18
Let Your Loss Be Your Lesson

(1977–1980)

His son’s face the only thing in his mind, Plant returned to England on the same day that he learned of the boy’s death, the complacency of the vast machinery that surrounded Led Zeppelin stunned into action by the news. It wasn’t easy piecing the flights together, but they managed it, flying him first to Newark, New Jersey, and then a shuttle to New York’s JFK for an international flight to London. A car waited there to take him home.

He barely left the house, or Maureen’s side, for months to come—for almost a year, in fact, before he was finally lured to that band meeting at Clearwell Castle in May 1978. And even then the wound was still fresh, the grief still palpable, and the blame still tightly focused—on himself for not having been there either at the time of Karac’s death or for the majority of his life as well, and on the band for having assured that in the first place.

All those months, all those years. He had questioned in the past the need, instilled into each of them by Peter Grant, for the band to continue churning, one album after another, one tour after another. He had asked on so many occasions why it was that Led Zeppelin needed to work like a horse when other bands that could conceivably have been placed on a similar plateau to them, Pink Floyd and Emerson, Lake & Palmer among them, were already falling into far more leisurely routines. Two years had separated each of Floyd’s last three albums, and while touring had devoured at least half of the interim, still the band operated to a regime that felt luxurious compared to Zeppelin’s. ELP had enjoyed an even longer break, leaving the road behind in 1974 and not even considering recording a new album (1977’s Works) until they’d had close to two years during which to recharge their batteries.

Grant would counter in the same way as he always countered. By pointing out that Led Zeppelin were bigger than either Pink Floyd or ELP, and the reason for that was because they kept going. Nobody could overtake them, nobody could outgross them. Now Plant was realizing the price they—no, not “they,” he—had had to pay for that.

Only one member of the band was welcome at Jennings Farm throughout this long, ghastly exile; the only one who even attended Karac’s funeral. John Bonham, Plant’s nearest neighbor, dropped by whenever he could, and was allowed to stay whenever he was sober. The friendship the pair had ignited so many years before, and that had remained on track despite all Plant’s misgivings about the drummer’s excesses, remained strong—perhaps grew even stronger now, as Bonham hid his own demons from view as he fought to pull Plant back on track.

Occasionally, Bonham would invite Plant along to watch the band that he was jamming with, led by the Move’s old bassist Trevor Burton, but there was never any pressure to do more than watch. But it did inspire Plant to take a similar route, teaming up with another local singer, Melvin Gittus, in a band that they saddled with the most unbecoming soubriquet they could think of, the Turd Burglars—a popular English expression reflecting upon the propensity of strangers to walk into a public restroom just as one is about to release one’s cargo. The sphincter closes, the turd has been burgled. Childish, yes. But a great band name, all the same.

Cherry picking members from Plant’s other hobby, the soccer team that turned out for the local Queen’s Head pub, the Turd Burglars gigged when the soccer team played, pitching up at venues the night before a game for a pre-match sing along to sundry favorite oldies. Plant even took the Turd Burglars into the local Old Smithy studio to record a brace of favorites, “Buzz Buzz A-Diddle It” and “Three Months to Kill,” and just maybe he detected a slice of irony in that latter title, because he did indeed have just three months left before the Zeppelin siren call finally lured him back.

He heeded the call and regretted it instantly. He found he still resented his bandmates’ coldness when he needed them the most, with Page, Grant, and Jones’s avoidance of the funeral only the most hurtful of the thoughtlessness they exhibited. A few phone calls, a note, a “How are you, mate?” That was all they needed to do. Instead, they left him to his solitude and heartbreak, maybe reassuring themselves that what Percy needed was peace and quiet, and they didn’t want to intrude. But as Plant’s father later growled, “All this success and fame . . . what is it worth? It doesn’t mean very much when you compare it to the love of a family.”

How serious was Plant about leaving Led Zeppelin? Very. And how was he brought back on board? Gently. He had already had his application to a teacher training school accepted when the first overtures were made, and his initial inclination was to ignore them.

It wasn’t as if there was unfinished business; Led Zeppelin had set out to become the biggest band in the world, and they had succeeded. They had dreamed of creating music that would survive for all time, and it looked like they’d achieved that as well—at least as far as anything can last that long. There was nothing left to prove, nothing left to do. It was the end.

Except it wasn’t. Among the rumors that percolated around the music industry, and made their way to Plant as whispers and “Did you hears,” was the most peculiar notion that Jimmy Page and Roy Harper were working together again. In fact, it was more than a rumor.

According to journalist Chris Welch, Harper had recently been interviewed by a farming magazine—no surprise, as he was also a farmer—and in the course of the conversation, he mentioned that he might be joining Led Zeppelin. Plant “subscribed to the same farming magazine and read the interview,” recalled Welch in Peter Grant: The Man Who Led Zeppelin.

It was a trick that the band would play again thirty years later, when Plant proved so reluctant to continue the latest Led Zeppelin reunion. On that occasion, it didn’t succeed. This time, though, it apparently did. “Horrified that Harper might be taking his place,” Welch continued, “he contacted Page for the first time in months.”

Harper plays the story down. “Me as Robert Plant doesn’t work!” he avows. He’d already tried to front a rock group once, a couple of years earlier with his HQ album, and he’d sworn off band work for good as a consequence. “When I have a band onstage, I’m not as focused on the audience as I should be, I’m more concerned about the democracy of the band. In order to maintain your quasi-leadership of the democracy, you have to give everyone their head, and give every instrument its due in the performance, and I always found myself diluted.”

Whatever the reasons behind Plant’s change of heart—and likely it was simply the passing of time, the opportunity to heal, and the tug of a lifestyle that he had generally enjoyed—he agreed to go back, and immediately had second thoughts. But having committed, there was no honorable way out. A new album was called for; a new album would be delivered. And once again, Grant didn’t even seem to care that, with a chilling echo of Presence, there was no new material, meaning whatever they intended recording would move straight from conception to realization as fast as it could be hustled.

Page appeared to have written nothing during the band’s long layoff, tinkering instead with various soundtrack projects; Jones had a few ideas, but was intending them for his own solo album; and Plant, whose attention was understandably far from the business of songwriting, had just one thing to offer, a piece he had written for Karac titled “All My Love.” It is no coincidence that of all the songs that would eventually be pulled together for what became In Through the Out Door, that song alone dripped with anything close to genuine passion.

Elsewhere, and this is where the now eighteen-month-old ramifications of punk rock did turn around and bite the band, it was as if Led Zeppelin had remained in both a creative and sonic bubble since Physical Graffiti, neither advancing on the sounds and textures that established that album as the epitome of their craft nor even particularly seeming to care to try.

Punk, and its new wave mutation, had spurred many other artists to try something new, to at least have a go at updating their signature sound to match the bands that were exploding all around them. Not all succeeded, and some perished trying. Others went rocketing off on fresh tangents that rendered them all but unrecognizable to their core following. But a handful (led by Pink Floyd, who commenced work on The Wall around the same time as Led Zeppelin began In Through the Out Door) had absorbed all the lessons that punk could teach them, and emerged all the more successful as a result.

Five years earlier, Led Zeppelin would have been consumed with curiosity, ravenous to restake their claim on their position as the world’s No. 1. Now it was as if they didn’t even care. Sequestered in the Polar Studios in Sweden, from whence ABBA had masterminded their own superstardom, Led Zeppelin went through motions that were as tired as any that had contributed to Presence—and just as fraught. Page, for the first time, abdicated his production duties in all but name. It was Plant and Jones who shepherded the album to completion; Plant and Jones, too, who became the album’s lead composers; and Jones alone who seemed to have noticed that music had moved on since the last time they were together. The studio was loaded with a clutch of the latest synthesizers, and Jones set himself the task of mastering them. Always the most adventurous of the band members when it came to grasping technology, Jones at least attempted to bring fresh pastures to the music.

Plant remained wracked by doubt regardless. As he told Uncut in 2005, one evening, out on the town with one half of ABBA, he found himself pondering death, and very sincerely asking himself, “If I go tomorrow, is this where I want to find myself? In a sex club in Stockholm, being silly with Benny and Bjorn from ABBA, while Agnetha and Frida are driving around trying to find which den of iniquity Led Zeppelin had taken their husbands to?”

The answer, for all the distractions that Stockholm could offer, was no.

In later years, Plant could find some justification for the album. “In Through the Out Door wasn’t the greatest thing in the world,” he admitted to Q in 2007, “but at least we were trying to vary what we were doing, for our own integrity’s sake. Of all the [Led Zeppelin] records, it’s interesting, but a bit sanitized because we hadn’t been in the clamor and chaos for a long time. In ’77, when I lost my boy, I didn’t really want to go swinging around—‘Hey hey mama say the way you move’ didn’t really have a great deal of import anymore. In Through the Out Door is more conscientious and less animal.” The problem was, that conscientiousness was all too often ditchwater dull.

With the album complete, Plant flew home in time for the birth of his third child. Logan Romero was born in January 1979, and Plant knew he had the next six months free. Peter Grant had desperately tried to force a fresh American tour into the calendar, but Plant was adamant. He was still in pain from the accident; Maureen too. They had a new child. He would not tour; he would not even leave the country.

He acceded to just one request: to announce the release of In Through the Out Door with a single festival appearance, at Knebworth House in August, topping a bill that would also include Todd Rundgren, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Dukes, the Marshall Tucker Band, and, playing what they intended to be their last-ever public performance before breaking up for good, Fairport Convention.

As it turned out, ticket demand was so vast that a second performance was added for the following weekend as well, with Led Zeppelin’s total earnings from the two performances widely touted as the largest single fee ever paid to a rock band at that time. Then, on the largest stage ever constructed for a concert, at a volume that received noise complaints from as far away as seven miles, Led Zeppelin played the last two British concerts of their life.

It was, Plant mourned in its aftermath, two he wished they had never given. He was “racked with nerves.” Aside from a warm-up in Brondby, Denmark, a few days earlier, the first Knebworth performance was Led Zeppelin’s first concert in two years—and their first British gig in four. The sheer weight of expectation from the four hundred thousand people who turned up for the two shows was simply too great. “[It] was useless. It was no good at all. It was no good because we weren’t ready to do it, the whole thing was a management decision. It felt like I was cheating myself because I wasn’t as relaxed as I could have been. There was so much expectation there, and the least we could have done was to have been confident enough to kill.”

They weren’t. So they didn’t.

In Through the Out Door was released immediately following the second Knebworth show, and though its sales were certainly respectable (four million sold in the United States before the end of the year), cynics (and there were plenty now) murmured that it only sold as well as it did because of a remarkable gimmick attached to the release. Delivered to the stores in a sealed brown paper bag, with just the band’s name and album title stamped on the front, the LP boasted no less than six different covers. And while nobody seems to have calculated how many people purchased multiple copies in the hope of acquiring all six, the fact is, many did.

Knebworth over, Plant retreated once more. He would surface once, to perform Elvis Presley’s “Little Sister” alongside Dave Edmunds’ Rockpile at the Concert for Kampuchea gig in London, and he mused on the possibility of launching a record label of his own, named like his studio for daughter Carmen’s Palomino horse, and specializing in hard-to-find oldies. But a year would elapse before he finally said yes to Peter Grant’s constant requests to reconsider his reluctance to tour again with Led Zeppelin. He agreed to a three-week European tour that would eschew the vast auditoriums and marathon performances of the past in favor of smaller venues and a tighter, more concise set. His bandmates even agreed to forgo their solos.

The shows that followed were, by no means, legendary Led Zeppelin performances. Which is maybe why Plant enjoyed them so much. A smaller stage and lesser dynamics allowed him to work as the front man in a rock ’n’ roll band again, as opposed to a preening sex god on an unreachable dais. As long as Grant could guarantee similar-sized venues, and his bandmates would agree to a similarly paced set, Plant was prepared to tour again.

Grant got to work, putting together a month’s worth of American dates, beginning in October 1980. Logistically, he knew that the tour would inevitably run into trouble, simply because the demand for tickets was destined to swamp every one of the venues they played. But it was enough to have gotten the band back on the road. In late September, the band set up their new headquarters in the small town of Bray, close to Windsor on the outskirts of London, with Plant and Bonham commuting daily from their roost at the Blakes Hotel in London, while Bonham opted to live at Page’s house.

Live there and, on the night of September 24, die there.

Led Zeppelin died with him.