Robert Plant: A Life (33 page)

“One day Robert said, ‘Right, I’m taking you guys out,’ ” Brown recalls. “He’s an interesting guy. He can be incredibly generous but also very tight. It’s a weird thing. He took us all down to Soho. We went to a restaurant and then to the cinema to see
Down from the Mountain.

“The rest of us were all sitting along from Robert on the same row wondering what all this was about and then on comes this most amazing movie. The two people that most impressed us in it were Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch. Afterward, Robert couldn’t stop going on about Alison Krauss’s voice.”

Plant’s friend, the DJ Bob Harris, had just then turned him on to Krauss. Harris had got to know Krauss and her records had become a fixture on his country-music show for BBC Radio 2.

“In the summer of 2001 Robert was driving back from a gig and he was listening to my show in his car, Saturday night turning to Sunday morning,” relates Harris. “I played an Alison Krauss track and it was the first time he’d heard her.

“Robert told me that he pulled the car over. He was in the middle of the countryside on a beautiful summer’s night. He said he turned up the radio, got out of the car and stood there under the stars listening to Alison sing. Robert described it to me as like hearing a voice from another planet.”

19

REBIRTH

I’m north of the Arctic Circle on a boat, playing gigs for the Inuit fishermen.

Robert Plant was set on his own great adventure. This took him further from the spotlight and deeper into his own musical roots, following his nose and trusting to his instincts. It fed the music that he was making. The further he roamed and the more baggage he shed the freer it became. It was as though in finding a new purpose he had also found himself.

He began 2003 journeying with Strange Sensation guitarist Justin Adams to the world’s most isolated music festival. The Festival au Desert takes place each January in the West African country of Mali, far into the Sahara Desert, staging a celebration of the continent’s musical riches. Plant and Adams flew into the ancient Malian city of Timbuktu from southern Morocco, hitching a ride on a prop plane chartered by the BBC for a TV crew from the children’s program
Blue Peter
. To reach the festival site from there requires a 60 km drive by jeep across the desert as there are no roads. If anything was symbolic of Plant’s flight from rock stardom this was it.

“We had Charlie Patton and some shrieking Berber music on the stereo,” he enthused to me. “The whole idea of paying your own way to the Sahara to sing . . . it’s insane. But isn’t that great? If you want to play for the Tuareg you’ve got to get there. You’ve got to do it in order to have the experience.”

Here, in the cradle of the blues, Plant performed radical reinterpretations of his own and Zeppelin’s songs, backed by Adams and percussionist Matthieu Rousseau from the French band Lo’Jo, whose own music is steeped in North African traditions. Their backdrop was sand dunes and a dark Saharan sky, spread out around them a makeshift village of Berber tents. Also on the bill were Tinariwen, a band of Tuareg tribesmen who play hypnotic desert blues. Soon after, Plant was instrumental in getting them a record deal in the U.K., Adams producing their excellent third album, 2007’s
Water Is Life
. At night they slept under the stars. I once remarked to Plant how he was able to have experiences like this and yet still the thing he was most asked about was re-forming Led Zeppelin.

“Yeah, it’s almost as if people can’t see it,” he responded. “It’s like, a woman with white high heels and a pencil skirt will attract my eyes but most people will miss it completely. Media, journalism, popular culture—all of it is just so monosyllabic. The wonder to me is that everybody isn’t doing these things.”

That summer he took Strange Sensation to northeast Europe to do shows in Latvia, Belarus and Ukraine, and they did some recording in Tallinn in Estonia. He and the band also drove north, heading to the outer reaches of Scandinavia.

“Robert wanted to know what the furthest place up was you could play in Norway,” recalls Roy Williams, Strange Sensation’s sound engineer. “There was a place called the North Cape, the last spot on the map. We didn’t know if anybody had ever been to play there or even if you could, but we went anyway and did four gigs in the Arctic Circle. The best thing I’ve ever done.

“We used boats to travel up country and along the fjords. One place we did, it was a village hall that held 500 people. They’d never had a band on there. There were a few times where we were the first band of any stature to go to a place.”

When he broke off from this roving Plant went back home to the Midlands or Wales, trading one sense of glorious isolation for another. At home his mind turned to more basic matters.

“Robert phoned me up out of the blue around this time,” recalls his friend Dave Pegg, bassist with Fairport Convention. “He said, ‘Peggy, do you know any women?’ I thought he was taking the piss. He said the problem was that he didn’t want to meet people who knew who he was. He asked me if I knew of anyone nice, those were his words.

“Actually, I did, a neighbor across the road from us in Banbury. Robert said, ‘Can you ask her if she fancies coming out to lunch?’ Turned out she knew of him but not much about him. He drove up here and we went with them to a local Thai restaurant. It was a very pleasant lunch and they got on really well. Thing is, though, I’d lent her that book about Zeppelin,
Hammer of the Gods
, and she didn’t think she could cope with all of that.”

In any case, a more significant union was on Plant’s horizon. Continuing to dig down to the roots of bluegrass music he had picked up the Smithsonian Folkways recordings of the earliest Appalachian artists, and traveled through Kentucky and Tennessee in a rental car. Plant had also got to know Bill Flanagan, an executive at the music TV channel VH1 in New York.

In 2001 Flanagan had been tasked with coming up with a concept for a signature performance show for VH1’s new acquisition, CMT, the country-music channel. He had hit upon the idea of pairing rock singers with country stars for a series of one-off collaborations, calling it
CMT Crossroads
. Having previously done a show for VH1 with Plant, he thought him ideal for this alongside one of CMT’s most popular artists, Alison Krauss.

Born in 1971, Krauss had been Illinois state fiddle champion at the age of 12 and won a Grammy before she was 20 for her third album, 1990’s
I’ve Got That Old Feeling
. She had gone on to release a further five albums with her band Union Station, becoming the most successful performer in modern bluegrass. Flanagan began the process of bringing her and Plant together. It ended up taking him more than four years.

“The funny thing about Alison is that she loves a lot of hard rock, things like Aerosmith and Def Leppard,” Flanagan says. “I called her then manager, Denise Stiff, and asked how Alison would feel about doing a show with Robert Plant if I could get him. Alison was sat beside her and she just screamed. Then I had to start work on delivering Plant.

“With Robert, it’s like meeting a 19th-century big-game hunter. He’s been around the world, bagged all the elephants, escaped from a boiling stew-pot and being eaten alive, and come back to the pub to throw darts with the boys. Robert really knew of Alison’s stuff, but he was off roaming the world and she always has fifty projects on the go. It was like trying to get a thread through the eye of a needle.

“In attempting to recruit him for the show, I’d leave messages with his office and eventually he’d call back. He’d say things like, ‘I’m north of the Arctic Circle on a boat, playing gigs for the Inuit fishermen. They call me,’ and he then said some unpronounceable, twelve-syllable word. When I asked him what it meant he told me, ‘Man who looks like an old woman.’ ”

So much of what unfolded in 2004 was ruinous or wretched, or both. The Middle East was wrenched by conflict, in Lebanon, Israel and the Gaza Strip, and also in Iraq. In December, a tsunami swept across the Indian Ocean, devastating whole countries and killing hundreds of thousands of people.

Robert Plant endured his own darkness that year, losing his father. He otherwise carried on his odyssey. In January 2004 he again performed at his local tennis club’s annual charity bash in the Midlands, getting up to sing Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis songs with a local band, and then drawing the raffle. The following September he donated money for a statue of the 15th-century Welsh king Owain Glyndŵr to be erected in Pennal, a village near his home in Snowdonia. He attended its unveiling at the small village church, asking the organizers that his presence not be publicized in advance. The patrons of this bronze figurine were recorded on a circular plaque set in stone beneath it. On this he was listed simply as “Plant.”

He also went back to writing songs, the first time he had done so to any concerted degree in more than six years, working with his Strange Sensation band mates at his home in Wales. From there they moved to studios in London and England’s West Country, piecing together a new album,
Mighty ReArranger
. It was to be his strongest solo record to date, the songs potent and powerful if never outstanding.

A musical stew, it mixed hefty blues with North African drones, ’90s trip-hop with the sound of America’s West Coast in the ’60s. There was something proud and defiant to it, a refusal on Plant’s part to rest on his laurels or go quietly to older age. He said as much on “Tin Pan Alley,” the song soothing to begin with, then raging, Plant singing: “My peers may flirt with cabaret, some fake the ‘rebel yell’/Me, I’m moving up to higher ground, I must escape their hell.”

“What he wanted to do with that record was simple enough,” says Roy Williams. “It was to send out message: ‘Don’t forget about me.’ ”

In the middle of stirring this potent brew Plant finally got around to making contact with Alison Krauss. Bill Flanagan at VH1 had passed on her phone number to him and he called her one night at home. Their first conversation, however, was short and inconclusive.

“Alison wasn’t really saying anything and I thought, ‘Fucking hell, she’s got those Quaaludes I’ve been looking for!,’ ” Plant later told
Q
magazine. “I’ve been married before so I know what it’s like to have a woman mumbling at me.”

“At the time I was putting my three-year-old son to bed,” said Krauss. “I was laying down next to him so I had to be real quiet. When Robert suggested I took down his number, I said to him, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t have a pen and I can’t get up right now.’ ”

Plant persisted, and the more he spoke to Krauss, the more set he became on doing something other than just a TV show. He had a notion that they should do a record of some sort together.

“Being the mercenary television executive that I am, I said that was a fantastic idea,” recalls Flanagan. “I said that we could put out a record of the show, like Eric Clapton’s
Unplugged
. He told me he didn’t mean that. What he wanted to do was go into a studio first and cut stuff with Alison.”

That November Plant and Krauss sang together for the first time in Cleveland, Ohio. This was at a Leadbelly tribute concert staged at the city’s Symphony Hall and they performed “Black Girl,” a song the venerable bluesman had written in 1944. Krauss did not feel the song had suited them but was swayed by Plant telling her backstage how he had driven through the Appalachians listening to the bluegrass singer Ralph Stanley. For his part Plant’s mind was made up.

“It was an amazing night,” he recalled, speaking on the BBC documentary
By Myself
. “I’m stood next to a beautiful woman who can sing like an angel and knows exactly what she wants. I thought, ‘That’s got to come back again.’ ”

Mighty ReArranger
was released in April 2005, attracting glowing reviews, a couple of Grammy nominations and an enthusiastic audience, without bringing Plant in from the margins. He and Strange Sensation set off on tour again. The dates extended to the end of that year and on through the next two summers, taking in Europe, the States and North Africa. They played shows at the Ice Palace in St. Petersburg and beneath the illuminated minaret of a mosque in Tunis, with the last of them being at a festival in the Welsh mountains in August 2007.

For all this, it was a few days that Plant spent in Nashville in October 2006 that would resonate the most. It was then that he went into the studio with Alison Krauss. At 58 he was about to make not just the best record of his solo career but one of his best of all.

The build-up to it was protracted both by the difficulties of matching up their respective diaries and also the different vision each of them had for the project. Krauss wanted to make a country record. Plant was more inclined to do something with a funkier flavor and using musicians from New Orleans.

In the end Plant relented. He agreed to test the water in country music’s capital city and with Krauss’s choice of producer, T-Bone Burnett, the two of them having first worked together on the
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
soundtrack. An accomplished musician himself, Burnett put together a crack studio band that included Tom Waits’s regular guitarist Marc Ribot and a stellar Nashville rhythm section of bassist Dennis Crouch and drummer Jay Bellerose.

“T-Bone, who is the smartest guy in any room, also brought in all these songs that had a spookiness and mystery to them,” says Bill Flanagan, invited down to the session by Plant. “I think Robert suddenly realized that Elvis had two DNA strands combining in him, and that the hillbilly strand led to a fascinating place.”

“The same darkness that you find in bluegrass and murder ballads, it is a darkness that is absolutely in Robert, in his voice and life,” Burnett told David Fricke of
Rolling Stone.
“Alison understands that, and Robert worked hard to get it.”

Encouraged by Burnett, Plant and Krauss had also picked out songs. The three of them amassed over fifty selections, ranging from 1950s country standards and an old Everly Brothers tune to a track Plant had previously recorded with Page, “Please Read the Letter.” Whittling these down to thirteen, they worked fast at recording them, as much out of necessity as anything else, spending five days at Sound Emporium Studios in Nashville and as long again at three studios in Los Angeles at a later date.