Robert Plant: A Life (22 page)

Plant took a low-key route back to performing, putting together a knockabout band with a group of musicians who drank in his village pub, the Queen’s Head. Calling themselves the Turd Burglars, they began doing intermittent pub gigs playing rock ’n’ roll covers. Plant’s co-vocalist in this band was Melvin Gittus, a local character reputed to have the biggest penis in the West Midlands.

“Melvin had been a sergeant major in the army and was then a double-glazing salesman,” recalls LeFevre, who became the band’s soundman. “He fancied himself as a singer and he did have the biggest dick you’ve ever seen.

“It was an incarnation of a local pick-up band having fun. After eight pints of beer one night we said, ‘What would happen if we called it the Turd Burglars?’ We all used to play for the Queen’s Head’s football team—I was the goalie. We did annual road trips. We’d arrange games with these social clubs in places like Penrith, up north, or down south in Weymouth. The stipulation was that we needed somewhere to pitch Robert’s tent, which slept thirty-two people foot to pole. Robert and the band would give a performance in the club the night before the game.”

The Turd Burglars also went into the Old Smithy and cut a couple of tracks, both American rock ’n’ roll tunes dating from the ’50s—Huelyn Duvall’s “Three Months to Kill” and “Buzz Buzz A-Diddle-It,” originally recorded by Freddy Cannon. It was an altogether different world from that which Plant inhabited with Led Zeppelin but one he would return to time and again. Here, surrounding himself with friends and playing for the hell of it, he was able to recapture the pure, untainted spirit that had first fired him.

Finally, in the winter of 1978 he regrouped with Zeppelin. Initially, they began rehearsing together in London, although the health of the band remained precarious. In the time off Page had not come up with any new music, and the split between him and Bonham, and Plant and Jones, was more marked than ever. Still, they ploughed on with making an album.

In November they moved base to the Swedish capital of Stockholm, where they booked in to local pop superstars ABBA’s Polar Studios. Mindful of Plant not wanting to be away from home for long stretches, and with relations in the band being fractious enough as it was, it was decided that they would commute between the U.K. and Sweden. For the next two months they flew out to Stockholm from London on a Monday morning, returning each Thursday evening.

“It was fucking mad out there,” remembers LeFevre. “We were staying at the Sheraton Hotel, on the fourth floor. The principals all had suites, one at each corner of the building. Since they all wanted their own sound systems, and packets of M&Ms with the brown ones removed, and this, that and the other, these rooms were kept for the whole period, even though they weren’t occupied half the time.

“Another crew guy, Rex King, and I were charged with looking after these suites and we had a blast. We’d go down to the local Atlantic Records office whenever we needed more money and they’d hand over wads of bills. Limousines were parked outside the studio and the hotel, twenty-four hours a day. They’d be sent off to McDonalds to get a Big Mac and a chocolate milkshake. It was total excess.”

Even though Page was subsequently credited as producer, he was often as not a spectral presence. As much out of necessity as design it was Plant and Jones who took the lead roles in shaping the record that became
In Through the Out Door
.

Jones had written a bunch of songs, although not originally intending them for Zeppelin, and had begun experimenting with the latest synthesisers. He and Plant had always maintained a distant relationship but, having been restricted to writing lyrics in isolation on the last album, Plant was grateful for having a creative partner. It was also a long time since he had been backward in coming forward.

“Robert, Jonesy and I would get up each morning and go for a jolly good walk,” says LeFevre. “We’d end up in the pub and get to the studio later in the afternoon. Maybe Jimmy and Bonzo would be there, maybe they wouldn’t. It was a fantastic studio. The control room was in the middle of a semi-circle of glass with all the separation rooms around it, so everybody could see each other.

“The engineer had warned us that sometimes the fire alarm would go off for no reason. The first room on the left from the control room was where Bonzo sat. One night he was in there, nodding off but still keeping the groove. The fire alarm went off and all these firemen came bursting in with extinguishers. Bonzo just looked up and carried on playing.”

Plant had his own particular memory of the period. He told
Uncut
magazine in 2007: “I was saying to myself, ‘If I go tomorrow, is this where I want to find myself: in a sex club in Stockholm, being silly with Benny and Björn from ABBA, while Agnetha and Frida are driving around trying to find which den of iniquity Led Zeppelin had taken their husbands to? And this guy lying on the circular mattress, how big is his dong? . . .’ ”

Maureen gave birth to a son in January 1979. The couple christened him Logan Romero and once more Plant retired to family life. The months rolled by. Britain got a new government, Margaret Thatcher coming to power that May, the country’s first female prime minister. The world’s first Islamist republic was established in Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini overthrowing the ruling Shah and sending him into exile in the West.

Zeppelin’s new album was due that summer. As its release loomed, Plant resisted overtures from Grant to commit to an American tour or even to consider going on the road for an extended period. Eventually, he agreed to just two shows in the U.K. These would be staged over consecutive weekends in August in the grounds of Knebworth House, a stately pile in Hertfordshire on the outskirts of London. The band would be paid £1 million for doing them, with more than 100,000 people expected to attend each day.

In the event there was a dispute about the exact size of the crowds. Grant claimed the total figure far exceeded the projected amount, an opinion backed up by many of those who were there. The promoter Freddy Bannister insisted that less than half the tickets had been sold for the second show, losing him a considerable amount of money, although if he intended using this as a tactic for recovering some of Zeppelin’s huge fee from Grant, he failed.

There were also different interpretations regarding the well-being of the band itself. Certainly, Zeppelin appeared changed. Plant and Page had trimmed their hair, and in publicity photos for the shows both of them wore a jacket, shirt and a skinny tie, although Plant still bared his chest on-stage. Bonham looked heavy, Page skeletal.

“They didn’t look as harrowed as they had on the ’77 tour,” insists Sheehan. “When I saw all four of them together at Knebworth I was amazed. They seemed happy and healthy, Robert extremely so. They appeared absolutely refreshed. That period had been good for them.”

“I was in a bad way, I make no denial of that,” says Cole. “Were the others? I don’t know. Not Robert and Jonesy, that’s for sure. I couldn’t honestly tell you whether either of them had ever used heroin, but they were very much against it by then. It had caused a split in the band, because those two were on a different wavelength.”

“I think we determined there was a point earlier that things changed,” concludes LeFevre. “There was nothing to be added to that at Knebworth, that’s all I can say.”

Yet just as they had on the best of nights two years earlier, when they had to perform Zeppelin could still soar. On both nights at Knebworth they hit the heights—majestic on “Kashmir,” roaring on “Rock and Roll,” revived on a towering new song, “In the Evening.” Whatever the trials of recent years they seemed unbeaten. Even the punks turned out to acknowledge them, Mick Jones of the Clash and Steve Jones, the former Sex Pistols guitarist, both appearing backstage. But the jibes the punks had made at Zeppelin still rankled with Plant. On-stage, he made caustic comments about “doing dinosaur rock.”

“The fact that we were so bloody popular made them hate us,” he told me. “We should only have been judged on what we did on record and we hadn’t done anything for a while then. So when 1978 and ’79 came around we were pretty remote. And we had a lot more money than Sid Vicious.

“The thing is, all those guys that are still around, they became careerists. You had John Lydon decrying Zeppelin in the Pistols. Then, when he was in Public Image Ltd, I got a call saying that he wanted to get hold of the lyrics to ‘Kashmir.’ ”

The reality was that punk had barely scratched Zeppelin. Had things turned out differently they might have faced a second, more sustained challenge from another quarter, at least in their homeland. As the new decade began bands like Iron Maiden and Def Leppard emerged from the U.K.’s regional club circuit. Although they saw themselves as being far closer in spirit to Zeppelin than the punks had been, these bands were also younger, hungrier and more accessible to a new generation of rock fans. This movement, saddled with the cumbersome title of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, rose up just as Zeppelin started their descent from view.

Critics in Britain generally dismissed
In Through the Out Door
when it came out a week after the second Knebworth date. It topped the charts, but was knocked from its perch after a couple of weeks by the electro-pop of Gary Numan’s
The Pleasure Principle
.

If this suggested a changing of the guard in the U.K., it was a different story in America. At a time when U.S. record sales were slow,
In Through the Out Door
shifted four million copies in just three months, singlehandedly bringing the market back to life. In doing so, it allowed Grant to prove a point. Copies of the album—for which there were six different covers, each one a variation on the same bar scene—were slipped inside a brown paper bag with the title and the band’s name stamped on it. Grant had maintained that Zeppelin records could be sold in paper bags.

It was not as though
In Through the Out Door
was a great Zeppelin album, either. The pall that settled over its predecessor had been lifted, but it was still disjointed and lopsided. It sagged badly in the middle—on the Elvis tribute “Hot Dog,” as wretched a pastiche as “The Crunge” on
Houses of the Holy
, and on the tiresome “Carouselambra.” Page and Bonham were largely muted, Jones’s clunking keyboards dominant. By contrast Plant sang with assurance but also restraint.

There were just enough good moments to sustain it. Both “South Bound Suarez” and “Fool in the Rain” had a lively kick to them. Yet it flew only when Page came to life. This he did on the opening “In the Evening” and the grand closing track “I’m Gonna Crawl,” shrugging off the fog he was in and playing beautifully.

As with
Presence
, Plant’s lyrics offered an insight that was more interesting than much of the music. “All My Love” was a tender tribute to his son Karac, his words and vocal too heartfelt for such a so-so song. While on “Carouselambra,” two lines, aimed at Page, stood out from the gloom: “Where was your word, where did you go?/Where was your helping, where was your bow?”

Plant also continued to look outside of Zeppelin for stimulation. At the end of that year he performed with Dave Edmunds, who had been signed to Swan Song, joining his band Rockpile at a Concert for Kampuchea gig at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, although if he was being arch in choosing the song he sang with them, he never said. It was an old Elvis tune, “Little Sister.”

He also considered forming his own record label, planning for it to release vintage rockabilly and rock ’n’ roll songs. “I was going to call it Palomino Records,” he told me. “I contacted Mo Ostin, who ran Reprise in America, and he agreed to give me some of his stuff on license—there were things like Ral Donner, an Elvis impersonator.”

This came to nothing. Instead, almost a year on from Knebworth, he agreed to tour again with Zeppelin. It was a short commitment, three weeks in Europe, beginning in Dortmund, Germany on June 17, 1980. The venues were modest-sized arenas, the shows shorter and stripped-down, shorn of Bonham’s drum solo and such extended pieces as “No Quarter” and “Dazed and Confused.”

“Having found out that he wasn’t invulnerable, I think Robert was possibly trying to believe that at least this thing—the band—would be,” reflects LeFevre, “even though it proved very difficult for him and all the guilt things he’d begun feeling as a result of Karac’s death were ever-present. I think it was an attempt to shake things off.”

The performances were erratic, Bonham often flagging. Missing from the touring party was long-serving road manager Richard Cole, dispatched by Grant to get himself off heroin. “From people I know that were there, that tour sounded more of a shambles than they like to make out,” he told me.

“It was a very different Zeppelin. There wasn’t the same cocksureness about them,” says Dave Lewis, who followed the tour as a fan. “Robert was on really good form and he was trying to be the rock star again, but Jimmy was obviously not in the best of health.”

However trying the tour, Plant had seen enough to suggest that the band had a future. As they touched down in London at the end of it he turned to Grant and told him he was prepared to go back to America once again.

The condition Plant set when submitting to a tour of America was that he would not be away from home for longer than a month. The first batch of dates the band announced were scheduled to run from October 17 to November 15, beginning in Montreal and ending with four shows at Chicago’s basketball arena. This initial itinerary followed the pattern of the recent European trek, keeping to indoor venues. It was as if, in scaling back the excesses of their production, it was hoped the band might also be able to cleanse itself.

“I don’t think everybody was over the moon about the prospect of that tour,” says LeFevre. “It was almost like, ‘Let’s try it once more and see if it works.’ Though certainly, everyone else didn’t bring Robert kicking and screaming to it—he’d agreed to do it.”

Rehearsals began during the fourth week of September. The band set up camp in Bray, a large village on the banks of the Thames, four miles from Page’s new house in Windsor. Again, they divided in two. Plant and Jones based themselves in London at Blakes Hotel, while Bonham was to bunk up with Page. There was no encouragement to be drawn from the first rehearsal on September 24. Bonham turned up drunk, too incapacitated to play, and the session was abandoned.