeze blowing in the dead of night.

The cast of songwriters pulled together on it was just as fascinating. Among them were the maverick Tom Waits and Gene Clark, who was behind some of the Byrds’ most elevated moments, a tortured soul dead of a heart attack at 46. And also the late Townes Van Zandt, the great lost son of country music. Like Clark, Van Zandt was an alcoholic and a drug addict as well, Dylan, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard among the many to have covered his aching songs.

Theirs and other compositions on
Raising Sand
were ballads, slow dances and hoedowns, each one as pared as the next, a skeletal framework for the two lead voices, both of them gentle and intimate like lovers on a first date. Krauss otherworldly, Plant not just emoting the words now, but crawling down inside each song and inhabiting it. He sang exquisitely, perhaps better than he had ever done—as convincing on the playful Everly Brothers track “Gone, Gone, Gone” as he was on Van Zandt’s desolate “Nothin’ ” or his own “Please Read the Letter,” reworked here as the softest incantation.

It would be another year before
Raising Sand
came out, and then it was amid all the fanfare of another Led Zeppelin reunion, although it would not get lost. Plant had written a line in the album credits that read: “Gratitude to T-Bone and the Blue Glow who steered an old dog to new tricks.”

“How much Mr. Burnett was able to say, ‘No, sing it like this,’ I don’t know,” says Benji LeFevre, Plant’s old friend and sound engineer, laughing at the thought. “I’m sure that he did but I’d loved to have been a fly on the wall at those sessions. Either way, it was the first thing Robert had done since Zeppelin that really blew my socks off.

“It was like he’d found something at last. He’d had the courage to sing songs that were in the range of his voice now, because he can’t do that wail any more, and he sounded fantastic.”

“Making that record was incredibly nerve-racking,” Plant told me. “Because the challenge of it was just that, can an old dog ever really learn new tricks? Hey presto! I was born again.”

20

GONE, GONE, GONE

What better way to sign off? Twenty million applications for tickets.

In 2007 pop culture’s Richter scale got nudged hard and often. By the unveiling of Apple’s iPhone and the 400th episode of TV’s
The Simpsons
. Or by Spanish actor Javier Bardem’s Oscar-winning portrayal of sadistic killer Anton Chigurh in the Coen Brothers’ film
No Country for Old Men
. From music there was the rise of Amy Winehouse and a spate of reunions by British groups—the Police, the Spice Girls, Pink Floyd at London’s Live Earth concert, and also Led Zeppelin.

Of them all, Zeppelin’s comeback had the most seismic impact. The band’s return for a single concert at London’s O2 Arena at the end of the year sparked an almighty scrum for tickets, many millions around the world entering an online ballot for the 18,000 available. The gig itself was a worldwide news event. Zeppelin’s myth had inflated exponentially in the two decades since Live Aid and the Atlantic Records concert, the memories of those rotten performances all but forgotten. Having once been reviled by critics, they were feted now as one of the greatest rock bands of all time, if not the greatest.

In that intervening period nothing had served to burnish the band’s aura more than Plant’s repeated refusals to regroup with them. The more he put it off and the longer Zeppelin remained silent, the more substantial they seemed in hindsight. Of course, bringing a version of Zeppelin back to life was one thing, living up to a legend quite another.

The challenge of doing so was the furthest thing from Plant’s mind as 2006 slipped into 2007. Having completed work on
Raising Sand
with Alison Krauss he went home to the Midlands and resurrected another of his former bands, although the Honeydrippers came back without fanfare for a couple of concerts in the Black Country. The first of these, at Kidderminster Town Hall in December 2006, Plant had organized to raise money for one of his neighbors to have life-saving treatment for a brain tumor. Two months later the band played JB’s club in the town of Dudley to mark the 60th birthday of Plant’s long-serving sound engineer Roy Williams.

Plant had called up his former guitarist Robbie Blunt as well as Andy Silvester for these gigs, both of them members of the original Honeydrippers whom he had toured with in 1981. The line-up was completed by keyboardist Mark Stanway, a friend of Plant’s who played in a local rock band, Magnum, and a rhythm section made up of two part-time musicians whom he knew from his village pub. There was a familiar ring to how Plant prepared this group. Rehearsals took place in the barn adjoining his house, the set of vintage rock ’n’ roll and R&B tunes they worked up pulled from his record collection.

At the Dudley gig Jeff Beck turned up to do an unannounced opening slot. Just like the previous date in Kidderminster, the venue was heaving that night and the vibe intended to be knockabout, although Plant’s idea of such things extended only so far.

“Robert wasn’t all that chuffed after the JB’s show,” reveals local journalist John Ogden. “He didn’t think it had been good enough musically and he was a bit grouchy about the band not hitting the standard he’d expected.”

“The size of the audience doesn’t matter to him but it’s got to be of a certain quality,” agrees Mark Stanway. “Robert’s got too much of a reputation to protect. He’s a perfectionist and he’ll let you know if it’s not what he wants—straight away. Robbie, Andy and I are long in the tooth now, so he was never on our case, but bear in mind that the bassist and the drummer weren’t pros.”

Plant remained sequestered in his Midlands sanctuary as winter turned to spring. He cajoled Stanway, Blunt and also Roy Williams into joining him in another of his local endeavors, the team he entered for his village pub’s weekly quiz night.

“There was us, a table of regular guys from the pub, and a team of women that won the quiz every week,” Stanway recalls. “If the question was on football or music, Robert was the man. He’s got such a wealth of knowledge of pre-’65 music. He can name all the players in each band and every B-side. Although oddly, he can’t remember a single word of any song he has to sing. Everything has to be written down for him. He’s got a hell of a library stashed out at his house, too, all the original classic sides. It must be worth a fortune.

“One week, I remember there was this question: ‘If you add up the numbers on a roulette table, what do they come to?’ The answer is 666. I just happened to know that and wrote it down straight away. Robert went, ‘Really? I’ve got to tell the Dark Lord!’ Next thing, he’s got his mobile out and he’s on the phone to Jimmy Page.”

Plant and Page were already in touch about another matter, that of Led Zeppelin’s return. Ahmet Ertegun, their champion at Atlantic Records from 1968, had died the previous December following a fall backstage at a Rolling Stones concert in New York. The eighty-three-year-old’s widow, Mica, intended staging a tribute show in her late husband’s honor and asked that Zeppelin headline it. Even in death Ertegun’s influence was enough to persuade Plant to do things others could not.

To begin with the band’s principals envisaged doing something as terse as their previous comeback sets had been, a handful of songs and off. They got together in London that June for a first rehearsal, Jason Bonham again joining them on drums. Plant, Page and Jones had rust to shake off, but the younger Bonham had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Zeppelin’s and his father’s work.

“I’ve known Jason since he was 18 months old, when his dad and mum were living in a caravan,” Plant later told Phil Alexander of
Mojo.
“We go back a long way. He came to the rehearsals without any of the trappings, except for the fact that he’s historically obsessive, which to me is such a yawn. I mean, who cares what the fuck the difference is between night one somewhere and night two somewhere else? You just play it and then go away.”

Plant fled such irritations later that month, taking off with his Strange Sensation band for shows around Europe and North Africa. After these were done he called time on that particular group. He might then also have reflected on how he had never been able to do the same with Led Zeppelin.

The O2 show was announced on September 12, 2007 and originally scheduled for the end of November. The following month
Raising Sand
was released. Expectations for it were slight, a measure of Plant’s standing at the time being the fact that it was almost cursorily, though positively, reviewed in Rolling Stone. The magazine afforded it the same amount of space as records by the Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour and an American indie rock band, Les Savy Fav, focusing much more on the Eagles’ first new album in twenty-eight years and on Radiohead’s
In Rainbows
.

Raising Sand
eclipsed both of those records. It entered the U.S. and U.K. charts at Number Two and by the end of the year had sold over two million copies, driven as much as anything by the old-fashioned phenomenon of word of mouth. Plant had not enjoyed a success like this for more than twenty years and he was as surprised by it as anyone. Zeppelin’s rehearsals for the O2 show had been ongoing and the idea had expanded to it being a full-blown set. There had also been discussions about a tour.

Yet if Plant had been hedging his bets to begin with he was soon enough resolved as to what to do—and not just by the acclaim being heaped upon
Raising Sand
. Within the Zeppelin camp old tensions had resurfaced. He and Page were bickering over the proposed set list, and the prospect of there being greater riches to follow had lent the whole enterprise an unsavory edge.

“The early days were very hush-hush. Other than the band and the crew there was no one else about,” says Roy Williams, running the sound at rehearsals and later the O2 gig itself. “When they decided to do a full show that all changed. Not among the group, but the various managers started coming in and vying for position. Part of that was that Bill Curbishley had once managed Robert and Jimmy, but Jimmy had now moved to another company, Q-Prime, with Peter Mensch.

“I remember driving past Wembley Stadium with the crew one morning and one of the guys said, ‘This time next year we’ll be in there.’ I was thinking, ‘I don’t know about that.’ With Robert the nature of the beast is to be inquisitive.

“Alison Krauss once said she got scared whenever he went into a record shop because she didn’t know what he was going to come out with or be thinking. That’s what he’s all about—he pursues music a little bit further. Like when he and Jimmy worked with the Moroccan musicians, that was more at Robert’s instigation.”

“Robert really, really didn’t want to do that reunion,” says Benji LeFevre. “He called me up about it several times. Reading between the lines and through the conversations that we had I could tell he was apprehensive about it before they even got together. Then there were things that happened in the run-up to the gig that were just so predictable. But what better way to sign off? Twenty million applications for tickets.”

As the O2 date loomed and rehearsals for it became more intense, Plant had to go off and promote
Raising Sand
. The success of the album had placed more demands on his time and this added to the tension surrounding the Zeppelin reunion.

One man, at least, was happy. More than four years since he had first approached Plant about it, TV executive Bill Flanagan got to make his
Crossroads
show for the country music channel CMT. Plant and Krauss filmed this in Nashville in the run-up to the record’s release, although it wouldn’t be screened until early the next year. For the taping the two of them and T-Bone Burnett assembled the full
Raising Sand
band, adding a third guitarist to it, Buddy Miller. The subsequent performance was striking, musicians at the top of their game combining with two outstanding singers whose voices entwined as if made for each other.

It peaked with two Zeppelin songs, “Black Dog” and “When the Levee Breaks,” both of which were stilled and made into gothic country blues. Krauss sang the latter as a mournful lament, Plant retreating to the shadows and plucking at a guitar. “Black Dog,” with the two of them singing together, was entirely remade, the stripping away of its musical bombast locating something desperate and menacing at the heart of the song. It was now about unrequited lust and pitched like a murder ballad. In a way he was not able to do working with Page on either
No Quarter
or
Walking into Clarksdale
, Plant could dip back here into his past and unshackle himself from it.