Chapter 29

Robert Plant

When I got the invitation to record the new Robert Plant / Alison Krauss record, I was excited. Led Zeppelin was one of my favorite bands growing up, so it was a big deal for me to work with Robert Plant. Robert and Alison had already recorded the album once with producer T Bone Burnett, who had also produced Raising Sand, their very successful first record. They weren’t content with the new album and had abandoned the material, until now.

I set up my studio in the front entranceway of Bella Vista mansion, in Silver Lake. There was a full studio downstairs in the dungeon-like basement with a Neve 8068, but I preferred to use my rig with all my GP2 BL99 custom preamps. I set up the studio facing the winding staircase. There were beautiful stained-glass windows with a scene of a forest with tall pine trees behind the stairs. The entranceway had high ceilings with hand-plastered walls. There was some echoing, but that made it great for singing, and it sounded better than the dungeon studio below.

The room makes all the difference when it comes to recording. The bottom line is if the room sounds great, then your recordings will be great. There is nothing worse than trying to get a great sound out of a bad room.

There were some complications with scheduling, so Robert and Alison couldn’t make it to the studio at the same time. Robert happened to be in L.A. seeing a new doctor. He arrived on time at noon, carrying a leather satchel and a book about William Blake, his favorite poet. Pointing to his satchel, he said, “These are all the songs of all the women I have loved and hated.”

Robert Plant is a tall, thick man with a mane of hair like a lion’s. He was wearing cool cowboy boots, and I asked if he’d gotten them in Spain.

His response? “No. I got them on Sunset.”

I was somehow disappointed.

We started the sessions with a small crew. It was Daryl Johnson on bass and vocals, Dan on guitar, and because we had no drummer, I used drum loops that I had in my personal collection. Robert was infatuated with Africa and its rhythms. He made us watch a show he had done there with some African musicians; he said he wanted to create something like it. I used a piece of one of my rhythms and looped it so they could play on top of it. Daryl layered some hand drums on it, as well as a little string part. Dan laid a big guitar hook on it using his ’50s Les Paul Goldtop guitar and his Vox AC30 amp. The song was called “Beautiful Girl.”

At the time, Trixie Whitley was staying at Bella Vista. We had just completed the Black Dub album that she was the singer on. I asked her if she would sing a little on the track to model what it would be like to have Alison sing on it. It was a magical pairing between Robert’s voice, Dan’s band, and Trixie.

Trixie would sing a verse and Robert would sing the chorus, then they would split verses and choruses. Daryl and Robert had stacked beautiful vocal “awws” that I set in the background. Robert sang the chorus with the power of a Zeppelin song.

The chorus went: “The bird of the fire in the eyes of a beautiful girl, the silver and gold to the feel of a beautiful girl.”

It really sounded great. I tried one of my vocal sounds on his voice, but Robert asked me to take it off.

“I don’t use that Phil Collins AMS delay sound,” he said. “I prefer long echoes and reverb.”

I came up with a sound he loved. Because we were moving fast, I was using a handheld Shure Beta 58 microphone on his vocal, with it coming out of the speakers so he could get immediate satisfaction.

The Bella Vista sessions, with Daryl Johnson, Daniel Lanois, and Robert Plant. © Trixie Whitley

On another song, I pulled out a loop that I had made with a drum beat from Brady Blade and a guitar riff from the late Chris Whitley. It was a heavy rock riff and Robert loved it. Robert went scrounging through his satchel of lyrics looking for something that would fit. He then looked through the William Blake book in which he found the line “a thousand sleepless nights.” It was perfect, and Robert penned some lyrics right on the spot to complete the verses.

Robert was a little shy about singing up high like he did on the Zeppelin records. On the other Plant / Krauss record, he sang down low and never ventured out of that range, it being a safety zone for him. Toward the end of this new song, he was hitting those high notes like in the Zeppelin days. I asked him to try a track of just the high parts for the end.

“I can’t sing up there anymore,” he insisted.

“You were just hitting them and you sounded great,” I told him.

He agreed to try and pulled off an amazing ending, still able to reach those notes.

I got Trixie to sing on the chorus with Robert, and it was also a beautiful blend. It was poignant and a little haunting that her late father was playing guitar on the track.

Robert had a ballad he wanted to try, and I used another loop of Brady Blade’s younger brother Brian’s slowed-down drum that I called “elephant drums.” It was an intimate song with a fragile-sounding vocal. The song had lyrics about Oklahoma nights and the chorus lyric was “the stranger is too perfect.” It was a moving, stripped-down track with just the slow drums, a beautiful pedal steel part, and Robert’s heartfelt vocal.

In our downtime, Robert told stories of being in L.A. while on tour with Zeppelin. Oddly enough, the only song he hated singing was “Stairway to Heaven.” He said he really couldn’t connect to the lyrics.

He told us that John Bonham was a wild man who would get all liquored up and go to the Whisky a Go Go and heckle the drummers, yelling, “You’re crap!”

Robert said he did cocaine with others and by himself, and in those days the coke was so strong that his whole face was frozen most of the time. It was at this time that he received the news that his son had died, and from that point on he stopped doing all drugs. The tour was postponed while Robert went back home to grieve his son. He said the only one who came to visit him during this period was John Bonham.

Robert was concerned that Zeppelin had not been giving credit to some of the blues singers they were copying, and Jimmy Page told him not to worry about it. Later in life, they did credit some of the legendary blues artists.

Robert told us that he didn’t usually go backstage to say hello to other artists, but one time he got invited backstage to meet Neil Young, so he decided he would go. He was ushered backstage to Neil’s dressing room and went inside. When Neil saw him, he called out, “Richard!” and waved him over.

Robert said that he didn’t correct him.

Down the line, while I was working on Neil Young’s record, I mentioned the story Robert had told me, about Neil calling Robert “Richard.” Eric, Neil’s road manager, laughed and said, “Oh . . . that night.”

“Yes, I might have been a little stoned when that happened,” Neil said to me, smiling but a little embarrassed.

In the movie This Is Spinal Tap, there is a scene in which the band is lost under the stadium and can’t find their way to the stage, and Robert told us that that really did happen to Led Zeppelin. They were down there for ages looking for the way to the stage.

Robert said a lot of the Zeppelin money went out as fast as it came in, going out the window to pay for things like limos that sat outside 24/7 waiting on them, among other money being squandered. Robert surprised us by saying that Led Zeppelin wasn’t a rock band, that they were really a folk band at heart, citing their use of folk instruments like dulcimers to prove his point.

“I don’t know why Page and Jonesy are doing these silly records with these bands these days,” Robert sighed.

Once Bonham died, that was the end of Zeppelin. He was the sound of Zeppelin, and no one else could match it. Robert said that Bonham lived a humble life in a house in the country with his little dog and was just another regular at the local pub.

One day, I had my 1948 Vincent Rapide motorcycle parked in front of the studio, and Robert commented that his uncle used to have one. He’d looked up to his uncle like a hero.

“When he would pull up on his Vincent, it was like seeing Marlon Brando pulling up.” Robert smiled. “If you had a Vincent in those days, you were like royalty.”

Robert felt a Vincent was like the Aston Martin of motorcycles. He had bought a 1965 Aston Martin DB5 at the height of his career, and it was his favorite car, even to that day. In Europe, every boy dreamed of owning a Vincent. In North America, the Vincent is a little-known bike, but in England, it’s revered. I’ve ridden every bike known, and riding a Vincent feels like a riding a horse. Most bikes have shocks in the back, but the Vincent has a cantilever rear suspension, and so it pivots in the center and feels like it’s breathing. It was a dream come true to own one, and riding it was the pinnacle for me. At one time, Vincent was the fastest production motorcycle on the planet, and in 1948 a man named Rollie Free broke the U.S. national motorcycle speed record in Utah, riding the first Vincent Black Lightning at the Bonneville Salt Flats, doing 151 miles per hour. Every detail of the bike is perfection and made to last the test of time, not cobbled together on an assembly line.

On the table in the pool room were a bunch of photos by Paolo Roversi, an Italian fashion photographer. Roversi had shot a series of photos of a Russian model, Natalia Vodianova, naked on a couch. The photos looked timeless, and it was impossible to tell if they were old or new. I asked Robert what he thought of them. He immediately said the model was too young for him and that if he was ever seen with a women that young, he’d be a laughing stock.

“I would need to be with a woman in her thirties at least,” he said.

Robert’s assistant, a beautiful Welsh woman named Nicola, would come by after the sessions were over to have a listen and a drink. Like Robert, she also had a nice set of cowboy boots, but I was afraid to ask her where she got them. She drank straight vodka and handled it well. I would walk them out at the end of the night, down the driveway. One night, on the way out, Nicola asked me if the Vincent was my bike. I was surprised — and pretty impressed — that she knew what it was.

“It’s only the best motorcycle in the world,” she said.

We stood by the bike as Robert and Dan carried on down the drive. Dan was there at night also.

She said, “You must take me for a ride one day,” and I told her I would.

Just as she was about to leave, she kissed me good night, but it turned into a little more than just a kiss. All of a sudden, I heard Robert yelling, “Hey! What you doing?”

My heart sank. I was busted for kissing the client’s assistant. We stopped and laughed, and she carried on down the driveway, but I could hear Robert saying, “Nic, what are you doing?” I was afraid that she had gotten into trouble.

The next day, I sent her a message commenting on what a lovely evening we’d had.

I got a message back that read, “Yes, it was nice, and I hope you have fun with your Russian friend.”

Obviously, Robert had told her about the photos I showed him and must have said something to make her leave that comment. I didn’t reply to the Russian comment but later she revealed she was just taking the piss out of me.

Nicola ended up becoming Robert’s manager and we still are friends. When they come through town, she always invites me to the shows. I still owe her that ride on my motorcycle.

I recorded five songs with Robert that were great. Sadly, the record didn’t materialize and the Alison sessions didn’t go very well. When it was time for Alison to come in, she was suffering from migraines. We had assembled a band of local musicians. I was still set up in the front entrance of Bella Vista. Steve Nistor was the drummer, and I had set him up under the stairs. To calm the drum sound a bit, I put the drums in a tent made out of Indian tapestries; it made the drums very dry and punchy.

The first record Robert and Alison had done was cover songs that T Bone had picked. They had covered one of Tom Waits’s songs, “Trampled Rose,” from the Real Gone album I’d done. Dan was offering his songs to Alison, but she didn’t want to do them. He had gone out and got his own William Blake book and had pulled the line “Surely you were meant to be mine” out of it. He tried to get her to sing this new song he’d just written, but Alison said she wasn’t feeling it and that she wanted to do a bluegrass song that she liked.

Dan didn’t like not getting his way and sometimes reminded me of a bratty kid, and he said, “Fine.”

Dan’s uncomfortable behavior was making Alison feel like she didn’t want to be in the studio. In the end, Dan ended up getting Trixie Whitley to sing “Surely” for the Black Dub record and Trixie really nailed it. Alison sang like an angel but she was insecure about her vocals, always saying she hated them. She needed a lot of reinforcement and Dan wasn’t giving her any. I would tell her she was sounding great, but perhaps it was too late. Robert had mentioned that Alison was like a fragile little bird and needed reassurance. At the first show they did for the album Raising Sand, she didn’t want to go onstage and Robert had to sit with her while she cried, and calm her down in order to convince her to do the show. I figured at that point that the record was not going to happen. Robert’s sessions had gone so well I suggested to Dan that we finish the record anyway with Robert, and make it a solo record. Daniel said he had no interest.