(1995–1998)
Twenty-five years later, Plant was still trying to prove that he was a regular guy. And it was still difficult. Regular guys don’t get inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
On January 12, 1995, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, and John Paul Jones, the three surviving members of Led Zeppelin, arrived in New York City for the annual bean feast that passed as the induction ceremony.
It was a richly deserved honor, of course, albeit one that it is easy to regard with cynicism. As so many past nominees (and non-nominees too) have remarked, rock ’n’ roll is about a lot of things, but being fossilized in a self-congratulatory museum is scarcely one that its founding fathers foresaw. But ever since the first rock bands became eligible for the honor (itself conferred after a minimum of twenty-five years’ active service), Led Zeppelin had been a shoo-in for this year’s award, shared with Neil Young, Janis Joplin, the Allman Brothers, Frank Zappa, Al Green, and Martha & the Vandellas.
What gave the event a little extra fission was the presence of John Paul Jones. Loudly excluded from the Unplugged performance, and from the UnLedded tour that was set to follow, no way did his necessary presence that night portend an evening of relaxed bonhomie and backslapping. It was an open secret, at least among those folk who claim to have an ear for such details, that he was not at all happy about his omission from the unfolding project—that he publicly described his old bandmates as “discourteous,” with their own silence on the subject adding insult to injury.
Apparently, the first he heard about the upcoming event was less than a month before the MTV program was broadcast, by which time UnLedded had been underway for six months—although it is ironic that, for at least one Zeppelin fan, Jones’s most recent activities had demonstrated just how far he had moved since the old days. He was on the road with avant-garde performer Diamanda Galas, “and one night . . . there was somebody in the audience [who] called out for ‘Kashmir,’ or something. And Diamanda just fixed them with a glare, shot something back at them, a ‘Fuck you’ or something, and you could see the whole crowd just parting around this poor guy, leaving him standing on his own in the middle of the floor.”
The other pair’s supporters have pointed out that both Plant and Jason Bonham joined Page on his Outrider album, and nobody questioned Jones’s absence from that. Which is true. But Outrider, unlike No Quarter, was not predicated around the reinvention of music within which Jones was an integral component. Nor was it titled for a Led Zeppelin song that most people associate solely with Jones; like Page’s marathon “Dazed and Confused” and John Bonham’s “Moby Dick,” “No Quarter” was reserved for Jones’s solo turn. Indeed, when a journalist asked him outright what he thought about “No Quarter,” he replied, “I always reckoned it was one of my better tunes.”
Compared with what some people were expecting, then, although probably not people who knew him very well, Jones’s acceptance speech at the Hall of Fame was a masterpiece of understatement. He simply said he was glad that this bandmates had finally found his phone number.
Neither was there any sign of discord as the trio, accompanied by Jason Bonham, Michael Lee, Steven Tyler, Joe Perry, and Neil Young, launched into a performance that was more of a jam than an actual set, rounding up “The Train Kept A-Rollin’”; a first-ever live performance of “For Your Life”; “Bring It On Home”; a blues medley that incorporated “The Prison Blues,” “Gambler’s Blues,” and “Baby Please Don’t Go”; and an epic “When the Levee Breaks,” which acknowledged Young’s presence with a dive into a song that Plant had performed in his own early days, Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.” Then it was back to business, and the Page and Plant world tour: a full band augmented in every city by a different local orchestra, rehearsed the day before each gig by Ed Shearmur.
It was, on the surface, a relaxed outing, particularly when compared with the madness that engulfed the pair the last times they toured together. But old differences were never far from the surface, not least of all Page’s reluctance—and more often outright refusal—to mix with the rest of the tour party. Unspoken but apparent too was Page’s unhappiness with the compromises he’d made in order for the tour to even happen—including, as it transpired, both the absence of John Paul Jones from the band and that of “Stairway to Heaven” from the live show.
Ignited in the US, the tour moved onto Europe and a clutch of festivals, including the annual Glastonbury bash, and then further afield: a second string of American dates, South America, Japan, and Australia. There might have been more, too, but Plant was growing restless. Too many of the old band’s demons had returned to haunt his relationship with Page, with the guitarist’s eye for the bottle only exacerbating their differences.
Neither were darker shadows ever far away. On November 21, 1995, just months after attending Page-Plant’s second night at London’s Wembley Arena, Led Zeppelin’s old manager Peter Grant was felled by a massive heart attack, and so the three surviving band members were united once again, this time by Grant’s funeral at Hellingly Cemetery. His misgivings growing deeper, and more widely shared every day, Plant made it clear that the final show on the current schedule—in Melbourne, Australia, on March 1, 1996—would be the last.
For all the differences and dissatisfaction, the music itself seldom suffered. Just as he had on his Fate of Nations tour, Plant set about resurrecting songs that even the original Zeppelin rarely performed live. Traditional concert chest-beaters like “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” “Kashmir,” and “Dazed and Confused” of course played their part in the set. But in a show whose prime intent was to reevaluate rather than rehash Zeppelin’s career, that also left room for “In the Evening,” “Four Sticks,” “Friends,” and even “Hey Hey What Can I Do,” a song that had only ever been aired on a 1970 B-side. There was even a nod toward Porl Thompson’s past, a deliciously chilling dance through the Cure’s eerie paean to arachnophobia, “Lullaby,” while those final dates in Australia saw the band indulge themselves in a televisual treat that rivals even Plant’s appearance on Tiswas.
The Money or the Gun was a surreal music show whose features, bizarre as it may seem, included its weekly guests being forced to perform “Stairway to Heaven” in their own inimitable fashion. An album of the greatest renditions, sensibly titled Stairway to Heaven, was released in 1992, including distinctive and occasionally excruciating versions by such Aussie TV staples as Kate Ceberano and the Ministry of Fun, “Love Is in the Air” hit maker John Paul Young, a B-52s tribute act called the Rock Lobsters, and veteran comedian/singer/artist Rolf Harris, who rendered the song in the spirit of his own “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport” and was promptly rewarded with a UK Top 10 hit.
For Page and Plant to have honored the show with their own version of a song they had written would, of course, have been futile—and in light of the fact that Plant had refused to perform it anyplace else, impossible. So host Andrew Denton offered them an even bigger challenge. Pay tribute to Rolf Harris instead. He bade them play Harris’s “Sun Arise” (“My favorite!” laughed Plant), and no matter that the song had already received a rock treatment once before, when Alice Cooper covered it on 1971’s Love It to Death, still Page and Plant turned in an absolutely unexpected, and utterly priceless, rendition.
Plant returned home after that, accompanied by singer Najma Akhtar, the latest woman in his life. He stewed around the house for a time, decompressing from a year on the road, but inactivity was never a state he could tolerate for long. Soon he was heading off to China for a vacation that took him along the historic Silk Road and onto the Great Wall, then back to England for a spot more recharging of the batteries.
He went to the pub and played soccer with his friends, and busied himself in the fashion of the gentleman farmer he sometimes wished he had become. He resumed his twice-monthly worship at Molineux, the stately but slowly decaying home of his beloved Wolverhampton Wanderers, and watched in a state of disbelief as the club’s new chairman, Sir Jack Hayward, began pumping unprecedented sums into the team in a bid to elevate them to the uppermost echelons of the English game.
For a decade since the side diced with extinction in the bleak mid-1980s, Wolves had been knocking on the door. Two promotions in successive seasons took them up to the league’s second tier; Steve Bull, a suitably bullish young forward who would spend his entire playing career with Wolves, was knocking in goals for fun, and in 1989 he became one of the first lower-league players ever selected to play for England’s national side. Now Wolves were almost there. Twice in the mid-1990s, they were so close to promotion to the top division that their fans could almost taste it, and Plant was as shattered by their failure to take that one final step as anyone else in the crowd. But he continued going to the games.
Plant did not turn his back on music throughout that year away from the bright lights, although very few people were aware of the fact. His local tennis club, Bewdley, was appealing for funds, part of its annual charity drive, and Plant agreed to do what he could to help out.
Choosing a guitarist was easy. Kevyn Gammond, his guitarist back in the Band of Joy, now counted among Plant’s neighbors. He also headed up a music course at Kidderminster College, from whence he introduced a drummer: one of his fellow tutors, Andy Edwards. They rehearsed a handful of favorite covers, songs that resonated with all of them, then turned out in front of the two or three hundred souls who had come out to support their tennis club.
Nobody recorded the show, nobody reviewed it. It was off the radar in a tiny place that many folk might have considered was off the map as well. And once it was over, Plant went home.
It was the death of his mother that proved the catalyst for him to start moving again. Of course they had long outgrown the period of estrangement that saw him kicked out of the house as an unruly teen—outlived, too, the sense of disappointment that wracked his parents as they watched him embark upon a life that was a far cry from any they may have mapped out for him. Indeed, there had been times since then when his parents felt like the only truly reliable constants in his entire existence, and losing his mother, as with other past anchors, seemed to force him to begin making fresh changes in his own life.
Breaking with Akhtar was one, but reuniting once again with Jimmy Page was another, a musical decision focused as much on his need for familiarity and comfort as on his continued urge to keep pushing his music forward. Back during the earliest days of the UnLedded project, the pair had discussed the possibility of recording a new album together. At that time, an exhausting tour schedule forced the possibility from Plant’s mind. Now he was ready.
There would be no extra flourishes this time, no armies of outsiders to blur the lines around the two stars’ contributions. Only two further players were recruited to the project, the rhythm section of Charlie Jones and Michael Lee; while their choice of producer, Steve Albini, echoed their determination to take their partnership back to basics, the greatest indication of all that this was not to be Led, or even UnLed revisited.
Still a schoolboy when the old band broke up, Albini’s reputation was built upon some of the most uncompromising records of the ’80s and ’90s, brutal slabs of hardcore punk carved out with such disdain for mainstream tastes that when Nirvana elected him producer of their third album, the follow-up to one of the biggest-selling records of the decade, most observers accused them of plotting commercial suicide before they’d even entered the studio. Of course it did not turn out like that, and In Utero was at least as vital as Nevermind before it. But still Albini’s name was enough to turn the average industry executive pale, and the notion of his sonic terrorism clashing with the giants of classic-rock legend felt unimaginable to even both sides’ most fervent admirers.
Which made the finished record all the more remarkable when it was released in April 1998. Recorded at Abbey Road in no more than seven weeks, the four musicians playing live for the most part, hunkered down in one room together, Walking into Clarksdale was titled in tribute to the Mississippi town that haunted so many British bluesmen’s dreams, and one listened in vain for more than the occasional spectral echo of past Zeppelin heights. Despite boasting no less than twelve brand-new songs composed by Page, Plant, and Lee, it felt like a Robert Plant solo set in all but name, awash in the same ear for a stark modern edge that he applied to his own work and almost painstakingly shy of stepping into what might have felt like recognizable territory.
It is a mood with which Plant seemed to agree, at the same time as acknowledging the album’s deficits when, a little over a decade later, he revisited the best track on the original record, the keening “Please Read the Letter,” during his collaboration with Alison Krauss—and proceeded to produce a far more satisfying rendering of the song than he and Page ever managed. Which is not to say Walking into Clarksdale was a disappointment. Combining the eclecticism of the UnLedded live show with the contemporary stylings that Albini brought to bear, Walking into Clarksdale could even be seen as an attempt to bring the Zeppelin sound into the mid-1990s, and as such, it succeeded.
The question it did not answer, for reasons that should be obvious, was whether the Zeppelin sound actually needed to be brought there—or whether its original form was timeless enough that any move to modernize it would ultimately wind up sounding hollow and, incredibly, dated. Complaints that could never be leveled at the original act. Played back today, Walking into Clarksdale scarcely demands a second listen; it might easily be ranked among the weakest of all Robert Plant’s recordings. (Although it was still better than Coverdale Page.)
Perhaps surprisingly, but also inevitably, the band toured in the aftermath of the album, opening with a mini-tour around Eastern Europe in the weeks before its release, then the US and Europe through the end of 1998. And once again, had Plant only had the appetite, more dates and indeed more albums could have followed. But he was growing bored again, not only with the routine, but also with audiences that were so easily sated by the handful of oldies they knew to expect. On his own tours, even those he embarked upon after he lifted his embargo on the oldies, Zeppelin songs were paced and placed in a manner that merely framed the new material. This time around, no less than before, they were the be-all and end-all of the audience’s expectations. The new material barely stood a chance.