Robert Plant: A Life (15 page)

“Above all the sounds I heard this voice—Oum Kalsoum singing. Her voice was everywhere, coming out of one doorway after another, shimmering through all the fuss and the chaos, the car horns and the braying donkeys. I just went, ‘Wow! How do you take that into what I do?’ And I bought into the whole thing.”

The fourth Led Zeppelin album did not emerge until November 1971. The record had been delayed by a battle Page fought with Atlantic Records over the sleeve artwork. He had grown sensitive to the critical attacks on his band and especially to the persistent charges that their label had hyped them. In response he intended the new album’s sleeve to have no information on it: neither the band’s name nor a title. The standoff between him and Atlantic lasted months, but Page won.

In the end all that graced the front cover was a framed picture of an old hermit—this Plant had picked up in a junk shop. The photograph on the back of the gatefold encapsulated the conflicting moods of the album itself: a withered tree in the foreground, a background of ruined terraced houses and a block of flats—a pastoral idyll encroached upon by looming hulks.

Page also had the idea that each member of the band should choose his own symbol. Pictured on the inner sleeve, these gave the record one of its default titles—
Four Symbols
, the other being
Led Zeppelin IV
. Page’s Zoso emblem has long been presumed to possess occult connotations, although he has refused to be drawn on its derivation. Jones and Bonham each picked something out of a book, neither giving the matter much regard.

Plant, however, had his symbol designed for him, a circle around a feather. He explained that the feather represented courage to Native American tribes and the circle was meant to depict the truth. “Though you might also say it’s about a French maid tickling someone’s bum,” Page quipped to the writer Mick Wall.

Whatever ground Zeppelin had lost with their third record, the fourth reclaimed it and then kept on going. It went to Number One in the U.K. and, although it was held off the top spot in the U.S. by Carole King’s mellow blockbuster
Tapestry
, it would remain on the charts there for three years, selling twenty-five million copies.

That November they headlined two nights at London’s vast Empire Pool, billing the shows “Electric Magic” and populating the arena with jugglers, acrobats and—but of course—pigs dressed with ruffs. Still there was no pause. The following year began with dates in Japan and Australia. And then the band started work on their next record, moving houses in Hampshire from Headley Grange to Mick Jagger’s country home, Stargroves.

There was no letup either in the torrent of material coming out from them. Page and Plant especially were filled with all the music they had taken in on their travels during the past year. At Stargroves the songs seemed to drip from their fingertips, so much so that they would spend the next months obsessing over which ones to use.

“The band was in great shape,” Eddie Kramer, engineer on the sessions, told the writer Barney Hoskyns. “They were focused, they were together and the music was incredible. They were fun to work with—and they wound me up something horrible. I’d brought this chick over from the U.S. and Robert banged her right away.”

Plant took a break from the ribald atmosphere of the Stargroves sessions toward the end of April, as he and Maureen celebrated the birth of their second child, a son they christened Karac Pendragon Plant. Pendragon was his father’s choice, it being the name of one of King Arthur’s uncles and also Welsh for “head dragon.” Just as he did with Carmen, Plant doted on the boy. At home, at least, he was the picture of a proud family man.

Yet he was gone again two months later. In the summer of 1972 Zeppelin took off on a sixteen-date rampage through North America. However much success they had had at home, it was in the States that they still reigned supreme. The Rolling Stones were heading out to America at the very same time but Zeppelin would outsell the self-styled “world’s greatest rock band” by a ratio of two to one. Before the trek began, Grant had used the full force of their power to demand for the band—and receive from the promoters—an unprecedented 90 percent of the tour’s profits.

They arrived in the States as news was emerging of a break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate building in Washington, D.C. Eventually, this act would engulf President Richard Nixon in scandal and bring him down. Yet for now he appeared able to act with impunity. It would be as good a parallel as any for the route Zeppelin were embarked upon and to where it would lead them.

On this tour they seemed unstoppable but also untouchable. Out in L.A., Page was widely reported to be consorting with a petite, dark-haired groupie named Lori Maddox, who bore a striking resemblance to him. Whatever went on, and whatever it took, Grant and Cole were there to clean up the mess and keep the rest of the world at a strong-arm’s length.

The band flew in to New York during the second week of June. They had booked a session at Electric Lady Studios to continue work on the new record. Mike Kellie, Plant and Bonham’s friend from back home, was also in town for a recording date of his own and joined the Zeppelin entourage for a couple of days.

“There were always limos parked outside the hotel for them; that’s the way they operated,” he recalls. “The entourage—Peter Grant, Richard Cole, the band—they’d all go out together. With the exception of John Paul Jones. He never joined us. Jonesy was a lovely, sweet guy and he’d fly his wife in whenever they had a day off. He suffered a lot of abuse from Bonzo, and some from Robert, too, for not being a party animal, but he was the real glue in the band.

“You didn’t mess with Richard Cole. He took the punches and gave them out. Him and Peter Grant—they were definitely intimidating. Of course, all that went too far but they made me hugely welcome. They showed me a different side of the world, however dark, through the parties and the debauchery that went on.”

One afternoon in the city Zeppelin trooped along to Madison Square Garden to see Elvis Presley give a matinée performance. Elvis was then on his first tour of America’s arenas, encouraged to do so by the example of bands like Zeppelin.

“Bonzo put on his Teddy Boy suit and slicked his hair back to go,” says Kellie. “I’ll remember one moment till the day I die. It showed off all Robert’s confidence and how he was this preening peacock.

“We were coming out of the show. I thought it had been wonderful but Robert wasn’t impressed—he thought Elvis had died when he went into the army. As we were walking to the limo a couple of girls walked by in the afternoon sunshine. Robert shouted to them: ‘Don’t worry, girls—Elvis is alive and he’s got long, blond hair!’ ”

9

SODOM AND GOMORRAH

That’s the kind of world they inhabited and Robert detested it.

Zeppelin closed 1972 and began the next year touring the U.K. There was a visceral, almost manic intensity to these twenty-five shows, the band cranked up into top gear. London aside, the venues were modest, theater-sized, seeming not quite big enough to contain them. When they were like this, locked into each other and the moment, it was as though they were an untamed force of nature.

Each night would open with an explosion of drums, Bonham hunched behind his kit, arms flailing. And then, to a blaze of white light, Page stepped forward to fire up the headlong charge of “Rock and Roll.” Next, they would go into a song destined to appear on their fifth record, “Over the Hills and Far Away,” light on its feet and effortless, before bringing the hammer down again on “Black Dog.”

His chest bared and head flung back, Plant puffed himself up and paraded through this spectacle like a great lion. No one, him least of all, doubted for a second who everyone was looking at. And he was now more than just a singer. He would send his voice shrieking to the heavens—using it like an instrument, just as he had heard the great Arab singers do in the markets and mountains of North Africa.

The sets were long, nearly three hours, but full of peaks and valleys—“Whole Lotta Love” stretching out into a melody of old blues and rock ’n’ roll songs, each night rounded off by a shuddering “Heartbreaker.” Yet it was “Stairway to Heaven” that emerged as the centerpiece of the show, hushing audiences as it unfolded, sending the place wild when it swept to an end. These were the best of times for the band in their homeland. Just then, it would have been impossible to believe that this was to be the last time they would tour the country.

Two London shows rounded off the first leg of the tour, both at Alexandra Palace, an elegant Victorian building set on a hill to the north of the city and once the site of the BBC television studios. The last of these took place on December 23, snow falling on a freezing night, and after it Plant handed the band’s crew a Christmas present. It was a single bottle of Scotch whisky to be shared between them. By now they had grown used to Plant being cautious with his money and had given him a suitable nickname. Among each other and his band mates he was called Percy—the man who never got his purse out.

When the band was not working Plant saw very little of Page and Jones. He would retreat to Jennings Farm, spending his time off messing around in his music room or, on a Sunday morning, playing football for the local pub team. Bonham had also bought his own farm, a fifteen-acre spread a couple of miles down the road from Plant’s, and the two men often met up for a beer, although Plant steered clear of Bonham whenever he went off raging.

“When John was really having a drink, I think he scared Robert and he didn’t want to be around him,” says Stan Webb, guitarist with Chicken Shack and one of Bonham’s regular drinking buddies. “I can remember a lot of the big nights I spent with Bonzo, and Robert wasn’t present at any of them.”

“Page, and Bonham to a degree, were different to me,” Plant told the writer Cliff Jones. “I reasoned that I could sing about misty mountains and then chip a football into the back of the net on my days off. That felt like the good life to me back then. It wasn’t all-consuming for me in the way it was for the others.

“Don’t forget that we had no choice but to get caught up in all that hotel room and drug binge kind of thing, because it was part of the experience, almost expected. But I always knew there was a timeout when I’d get off the bus and come home.”

Plant bought a second property, a working sheep farm at Dolgoch on the southern edge of Snowdonia National Park in Wales. Dividing his time between there and Jennings Farm he settled back into life with his wife, daughter and newborn son at the end of the U.K. tour. He had converted the old stables at Jennings Farm and went riding in the surrounding fields or hiked up into the hills.

By now he had also wrapped around him a close-knit gang of mates, most of whom he had known from his first bands or the local club circuit. Although people came and went, the central core of this group has remained to this day. To a man they’re fiercely loyal to Plant, so much so that in the Zeppelin camp they were referred to as his “Midlands mafia.” Among these friends, and with his family, he seemed less imposing, more relaxed, although no less sure of himself.

Bev Pegg, a local folk musician, first met Plant that year. “He was converting his barn into a recording studio and he’d got these old Revox tape machines lying around that he didn’t know how to use,” he recalls. “I gave him some tips on how to multitrack with them. He’d got a beautiful old jukebox in there, too.

“He took me around the house. The living rooms and the bedrooms all had a very Indian-style décor. There were several cars parked out the front, a late-’50s Buick and a maroon Aston Martin, which he said he’d bought from Donovan. He seemed very down to earth, though. He could be a bit abrupt sometimes, but I found it difficult to understand all these reports about hotel rooms being smashed up. It didn’t sound like the same bloke I knew. He always gave me the impression of being someone who’d be in control.”

“Robert had kept in touch with me and he’d come by when Zeppelin weren’t doing anything,” remembers Bill Bonham, keyboard player in Obs-Tweedle, Plant’s immediate pre-Zeppelin group. “The last time I saw him was at Jennings Farm in ’73. He wanted to know if I still had a pair of trousers that he’d left at my parents’ pub five years ago.

“We went out to his village pub and he was telling me about all the money he was making. Back then he was still saving the money-off coupons from his cigarette packets. Then he said he’d left his wallet at home and I had to pay for the drinks.”

Soon enough Zeppelin stirred again. For the next tour Plant wanted to have a sound engineer to enhance his on-stage vocals. He was recommended Benji LeFevre, a twenty-three-year-old Londoner who had been working with the prog-rock band Soft Machine and at a jazz club, Ronnie Scott’s.

“He rang me and suggested we meet near his home—at this pub in Kidderminster called the Market Tavern,” recounts LeFevre. “He told me they had a great stripper on. So I took the train up from London, met him, watched the stripper and had a few pints. Then he asked me back to his place.

“We got in his E-Type Jag and he scared the living daylights out of me with his driving. Anyway, I didn’t appear fazed so I guess I passed the audition. I thought he was arrogant, full of himself and very confident. He was also articulate and I thought perhaps I could have a laugh with him.”

The band went back out on the road at the start of March, touring Europe. This was a prelude to the serious business. Released at the end of that month, the new album paved the way for their biggest and most ambitious assault yet on North America.

It had taken months of wrangling, but the band had pruned the excess of material they had cut at Stargroves the previous spring down to eight songs. The rest they put to one side. One of these leftover tracks gave the album its title,
Houses of the Holy
, the first time they had bothered with such a thing.

If Zeppelin had felt pressured at having to follow the staggering success of their fourth record it did not show. Most of all,
Houses of the Holy
sounded like the work of a band that felt they could do whatever they liked. At best, this sense of abandon resulted in some of their most enduring songs, such as “The Song Remains the Same” and “The Ocean,” full-bore rockers both, Plant’s urging vocals cutting a swathe through Page’s driving, densely layered guitar parts. Or the gently meandering “The Rain Song,” Page’s response to ex-Beatle George Harrison, who had told Bonham his band could not do ballads. Or “No Quarter,” an imposing and doom-laden epic that Jones had brought to the table.