Robert Plant: A Life (35 page)

“It was a great show, and we had an interesting opportunity to see the Nashville audience’s reaction and their kind of awe,” recalls Flanagan. “Though at the beginning of the taping there might have been too much awe, since people were sitting there like they were in a cathedral on Christmas Eve.

“Thing is, Nashville is a whole town devoted to music, and if you’re 25, 35 or 45 years old and a music fan, you’ve listened to Led Zeppelin and Robert Plant. When Robert walks in the room, it’s like Jesse James going into the saloon in Tombstone. Just going out to dinner with him in Nashville, people were falling over themselves.”

“Robert’s voice had changed drastically,” adds Plant’s friend and neighbor Kevyn Gammond. “That wailing for the Devil had quietened down. When he was working with Alison Krauss, people down our local pub would say to him, ‘Oh, we like this song and that song, Robert.’ They all probably hated Zeppelin.”

Within a month, however, Plant was expected to be wailing for the Devil again, handcuffed once more to Zeppelin and all that he had been almost forty years ago. For him, Page and Jones to be able to re-create that image of themselves seemed an impossible conjuring trick, one they had twice before failed to pull off when they were two decades younger.

The suspicion that each of Zeppelin’s three originals was finding the task onerous was strengthened at the start of November, when the O2 show was postponed for a month. The reason given for this was that Page had fractured a finger. Perhaps all too conveniently, this bought them more time. And as if Plant’s emotions were not mixed enough with all that was going on, he had also learned that his friend and assistant “Big” Dave Hodgetts had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and given just weeks to live.

The vacuum before the gig was filled by Atlantic’s release of a Zeppelin compilation album,
Mothership
, which sold well. In the week leading up to the show Zeppelin staged a full dress rehearsal at the O2. This calmed nerves. Plant’s voice had warmed to the job. He had also been judicious in fighting his corner over the set list, refusing to do songs like “Immigrant Song” or “Achilles Last Stand,” the highest registers of which he fought to reach. The band had gelled, too, the extra weeks having been put to good use.

“The other three weren’t happy initially that I’d missed those rehearsals,” Plant told
Q
magazine later, “but it was actually a good thing. It gave them the chance to get used to playing together. So from everybody’s point of view things worked out perfectly.”

When the day of the gig finally dawned, December 10, it did so gray and chill. Plant had invited Alison Krauss to London for the show but she had declined, instead giving the ticket to her elder brother Viktor. Plant had also arranged for the ailing Dave Hodgetts to be flown down to London and be sat at the mixing desk in the O2. It was otherwise a night on which Plant wanted to at last put ghosts to rest.

There were several other acts on the bill for the concert, former
Rolling Stone
Bill Wyman, ex-Free and Bad Company singer Paul Rodgers and the Who’s Pete Townshend among them. Few, if any, of the 18,000-strong audience were there because of them and not even a trace memory of their performances lingered. For those picked out from the online lottery and paying £125 each for a ticket the show was only ever about Led Zeppelin and the measure to which reality stacked up to myth.

In the immediate build-up to the band’s set the backstage area was cleared of people, the warren of corridors, catering rooms and production offices silenced. In their respective rooms Plant, Page, Jones and Jason Bonham were left alone with their thoughts. His mind made up that this would be the last full show he would ever do with Led Zeppelin, Plant paced and fretted. Good would not do it. He had to not just meet expectations but to transcend them.

Minutes before going on the four of them gathered in the corridor leading to the stage. They shared a brief, awkward embrace. Out front the audience was being shown a short film that compiled moments from Zeppelin’s heyday, flickering images of them as they once were. Building up from a low rumble to a sustained roar, rolling from the back to the front of the arena, the charged atmosphere was lit by this and then exploded as the stage lights went up.

During the next two hours, through a sixteen-song set and willed on by the crowd, Led Zeppelin flew again. There was something almost heroic about it, watching as this battle against the ravages of time was fought and won. They started cautiously, edging their way into “Good Times Bad Times” and “Ramble On,” the three principals all dressed in black. Liftoff came with “In My Time of Dying,” Page’s bottleneck guitar still vicious, Plant gone off to some other place, his voice rising up from the depths of the song. A furious “Trampled Underfoot” came next. Then a brutish “Nobody’s Fault But Mine,” followed by “No Quarter” and “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” each as imposing as the other.

Only “Stairway to Heaven” seemed shrunken. It came just over half way through the set, Page not quite nailing the intro and Plant still unable to give his all to it. In any case, it was “Kashmir” that defined them now. Greeted with the loudest roar of the night, it sounded ageless. “Whole Lotta Love” was next and then the closing “Rock and Roll,” the admirable Jason Bonham hurling the band into it, the crowd left drained but exultant.

Standing outside the arena after the gig, Dave Grohl ran up to me and put me in a bear hug. I had met him just once before, not long after he had started Foo Fighters, and we had spoken briefly then, but he barely knew me. It was that sort of night. Grohl had flown in from his home in Los Angeles that morning to see the show and was returning the next day. He was effusive, though, suggesting this had been one of the great nights of his life.

“It was one of the best concerts I’d seen Zeppelin do,” insists the DJ Bob Harris, who had first seen them in 1971. “They were so clear and focused. I know that weeks of work had gone into it, and that Robert had been completely insistent about that being the case.

“Watching him come back on for the encore and seeing all hell was breaking loose in the audience, I thought, ‘Whose head would not be turned by this moment?’ I caught up with Robert a few days later and said to him that surely now he’d do a reunion tour. He said no and asked why would he, because to him it had been all about revisiting something that had passed and not a new experience.”

Not that everyone had been convinced. Benji LeFevre, twenty-seven years after he had last managed Zeppelin’s sound, found himself at the O2 marvelling at the audience’s reaction but not the show itself.

“I didn’t think it was particularly terrible or brilliant,” he says now. “It was too loud and there was too much feedback during the first half. The physical reality is that Robert can’t hit the high notes any more, so it wasn’t even a facsimile of what it used to be.

“I’d be very, very surprised if they ever did it again. The honesty with which Robert opened his arms at the end of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and said, ‘We’ve done it for you, Ahmet’—I think that was probably a great personal moment for him. It might have been the point at which for him it was all neatly tied up and filed away.”

For all the big musical gestures it was smaller moments like this that spoke loudest that night. Such as the smiles and eye contact that passed between Plant, Page and Jones, caught on the stage screens and communicating joy, relief and the knowledge of all they had shared but also endured. Or being sat at the side of the stage and watching as Page was led down the steps from it at the end. Soaked in sweat, his shoulders hunched, he had nothing left to give. This was to witness the curtain pulled back, revealing what just one performance had taken out of the sixty-three-year-old.

At the climax of the show, Plant’s first thought had been for his friend Dave Hodgetts. As the last notes of “Rock and Roll” were still fading he peered into the darkness and asked, “How was it, Dave?”

“That was a special moment,” recalls Roy Williams, who was standing beside Hodgetts on the mixing desk. “When he said that, I saw Dave’s two thumbs going up. That probably says more about the man than anything else. The fact that with all that was going on around him, in that few seconds he’d thought of his mate. It was a week later that Dave passed away.”

Soon the backstage corridors filled with friends and revellers. Plant slipped through this throng, got in a car and drove off to a kebab shop in North London, leaving it all behind.

In the immediate aftermath of the O2 gig there was the sense of something special having happened, and then mounting speculation that the band would announce further shows in a short time. This never came to pass, although Page, Jones and Bonham were convinced at first that Zeppelin was going on. At one stage plans had been laid for a thirty-date world tour, gigs pencilled in for London, Paris, New York and Los Angeles, as well as Australia, New Zealand, India and China.

“Some of us thought that there would be more concerts in the none-too-distant future,” Page told David Fricke of
Rolling Stone
. “I know that Jason, who had been playing with Foreigner, resigned from that band. But Robert was busy.”

For a time Page, Jones and Bonham continued to work together, attempting to write new material. They considered finding a new singer, going so far as holding auditions, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith being one of those who was tried out. Common sense won out, however, and the plan was abandoned. Plant was long gone by then, off with Alison Krauss and down the road ahead.

“The O2 was great for Bonzo’s mum and for Jason, and for the rest us to put our shoulders back once more,” he told me. “It was good but that was because we didn’t have to look at it twice. It didn’t come around every summer, or end up as background music for picking out the balls on the National Lottery and all of that old bollocks.”

The dust from Zeppelin’s comeback having settled, Plant and Krauss began a tour together in Louisville, Kentucky, in April 2008. In all they played forty-four shows in North America. These gigs followed the pattern of their
Crossroads
performance, picking out the highlights of the
Raising Sand
album and other country standards, recasting Zeppelin songs such as “The Battle of Evermore” to fit the same mold. The tour crossed to Europe that May for a handful of dates, among them a sell-out at Wembley Arena in London, before returning to the States for more shows in the autumn, the last of these being in Saratoga, California, on October 5.

On the tour Plant formed a close bond with guitarist Buddy Miller. Born in Fairborn, Ohio, in 1952, Miller had been playing in bluegrass and country bands since high school. A musician’s musician, he had toured with Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle and Linda Ronstadt, releasing several decent solo albums and also producing records for soul man Solomon Burke and the country singer Jimmie Dale Gilmore. Plant seemed at ease with the world. He enjoyed being able to share the spotlight with Krauss and sang beautifully.

“Robert came to do a show in New Jersey where I’m now living,” recalls Dennis Sheehan, Plant’s assistant during the late ’70s. “It was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen and he appeared to me to get so much joy out of it. He didn’t look as if he was under any pressure.

“We met up beforehand. Robert’s a tall guy but he was stooping. I told him he looked like an old man. He said he’d gotten a bad back from being sat on a tour bus. I did wonder what the hell he was doing on a bus when he could fly. He told me that country folk still tour on buses and he didn’t want to feel like he was doing something different. He said, ‘It’d be like I was showing off all my money.’

“That’s one great thing about Robert, he knows the reality of being very wealthy but he’s remained down to earth. At heart he always will be the proverbial hippy.”

“Alison’s a lovely lady but also an absolute hoot,” says Roy Williams, sound engineer for the tour. “The one thing us guys on the crew all said was that we wished she’d project that side of her personality a little bit more at the gigs, rather than being demure.

“She used to do an a cappella thing during a song called ‘Down to the River to Pray,’ with her, Robert and the band all stood around one microphone. I remember the first open-air show they did, the New Orleans Jazz Festival, hearing silence sweep across a crowd of 60,000 or 70,000 people. That was something quite special.”

Plant had invited another of his old friends, Bob Harris, out to see him and Krauss perform in New Orleans in the spring of 2008. Harris and his wife were then celebrating their wedding anniversary, and Plant insisted on taking them out on the town afterward. On the drive back into the city from the festival site, the early evening air hot and sticky, Plant spotted an old roadhouse bar, the Mother-in-Law Lounge. It had belonged to the late R&B singer Ernie K-Doe and was named after his Number One hit of 1961.

“Robert wanted to go in but the place was locked up,” remembers Harris. “We all of us hammered on the door for a couple of minutes. Eventually, this tiny little black woman in her 70s opened the door, Ernie K-Doe’s widow. She’d got a wig on that was lopsided and seemed entirely nonplussed by our arrival.

“She put the lights on and went behind the bar, stood with her back to us fixing drinks. Robert started telling her how amazing it was to be there, because he used to practice singing to her husband’s records, doing the classic hairbrush in front of the mirror pose. He said it was through her husband’s music that he’d started to sing. Finally, she turned around and said, ‘Well that’s real nice, honey. Do you still sing?’ Robert said, ‘Yeah, every now and again.’ ”

21

JOY

I think it’s all down to the way the coke was cut in the ’70s.

Robert Plant had never paused much to celebrate, wanting to be on the move and doing. Yet he made an exception for such things during the summer of 2008 and also into the next year. That August he turned 60 and marked the event with a party. The nature of this said much about him. It was no glittering occasion but rather an informal get-together for family and friends held at his village pub, the Queen’s Head.