(1981–1983)
Close to twenty years later, Robert Plant sometimes wished he had paid more attention to that particular strand of his education.
It was the accountants who stymied his dream of simply forming a new band and heading out under their name, allowing people to discover for themselves that the singer used to be in a famous group; the accountants who pointed out that, having financed the Pictures at Eleven sessions himself, and paid his musicians generously too, now it was time for him to recoup his outlay and make some money as well.
The name “Robert Plant” might not have literally been guaranteed a license to print money. But it certainly had a lot more commercial traction than a brand-new band name that he’d formed with his friends.
It was financing, too, that played a part in the decision not to tour the new album, and once again Plant demanded a lot of convincing before he acknowledged the wisdom behind that. He had already made clear, both privately and publicly, that the Led Zeppelin catalog remained off-limits in his repertoire. “It would be a cheap shot to visit those songs without John Bonham,” he wrote later, in the liner notes for Sixty Six to Timbuktu. “Either with or without the remainder of the dream factory.” If he was going to play, he would play his own songs.
But Pictures at Eleven alone would not sustain a live show, and padding the set with Honeydrippers-style covers would only focus an even brighter spotlight on the absence of the oldies. As Peter Grant reflected, “He was always walking a tightrope in that respect, and even later on you heard people complaining, ‘He won’t do “Whole Lotta Love,” but he’ll happily play a bunch of Elvis songs.’”
Neither was Plant in the mood to compete with his past. Pictures at Eleven was released in June 1982; Coda, the first in what would ultimately become a long line of Led Zeppelin compilations and repackages, was scheduled to follow it in November. Right around the time that Plant would be on the road, and serving up a major distraction for anyone who cared about what he was doing.
No matter that Coda was, for the most part, a hodgepodge, an assemblage of outtakes and live cuts that Jimmy Page insisted existed only because “there was so much bootleg stuff out. We thought, ‘Well, if there’s that much interest, then we may as well put the rest of our studio stuff out.’” The name on the cover was enough to drown any applause that its makers might individually merit.
There was only one thing to do. Pictures at Eleven was still fresh on the racks, and Plant was already thinking about its follow-up. The sooner it was finished (and the sooner Coda had run its course), the sooner he could get back out on the road.
He had already recharged his batteries, returning to his beloved Morocco with Maureen, Logan, and Carmen for a short vacation while Pictures at Eleven geared up for release. There, they explored the culture and legends that he had come to adore, spending time in such places as the hills and forests of Ouirghane, long before it was established as an up-and-coming vacation spot; the village of Tahanaoute; stately Marrakech—the lands that travel writer and historian Gavin Maxwell assigned to the Lords of the Atlas (in the book of the same name), and all poised at the gateway to one of the most impressive mountain ranges in the world. Lands in which, at that time at least, all you could hear on the wind was the music being made in the casbahs and souks that dot the region, drifting out of the valleys to merge with heavens and send Plant into raptures of delight.
Too soon the vacation ended. Now the quartet of Plant, Martinez, Blunt, and Woodroffe were destined for his friend Roy Harper’s home studio in
Hereford, to work up the songs that would become The Principle of Moments.
Harper had long been a part of Robert Plant’s landscape, both as a friend and a musical influence. Born in Manchester, the singer-songwriter-to-be was already twenty-three when he arrived in London in 1964, part of the influx of aspiring folkies drawn to the city that season. He was rarely considered a fulcrum of the inner circle, if only because he was forever more interested in performing his own idiosyncratic compositions than voicing the traditional favorites or penning the slavish sound-alikes that were most performers’ route into those charmed circles.
Nevertheless, he had his first album out by 1967, Sophisticated Beggar, and the following year he was in the studio with legendary producer Shel Talmy, recording Come Out Fighting, Ghengis Smith. He shared management with Pink Floyd, Tyrannosaurus Rex, and the Edgar Broughton Band, and he numbered Deep Purple, Kevin Ayers, and Floyd again among his labelmates.
In the early 1970s, when other purported folkies were driving toward premature musical middle age with a relentless stream of self-flagellating ballads and soft-rock future classics, Harper was conjuring side-long suites for his new LPs. At a time when there seemed to be an immovable mafia of folkie sidemen, all playing on one another’s records, Harper had Jimmy Page playing on Stormcock. And in 1975, to the amazement of many but the disapproval of few, he supplanted all three of Pink Floyd’s proven singers by taking lead vocals on their “Have a Cigar.”
By which time, Harper had already been writ large in the annals of Zeppelin, via the closing track to the band’s third album—a happenstance that he recalled a few years later. “I used to go up to [Led Zeppelin’s] office in Oxford Street . . . and one day Jimmy was up there and gave me the [band’s] new record. I just said thanks and put it under my arm. Jimmy said, ‘Look at it.’ So I twirled the little wheel around, and put it back under my arm. Very nice and all that. So he went, ‘Look at it!’ Then I discovered ‘Hats Off to (Roy) Harper.’ I was very touched.”
Set out in rolling fields, its closest neighbors sheep and horses, Harper’s home was a natural home away from home for Plant and the band. Harper, too, owned a farm, dominated by a magnificent fifteenth-century house, and the whole place was even more delightfully rambling than Plant’s own. The days when musicians had routinely traipsed off into the wilderness to “get their heads together in the country, man,” were long past. But for Plant, Hereford’s rural calm, mythological history, and gentle pace proved a creative panacea that even home could not.
It is, after all, one of England’s loveliest cities, physically dominated by one of the country’s most beautiful cathedrals, but culturally as close to Wales as you can get without leaving home turf. All around, the land speaks of the centuries of strife and uncertainty that were once waged between the two kingdoms—and following Wales’s absorption into England, the two peoples—while local legend simply prickles with Anglo-Saxon saints, phantom horses, gory martyrdom, and witcheries galore.
In and around the business of making music, Plant happily meandered through town and country, and if his thoughts ever turned toward the business machinations that had strived so hard to prevent him from enjoying an idyll such as this, he ignored them. Had Grant and Co. had their way, he knew, he’d probably be writing his new album for a few hundred dollars an hour in whichever airless, whitewashed superstudio was this year’s recording facility du jour. Instead, one can only be grateful that he chose to exact his revenge through his music, as opposed to the method recommended by some long-forgotten local witch, whose curse can be read alongside the effigy she made of her greatest foe in a display case in Hereford City Library Museum:
I act this spell upon you from my whole heart, wishing you to never rest nor eat or sleep the restern part of your life. I hope your flesh will waste away, and I hope you will never spend another penny I ought to have.
Preparations for the new record were not Plant’s sole reason for being glad to get away from Jennings Farm, however. Despite their Moroccan sojourn, relations between Plant and wife Maureen were souring—had been rocky, in fact, for a few years. In the past, the shock, guilt, and mourning that surrounded the death of their son Karac had seemed cause enough for their unhappiness, and both hoped that time would heal those breaches. If anything, however, they had only worsened. Time away to work up the new album, both hoped, would allow them both to figure out what they wanted to do next.
That August, their divorce would be finalized.
It’s a cliché, but that does not make it any less true. At the top of a profession in which felicity and fame make for the least likely bedfellows of all, the fact that Robert Plant was not merely married when Led Zeppelin formed, but remained married throughout their career, is one that catches a lot of people by surprise. But Maureen was always more than the mother of his children and the keeper of the castle to which he would return when he was able to pull himself off the road. She was also his No. 1 cheerleader and the wellspring of his support system, a role into which she had slipped almost from the moment they met, at a Georgie Fame gig in summer 1966.
Like Plant, Maureen was born in West Bromwich. Her parents, however were Indians, first-generation migrants from the old Portuguese colony of Goa, just two of the thousands of their countrymen who had relocated to “the mother country” after India won independence from the old British Empire in 1947, amid scenes of vicious violence and ancient score settling. Because of the preponderance of industry in the region, the Black Country was one of the areas to which this influx flocked, a circumstance that inevitably ignited its own new set of flash points and prejudices. In 1964 in nearby Smethwick, the town’s own Member of Parliament, Peter Griffiths, fought his candidacy on an unrelentingly racist platform, and while he lost his seat at the next election in 1966, nobody doubted that he spoke for a lot of people—including many who would never even have considered themselves to be racist. They just didn’t want dark-skinned foreigners living in their midst.
Even closer to home, Wolverhampton MP Enoch Powell was fermenting his own brand of racial disharmony, speaking out against the incumbent Labour government’s apparent open-door policy regarding immigration, which culminated in April 1968 with what remains one of the most infamous and inflammatory speeches ever delivered by a major British political figure, the so-called “Rivers of Blood” address to an audience in Birmingham: “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’ That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself [the continued Civil Rights struggle], is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the 20th century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now.”
The Times newspaper condemned Powell’s words as “evil.” But for people of Plant’s parents’ generation, he may not have spoken the truth, but he certainly spoke a truth. Like Powell, they had been raised—and, in the process, firmly inculcated—with the lingering Victorian belief of English superiority, not only over the Empire’s other subjects, but over foreigners of all persuasion. Like Powell, they had largely grown up in a society where blacks simply didn’t exist outside of picture books, movies, and jazz bands.
For their children, however, there was no such defense. Since the end of World War II, Britain’s once defiantly exclusionary immigration laws had grown more and more lax, and in the major cities at least, it was unlikely that anybody could grow up without seeing and hearing a dozen other lands and languages represented in the hubbub of daily life.
When he first started dating Maureen, Plant expected there to be opposition from his parents. He was more surprised to encounter it from his friends, and it is an early mark of his self-belief and capacity for self-determination that he closed his ears completely to their racist quips, and indulged himself instead in the ready welcome that Maureen’s own family and friends extended to him. They, unlike their white neighbors, were happy for their cultures to integrate.
Even early in the relationship, Plant was frequently invited to eat with the Wilsons; later, once it became clear that the couple were serious about one another, he actually moved in with them, while Maureen saved what she could from her wages as a shop assistant to tide them over for the future. There, he developed a taste for Indian cuisine that was far removed from the fare served up in the handful of ethnic restaurants that were beginning to pop up, and when he was offered an introduction to the family’s heritage, the music and mythologies that they had brought to England with them, he proved a ready and willing student.
Far beyond the parameters of Plant’s own universe, the likes of Beatle George Harrison were taking their first steps toward incorporating a flavor of Indian music into their music—a splash of sitar here, a word about Ravi Shankar there. Plant, however, was absorbing that culture in a way they never could, not treating it as a learning experience and bookishly assembling all the ingredients so that he might one day make a curry-flavored LP. Rather, he was living within it, until he came to see Maureen’s family as his own, and her voice became the closest he had ever had to wise counsel.
The couple got engaged in 1968, when they discovered that Maureen was pregnant, but they would have done so anyway. And on November 9 that same year, they married. Even then, there were those around them who said it would never last, and ultimately they were proved right. But the sixteen years that those Cassandras had to wait before their prophecy came true surely took away a lot of the impact.
Once again Phil Collins was scheduled to drum on the new album, when his own schedule allowed him the time (Barriemore Barlow, the Birmingham-born drummer with Jethro Tull, was also on board). Collins would be joining them once the sessions moved back to Rockfield Studios, which would take place only after the band spent a few weeks that summer in Ibiza, taking over the Pikes Hotel and setting up a makeshift stage by the swimming pool.
But the scenery was not the only thing that had changed since the sessions that produced Pictures at Eleven. Those sessions, by necessity and Plant’s own state of mind, had been very much a democratic process, each of the musicians contributing freely and openly to the proceedings and every idea having as much of a chance of being taken up as any other. This time around, Plant determined to exert more control: to have the final say and, more than that, to impose his own will upon the proceedings. He’d had enough of those old jibes, especially once John Paul Jones’s response to Pictures at Eleven had proven they were not so old after all. He was not simply the guy who sang the songs, and each of his bandmates came away from the sessions with the awareness that the gang mentality that fired the first record had been utterly suppressed.
None of this should have surprised them. No matter how much Plant’s contributions to his storied past may have been overshadowed by the public’s insistence on admiring a virtuoso guitar, drum, or keyboard solo over the efforts of the singer, he knew how much he had contributed to the sound and success of Led Zeppelin. And he was certainly not so ego-free as to be content with keeping that knowledge to himself. For the first time in his life, he celebrated, he alone was responsible for the success, or otherwise, of a project.
It was a responsibility that he relished, even as he acknowledged that sometimes, he missed having someone else around—someone who didn’t just share the creative load but also challenged it. As he told Rolling Stone’s David Fricke in a rare moment of on-the-record vulnerability, he missed the “volatile showmanship” that came so easily, so naturally, to Jimmy Page, although he was adamant that its absence in no way played down the contributions that his new bandmates, and Robbie Blunt in particular, were offering.
In fact, he acknowledged, Blunt had the most difficult task of all, as a great guitarist in his own right but one who knew the world would be watching as he stepped into the footsteps of an even greater one. Of all the accomplishments that Blunt racked up as rehearsals and sessions went on, it was the guitarist’s refusal to back down from his own vision that most impressed Plant. Because that rubbed off on Plant as well, reeducating him in a way, and for all his occasional eruptions—the apparent insistence that it’s “my way or no way”—he prided himself at least on giving everybody a fair crack of the whip. He told Record magazine’s John Hutchinson, “I’m only dominant when I don’t like what’s going on,” remembering how disputes with Jimmy Page over the direction of a song could spill out into the most atrocious name calling. “We would curse each other to everyone else, but be very polite to one another.”
A relationship like that takes time to breed, however. “With these new people, it’s extremely difficult, because my track record is a little daunting for anyone that is going to step into that situation with me.”
Indeed it was. No matter how confident a player might be, no matter how convinced that his idea is right, it still requires a lot of courage to walk up to one quarter of the biggest rock band in the world and tell him, “You know that last idea of yours? It really sucks.” Besides, no matter what tensions may or may not have been generated by the creative process, the finished album betrayed none of them. Even more so than its predecessor, The Principle of Moments was a dynamic succession of ever-shifting musical ideas and ambitions, and it was shockingly contemporary too. Or perhaps shockingly is the wrong word: both Yes and Genesis, to name two of Plant’s peers, had embraced the technologies and temperament of the early 1980s to utterly redesign old musical pastures, keeping up with the kids with ruthless syncopation.
Plant, too, adopted a modernistic feel, with Phil Collins’s own trademark drum sound an integral element of the overall picture. But he did so without any compromise of his own sound and vision, and when the album’s first single, the lascivious (but oddly Dire Straits-ish) lurch of “Big Log,” emerged a major Top 10 hit on both sides of the Atlantic, it was clear that Plant’s stubborn insistence on pursuing his own musical direction, as opposed to ones that his “advisers” had urged him to take, was paying off.
He had a new record label. Swan Song, the house that Zeppelin built, had crumbled; lost without the Led to lead it, and with its only other major seller, Bad Company, long past their sell-by date, the company went into irreversible decline, closing their doors for good shortly after Pictures at Eleven. In their stead, Atlantic allowed Plant to create his own new identity, and while Es Paranza was never intended to house any artist other than Plant, its existence still permitted him to maintain his status among that select handful of superstars marked out by their own corporate identity.
Now it was time to take that identity out on the road.
In August 1983, even as his marriage finally came to an end in the divorce courts of England, Plant was in the United States, preparing for his first-ever solo tour. Phil Collins was firmly established in the drum seat for the duration, twenty-three arenas that included many that Plant had first visited as a member of Led Zeppelin. The fact that his solo star was vast enough to sustain not merely a repeat visit but also a return appearance for the “show sold out” signs only amplified all he had achieved over the past year.
While Jimmy Page skulked in the musical shadows, his only post-Zeppelin prolusion a moody but scarcely remarkable soundtrack to the movie Death Wish II, and John Paul Jones returned to the session work that was his pre-Zeppelin milieu, Plant alone seemed set to continue pushing at the barriers that the band once railed against, by forcing his own vision deeper into the rock ’n’ roll consciousness. And if history has not responded by hauling at least a handful of his solo recordings up to the same stratospheric heights as his earlier repertoire, then that only sweetens the thrill of discovery for new audiences.
Where, some people asked, was the new “Stairway to Heaven,” the new “Whole Lotta Love,” the next “Kashmir”? But were such songs truly absent? Or were they merely still waiting (fruitlessly, as it transpired) for received history to elevate them to the legendary pastures of their illustrious forebears?
Certainly “Other Arms” rode a danceability that at least placed it in the same room as “Trampled Under Foot” (or the previous album’s “Mystery Title”), while the drifting “In the Mood” was firmly cast within the kind of staccato dream state that fired “The Crunge” and “Misty Mountain Hop” without really invoking either of them.
“Through with the Two Step” yearned over synthesized orchestration; “Messing with the Mekon” tracked out of a fanfare as memorable as “Rock and Roll” and a lyric as laugh-out-loud joyful, too, its title an affectionate nod back at the grotesque, hairless green alien who menaced space ace Dan Dare during Plant’s comic-reading childhood. Indeed, all that really separated Plant’s solo works from those he recorded with Led Zeppelin was the safety net of a band name that conferred “classic” status upon any song they performed. No, he had not come up with a new “Custard Pie.” But Zeppelin never came up with “Stranger Here . . . Than Over There.” So, honors even.
There was another blast from the past aboard, as Plant arranged for a private jet to transport himself and the band around, albeit one that was a far cry from the luxury aircraft of old. The Viscount turboprop plane was scarcely as well-appointed as the Starship, the Boeing 720 that ferried Zeppelin around on the 1973 and 1975 US tours, and its cabins would not bear witness to so many airborne hijinks either. But still it was a nice way to travel, and as Plant relaxed into the tour, so circulating recordings depict him relaxing into his new persona: the singer and leader of a rock ’n’ roll band so confident in his new material that he never even acknowledged the audience calling for his old, and so confident in his bandmates that, when Jimmy Page showed up at the Madison Square Garden show, Plant had no hesitation about inviting him to join them for the encore.
Later, critics and onlookers would seize upon that moment as a sign, or at least a suggestion, that Plant might never shrug away the ghost of his past. But the reality tramples that notion underfoot. It was Plant—not the promise of anything or anyone else—that was booked into Madison Square, Plant whose name alone sold it out, and Plant whose regular live set had already reduced the audience to paroxysms of glee. Even as Plant introduced his old ally to the audience, and the resultant roar all but raised the roof off the building, he knew that Page’s appearance was simply the icing on an already luxuriously decorated cake. Just as the onstage arrival of John Paul Jones at the show in Bristol, England, later in the tour, was nothing more than a special treat for an already-loyal crowd; just as a return guest spot for Page at Hammersmith Odeon, London, was just another night on the road for Plant.
Plant’s insistence that neither the past nor an audience’s sense of familiarity should be allowed to intrude upon an artist’s vision was not reserved for his own work. Another member of the Bonham clan, John’s sister (and Jason’s aunt) Deborah, was planning her own entrance into the music industry, and Plant was her sounding board for many of her concerns and questions. Beginning with: should she deploy the familial name?
Plant said no, and Deborah knew precisely what he meant. The world was a very different place back then, and the music industry especially so. Nepotism was a power in the land, whether real or perceived, and there was already a long list of worthy talents whose potential had, effectively, been snuffed out, not because they had a famous relative, but because people assumed the famous relative was somehow responsible for this latest emergence.
No matter that Deborah was not a drummer—she was, and she remains, a stunning singer-songwriter. Led Zeppelin remained a force to be reckoned with, and their reputation even more so. Plant himself remained leery of doing anything at all that might draw attention from his then still-youthful solo career, and back in the direction of the band. He could only imagine what the media would make of young Debbie. . . .
Three decades on, Deborah laughs. “I was always calling Robert up and saying, ‘Can I come round to do some demos?’ and it was him who alerted me to the fact that it was not going to be an easy ride if I was going to use my own name.”
She was determined, however. Although she did send out her initial demos all but anonymously, revealing her true identity only when she was offered a record deal, she is adamant. “I didn’t want to deny being John’s sister. I am extremely proud of it, it’s what made me who I am, even back then, and to change my name [as some people suggested] felt really alien to me. I couldn’t do it, and I said to myself, ‘I don’t really care about what I’m going to face with the Led Zeppelin crowd. Everybody’s going to have an opinion, they’re going to prejudge, the record company are going to sell it on that, it’s going to be all over the place, and I’m going to hate all of it. But as long as I’m doing my brother proud, and my family name proud, I’m okay.”
Other people could make of it whatever they wanted to.