Robert Plant: A Life (37 page)

Plant also handed the group songs from his solo career, such as “In the Mood,” and Zeppelin standards like “Tangerine” and “Houses of the Holy,” to have them recast. They felt like new again, but sounded as aged as whiskey matured in an oak cask. This act of transformation served another purpose, of making Plant’s own musical history seem amorphous and constantly evolving.

“We filmed that gig and, man, you should see it,” he enthused to me weeks later. “It’s one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. Like the Band’s
The Last Waltz
but without anyone famous. I was so proud of it.”

Plant and his latest Band of Joy began a full tour in Europe that October, returning to the U.K. at the end of the year and then heading to North America for a six-month run from the start of 2011. I ran into him in London before the tour began, when Band of Joy were filming a performance for the BBC TV show
Later . . . with Jools Holland
. I had gone there to interview Adele, who debuted a new song called “Someone Like You” on the same show. She sung it unaccompanied but for a piano, sucking the air from the studio.

After the filming Adele was standing in her dressing room, surrounded by people from her management and record companies, drinking wine from a plastic cup. Plant swept in unannounced and strode straight up to her, wrapping his arms around her and then kissing her on the cheek. “You know, you make me very proud to be British,” he told her, beaming, and then he was gone again.

Playing with the Band of Joy he became captivated by Patty Griffin. Even before it became known that the two of them had fallen in love, it was obvious that their working relationship was different to the one he had had with Alison Krauss, less formal and much more flirtatious.

“Patty Griffin is a fantastic entity,” he told me. “She’s delicate and charming. She’s a great songwriter and sings like Mavis Staples’s kid sister. And she has this great Irish laugh.

“On stage, whenever I go into character and become that guy from way back,” he said, miming brandishing a microphone stand, tossing his hair back and pouting, “she laughs so much that I have to be him all the more. So then I sidle up to her like Rod Stewart, even more of a caricature.”

“Robert always traveled on the bus with the rest of us,” says Giovino of the tour. “The post-gig drives in America would be the most rowdy, with pretty much everyone in the front lounge of the bus, someone DJ-ing on their iPod and the wine flowing. He seemed to really enjoy it, trading jokes, ball-busting and talking about obscure bands. Though none of us would ever have to ask when his football team had lost.”

The band began the final leg of the tour in Rome in July 2011. On the morning of their show in the city Plant was enjoying a sightseeing trip to the Coliseum with Buddy Miller and Patty Griffin when he took a call from his friend Bob Harris. Having been successfully treated for cancer in 2007, Harris had just then learned that he would require further surgery.

“Robert was deeply sympathetic but he didn’t overreact,” recalls Harris. “Later, through the course of the treatment I was having, one of the doctors mentioned Robert’s name. I didn’t know it but he puts a lot of money into cancer research. When I went back to him about it, he just said, ‘I’ve got all this money sloshing about for Christ’s sake, I may as well do something constructive with it.’

“Throughout that period he phoned me two or three times a day, when he was getting on and off planes, checking that I was all right. He was determined to keep my spirits up and it was phenomenal what he did. When I got the all-clear, the second I told him he said, ‘Brilliant, you don’t need me ringing you every day now.’ And that was it, he stopped.”

The Band of Joy played their last show at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in San Francisco on September 30, 2011. I had met up with Plant in London some time before this and then he had been bright eyed and full of bravado. He had come straight from one of the regular Led Zeppelin business meetings. “Five hours with Pagey,” he said, an inscrutable smile on his face. I asked him where he saw himself heading next and he shrugged, suggesting anything was possible.

“With my career, I think it’s all down to the way the coke was cut in the ’70s,” he added, laughing, before becoming more serious. “Some people think you get to my age and it’s an easy option. Well it isn’t, because I’m learning all the time and sometimes I fuck up really badly. But at least everybody smiles. It’s not the end of the world.”

22

CODA

It’s a very different life that he’s living now.

In February 2013 Plant gave an interview to the Australian TV news show
60 Minutes
. During this the host Tina Brown asked him about being the “bad guy” for not agreeing to tour with Led Zeppelin following their 2007 reunion concert in London. “The other two guys are Capricorns and they keep schtum,” he responded. “But they’re quite contained in their own worlds and they just leave it to me to do this. I’m not the bad guy. You need to speak to the Capricorns because I’ve got nothing to do in 2014.”

Within hours of Plant’s words being broadcast, media outlets around the world were reporting the possibility of Zeppelin re-forming the following year. Yet there was no mention of a second interview he gave to Australian TV the next month, this time to the
Today Tonight
show in Adelaide. Asked if he was genuinely considering rejoining the band, Plant replied, “Well, no. I just said I wasn’t doing anything then. I would definitely rule that out. I’m up for anything that’s new. Just give me a hint of something that’s good fun.”

Not that it ever dulls, but interest in Zeppelin had been stirred toward the end of 2012 by the release of
Celebration Day
, the belated film of their show at the O2 Arena. The film itself was a disappointment, being nothing more than a straight document of the gig. It put neither the event nor Zeppelin into any kind of context, failing to capture the subplots and little intimacies that surrounded both.

Yet it was enough to reunite Plant with Page and Jones, the three of them promoting the film at screenings in New York, London, Berlin and Tokyo that October. A couple of months later they were together again. This time it was in formal evening attire to receive the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, DC, from President Barack Obama in recognition of their contribution to American culture and the arts. In his introductory speech Obama thanked the three of them for behaving themselves, noting their history of “hotel rooms being trashed and mayhem all around them.”

That night’s tribute concert to Zeppelin featured performances from Foo Fighters, Kid Rock and Lenny Kravitz, with Plant, Page and Jones looking on. The highlight of this was an extraordinary version of “Stairway to Heaven” by Ann and Nancy Wilson of the band Heart. Backed by Jason Bonham on drums and, as the song unfolded, also by a gospel choir and a string section, the Wilson sisters reclaimed Zeppelin’s most familiar tune as a grand epic. At its end Plant was caught on camera, apparently wiping a tear from his eye.

During the London press conference to announce
Celebration Day
Plant had been testy but in all other aspects he appeared at ease with this popping back to his past. Latterly, he had seemed more reconciled with it, happy enough to revisit that time so long as he was not expected to stay there. And happier still to be able to keep people guessing.

“The great thing is Robert can do anything now,” says Bill Flanagan from VH1, who had got to know Plant well. “What will he do next? It could be that he’s going to wet his finger, put it up in the air and say, ‘You know, there’s a nice breeze blowing in from Africa, I guess I’ll head off that way.’ Or then, he might think it’d be kind of fun to get up and sing ‘Black Dog’ again.”

“I did a shoot with the three of them in New York on the afternoon of the
Celebration Day
premiere,” recalls photographer Ross Halfin. “The weirdest thing was when they were walking out of the hotel at the end of that, Robert turned to Jimmy and said, ‘We really should do something together.’ Jimmy sort of dismissed it afterward, saying he didn’t mean it. But you never know with them.”

It has been more than thirty years since Zeppelin broke up but an awful lot of people still cling to the hope that they will return, most never having got to see them the first time around. But then, of course they do. In all that grainy concert footage, on the records and through the acres of print devoted to telling the glorious and gory details of their story, Zeppelin seem immeasurably bigger and better than the countless groups that have since taken their place. No matter that they are that much older now, or that one of their number is missing—even the suggestion of what Zeppelin once was would do.

This much has been—and very likely will be—unchanging. So too, however, Plant’s resolve not to give himself up to it again, hardened through the years by the successes he has had on his own. The older he gets the more this appears to be the one thing about which he is intransigent. In all other aspects of his career Plant seems forever open to change and having different experiences. To press on, as if standing still might be the death of him, forward motion being his benediction.

Toward the end of 2013 Plant parted company with his long-serving manager Bill Curbishley, replacing him with his personal assistant Nicola Powell. Although he did not give a reason, it was suggested to me by people who know both men that Plant felt that Curbishley had been too willing to push him back toward Zeppelin. Indeed, Curbishley had instigated his reunion with Page in the 1990s and he appears to have been more enthusiastic than Plant about the group coming back together to promote the
Celebration Day
film.

Plant’s friend, the folk singer Roy Harper, refers to him as “Robust Planet.” “Robert was very wise not to carry on into a dusty, web-strewn grave,” Harper insists. “It’s not something he can recapture and all those things are not as emblematic to him as they would have been in his youth. It’s a very different life that he’s living now.”

In the summer of 2012 Plant formed another new band, calling it the Sensational Shape Shifters. The core of this was the same as that of his previous group, Strange Sensation. Drummer Clive Deamer having joined Radiohead in the interim, Plant brought in Dave Smith, who had been playing North and West African music for years, and added the Gambian musician Juldeh Camara to the lineup.

He debuted the band at shows in the U.K. and the U.S. that July and August, his partner Patty Griffin joining them for some dates. They toured Central and South America in the autumn, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand through the spring of 2013, and the U.S. again the following summer. This particular collective is like a hybrid of all the music Plant has fixated on, repurposing Zeppelin songs and old blues and folk standards, mixing in the Americana influences of his most recent records and also the very differing sounds of North Africa and ’60s psychedelic rock.

Although there were no original songs in their sets their feel was fresh and unpredictable, the heat of reinvention warming them. Plant delighted most of all in overhauling the Zeppelin canon. In these hands “Black Dog” became a desert blues, “Heartbreaker” like a ’90s techno track and “Gallows Pole” music for a whirling dervish.

For the first time in nearly a decade Plant has also been writing songs, and with different people again. During the last couple of years he has worked up a bunch of material with guitarist Buddy Miller and another of his last Band of Joy musicians, drummer Marco Giovino.

“I’m in touch with Robert a lot, and six months after the Band of Joy tour ended we began trading ideas back and forth,” says Giovino. “Not long ago we met up at Buddy’s house here in Nashville. I’d sent Robert some drum loops that I’d made up at home and he’d been jotting down ideas to go with them.

“It’s definitely different to the Band of Joy record, rockier and with more of an edge to it. I was witness to a lot of what Robert’s writing about while we were on the road because he’s talked about his relationship with Patty on a couple of the songs.”

Added to this Plant and Patty Griffin have been writing together. One of the tracks resulting from this, “Highway Song,” appeared on Griffin’s excellent
American Kid
album of May 2013 and Plant sang on another, “Ohio.” Both songs are bare, gentle and graceful, with Plant’s voice whispering through them like the wind. “We each have similar places we come from as singers,” Griffin told
Billboard
at the time of its release. “He inspires me. He goes far and deep.”

Plant has taken the Sensational Shape Shifters into the studio, too. He intends releasing a new album in 2014. The measure both of how far it is that he ranges and how freely he roams is that he could make this record with this band, or with the Band of Joy or Patty Griffin, or with someone or something else. Likewise, there are no boundaries to its musical remit; it could just as easily head for the Appalachians or the Sahara again as another place entirely.

Fifty years since he first started singing and performing in bands Plant still so obviously gets off on music, and he continues to cast around for different ways of experiencing it. These other ongoing projects aside, in the last year or so he has also sung with the Texas-based folk singer Amy Cook on a track titled “It’s Gonna Rain” on her
Summer Skin
album, and on the British rock band Primal Scream’s most recent record,
More Light.

“This is what knocks me out. There are a just a handful of people that have had the experience and accomplishment that Robert Plant has had,” says Flanagan. “There’s thirty, forty, at tops fifty of them in the world in that pantheon. First of all, most of them are smart because you don’t survive if you’re not. The dumb ones have either died or gone bankrupt. But usually, the passionate love of music that got them there in the first place has cooled.

“Success sidetracks people in a lot of different ways, not all of them bad. It’s not just that they get greedy and have to support their six mansions and their private planes, running off with groupies and getting divorced. People also get pulled from music by doing charity work, making movies, writing books and collecting art. You very, very rarely meet someone like Plant, who is still just as fanatical about music after forty years at the top. That’s almost unprecedented.”