(1985–1988)
Coming off the road at the end of the Shaken ’n’ Stirred tour, himself shaken by the realization that it was not an outing he would be proud to remember, Plant’s own thoughts could not help but fold back to the early days of Zeppelin, not for the sake of the band itself, but for the sense of adventure, excitement, and novelty that permeated everything the musicians said and did together.
There was no vast master plan when Led Zeppelin was born, no preordained belief that they were destined for the stars. Just four musicians bonding in a fashion that none of them had experienced before, knowing that even in the pits of the most fiery disagreement, it was not ego or selfishness that were screaming bloody murder but a fervent belief in what was right for the band. Nothing else—not the audience, not the record company, not any grandiose vision of fame—mattered. Not one of them, after all, had truly experienced those things in the past; not one of them really expected it.
Yes, Peter Grant was his bullish self, insisting to all who came near that his boys had the best band in the world. But that was what he was paid to do. It was what managers did. They looked after the band, and they looked after all the things that related to the band. And for all the differences that he and Plant would encounter over the years, and even the less-than-happy conclusion to their working relationship once Zeppelin crashed, Plant missed that unswerving sense of belief, missed having somebody who was so single-mindedly devoted to the music and its makers that nothing could deflect him from dragging them both to the top of the hill.
Whereas who did Plant have? His band had effectively crumbled away without him even needing to call up and formally dismiss them. They parted at the end of the tour with barely even a “See you next time” to one another, all just happy to have gotten it out of the way. He said farewell, too, to Benji LeFevre, his right-hand man for almost fifteen years. If he had to begin again—and the more he thought about the last tour and album, the more he believed that he did—it would be from a completely new direction.
The 1980s were a funny old decade, not only for Robert Plant but for almost every musician who marched into them from a position of power in the years before. Almost without exception, the superstars of the ’70s, and those of the ’60s who’d clung onto power, met the new era head-on and triumphant: David Bowie with Let’s Dance, the biggest album of his entire career; Yes with 90125, home to their biggest hit single; the Rolling Stones with Tattoo You, which transformed an ages-old outtake into the anthemic “Start Me Up”; Paul McCartney with McCartney II—and so on and so forth. When Robert Plant launched his solo career and his numbers barely hiccupped from where he’d left off with Zeppelin, he was simply marching to a rhythm that people thought would last forever.
But then things started to change, and it doesn’t matter who or what history chooses to blame, be it bad business, lousy albums, cruddy videos, whatever. Suddenly, people stopped caring so much. Maybe the stars lost touch with their people; maybe people lost interest in the stars. Being a rock god in an age gone by was no longer enough, though, and when the time came to follow those monster-selling albums, anticipation was eroded by apathy and yawns, with Live Aid ironically confirming the worst.
While (comparative) young guns like U2, Dire Straits, Simple Minds, Duran Duran, and Run DMC turned in performances that all agreed were so stellar, only Queen, of the old guard, seemed to be at their best, with Bryan Ferry possibly easing in a close second. But Zeppelin, Sabbath, McCartney, Dylan, Jagger, Bowie, the Who, and Elton John all rolled out so underwhelmingly—disappointing, even perfunctory, as though they believed that merely turning up for the concert and playing a few old favorites was all they needed to do. And why? Because they either forgot or overlooked the one thing that all true stars need to remember. They were not simply competing with the rest of the pack to turn in a show that would ring through the ages. They were competing with their own selves as well, with the past that had placed them where they were today. And not one of them could hold a candle to the things they did before.
That was the realization that Robert Plant came to as he looked back on a summer that he wished had never started. Always susceptible to a bout of self-excoriation, never content to rest on laurels that he suspected might well be snatched away tomorrow, he was well aware that the music he’d made in the past was still all that people wanted to hear from him; that if he went out on tour tomorrow and announced each show would be determined by requests from the audience, he’d be lucky if a single song from his last three albums even merited a half-hearted mention.
But what was the answer?
Beyond the confines of Jennings Farm, if one thing did come out of Live Aid that could be considered worthwhile, it is that it reopened the avenues of communication between Plant and his bandmates. It was an open secret in the music industry that Page had always been hopeful that the trio could work together again, that Jones had never ruled it out and that it was Plant who was the obstacle. And why? Because Plant wanted to prove, to himself as much as to anybody else, that he wasn’t just the guy who sang the songs, he was an equal member of the team that wrote and arranged them as well. And the only way to do that was by doing it again. In the aftermath of Live Aid, in January 1986, he reconvened with Page and Jones to discuss the ramifications of flying together again.
But long before their discussions hit stalemate, he knew that his heart wasn’t in it. Not because they didn’t get on or because he didn’t think they could work together, but because he doubted they could ever attain the same standards again. The band’s final album, maybe even their last two, had both disappointed compared to what had passed before them. Did they really want to continue on that same downward slope, just for the sake of applause and cash? Or did they want to prove themselves all over again by trying something fresh?
His bandmates’ responses have never been revealed. But Led Zeppelin did not reform in 1986. With Tony Thompson reprising his Live Aid role, the quartet got together in a small village hall and just started batting ideas around. Some of them even sounded promising. But no matter how keen everybody was to do it, the timing was all wrong.
In 1984, Page had finally put together a new band, teaming with former Free and Bad Company frontman Paul Rodgers in a project they called the Firm. A hit debut album duly followed, and a second album, Mean Business, was imminent. “And I think he was a bit confused about what he was doing,” Plant told Rolling Stone in 1988.
Socially, too, there were difficulties, as Page took to staying at his lodgings, disdaining any opportunity to socialize with his bandmates. Even after Plant and Jones discovered a local club, within easy walking distance of headquarters, and open till a most acceptable 2 a.m., Page kept himself to himself. “Which is hardly the way to get everything back together again,” Plant continued. But if anything finally drove a stake through the project’s heart, certainly as far as Plant was concerned, it was the car crash that left Tony Thompson hospitalized just a week into the proceedings. He wasn’t seriously hurt, but he would not be playing drums for a while. And Plant, who needed no reminders whatsoever of the hostile forces that so often seemed to stalk Led Zeppelin, was not in the mood to confront them again. Although the band had one more rehearsal, with a roadie sitting in on the drums, Plant had had enough. He headed home.
Despite everything, Plant and Page would reunite onstage during 1986. That October saw the sudden death of guitarist Johnny Pasternak, the switchblade-touting founder of the Crawling Kingsnakes and a veteran of the Shakedown Sound. A hastily arranged tribute concert saw a host of local musicians gather in his memory, and included an impromptu set featuring Plant and Page.
• • •
Back in 1977, Robert Crash was the distinctively shorn blond bassist for the Maniacs, one of the most exciting London live bands in the seething punk ferment. From there, with a growing fascination in electronics, he led the Psychotic Tanks through a deliciously growled and threatening take on Elvis’s “Let’s Have a Party,” one of the first releases on the infant 4AD label, before moving to the other side of the desk to produce the Eurythmics’ sophomore album, Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This). Now he was being introduced to Robert Plant by their mutual friend Dave Stewart, as the singer spent the summer experimenting with a host of different potential sidekicks: Bruce Woolley of Camera Club and Buggles fame (“Somewhere at the bottom of a drawer back home, there is a very strange-sounding cassette,” laughs Plant), guitarist Robin George, and Stewart himself.
Crash was in the studio with Robert Plant, writing the first songs destined for what would become Plant’s next album: “Why” and “Dance on My Own.” Both delivered a template that would take Plant further from his audience’s comfort zone than anything he had done in the past: stark dance anthems led by electronics, unerringly aimed toward darkened corners in sweat-soaked, badly lit nightclubs—and destined to be delivered by a new band cast unerringly around their grasp of current technology.
Guitarist Phil Johnstone and drummer Chris Blackwell were recruited from The Rest Is History, a band Plant discovered when his music publisher sent him one of their songs, the souped-up hyperpop of “Heaven Knows,” and the singer decided to record it. Guitarist Doug Boyle and bassist Phil Scragg were likewise unknowns. But together in Marcus Studios, they alchemized an album that made even Shaken ’n’ Stirred appear a masterpiece in restraint.
Tim Palmer was back as producer, reveling in Plant’s open-mindedness, gleefully conspiring with Plant and Johnstone as they assembled a barrage of samplers, synthesizers, drum machines, and more. Indeed, at one point Palmer found himself suggesting they add guitars to the brew, so far had Plant leaned in the opposite direction. But Plant would not be dissuaded.
The vision in his head, which his bandmates were expected to flawlessly translate, was of the spirit of old-style blues and rockers, revived and imbibed by the latest sonic innovations. If Howling Wolf had had access to a sequencer, what would “Smokestack Lightning” have become? If Sonny Boy had a synth, where would “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl” have gone? The new songs, for the most part, were not styled as the blues, but that was a part of the plan as well. Writer Chuck Eddy had suggested that Shaken ’n’ Stirred was a new, unnamed music. Now Plant wanted to discover where it might lead.
There would be tensions as the sessions unfolded. Particularly after Jimmy Page was invited along to add solos to “Heaven Knows” and “Tall Cool One.” Which, in turn, was before he was informed that the latter would feature a brace of Zeppelin samples. “The Wanton Song” and “Custard Pie” both flash through the ether, with Plant laughingly pointing the finger of blame at the New York hip-hop trio the Beastie Boys. Their “She’s Crafty” had sampled “The Ocean,” and it felt like a good idea at the time. It still does, in fact.
Plant would swiftly return the favor, cowriting a new song, “The Only One,” for Page’s solo debut album, Outrider, and dropping by the studio to sing it as well. But it was scarcely a golden moment in either man’s career, and it certainly pales to deathly white in comparison with all that was wrought by “Tall Cool One,” a song that stands as the epitome of all that Plant dreamed the new album should be: a title he borrowed from the Wailers, a Seattle garage band of the early 1960s; quotes from Gene Vincent and rockabilly hero Charlie Feathers; and the entire thing, he explained, “tipping my hat to the original song,” even as he drifted miles out of its orbit.
He was, he declared to Creem’s Chuck Eddy in 1988, a technobilly, “trying to do something that’s not been done before, even at the risk of not making that extra buck. There’s so much I want to get in there on my records—it’s hard to get in everything that I’d like to.” He raved about Let’s Active and the Swans—bands just commencing their maniacal sonic journeys at the time, but already destined to make some of the most influential music of the age—and announced, “I want to cut through radio with a hot knife, this idea where they say, ‘We’re only gonna play stuff guaranteed on being a hit.’ I wanna stretch it out some. People like Tom Verlaine and Hüsker Dü are making quite important music now, and people aren’t hearing it because it never gets played.”
No less than punk rock a decade before, but with less vocal opposition from the musicians themselves, Plant was flying the flag for new music. Perhaps he was not so far out on the edge as his interviews suggested he thought he was (although the primitive rockabilly distortion of “Billy’s Revenge” still feels dramatic and edgy today). But more than any other artist of his stature, he was at least giving it a go, and trusting his reputation and fame to open doors through which the next generation could pour.
That, too, was something he’d done before, when the colossal success of Led Zeppelin paved the way for an entire generation of likeminded imaginations. It worked then, and it worked again this time. Now and Zen, as the new album would be punningly titled, was destined to dominate American radio in a manner that the solo Plant never had. With almost every track spinning into rotation, with the gorgeous “Ship of Fools” becoming the slow dance of the year, and with sales that pushed it to triple platinum and the Top 10 in both the US and UK, Now and Zen reestablished its maker as a leading force at a time and in a climate where he might well have continued redundant, while earning him reviews that were all the more laudatory because of that.
Its nine tracks, said Rolling Stone, “don’t simply sound contemporary; they point to new ways to transmute roots-rock verities of swing and harmony amid the technological conventions of late-Eighties pop.” It humanized what many people still regarded as the icicle inhumanity of so much electronic music, and was “so rich in conceptual invention” that you almost missed the fact that Plant’s vocals were as good as any he had ever unleashed. “Better, in some ways, than ever.”
Later, observers attempting to explain the album’s success would point to any number of contributory factors, including the presence of Jimmy Page on those two songs. In reality, however, that was simply a name on the door, and ultimately of no more value to Plant than his contributions were to the success (or otherwise) of Outrider—which scarcely made the Top 30. Page’s presence had nothing to do with the overall sound, mood, and confidence of the album, nor the innovations that it posited—the sonic subversion of all that had grown tired and derivative about “rock” in the ’80s by seizing upon the genre’s most subversive offspring and bringing them face to face with their parent.
Inevitably Plant ignited a tour in the album’s wake; gratifyingly, it proved one of the most successful he had ever undertaken. With another young unknown, Charlie Jones of the Bath band Violent Blue, replacing Phil Scragg on bass (and soon becoming Plant’s son-in-law; he was dating and would eventually marry daughter Carmen), Plant unveiled the new lineup with a pair of semi-secret pre-Christmas shows, one in Folkestone, Kent, and the other close to home in Stourbridge. At both he astonished audiences, not only with the ready transition of the new material from disc to stage, but also by finally breaking his self-imposed embargo on performing Zeppelin oldies. He had no need to hide them anymore.
“Misty Mountain Hop,” “Rock and Roll,” and the band’s trademark reassemblage of “Traveling Riverside Blues,” immortalized on their second album as the juvenile favorite “The Lemon Song,” were all included in the show, while Plant’s newly installed manager, Bill Curbishley (overseer of both the Who in their pomp and another midlands mob, Judas Priest, at their peak) looked on with something approaching satisfaction and relief. Like so many other people circulating around Plant through the ’80s, Curbishley knew that a nod to a past that everyone wanted to relive would put butts on seats wherever they touched down. He was the first person ever to convince Plant of that, but only after Plant had finally convinced himself that the butts would come regardless.
The full tour got underway in spring 1988 around the UK before hitting the US for the summer season. And Plant appeared to be having the time of his life, “wriggling around like some aging big girl’s blouse,” as he put it, but “what else am I going to do?” That, he said, was what he was good at, and even as he pushed the age of forty, he pulled it off with an assurance that too many of his peers had replaced years ago with bad parody and self-conscious posturing. Compared to Plant’s last tour around the US, Now and Zen was vivid daylight to the dark and stormy night of Shaken ’n’ Stirred. Which made it all the more remarkable, not that Zeppelin-shaped lightning should strike yet again, but that Plant would permit it to.
Atlantic Records was celebrating its fortieth birthday with a star-studded concert at Madison Square Garden. Asked what he would most like as a gift to mark the occasion, Ahmet Ertegun—who, with jazz promoter Herb Abramson, started the label in 1947—had just one wish. He wanted to see Led Zeppelin back together again. The Coasters, Wilson Pickett, Phil Collins, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Roberta Flack, Yes, and the Bee Gees had all agreed to perform, a cross section that summed up at least three of the label’s four-decade history, and Plant’s own band was already booked in for a set. He could manage a few more songs with some old friends . . . couldn’t he?
Plant agreed. “Top-secret rehearsals,” duly reported in a raft of newspapers, preceded the show, Page, Plant, and Jones joined by Jason Bonham for the occasion (he and Page were already working together on Outrider and the tour that would accompany it).
No less than at Live Aid, Zeppelin’s performance would be short: five songs in thirty minutes at the end of an eleven-hour day, taking the stage at 1 a.m. to the drama-soaked rhythms of “Kashmir” and moving on through “Heartbreaker,” “Whole Lotta Love,” and “Misty Mountain Hop” before wrapping with a “Stairway to Heaven” that was so rapturously received that many people didn’t even notice that Plant forgot the lyrics to a song he’d again not wanted to perform in the first place.
He didn’t even give it much of an intro, just a grinning “Good evening” and then an understated “Okay.” And watching the performance as it was simulcast round the country, it wasn’t that far off the mark to say he even looked bored as he sang. Later, few people described the performance as anything more than lackluster, four musicians whose heads and attention seemed anyplace but together, as if Ertegun received the birthday present he had asked for but the batteries weren’t included.
Either that or the internal political dynamics that once fired the Zeppelin’s engines had finally been turned upside down.