Robert Plant: A Life (26 page)

This began in June and totalled thirty-one arena dates. It was intended to be an elaborate spectacle, the centerpiece of which was a short Honeydrippers set, Plant and the band being framed by giant inflatable Cadillac cars. In the event it played out to three-quarters full houses or worse. It had been almost two decades since Plant had looked out on to rows of empty seats and it was a blow to his ego.

“Robert actually started to get ill,” says Woodroffe. “We had to cancel one or two shows because he couldn’t sing—he was getting sore throats and stuff. I think a lot of it was because he could see we weren’t selling out.

“At the same time everything around us was becoming a much bigger deal. We started flying about in an executive jet, and we each had our own limousine waiting outside the hotel when we could have all got in to one car. It was all getting a bit too flash and it didn’t feel as good as it had done in the past.

“Robert and I used to have talks about it, where we were going to go from there. I remember we were in Chicago four weeks into the tour, the two of us in a hotel room, and he asked me what I thought we should do, carry on or go home. We did finish the tour, at least.”

“It could all have been avoided,” says LeFevre. “The record was put back by six or seven weeks, but the tour was not. I pleaded for it to be postponed but it fell on deaf ears. I was told that the success of the Honeydrippers record would more than make up for the fact that Robert’s new solo album hadn’t gotten any exposure on the radio. This didn’t come from Robert but it was very hubristic.

“It was oh so disappointing. Even though I had such proximity to him personally, on tour I was the sound engineer and I traveled on the crew bus so our paths didn’t cross as much on the road. It’s very possible, though, that the failure of it all would have been mulled over again and again after each gig.”

Whatever professional agonies Plant was going through, the ailing tour doubtless influenced his next move. He had been asked to perform at the American Live Aid concert in Philadelphia, one of two to take place simultaneously on July 13, 1985, the other at London’s Wembley Stadium. Live Aid was the brainchild of Bob Geldof, then singer with the Boomtown Rats, and intended to raise money for famine relief in the poverty-stricken African country of Ethiopia.

Geldof had assembled two stellar bills for the concerts. These might have reflected a new-found sense of altruism sweeping through the music business, although both shows were being broadcast worldwide and afforded all the participants unprecedented exposure. The London cast brought together Paul McCartney, David Bowie, the Who, Queen and U2. In Philadelphia, old-stagers like Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young rubbed shoulders with more up-to-the-moment pop stars such as Duran Duran and Madonna.

Plant had been approached with the offer of doing a Honeydrippers set. Agreeing, he corralled Page into this and somewhere along the line the plan was hatched for them to do Zeppelin songs instead. In a turn of events bordering on farce, John Paul Jones found out their intentions and asked himself along, the gig then becoming a fully fledged Zeppelin reunion. The haphazard nature of its coming together was carried through to the day itself, the show taking place at JFK Stadium, one of the venues that Zeppelin were due to play at the climax of that awful tour of 1977 but had been forced to cancel.

Since Plant had already asked Paul Martinez to play bass and refused to climb down, Jones had to be accommodated on keyboards, tucked to one side of the stage and barely visible. There were two drummers, Chic’s Tony Thompson and Phil Collins, who had first performed in London and then flown across the Atlantic on Concorde to join up with Zeppelin. The price of this gimmick was that Collins did not appear to have familiarised himself with Zeppelin’s set, and he sat dumbfounded through most of it. Even still, he fared better than either Plant or Page.

Looking like an aging Club Med dandy in a lurid purple shirt and white slacks, Plant strutted and preened, but his voice was strained, never quite hitting the notes. At a stroke, he had turned himself into the very thing he’d spent the past five years running to avoid becoming—a fading reminder of former glories. It was worse for Page. Eyes hooded, a cigarette dangling from his lips, he struggled to wrestle anything other than a tuneless squall from his guitar.

Fortunately for all concerned, there were just three songs for them to fumble through—“Rock and Roll,” “Whole Lotta Love,” and “Stairway to Heaven,” which sounded so fraught it appeared as though they were playing it for the first time. They were not even the most embarrassed of the old guard. Confirmation of the Zeppelin revival had been so late in coming that they took the early evening slot initially allocated to the Honeydrippers, going on before Duran Duran and leaving Bob Dylan the honor of closing the show. Dylan had asked Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood of the Stones to join him without seeming to have told them what songs he intended on doing. Their brief set began as if by accident and soon degenerated into a hopeless shambles.

“Live Aid was a very odd thing to do,” Plant told Tom Hibbert of
Q
three years later. “I found myself saying, ‘Great idea—let’s have a rehearsal.’ And we virtually ruined the whole thing because we sounded so awful. I was hoarse and couldn’t sing, and Page was out of tune and couldn’t hear his guitar. Jonesy stood there as serene as hell and the two drummers proved that . . . well, you know, that’s why Zeppelin didn’t carry on.

“Yet through it all, the rush I got from that size audience, I’d forgotten what that was like. I’d forgotten how much I missed it. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t drunk on the whole event.”

Indeed, Zeppelin’s performance might have been horrible, but the 95,000-strong crowd still roared in approval. Fifteen minutes after Zeppelin had left the stage thousands were still chanting for them.

“The whole thing was bonkers,” says LeFevre, Zeppelin’s soundman at Live Aid. “We were in the middle of Robert’s tour, we breezed in, Jonesy wasn’t invited. It was completely surreal. I can’t even remember what songs they played, for fuck’s sake.

“Back on Robert’s tour, Jimmy came and got up with us at a show at the Meadowlands in New Jersey. He couldn’t play a note. It was like his brain was scrambled and his fingers weren’t doing what he was thinking. It was terribly sad.”

For Plant, the return to his own tour after Live Aid was a sobering reality check. It limped on in America through to the end of July, coming to an abrupt conclusion in the U.K. the following September. There were just two British dates, in Birmingham and London. Plant had come to a crossroads and he was unsure which way to turn. Whichever direction he chose, however, he had made up his mind not to take anyone from his existing band with him.

“Being there at that time, I had too much information and too much technology,” he told me. “I’d cut my hair and back-combed it, and I’d started wearing purple jodhpurs. Very funny, all that shit. Then I realized that David Crosby was right on that song of his, ‘Almost Cut My Hair’—he’s not a sad old hippy.

“The whole deal is this, with people like Crosby and Neil Young and me, and this will make people dive for buckets to throw up into, but it’s true: I bought the ticket,” he said, rubbing his hair, which had then grown long again, “and I’ve still got it.”

“I’d just moved to Monmouth, near the Forest of Dean,” Woodroffe recalls. “Robert had bought a place near there, too. He called me up one day and suggested we go for a drink. He came and picked me up, and we went to this little pub in the forest called the Foresters Arms.

“We had two pints of beer, both of them looking like pond water, and we sat there staring into them. He said to me, ‘What do you think we should do then?’ I told him I didn’t know. He said he’d have to think about it and give me a call. We didn’t drink our beers. We both left and went home, and we never talked to each other again about it.”

Plant’s purge didn’t end with the musicians. It also took in Benji LeFevre, who had been working for him since 1973.

“By then, I’d bought a place near Jennings Farm,” says LeFevre. “A little, rundown cottage that I’d picked up at auction. Robert came around one day and said, ‘I think that’s it. Ta-ta, mate.’ No, it wasn’t like that. After the tour ended, things had become frustrated. All he said to me was that he felt like he needed a change of blood.

“There you go. There was a bit of animosity about it between some of the band members and I voiced my opinion, and I don’t think it necessarily sat particularly well with Robert. But I wasn’t about to become a yes man after all that time with him. The proof of the pudding is that we’re still mates and we still talk, though I felt a bit peeved about it at the time, as you can imagine. It was like, ‘Fourteen years and now what?’ ”

15

TALL COOL ONE

Last night, I was wiggling around like some aging big girl’s blouse.

Four months after closing the door on
Shaken ’n’ Stirred
and the band he made it with, Plant again found himself chasing after a new direction. He turned back to Led Zeppelin, agreeing to an initial meeting with Page and Jones. It would not be the last time he’d do so. Whatever else he has done, he has continued to be linked as closely to the band as Page. Even closer is the bond between him and Page. Indelible and unique to both of them, it is as dependent on one as on the other. Through all the fluctuations in their relationship, this much has been constant.

Also unchanging, nothing has seemed to separate Plant and Page ever since Zeppelin ended as much as what their former band has appeared to mean to them. The accepted view has long been that Page still needs Zeppelin and Plant does not; that Page has guarded his old band’s legacy with a zealot’s fervor but also been trapped by it, never able to move on, whereas Plant has shrugged off the past, forging ahead on his own terms.

Certainly, the dynamic between the two men has changed. Plant established a career apart from Zeppelin and Page did not. Page has long wanted to re-form the band and Plant has often resisted him, shifting the power base between them. As much as Page has burnished Zeppelin’s myth, Plant has been sardonic about it. Seen from this perspective, it is easy to believe that Page leaped at the chance to have Zeppelin do Live Aid and just as surprising that Plant submitted to it. The basic truth is that while Page has never escaped from being under Zeppelin’s looming shadow, for the most part Plant has thrived outside of it. This, coupled with the fact that Plant is now the more dominant partner in their relationship, have been like thorns in Page’s side.

Yet the fact is, no matter how ordered things have looked on the surface, tangled undercurrents govern Plant’s feelings toward Zeppelin. He never forgot the control Page exerted over him at the beginning of the band. Although he avoided Zeppelin’s songs when he first struck out on his own, not wanting to be seen to be using them as a crutch, it was never the band’s music that he ran from. Rather, he was repelled by the world that had grown up around them and the terrible tragedies he saw as resulting from it. He left Zeppelin bearing an unspeakable sense of loss, and also a dreadful and unresolved guilt. There is no wondering that he wanted to get as far from the source of all this as fast as he could; and the further away he reached, the harder it became for him to return.

This is not to say that Zeppelin’s accomplishments did not fill him with as much pride as they did Page; that he did not hold them up as high or would not fall back on them just as hard when he had to. Working on his own records, he continued to use Zeppelin as a reference point for his current collaborators and also to set a benchmark to measure them against—as often as not an impossible one. The suggestion that he has never wanted or needed to go back to the band is also wrong. He did not consent to Live Aid from a position of strength, but against the backdrop of a failing album and an ailing tour.

“I once went to his house to shoot him and I was shocked,” says the photographer Ross Halfin. “He’d converted a barn on the property into a kind of museum to Zeppelin. He had all these gold discs hung up and steamer trunks filled with copies of magazines that he was in. In the toilet, he’d framed the telegram from Peter Grant asking him to join the band. He was the last person I’d expected to see that from.

“I asked Jimmy why Robert was so dismissive of Zeppelin. He said, ‘I taught him how to sing, how to act and how to move—I told him how to do everything, and he resents that.’ ”

Unlike Live Aid, this latest reunion took place away from the glare of publicity and in secret. In January 1986 Plant, Page and Jones met up in a village just outside Bath in England’s West Country. Tony Thompson, who had drummed with them in Philadelphia, was flown in from the States. Their crew took over the village hall, filling it with equipment and using a couple of old parachutes to soundproof it.

To begin with, the signs were promising. They began messing around with ideas for new songs, Plant later suggesting that the results sounded like a cross between two of America’s great alternative rock bands of the period, Talking Heads and Hüsker Dü. It was not long, though, before the same old problems came up.

“As much as we wanted to do it, it wasn’t the right time for Pagey,” Plant told David Fricke of
Rolling Stone
in 1988. “He had just finished the second Firm album and I think he was a bit confused about what he was doing. There was a little club that we’d go to in the town. Jonesy and I often chose to walk back from it to the place we were staying in, at two in the morning. Pagey wouldn’t come out, which is hardly the way to get everything back together again.

“The interesting thing is that after being without him and fending for myself, I’m a lot more forthright. When I reach a conclusion, I immediately react to it. Way back in the old days, this might have taken a week of mutual discussion.”

Things came to a head after just a week. The catalyst for this was Thompson being involved in a car crash, which put him out of action.