Robert Plant: A Life (32 page)

“Robert had a Dictaphone with a tennis training tape on it. In between songs he held it up to his microphone. The audience were hearing stuff like, ‘To play the overhead stroke . . .’ It was so stressful for the rest of us because we just wanted to get it right.”

Further shows followed at pubs, clubs, school halls and local folk festivals. The music he was performing in Priory of Brion cemented Plant’s connection to his roots but the process went deeper than that. It seemed to be a reminder to him of the man he had once been or the one he was when not being Robert Plant, the Rock God. He sat on a stool for these gigs, his hair pulled back, scanning sheets of lyrics that he had placed on a music stand, reading glasses perched on the end of his nose. There was no act, no artifice. It was as though he were stood naked before each small audience.

Like the Honeydrippers all over again, Plant revelled in being in a band that played music for the pleasure of doing so. And just as he had done back then, he called up local promoter Roy Williams to ask him to book gigs for the band and run the sound desk for them.

“My manager Bill Curbishley fled in horror,” Plant told me. “He said it was like watching a thoroughbred racehorse pulling a milk float. Bill asked me, ‘Why are you doing this? The whole thing is so fucking awful I don’t even want any commission.’ I told him that was good because there were no earnings.”

Toward the end of the year Priory of Brion did a couple of shows at venues significant to Plant during his formative years: Stourbridge Town Hall, where as a teenager brimming with self-confidence he had opened up for the likes of Gene Vincent and the Walker Brothers, and Queen Mary’s Ballroom on the site of Dudley Zoo, which he had played with the first incarnation of the Band of Joy and had also been the scene of his wedding reception in the far-off winter of 1968.

“That Ballroom’s not a bad gig, it’s got a nice low ceiling,” he told me. “I also saw Spooky Tooth and Joe Cocker there in the ’60s. The thing is with music now, it’s opened up into this huge deal where, if someone like Oasis re-formed, it would be for a tour of fucking stadiums around the world. Wow! I think I’d rather be at Dudley Zoo. Though that might also be the only choice I have left.”

“At that show, the crowd were all shouting out for ‘Whole Lotta Love’ so Kevyn Gammond jokingly played the intro to it,” says journalist John Ogden, who was covering the night for the Midlands newspaper the
Express & Star
. “Robert wouldn’t do it, though. I heard that Kevyn got a real bollocking from Robert afterward.”

Plant began to range further with Priory of Brion. The following spring the band left the U.K. for the first time, playing at a blues festival in Bergen, Norway. For now the sense remained that such jaunts were like boys’ clubs outings and of the pressure being off Plant. He particularly enjoyed a short tour of Ireland they did that June, opening up for the irascible Irish singer Van Morrison. Plant had been afflicted with a bad back since his car crash on Rhodes in 1975 but he delighted in cramming into a small Transit van with the others.

“That Irish tour was like being on holiday and seeing the sights,” recalls Andy Edwards. “The guy we had driving us on the first leg was giving us the history of Ireland as we went, all about the potato famine and where St. Patrick had done what. Robert ended up handing him more money and telling him he was staying with us.

“I can remember us doing one gig in a big tent. There was a 25-foot walk from it to the dressing rooms. Van Morrison got picked up in a limousine and driven to the back of the stage. That was the closest I got to him. Back then Robert seemed to be rebelling against that whole kind of thing.”

Soon, however, the fun began to seep out of the band. Plant could not keep a lid on things—did not want to—and the shows started to get bigger, raising his and the audiences’ expectations. That summer Priory of Brion had slots at both Glastonbury and the Cambridge Folk Festival, steps up from the local events they had done the previous year. There were more dates on the continent, too, where Plant was now being billed under his own name, the crowds numbering thousands rather than hundreds.

Plant was also getting itchy feet. Pressed by Roy Williams into listening to Emmylou Harris’s 1995 album
Wrecking Ball
, he’d become evangelical about it. The great American country singer and her producer Daniel Lanois had fashioned an atmospheric new sound on this record, one as evocative as a moonlit prairie, allowing her to haunt and shape-shift songs by Bob Dylan, Neil Young and others. Plant had begun to think of doing something similar, although he doubted it would be possible with his current group of musicians. He took them into Rockfield Studios in Wales to demo three tracks, the feeling that they were being tested not escaping the others.

“I imagined those tracks were to go and play to his management,” says Edwards. “There was a growing pressure on us and you started to see the cracks. Robert seemed to be slowly getting disenchanted. I felt there were a lot of people around him asking why he was wasting his time with the band.

“Robert argued our case, but there was pressure on him, too. Bill Curbishley came to see the gigs but he didn’t talk to the rest of the band. He seemed to be grumpy with us.”

That November Plant took Roy Williams with him to see Emmylou Harris perform in Dublin. Backstage he got chatting to Harris’s guitarist, Buddy Miller, filing his name away for future reference. On the flight over to Ireland he had also quizzed Williams about the size of venues that Priory of Brion was now being booked into, 2,000-seat theaters like La Cigale in Paris and with more of a production.

“I told him I thought it was getting too big,” says Williams. “I said, ‘We’ll go and watch Emmylou, and put it into your head that you’re going into the same venue the next night with what you’ve currently got.’ He came out of the show and said that he didn’t want to have any more gigs booked for them.”

Priory of Brion played their final shows in November and December 2000, four in Greece and three in the U.K. The last was at the Wulfrun Hall in Wolverhampton, four days before Christmas.

“We’d had a row with Robert in Greece, nothing terrible but everyone was starting to get on each other’s nerves,” explains Edwards. “After Christmas he rang me and said he didn’t want to work with Paul and Tim again. He was very vague about what he was going to do with me. Nothing was cut and dried.

“It was a difficult time. Paul, Tim and I had all had to give up our day jobs, so we were earning a living with the band. I had no other work. I ended up joining an Oasis tribute band and then a prog-rock group. I built myself back up but I came out of the Priory being quite insecure about my playing because of all the outside stuff that had gone on.”

“If you’re those guys, you’ve got to enjoy the moment,” insists Roy Williams. “That’s the reality of it. It’s not a bad thing to have on your CV. Take that and move on.”

In any event Plant had disappeared around his next corner, gone to them, although there is no doubting that he had been changed by the Priory of Brion experience and that it had also allowed him to sketch out a blueprint for the future. From now on Plant would no longer peacock about in leather trousers or scream like a banshee. Likewise it had fired his interest in interpreting other people’s music and doing so through the process of improvisation.

Piecing together a new band, one that could be flexible and adaptable, he went back to his son-in-law Charlie Jones and also guitarist Porl Thompson, who had toured with him and Page. At Roy Williams’s recommendation he brought in drummer Clive Deamer, who had been working with the Bristol trip-hop collective Portishead, and another musician from that scene, keyboardist John Baggott. For lead guitar he turned to Justin Adams, who had a track record playing with North African musicians and had been a member of ex-PiL man Jah Wobble’s band.

Plant called this band Strange Sensation and they began gigging in the spring of 2001, taking on shows that had originally been pencilled in for Priory of Brion. That summer he took them into RAK Studios in London to make an album, bringing in an old acquaintance to record them, Phill Brown, who had worked briefly on his
Fate of Nations
album and had engineered a session for Led Zeppelin.

In great part
Dreamland
was a covers album, some of the songs surviving from Priory of Brion’s live sets, such as the American folk singer Jesse Colin Young’s brooding “Darkness, Darkness” and also “Morning Dew.” As he had done for his first solo album, Plant was funding the sessions himself, having left Mercury Records.

“Robert could do what he wanted and he was certainly no longer looking at it in terms of making a hit record. Most of the songs were way too long for that,” says Brown. “That didn’t interest him at all. His approach was very much to capture a great blues track.

“He’s completely in control of things in the studio and he doesn’t accept half measures, but when you bring in musicians of that caliber you don’t need to give them constant direction. There’s always an edge to him and he doesn’t suffer fools, but he was enjoying himself and good humored. He had a house around the corner from the studio in Primrose Hill and of an evening we’d all go down his local pub. Robert was always joking that he had to be careful about how much he drank because he has high blood pressure.”

Brown also recalls being in the studio on the anniversary of Plant’s son Karac’s death on July 26.

“He and I talked at great length on that day, about his kids and that business of there being a supposed curse on Zeppelin,” recalls Brown. “He just dismissed it, said it was one of those terrible, tragic things. He’s quite forthcoming if you get him in the right environment, otherwise he didn’t dwell in the past. There was the odd remark about Jimmy Page, either positive or not, depending on the discussion, but he very much looks to the present and to the future.

“While we were doing the album, he got an offer to re-form Zeppelin with Jason Bonham on drums, something like $70 million for a world tour. Bill Curbishley brought it up and I know that Page was totally up for it, but Robert wasn’t interested. He and Jimmy have a total love–hate relationship. They’ll get together and do things, but then something always screws it up and they don’t talk to each other for a while. They disagreed a lot about the way things should be.”

Like Page, another constant in Plant’s life was his interest in women, his relationships with them often being just as complicated and messy as the one he had with his former band mate. Brown remembers him bringing a new girlfriend to the studio one day.

“He was fifty-two, fifty-three at the time and she was twenty-seven,” Brown says, laughing. “His daughter Carmen popped in later and, in front of everyone, said, ‘Next time you bring someone home, Robert, can you make sure that they’re older than I am?’

“Robert moans a lot about all the alimony he has to pay out but he keeps screwing around. That girl caught him with someone else and left immediately. He’s never going to learn. My wife knows Robert from way back and she’s always had this slightly uneasy feeling about him, because of his flirting. He flirts a lot.”

Listening to
Dreamland
is to hear many of the sounds that had filled Plant up these last forty years come pouring out. He had been singing the powerhouse blues of “Hey Joe” and “Skip’s Song” by Moby Grape for almost that long.

Plant and Strange Sensation toured the album through to the end of 2002, five months of dates in Europe and three around the States, playing theaters and ballrooms. The shows amplified the mood of the record, the band mixing different and more exotic flavors into Zeppelin songs and whisking an older song of Plant’s such as “Tall Cool One” off down a Moroccan souk.

As he had been making
Dreamland
Plant had also heard something else that had stopped him dead and suggested yet another path for him to follow. The folk music of black America, the blues, he had known for years, but just now he had started to explore its white counterpart, bluegrass. Its roots going back to the music of the peoples who had migrated to and settled in America—jigs and ballads from England, Scotland and Ireland, gospel and blues spirituals sailed over from Africa on the slave ships—bluegrass had first fermented in the Appalachians and the country’s rural backwoods. Played on traditional instruments such as banjo, guitar, Dobro and fiddle, it was music that was danced and sung along to at large social gatherings.

The advent of the radio age at the dawn of the 20th century enabled bluegrass to be broadcast across the country and by the time of the Second World War it had its first stars—Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, and also the Monroe Brothers. It was fiddler Bill Monroe who gave bluegrass its name, splitting with his sibling Charlie in 1938 and forming a new band called the Blue Grass Boys. Bluegrass festivals popped up around the States through the ’60s but the music was introduced to an even wider audience in 2000. That year saw the release of the Coen Brothers’ film
O Brother, Where Art Thou
?, which was set in rural Mississippi during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The film’s soundtrack featured contemporary bluegrass and country artists performing traditional songs and sold more than eight million copies in the U.S. alone.

Such was the success of the record that the cast of musicians assembled for it reunited for a sell-out tour of the U.S. in the summer of 2002. They had also gathered two years earlier for a show at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville that had been shot for a documentary film called
Down from the Mountain
. Among the artists seen performing and being interviewed in the film were Emmylou Harris and such established bluegrass acts as the Fairfield Four and Ralph Stanley, as well as two of American country’s brightest stars, Gillian Welch and a singer and fiddle prodigy from Decatur, Illinois, named Alison Krauss. Plant was in the middle of making
Dreamland
when the film was screened in London in the summer of 2001. He took off to see it, bringing his band and producer Phill Brown along with him.