(1988–1994)
Off the road for a short time and then back to the US at the end of 1988, Plant whisked the band back into rehearsals in the new year, with a new album paramount on his mind. Anybody expecting a prompt follow-up to the textures and passions of its predecessor, however, was in for a major surprise. Early sessions at Plant’s newly purchased home in Monmouth painted his intentions in vivid neon: a complete reversal of Now and Zen, a record that sounded as basic and heavy as he could possibly get away with.
Even his choice of studios spoke of his ideal, as he returned to Olympic in the London suburb of Barnes, the very same surroundings in which Led Zeppelin I took shape back in 1968. It was as if he were acknowledging the problems of the Madison Square reunion by—again—going back to the source of the legend in the first place and rebuilding it in his own image.
His scheme appeared to be working, too. On November 21, 1989, with the sessions done and dusted, Plant arranged for what the record books record as the third Led Zeppelin reunion, although this one was to take place far from the spotlights of the world. Daughter Carmen was celebrating her twenty-first birthday with just a couple of hundred friends, at the Hen & Chickens pub in Oldbury. Of course she wanted a live band to play, and of course her father was happy to oblige. Accompanied by his old friends John and Jimmy, with Chris Blackwell and Phil Johnstone dropping by as well, Dad serenaded his firstborn with a selection of the songs that she had grown up alongside: “Rock and Roll,” “Misty Mountain Hop,” and “Trampled Under Foot.” There may even have been a couple more. But nobody was keeping score. It was a private party, for goodness’ sake.
Manic Nirvana, Robert Plant’s fifth solo album, reached the racks in March, 1990, a shock to the system for anybody expecting Plant to have continued pursuing the paths of Now and Zen. The opening “Hurting Kind (I’ve Got My Eyes On You)” set the stage, with slashing guitars punctuating lyrics that bled ’50s insurrection and verses that defied any kind of convention—almost random snatches of speech and melody that resolved themselves only when they hit the seven-word chorus—while Plant’s vocals wailed like a siren. “Big Love” reinforced the attack, choppy rhythms and scattershot riffs that the occasional ear compared to mid-period Zeppelin, musical unmusicality that could have found a happy home among the shorter shots on Physical Graffiti, but updated in a manner that gave the entire disc an edgy air.
There was no easy listening here, no sense that Plant was settling back into anything approaching his fifth decade on earth. “Nirvana” churned on hardcore-guitar assault, manic indeed even after the big drums echoed the ’80s through the mix. “Tie Dye on the Highway” swirled on an angry, gothic axe attack, vicious and relentless, a loping loop that paused for mere seconds before the crackled wax thunder of “Your Ma Said You Cried in Your Sleep Last Night” reeled back to an undiscovered primal rock ’n’ roll vibe, “Heartbreak Hotel” meets “Summertime Blues” in the radioactive bayou night.
“Liars Dance” sailed resplendent over heartwarmingly mournful acoustic guitar, if only to ensure that “Watching You” could pound paranoia from the battlements.
And from the same sessions (but reserved for a B-side), “Oompah” felt like a Disney soundtrack, with a subtitle that was pure Monty Python—“Watery Bint” is a line from their Holy Grail movie, tormenting the Arthurian legend of the Lady of the Lake, as a serf confronts the King on his claims that he is rightful ruler of the land because a watery bint lobbed a scimitar at him. Dialogue at the end of the song, incidentally, was lifted from Wolves hero Steve Bull’s comments on Wolves’ club-call line.
From start to finish, front to back, Manic Nirvana was pure testosterone, an ear pressed to the wall of a garage-band rehearsal, then painstakingly realigned so that every sound hung in exquisite isolation.
It may have been too much. It certainly sat in dissonant awkwardness alongside the rest of the year’s offerings, with even the most common comparison, to Neil Young’s furious Ragged Glory, little more than a limp nod toward a certain common ground. Young’s album, for all its deliberate noise making, retained a warmth rootsiness amid its innovation. Manic Nirvana, by comparison, was the sound of breaking glass, a CD that demanded you play it loudly and wreck the house while doing so.
The ensuing tour was less abrasive, the new material scaling its extremes back to become more of a whole with the older songs, although it says much for the general critical response that far more print was expended on rumors that Plant was seeing rather a lot of Alannah Myles, the support act on the current tour, than on the events of the tour itself. Back at Jennings Farm, however, Shirley awaited his return, and nine months after Plant got home from the tour, in January 1991, the couple celebrated the birth of their own first child, Jesse Lee. And this time, for the first time in Plant’s life, he intended to be there to watch his son grow up.
There was no return to the studio to crank out a successor to Manic Nirvana, no restless urge to get back on the stage. For two years, Robert Plant was a superstar no more, sitting back while the music scene revolved through its next set of convolutions, and not really caring one iota for it. In the past, through the ’80s, as he sought to establish his solo chops, he had listened to the radio and new music ceaselessly, driven to compete with whatever new material he heard, and generally succeeding too. But that task was complete now. He had proven himself to his own satisfaction, and had bucked the trend of the failing old farts that so many of his peers had tumbled headlong into. Now it was time to relax, and that meant listening to music for fun, to remember what he loved as opposed to what he should be learning, and to bury himself in books—old favorites, new interests.
Only once did he interrupt his seclusion. On October 27, 1991, his old friend and mentor Frank Freeman, host of the Dance Club in Kidderminster, collapsed and died. Plant had remained loyal to Freeman’s long after his fame moved beyond Kidderminster’s reach; every Christmas that he could make it, he and his family were guests at the Dance Club’s festive party. When he heard about the tribute concert that was being arranged in Freeman’s memory the following spring, Plant not only agreed to perform, he also interrupted rehearsals for the somewhat higher-profile Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert to do so.
Plant performed two numbers at the Mercury show, at Wembley on April 20, 1992, Queen’s “Innuendo” and “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” plus a couple of crowd-pleasing Zeppelin snatches, “Kashmir” and the intro to “Thank You.” Then it was home again to continue pondering—though he scarcely said a word to anybody about it—a new album, Fate of Nations. One that he intended would restate every one of the core values he held most dear.
“Right after the Manic Nirvana album, I knew what I was going to do,” he told Interview. “Go back into my past. I wanted to know what I really loved to listen to, what I could really associate with.” He was tired, he said, of “drinking from the cup of the contemporary sonic order,” because he had suddenly realized, “I didn’t need to.”
He did not abandon the musicians he’d been working with. Charlie Jones, Doug Boyle, Phil Johnstone, and Chris Blackwell would all take part in the sessions, although their contributions would necessarily be competing with those of an array of other players—among them a new producer, Chris Hughes, whose own roots included a spell playing drums for Adam and the Ants. Later, sundry members of the old band spoke out about those sessions, the sense of uncertainty and unease that permeated recordings that clearly were not intended to engender a mood of security.
Perhaps thoughtlessly, although with commendable honesty, Plant made no secret of the fact that he had two or three players in mind for every instrument, and particularly during the first set of sessions, at the RAK Studios in London, his regular musicians could scarcely avoid the sight of the newcomers hanging out. Later, too, as the sessions moved to the residential Sawmills Studio in Cornwall, Plant thought nothing of calling somebody else in, not because he didn’t think the players around him could do what he wanted, but because he knew that somebody else could do it better. And swirling in and around them, just as their contributions to the record would swirl in and around the expected instrumentation, was a wealth of unexpected guests: classical violinist Nigel Kennedy; hurdy-gurdy maestro Nigel Eaton, string arranger Lynton Naiff, Jethro Tull multi-instrumentalist Maartin Allcock, guitar legend Richard Thompson, Celtic siren Marie Brennan, and a trio of Indian musicians—Nawazish Ali Khan, Gurbev Singh, and Sursie Singh—adding violin, dilruba, sarod, and sarangi to the stew.
Yet this portrait of its esotericism is but the opening fanfare to what even Plant’s career-encompassing Nine Lives box set would describe as “quite simply the best album Plant had made with any band . . . as unexpected as it was unprecedented . . . epic, adventurous and deeply challenging.” This was no casting back to the folkier pastures of Led Zeppelin III, the 1970 album that so furiously recanted the band’s burgeoning reputation as heavy metal pioneers. No reimagining of the proto–World Music landscapes that whipped “Kashmir” into shape. It was so much more fulfilled than either.
The opening “Calling to You” saddled Western rock riff and Eastern energies alike, while staccato drums nailed down a rhythm that would have been ponderous were it not all so exciting. “Come into My Life,” with Richard Thompson’s guitar so instantly recognizable, molded itself into the imagination even before Marie Brennan’s spectral backing vocals slipped into earshot. “If I Were a Carpenter,” the Tim Hardin composition that Plant had adopted as a showcase back in the Band of Joy days, rode sensitive strings and a softly picked mandolin, and “Great Spirit” slithered across the floor, a funky second cousin to Patti Smith’s “Ghost Dance,” mourning man’s destruction of the planet and calling upon its natural spirit to arise and repair the damage.
Plant sang with heartbreaking passion of his lost son Karac in “I Believe,” and the gossips had a field day with the assumption that he’d written a song for Alannah Myles too, “29 Palms.” And then there was “Network News,” a savage assault on the Western world’s so-recently concluded Desert Storm assault upon Iraq and the manner in which it was portrayed by the media.
“I was disgusted with all the propaganda surrounding the Gulf War,” Plant chided. “The constant flood of details and death was so obscene, and taking in all this carnage was just too much.” “Network News” put that rage into focus—and beyond that, the album’s very title spoke to the brittle balance that is international politicking. But it was the feel of the album, the constant questing for something more than rock and noise and energy, that truly encapsulated Plant’s feelings and his hopes for the future.
It was a stellar album, then, albeit one destined to receive far greater plaudits later in time than it would upon release. Commercially overshadowed by even Shaken ’n’ Stirred, its downfall was only exacerbated when Plant went out on tour and found himself opening for Lenny Kravitz, an American performer who had established himself as the latest absurdly judged “future of rock,” essentially by basing his entire act upon the genre’s most sainted past.
The two artists were conjoined for only a handful of dates around Europe that summer, and Kravitz’s own star was destined to soon fade. But for anybody with a soupçon of history in their veins, it was a reversal of fortunes that could never have been imagined, albeit one that should have been expected, which was, even in the short history of rock ’n’ roll, an inevitable consequence of the passing of time.
In the ’80s, old prog fans had gazed in horror upon bills that placed Marillion, who wouldn’t have existed without the giants of the past, ahead of Peter Hammill, one of the mightiest of those giants. In the ’60s, it was the Rolling Stones headlining over Bo Diddley that sent the purists white with rage. A new generation is always going to trump those who came before, because otherwise what purpose does it serve? If the old guard remains forever on the throne, then all future growth will wither and die.
In 1993, Robert Plant was as about relevant to the average teenager as Frankie Valli would have been to a mid-’70s Zeppelin fan, or Dinah Shore to Plant when he was fifteen. So what if they’d made some good records in the past? A forty-five-year-old man is never going to speak to the fascinations of a teenager, not when there’s other teens-or-thereabouts making music that does. It was now the turn of Nirvana, Suede and Saint Etienne, Pearl Jam and Pavement, Nine Inch Nails. And good luck to the lot of them.
All of that said, the early 1990s were somewhat less harsh with respect to another of Plant’s generation. True to Jimmy Page’s word, the Firm had acknowledged their infirmities after that second album, but the guitarist had not yet tired of the supergroup format, as he teamed up with one-time Deep Purple/Whitesnake frontman David Coverdale to create the no-nonsense double billing of Coverdale-Page.
It was, by either man’s standards, a grisly enterprise. Coverdale, whose vocal abilities rarely strayed far from an anguished shriek, and whose lyrical talents seldom found their way outside his pants, certainly imbibed their album with a modicum of bite. You couldn’t argue with its chart success, either, an American Top Tenner at the same time as Fate of Nations barely nibbled the toes of the Top 40. But it all seemed very desperate, routine clichés piled upon half-baked hooks, as though both musicians simply phoned in their parts from a call box someplace sunny. And when Page seemingly acknowledged that he’d only done the Coverdale thing because the singer he most wanted to work with was busy, then maybe that singer pricked his ears up as well.
Plant’s next American tour did sell out at most of its halts, but only because the halts themselves were smaller than any he’d played since the Honeydrippers back in 1981: theaters and converted movie houses mostly, two-to-three thousand people a pop—sometimes more in the most loyal markets, but nothing like anything he’d grown accustomed to playing.
But in a lot of ways, it worked. Fate of Nations was not an album for arenas. It demanded an intimate setting, an audience that could see what was going on with their own eyes, and whose proximity washed up to the stage to the players. Last time out, in 1990, Plant had played the Seattle Center Coliseum, an echoing concrete barn that might have been designed as an Olympic-sized swimming pool for all the ambience it possessed. This time around, it was two nights at the Paramount, a beautifully preserved 1920s movie house that now staged both concerts and theatrical presentations.
Plant tailored the live set for the surroundings, but also for the loyalty of the fans that filled the venue. Just two songs into the set, “Ramble On” rambled out of the Zeppelin songbook. Later, and elsewhere on the tour too, three or four of a seemingly bottomless bagful of Zeppelin classics would be hauled into view. “Thank You,” “Going to California,” “What Is and What Should Never Be,” “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” “Whole Lotta Love,” “Nobody’s Fault but Mine,” “Living Loving Maid,” “Immigrant Song,” “Custard Pie,” “Trampled Under Foot,” “You Shook Me”—every night, a set that lasted around seventy minutes would pause in its perusal of the latest album and the best of the rest that preceded it to deliver an opening rumble that every soul in the venue knew.
Now the reviews bounced back, and as word spread of the tour’s nightly triumphs, so MTV approached Plant to record a show for what had long ago established itself among the channel’s most popular programs ever, the very sensibly titled MTV Unplugged. The format was simple. Take a band, any band, and strip away their electric instruments. Unplugged was an acoustic showcase, a chance to allow a song to breathe without the accoutrements of amplification and effects. And it worked fabulously.
Squeeze were the first band to headline the show back in 1989, but it was Paul McCartney’s appearance in 1991 that truly established it, not only as a broadcast, but also as a recording of his performance spun out as his own Unplugged album. Since that time, Mariah Carey had topped the US chart with a single drawn from her Unplugged, and Eric Clapton grabbed six Grammys when he released a CD of his broadcast. Neil Young and Bob Dylan both took the Unplugged route, and Nirvana’s airing in late 1993 stands as many viewers’ final memory of frontman Kurt Cobain before his suicide the following April. At least for now, Unplugged was more than a showcase for the artists who appeared. For many, it was the most valuable television exposure they could get.
Of course Plant agreed, and initially he saw the show as the ideal introduction to his next scheduled project: an album built around a collection of North African loops and drones that the French producer Martin Meissonnier, husband of the Tunisian singer Amina, had collected from the University of Tunis and was now assembling for him. But manager Bill Curbishley had his eye on richer prizes. His client base had recently expanded to include Jimmy Page as well. Maybe the pair of them could do something together?
On November 20, 1993, as Plant prepared for the first of two nights at Boston’s Orpheum Theater, Page flew into town and watched the gig, then after the show the pair sat down to talk. Plant was open to a collaboration but remained adamant that he wanted to work with Meissonnier’s drones, as Page told Rolling Stone’s David Fricke later on. “He had these loops and it was, ‘Let’s see if Jimmy can come up with anything. Or is he about to get in the limousine with David Coverdale?’”
Page surprised him. “I’m fine with a challenge.”
He was, but Plant remained uncertain. He had recently been working with Tucson-based, Berlin-born guitarist Rainer Ptaček, recording a clutch of what Plant described as “eerie and very open” songs at RAK Studios in London. Now the pair were seriously considering taking their collaboration to the next level. Plant asked for more time to think about the Page project, first as his tour continued on through South America and then once he got home to Wales again. (The Ptaček project never got off the ground. In 1996, the guitarist was diagnosed with the brain tumor that would kill him the following November. Before that happened, Plant and Giant Sand’s Howie Gelb schemed a tribute album, The Inner Flame, to raise funds for Ptaček’s continuing treatment; Page and Plant contributed one song, “Rude World,” to it.)
It was April 1994 before Plant gave his assent, after he and Page got up to play at a tribute to Alexis Korner, who’d died the previous New Year’s Day. It was the first time they had shared a stage since Jason Bonham’s wedding party, almost four years ago to the day, but whereas John Paul Jones had again completed the quartet on that occasion, this time it was to be just the pair of them.
They came up with a name for the project as well. It was to be called UnLedded.
The venture was never intended as a Led Zeppelin “reunion” in any shape or form. Rather, it was an opportunity for two former members of the band to revisit their past in the guise of their own current fascinations—which, with Plant sticking to his guns, meant either reworking or recreating any old songs they wanted to play, to conform with the North African disciplines he was determined to mine. In fact, one of the first pieces they completed to their satisfaction was a completely new song, constructed directly around one of Meissonnier’s loops, titled “Yallah.”
Plant was, he insisted in a 2007 Mojo interview, a very different person from the one Page had worked with all those years before. “The whole idea of being able to brandish the Arab link was so important to me and really crucial. If you don’t modify it or present it in hushed tones, but mix it the way we are, a couple of questionable characters of ill repute, then you make a totally different form.” In another interview, with Show, he admitted, “I don’t want to bring too much attention to the past, beyond the fact we’re old fuckers who can still do it and have a history.”
The choice of accompanying musicians reinforced his determination that no matter how the show might be billed, it remained his edition of Unplugged. Rehearsing with Charlie Jones and drummer Michael Lee, recruited to the set-up for the Fate of Nations tour, Plant added arranger Ed Shearmur and Egyptian percussionist Hossam Ramzy, whom he’d first heard on the soundtrack to Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Ramzy in turn was placed in charge of building a band of his own countrymen, in whose hands “Kashmir” became the first experimental guinea pig—and, in places, barely recognizable, as the Egyptians slipped into their homeland’s own blues, baladi, and then bade Plant and Page blend their intentions the best they could.
The result was eerie, alien, ecstatic. They were on their way.
In many ways, the rehearsals for this latest collaboration harked back to another, a little over twenty years before, when Plant and Page—again infused by the quest for new sounds and experimentation—decamped for a few weeks to India, to record with the Bombay Symphony Orchestra. Two songs reworked from the then-recently released Led Zeppelin IV and its predecessor, Led Zeppelin III, were attempted, “Four Sticks” and “Friends.” And while that enterprise was ultimately deemed a failure and consigned to the archive, its spirit—and indeed those same two songs—was an instant touchstone for this new outing.
So was a second trip the pair took in 1972, this time to Morocco, where with tape recorder in hand, they listened to and captured the sound of the country’s master musicians. It was a trek that the Rolling Stones had undertaken back in 1968, which Brian Jones preserved on what became the Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka album. Plant and Page had no such grandiose ideas at that time. But now, as they talked and schemed their latest project, the emotions they experienced and the music they heard on that adventure came screaming back into focus.
Other instruments eased in. Porl Thompson, guitarist across the Cure’s late ’80s output, and hurdy-gurdy man Nigel Eaton joined the sessions. When “The Battle of Evermore” was suggested as a possibility, Plant leapt at the opportunity to transport the song from the mists of English myth to the burnished lands of djinn and marid. Najma Akhtar, an English-born Indian singer, joined the team, and in August 1994, Plant and Page moved on to Marrakech, Morocco, where they would shoot a series of filmed interludes to be run during the MTV broadcast, with the Gnaoua master musicians as their accompaniment. Other footage was filmed in a slate quarry close to Plant’s home in Snowdonia, and then it was time for the concert itself, spread over three consecutive nights at the end of the month, with the London Metropolitan Orchestra added to the soundscape.
Not every reinvention was successful, although few fans can agree which ones. But “Gallows Pole,” a song that was old even before the American collector Francis Child reeled it in for his esteemed anthology of ballads in the late nineteenth century, swung as carefree as any song about a hanging ought to do, while “When the Levee Breaks”—remembering the great flood that drowned much of Mississippi in 1927—swept away the years. Across the board, the opportunity to reinvent so many old favorites with new eyes and ears, and develop old notions into fresh compositions, was clearly one that both Plant and Page relished. Indeed, so vast was the acclaim, and so successful the album that appeared in time for Christmas (so aptly titled No Quarter) that when the offers came in for more of the same, both Plant and Page agreed.
They would remain on the road for more than a year, and in the process bring the ears of a whole new generation to what remains the original band’s finest album.