31

And What Should Never Be

My peers may flirt with cabaret, some fake the rebel yell / I'm moving up to higher ground, I must escape their hell.

—Robert Plant, “Tin Pan Valley” (2005)

ED BICKNELL (former Dire Straits manager) Right before the O2 show, I ran into Robert at Ronnie Scott's and he said something like, “I'm going to go on tour with Alison Krauss, and if Jimmy doesn't like it, he can fuck off. ” But he kind of grinned as he said it. In my recollection, he also said something like, “Jimmy wants to go out and play the greatest hits, whereas I want to write some new songs and make a new record.” And that seemed to be the nub of the difference.

GYL CORRIGAN-DEVLIN (friend of Plant's) Robert is afraid of looking like he doesn't have anything new to offer. And I hope that maybe now he's proved himself in this area—and proved that he can sing and not just yell—he might say, “Okay, let's go, I can do it.” But he's also afraid of looking foolish. He thinks Mick Jagger looks silly when he's strutting around.

Robert is probably at his happiest traipsing around old churches and cemeteries. It's like an alter ego that goes onstage. He probably can't even remember who that Led Zeppelin guy was.

ALISON KRAUSS (Plant's partner on Raising Sand) When I first met him at a Leadbelly tribute, I saw that big hairdo [and] I said, “Robert.” He turns around, he's got these glasses on, and he goes, “There you are.” And the first thing he starts talking about is Ralph Stanley. He's very passionate about music. We were riding around making the record, and he goes, “Do you think something's wrong with me? My kids say, ‘We want a real dad, can't you be a normal dad?' and I'm like, ‘They're going to be waiting a long time.'”

ROY WILLIAMS (sound engineer for Plant) There was a guy who did a show called Crossroads for CMT, and they would invite two people from different genres. Alison was due to do something with Steven Tyler, but it had all fallen through. So the guy had sent this letter to Robert and asked if he might be interested. That brought them together. And then Alison brought T Bone Burnett into the frame.

ROBERT PLANT With Raising Sand, I finally wanted to visit the America I've always loved musically. And I just had to believe I could do something I'd never tried before. That's the challenge, to go to a new land and be prepared to take the risk, be prepared to make a mistake. Be prepared for anything, really—Gene Clark's “Polly,” for instance. When I first heard my vocal on that, I went, “My God, is that me?” It's such a beautiful song, and I'd never sung lyrics, I don't think, that are so poignant.

ROY WILLIAMS Alison's expression on the first show was like a rabbit caught in the headlights. But then we realized that the fear of it being two audiences was unnecessary: most people were coming for that album. The fourth gig in, we realized, “There's an audience here for this.” It became almost churchlike.

ROBERT PLANT Alison is just a miracle. There was no real “Let's do it like this.” The two of us step up to the microphone, and she's amazing, she can just follow my voice. She said, on “When the Levee Breaks,” “If you want to go up, I'll come with you; just give me one split second …”

GYL CORRIGAN-DEVLIN Alison is like a petal, very sweet and delicate, everything very feminine. There was nothing rock chick about her, which I thought was very cool. Robert picks up the tambourine and starts banging it, and you could hear Alison whispering to him, “Tell me what to do.” She was in awe of him, but he was in awe of her.

JAAN UHELSZKI (writer for MOJO, Harp and other publications) I saw Robert with Alison in Berkeley, and I thought, “He shouldn't be playing second fiddle to anyone…. This is subverting his power into some idyllic Americana dream that he has, and I think he's so much bigger than that.” I was shocked that he was kind of making fun of Zeppelin, albeit in a very charming way. If it hadn't been him doing this kind of pastiche of Zeppelin songs, I'd have gone, “How dare you.” It was very cute, but cute doesn't stand anywhere near monolithic.

ROBERT PLANT With everything I've done solo-wise, I've looked back and I've sort of mimicked and smiled at the Zeppelin thing a little impishly. But that's my prerogative.

ROY WILLIAMS I'm pleased for his success because it just came naturally, and no one expected it. I know that they got back together for a while with T Bone, and what I do know is that Alison said to Robert, “There's nothing wrong with killing the goose that laid the golden egg.” They went to Nashville, and it wasn't quite working, and everyone else had their other schedules, so that's why nothing continued with Alison.

ROBERT PLANT It wasn't Raising Sand, it was Raising Hell. We had a few songs, but they weren't as immediate. Alison also wanted to do something more contemporary, so she went back to her band Union Station. Our record captured a moment, and I'm sure we'll have others.

JOHN OGDEN (former pop writer for the Birmingham Express and Star) Robert can walk 'round town, and nobody will bother him. He's got his mates, and if they go out on the town, they all pay the round. There's no superstar thing about it at all. If he ever intimidates people, it's only by his presence, not his attitude.

GYL CORRIGAN-DEVLIN When you go and stay with him, everyone is like, “Morning, Planty!” It's like, “Don't be pulling your rock-god stuff here.” When he goes to the pub, people go out of their way to ignore him.

ROY WILLIAMS I think it's the nature of the Black Country that the people here are reasonably grounded. If Robert was stepping out of line, somebody would tell him. When he got his CBE, he was down the pub, and everybody was saluting him and calling him “My liege.” It's the same when he goes down the Wolves. He's in the stands, and people are saying, “Still doin' a bit of singin', are we, Planty?”

DAVID BATES (former A&R man for Page and Plant; friend of Plant's) I called Robert up to congratulate him just after he'd been made vice president or whatever it is of Wolves, because I knew how much that meant to him. He gets great pleasure and great pain from that club. And it always rankled with him, I think, that Wolves never really recognized him. The new owner, when he came in, realized that Robert in PR terms has done an awful lot for them. I said to him, “Well done, but let's look at you and Raising Sand now. You've finally done it. You are no longer just ‘Robert Plant, formerly of Led Zeppelin.'” I think he was touched by that.

Billy Wright Stand, Molineux, spring 2010. (Art Sperl)

MAC POOLE (drummer and old friend of Bonham's) Robert was always smooth, always able to charm everybody. But he still had the Black Country manner. All the fame and fortune, it's all bollocks, and he knows that.

ROBERT PLANT I'm still moving in the same space with the same people that I was forty-odd years ago. I'm able to go to a class reunion where everybody will take the piss out of me. I think my luck has been that I've always believed in the strength of family. There's nothing noble about that, but it's a better drug than anything you can buy.

KEVYN GAMMOND (former guitarist in the Band of Joy and Priory of Brion) I don't think Robert likes the darker edge that I do. I remember asking if he wanted to come over and watch Lars von Trier's Antichrist, and he said no thank you very much. He likes happier things, I think because he's had a lot of sadness in his life.

GUY PRATT (bassist in Coverdale/Page) Robert's arguments for not doing Zeppelin again stand up: it's a young man's job, and he says he can't get his shoulders back that far. On the stuff that he's doing, he sounds like a man who is very comfortable in his own skin. I feel sorry for Jimmy, and I'd do anything to see them together again.

JAAN UHELSZKI I think Jimmy has one big move left, and I hope that he can get to it in time. I applaud Robert for going forward, but maybe in my time capsule I want to remember those guys in Valhalla. I feel like a child of divorce who's still hoping my parents will get back together.

UNITY MacLEAN (former manager of Swan Song office in the U.K.) There is life after Led Zeppelin, according to Robert. Whereas Jimmy hasn't found it. It's ironic because Jimmy was always the one who loved to explore. Jimmy is stuck, and I think it's partly because he's a loner. He's always been alone in his room, instead of getting out there and socializing.

EDDIE KRAMER (engineer on Led Zeppelin II and Houses of the Holy) I just wish Jimmy would make something really significant today. I think he's living in the past. Robert is flexible, and Jimmy is not. Jimmy has one vision, and that's it. I admire Robert so much for having taken all those musical chances. Experimenting, trying different things. The thing that he did with Alison Krauss is bloody marvelous. You hear the Zeppelin influences very clearly, but it's different. It's not Led Zeppelin.

KEVYN GAMMOND Jimmy has kept the Zep flag flying. If you go into any W.H. Smith, there's always a magazine cover with him on it, whether it's Record Collector or a guitar mag. And in some ways it's kind of sad, because he was capable of going with someone like Scott Walker and doing some really interesting stuff—as opposed to working with Paul Rodgers or the Black Crowes or whoever it is.

JANE AYER (former press officer, Atlantic Records) When you look at Eric Clapton or Jeff Beck, who are always out there and touring and collaborating, you think, “Where's Jimmy?”

GUY PRATT For “Whole Lotta Love,” we went into Olympic Studios 2, where they'd recorded the original, and they had all the original amps. And then Leona Lewis came in and sang it. My little joke is that it seems a bit shorter than the original, and I suddenly realized why. They had to leave the last verse out because nobody had the heart to tell Leona there is no female equivalent of a back door man.

I'm the bloke who accidentally leaked the name of the song to the press in my blog. I put a little footnote, saying, “Oh, by the way when Leona Lewis and Jimmy Page do ‘Whole Lotta Love,' that's me playing bass on it.” I was woken at six o' clock in the morning by a lawyer in Beijing. In the Sun, I was the appropriately named “Mr. Pratt.”

Jimmy didn't want anything to do with me. When I saw him after that, about two years later, he said, “We're not talking to you.” And he made me fucking tap-dance for about five minutes before he would speak to me. There's a certain type of pop star who just loves to be upset with people: “Just give me a reason to be upset.”

Other than that, it was absolutely fine. I've done all sorts of stuff with Jimmy over the years and remain incredibly fond of him. He came to my book launch, and we had a very nice chat and he forgave me. He told me the terrible tale of Michael Lee, who spent the last fucking two years of his life homeless, alcoholic, and epileptic. Jimmy was saying he'd gone up to the funeral in Darlington. I thought it was very sweet of him to go.

LORI MATTIX (former L.A. groupie) Jimmy did sell his soul. So many bad things happened, and I think Jimmy thought it was kind of his curse. In a way, his sobriety was making amends to himself, because he felt like a lot of it he brought on.

MARTIN STONE (guitarist and book dealer) Jimmy today, clean and sober, doesn't seem like someone who would be drawing pentagrams. Recovery is about shedding the ego, whereas all that Crowley stuff seems to be about expanding and inflating it.

BRAD TOLINKSI I just want to hear Jimmy play music and do something creative, and I think Robert's success has helped awaken some of those impulses.

MICHAEL DES BARRES (former lead singer of Silverhead and Detective) Jimmy now has to capitulate to Robert's needs and wishes. Robert is a six-Grammy winner with three million sales who does not want to sing about squeezing lemons anymore. That being said, Jimmy is now sober, and I think he accepts what is going on. Is he sitting at home wishing he was playing at Madison Square Garden? Probably not. I think in the documentary with Jack White and the Edge, you can see that he's at peace.

JACK WHITE (singer-guitarist with the White Stripes and other bands) Songwriting-wise, I was coming from the same places that Jimmy and Robert were—Robert Johnson, Tommy Johnson, Blind Willie McTell. We were feeding from the same trough. Like, “If you want this to be powerful and feed from these same influences, there are going to be moments where you sound like Led Zeppelin.” So then it was, “Oh, well, maybe it does sound like that, but I know in my heart I didn't sit down and try and copy Led Zeppelin. So what do we do? Do we leave them off the record?”

ROBERT PLANT I love the way that Jack in his interviews says, “Robert Plant is the thing I least liked about Led Zeppelin.” And I think, “Well, that's fine, boy, but if you're gonna play ‘In My Time of Dying,' listen to the master … or even to ‘Jesus Gonna Make Up My Dying Bed' from 1930. I tell you, there's no Blind Willie Johnson there. But you know, that sound hasn't really been heard in the contemporary world, in bedsit-college land, since 1970. So its sudden reemergence via the White Stripes was, like, “Hey, what's that?”

LORI MATTIX Robert wanted to prove his success on his own, and he did it. Now that's out of the way, he might just go there, because he would like that adoration one more time. He'll never get that unless he does that coliseum shit again.

ROY WILLIAMS From the physical point of view, Robert can keep on pursuing this musical adventure that he has got and know full well that he has control of his environment, rather than go back into that Zeppelin thing and not be in control because of the expectations.

ROBERT PLANT I'd love to work with Jimmy and John Paul, but I don't see how we could give it anything constructive without falling back into the sort of general melée of everybody's expectations. It would be good to see what happened, but that means that you reinvoke that tired old harness. And I'm very, very happy where I am musically. I've reached that stage where the old guard has given up, and there's a new crowd out there that gives you far more energy and response when you play.

HENRY SMITH (former Zeppelin roadie) Robert knows he can't do Zeppelin the way people would want it to be done. And that's no disrespect to him; it's just what happens with age. You just can't hit those higher registers, and for a band like Zeppelin to take a song down a half-step, you lose the energy and feel of a song. And there's no way Robert would ever allow that to happen.

JACK CALMES (Showco) There's all kinds of speculation on why Robert Plant won't do Zeppelin again. I think there's probably a little bit of the old “Something bad's going to happen if I do this again,” but also a little bit of “I don't need to do it—I've got a good career going.”

DANNY MARKUS (former artist relations man, Atlantic Records) I've been on those One Show Too Many tours, and there's everything to lose and very little to gain. Led Zeppelin sell a million a year without ever doing anything, so why screw with that?

PHIL CARSON (former head of Atlantic Records in Europe) It doesn't matter what Jimmy or Robert ever do in life separately or how successful it becomes. That magic when they're together takes it to a different level. And neither of them can get away from that fact.

• • •

AUBREY POWELL (designer and cofounder of Hipgnosis) Robert and Jimmy will always be joined at the hip by Zeppelin, but they will never embrace it again in the way they did.

BENJI LeFEVRE (former Zeppelin technician and producer of Robert Plant's) It would be so interesting to have a candid conversation with the three of them sitting there and know that they were over it all and able to talk about it. Clearly, they aren't.

KIM FOWLEY (L.A. producer and scenester) In the twenty-first century, there'll never be another Led Zeppelin, because there'll never be four geniuses in a band again. It's a different time and a different environment.

JIMMY PAGE The music was never in fashion, in a way, and it was never meant to be in fashion. It was meant to be there, and it's still there, so that part of it is right and has triumphed. All the other things are relative to, “Oh, so-and-so did this in a hotel.” But the bottom line of it is what the music is all about.

JOHN PAUL JONES Listening to Zeppelin music now, it only dates because of the recording techniques—the amount of bass drum there is and so on. The music itself is timeless.

ROBERT PLANT I was part of something magnificent that broke the Guinness Book of Records, but in the end, what are you going to get out of it? Who are you doing it for? You have to ask these questions: Who pays the piper, and what is valuable in this life? I don't want to scream “Immigrant Song” every night for the rest of my life, and I'm not sure I could.

DANNY GOLDBERG (former president of Swan Song in the U.S.) My guess, and it's only a guess—again, I have no inside information—is that sometime in the next five years, Robert will call Jimmy and John Paul, and they'll do a tour. I think it's just as valuable to the marketplace now as it would have been in 2009. It's still a billion-dollar tour. It's still an extraordinary opportunity.