(1984–1985)
Three months is a long time when you’re nineteen and counting down to zero on what’s left of your ambition. It’s a lot less time when you’re thirty-five and counting down the last days of what now passes for a regular life before boarding the musical treadmill once again.
Not that Plant was complaining. Financially he had long since passed the point where he needed to work to maintain his lifestyle, and creatively he knew there remained a lot more juice in the tank. But still, when he and the band came off in the road in February 1984, following a massively oversubscribed Japanese tour, it was with the knowledge that the next three months, at least, were his. His to waste, his to fritter, his to do whatever he wanted with. It was only the outside world that had any kind of problem with what happened next, as ex-wife Maureen’s younger sister Shirley, hitherto married to Plant’s farm manager John Bryant, moved out of one house on the Jennings Farm estate and into another one. With Plant.
In some ways, the apparent shift of Plant’s affections from one sister to another was a case of wish fulfillment for a lot of people—particularly those who reported lasciviously on Plant’s sexual appetite when Zeppelin were on the road and wondered how he kept it in check when he was home with the family. As Paul Rees, author of the biography Robert Plant: A Life, delicately puts it, “Led Zeppelin insiders had been gossiping about Plant and the Wilson sisters for years.” Plant’s own inner circle, meanwhile, simply accepted the couple’s love as the inevitable consequence of a closeness that had been developing for so long, particularly as Plant’s marriage to Maureen slowly collapsed.
Like Maureen, Shirley had known Plant since their teens; the affection between them was as deep-seated as any twenty-year friendship can be. Shirley and her husband lived on the farm; the two couples were always in one another’s orbit, and when Plant needed to talk as he and Maureen drew apart, it was natural he would turn to the only other person who knew her as well as he did. Maureen herself seemed to accept the situation, eventually moving back to Jennings Farm with the children, while Shirley’s husband continued working there for a time as well.
In fact, as field days for spiteful tattletales go, the torrid tangle of Robert Plant’s love life was really something of a nonstarter. Although you do have to love the comment made by an anonymous Zeppelin roadie, again in the Paul Rees biography: “When you’ve seen Robert shagging his way through 16,000 women, there’s nothing very shocking about another, whoever it is.”
In fact, for many people, and Plant’s fan club can be included here, the biggest surprise he had in store that year had nothing to do with his domestic arrangements. It was his decision that May to enter the studio with Tim Palmer, an engineer whose only prior experience of any major note was among the studio team responsible for Kajagoogoo’s “Too Shy.” At a time, it should be added, before bassist Nick Beggs became an icon of the modern prog rock scene and when singer Limahl was best regarded for an almost painfully fashionable haircut. Stints in the studio with electro-maven John Foxx; Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler, as he worked up the soundtrack to the movie Local Hero; and most recently, gender-bending dance sensation Dead or Alive lurked elsewhere on Palmer’s resume, and he was as shocked as anyone when the call came in from Plant.
But Plant knew what he was doing. Among the albums bending his ears that spring was the latest by Depeche Mode, popularly dismissed by the rock cognoscenti as a bunch of synthesized sillies who wouldn’t know a rock guitar if you wired one into their brains. But move beyond the self-conscious daftness of Depeche’s pop-television appearances and the deceptive confections they put out as singles, and behind all that was a band whose grasp on modern technology, whose ear for sounds and eye for effects, pushed them to the forefront of sonic possibilities, at least within the framework of modern music.
Some Great Reward, Depeche’s latest album, arrived bristling with a metallic attack that nobody had ever applied to mere pop in the past—and that is “metal” in a literary sense. Half of the album appeared to have been recorded without resort to even unconventional musical instruments, just sheets of iron being pounded with hammers. Plant was impressed.
Even his choice of studio, Marcus Studios in Bayswater, West London, spoke toward his outlook. Small and intimate, it was a far cry from the historically steeped environments in which Plant customarily functioned. The Smiths, all but unknown at that time, were among the studio’s immediate clientele; Tubeway Army, Fashion, and Classix Nouveaux ranked among its most storied.
There were fewer surprises among the lineup he selected to accompany him on this latest adventure. Richie Hayward, once of Little Feat, was planted on the unsettled drum stool, and a teenaged backing singer, Toni Halliday, joined the gang too. But the meat and potatoes of a functioning rock band seemed less of interest to Plant than the possibilities of the new technology, as Hayward was presented with an electronic kit, and his own ears seemed attuned only to the fresh keyboard sounds that Palmer and Woodroffe were conspiring to create. Without anybody saying as much, it was becoming increasingly clear that neither Blunt nor Martinez would be around much longer, even after the sessions moved back to the familiar pastures of Rockfield.
Shaken ’n’ Stirred, Robert Plant’s third solo album, would not ultimately see release for another year, by which time cynical ears could complain that some of its more cutting-edge notions had already been dated by the ever-increasing pace of studio technology. It is a sad but true fact that much of the music made during the 1980s by artists poised, or reaching, for the outer limits of what was possible was ultimately granted a far more finite life expectancy than records (or increasingly, CDs) recorded using the tried-and-tested tools of old.
But Plant remained unrepentant. It was vital, he believed, to escape the typical trappings of what passed for “rock ’n’ roll.” He wanted to capture the mood of the moment, and the wild adventure of surfing technology wherever it might take him. Whether or not his traditional core audience would appreciate that adventure was to remain undecided for now, however. In the meantime, Plant had another project to undertake,
and one that, if he was perhaps totally honest with himself, said far
more about his personal musical tastes than any number of electro beats and rhythms.
“The reason Ahmet [Ertegun] asked him to reinvent the Honeydrippers was to try and persuade him to go back to basics,” Peter Grant alleged. “Everybody at Atlantic felt he was trying too hard to remain competitive with everything else that was going on in the charts, and while that was good for short-term success, hit singles, and MTV, it was damaging his long term credibility.”
Plant was in Japan when Ertegun first suggested he turn his hand to an album of oldies: ’50s American covers bashed out with the most kick-ass rock ’n’ roll band he could muster. Plant was intrigued, perhaps all the more so as he knew that had he floated the same idea back in 1981, he would probably have been howled out of the room. But the Honeydrippers tour was a cherished memory now, and the possibility of reconvening the band name, if not the musicians, was certainly tempting. Particularly as pre-production of the new studio album marched on, and Plant realized it would probably take as long as the actual recording had.
Not one of the original Honeydrippers would ultimately be involved, not even Robbie Blunt. Instead, Plant flew to New York where Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Chic’s Nile Rodgers, Paul Shaffer, and a crack local rhythm section of Wayne Pedziwiatr and Dave Weckl awaited him at Atlantic’s own studio. Ahmet Ertegun was producer, and that was a large part of why Plant agreed to do it. For all the years that he and Ertegun had worked together, Plant had never experienced the man’s studio expertise. This was his chance.
The first decision was that they were not aiming for a full album, but rather a mini-album, bigger than an EP, smaller than an LP. Five songs were settled on, including Plant’s mother’s favorite, “Sea of Love.” Ray Charles’s “I Got a Woman,” Ben E. King’s “Young Boy Blues,” Roy Brown’s “Rockin’ at Midnight,” and Wynonie Harris’s “I Got a Thrill” completed the menu, a decade’s worth of American rockers that were bashed out in barely more time than it took to play them, and rushed out in not much longer. Raw and raucous, frantic and febrile, any one of the songs could have been kicked out at any time in the past thirty years and would not have sounded at all out of place.
Back in the day, Led Zeppelin had frequently relaxed during soundcheck or rehearsal by blasting through a handful or two of favorite oldies—songs that they’d grown up with, that were musical mother’s milk to them all. Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent, Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, Cliff Richard and the Shadows. Bootlegs of these moments of carefree un-self-consciousness rank among the most precious, and revealing, of all Led Zeppelin recordings, because they are un-self-conscious, four musicians simply playing for themselves, laughing at their mistakes, helping one another past forgotten chords and lyrics, just throwing themselves back to a simpler, easier, time.
These latest sessions were not that relaxed. The performances needed to be honest, but they couldn’t be slapdash, and so a few takes of each song would be hammered down, and then the best ones pulled out for the final disc. But still they remained as brash as they needed to be.
The Honeydrippers Volume One, wryly titled in the firm knowledge there would never be a volume two, was in the stores by November 1984, spun off a Top 5 single in “Sea of Love,” and maybe, just maybe, reacquainted old fans with the Robert Plant they thought they might be losing. The still-unheard Shaken ’n’ Stirred would probably have dispatched such fans screaming to the hills. In fact, maybe it did anyway.
The first reviews of Shaken were enthusiastic, though, and the passage of time did not dent the sheer shock with which the needle hit plastic for the first time. The opening “Hip to Hoo” faded in on dissonant shadows and the sound of a party in a far distant room before melding into a percussive thump that echoed around Plant’s impulsive vocal; “Trouble Your Money,” with its foreboding bass line and finger-popping rhythm, could have been a Bryan Ferry masterpiece, and was sharp and current as Christmas.
Writing in Creem three years later, Chuck Eddy still described Shaken ’n’ Stirred as Plant’s best LP yet, the repository of “some of the most structurally outlandish commercially successful white rock this decade. The second side had nods to the Human Beinz and the Police, plus a creepy hit single . . . ; the first side was mainly abstract soundscapes with bizarro changes, stutters, skids, and added-and-subtracted-tracks.”
By the time he reached “Too Loud,” Eddy was seeking comparisons as far afield as Afrika Bambaataa “and certain Mark Stewart and the Maffia obscurities”—names that themselves would have been hopelessly obscure to the people who normally bought a Robert Plant album. But he did so for a reason. Mostly, Eddy decreed, Shaken ’n’ Stirred was the sound of Plant “making some kind of music that doesn’t have a name yet.”
As if to compensate, circling musical psychologists zeroed in on lyrical fragments to try and haul something recognizable from there. Chuck Eddy suggested that “creepy” hit single (“Little by Little”) was possibly about the death of Zeppelin; others posited one final eulogy for either John Bonham or son Karac. The cavernous “Pink and Black” may have been the final resolution of a reformed sexual gadfly (and would have made a great Robert Palmer single); the album as a whole, some even suggested, was so splintered and contradictory that it could only have been a reflection of Plant’s own mental state.
This was a colossally presumptuous charge to lay at either artist or album’s doorstep. Perhaps the recent transitions of Plant’s love life did strike some people as unconventional; maybe they did add credence to a decade-old legend that the song “What Is and What Should Never Be” was about an already-thriving relationship with his sister-in-law. But that was scarcely Plant’s concern, or any kind of scar on his happiness either—he and Shirley would remain together for close to the next decade and have a child together, Jesse Lee, in 1991.
Perhaps, too, the contradictory nature of his last two releases, one primal rock ’n’ roll, the other startling sonic trickery, suggested some kind of conflict within his own musical intentions. But more than likely it didn’t, and Plant’s explanation for The Honeydrippers Volume One, that it was a piece of fun arrived at after laying a wager with Ahmet Ertegun in a Tokyo hot tub one night, really should be taken at face value. What could not be denied was that by following his own musical instincts and apparently trusting his audience to either follow or abandon him, Plant had finally succeeded in convincing them to take the latter course.
It is utterly absurd to describe Shaken ’n’ Stirred as a failure, as many chroniclers have. The album itself reached No. 20 in the US; “Little by Little” topped Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Track chart. But total sales were less than half of either of the album’s predecessors, while a thirty-date arena tour set to run through summer 1985 became Plant’s first not to sell out weeks in advance—or even sell out at all. In many cities, venues were still offering plenty of good seats on the night of the show, and while reviews of the evening’s entertainment tended toward the ecstatic, tickets didn’t move any faster as a consequence.
This was a shame, because it was a great show. On a stage decorated by inflatable Cadillacs, and with Honeydrippers fans catered for by a short set of that band’s material too, Plant was ring-mastering a performance that was at least the equal of any other on the road that season. Almost any other, at least. There was one event on the horizon with which nobody on the road that summer could reasonably hope to compete, and the only consolation for any of them was that most of them were taking part in it.
Live Aid was the culmination of seven months’ desperate work by Bob Geldof, once best known as the garrulous frontman for midstream Irish new wavers the Boomtown Rats, but now cruising towards canonization as the Blessed Bob, Patron Saint of the Ethiopian Famine. Watching a TV report on that disaster late in 1984, Geldof was moved to call together the cream of current British popdom to perform a fundraising single: “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”
It promptly became the fastest and biggest-selling single in British history, and was followed in America by the similarly inspired, similarly all-star “We Are the World.” What followed, however, made the logistical tangle of making those singles happen look like booking a one-man band: two stadiums, in London and Philadelphia, simultaneously hosting the vastest one-day rock concerts of all time, and rounding up the great and good from every generation in sight. Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Bryan Ferry, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Paul Young, Madonna, the Thompson Twins—superstar followed superstar onto the bill, and that was the easy part. Because next, Geldof started to alchemize the impossible.
He convinced Black Sabbath to re-form with Ozzy Osbourne for the first time since a gruesomely acrimonious split at the end of the 1970s. He arranged for Phil Collins to appear onstage on two continents in the same afternoon; he got the Who back onstage, four years after their Farewell tour; he reunited Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young . . . and barely had he asked Robert Plant if he’d perform than Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones were on board as well.
With Phil Collins and Chic’s Tony Thompson sharing drum duties, and Paul Martinez playing bass to allow Jones to concentrate on keyboards, it would be unfair to describe Live Aid as a true Led Zeppelin reunion. But the core trio seemed to treat it as such, and with time to perform just three songs, there were few surprises as to what they’d be: “Rock and Roll,” “Whole Lotta Love,” and “Stairway to Heaven.”
And it was . . . awful is far too strong a word, although that is Robert Plant’s chosen adjective. He told Details’ Danny Fields, “Live Aid was awful, I mean for us. We were awful.” Coming straight after three successive shows with his own band, with Zeppelin’s own typically grueling rehearsals on top, “when I came to sing that night I had nothing left at all.”
He likened the ensuing performance to “some kind of aimless dog trying to bite its tail.” Page’s guitar was out of tune, the guitar leads weren’t long enough; everything, Plant swore, conspired to reduce the show to “one of the worst performances I’ve ever done in my life. . . . It was a most peculiar sensation. The idea of doing that every night is probably one of the least attractive things I could think of.
“Being in Cleveland the day afterwards with my own band was much more fun,” he concluded. Even if there were rows of empty seats staring back at him.
Plant himself was astonished, not to mention surprised, by just how powerful his reaction to the reunion felt. He’d played with both Page and Jones since the split—whether as guests at his own shows or, in Page’s case, in the studio as the Honeydrippers. And there the sole emotions were happiness, being reminded of the good times they’d shared, and a fuzzy sense of nostalgia as he looked around and saw that old familiar face alongside him. The difference was, there, they were guests. It was his show, his songs, his audience, his band—and the ghosts were simply passing through, a special treat for the crowd.
Live Aid was different. Live Aid, or Zeppelin’s fifteen minutes of it, had nothing to do with Robert Plant, solo star, and everything to do with reawakening the past. It was as if—and this only hit him as he walked out onto the Philadelphia stage—someone had marched up to him on the street one day and told him, “Here’s the band, here’s the crowd. Now give them absolutely everything that Led Zeppelin ever meant, that it ever stood for, that they ever dreamed it could be. And you have a quarter of an hour, starting now.”
He froze, and he has continued freezing ever since. No matter what entreaties have been made for Led Zeppelin to allow their performance that afternoon to be reshown, either in televised memories of the Live Aid afternoon or as part of the official DVD package, the answer has always come back the same.
No.
Some memories are too painful to be given a second viewing. And Plant was not only thinking about their Live Aid set when he arrived at that conclusion. He was thinking about Led Zeppelin themselves as well. No matter what trials and tribulations his solo career might lead him through as the future scrolled by, no matter how many other aspects of his past he finally felt comfortable enough to revisit, one always remained strictly out of bounds. Led Zeppelin—the Led Zeppelin that deep down, he cherished so preciously—existed in a time and a place that could never be revisited. So for another twenty-two years, he refused to try.
It’s just a shame that so few people could actually understand why he felt that way, even among those who had taken the same ride alongside him. Which was why, whenever he pored through his past for future inspiration, he always returned to a time before he’d even met them.