Robert Plant: A Life (36 page)

Plant arranged for a marquee to be erected in the pub’s beer garden, in which caterers served a buffet of Indian food. His three children were there and also his ex-wife, Maureen. Among friends present were the DJ Bob Harris, his former Band of Joy guitarist Kevyn Gammond, and also Perry Foster, who had taken the teenage Plant on as singer with his Delta Blues Band as far back as 1964. The American blues musician Seasick Steve turned up and so did Lenny Kravitz, his band’s large tour bus getting stuck in the narrow country lanes leading to the pub.

This being British summertime it poured with rain, but Plant had hired a couple of stand-up comics for the occasion and they kept spirits high. Frank Carson, the late Irish comedian, based his routine on Plant’s perceived tightness with money. Plant, he said, had paid for him to stay at a three-star hotel. “Sure enough, as I was lying in bed last night,” he concluded, “I could count three stars through the hole in the roof.” Plant laughed louder than anyone else.

“These days, Robert has mellowed entirely,” reflects Perry Foster. “He’s still got a bad back and he walks with a bit of a stoop. His face looks a bit lived in, too. At the party I told him, ‘I know just the thing for you, Bob—why don’t you go off and get a facelift?’ He jokingly told me that he’d just had one.”

The weekend before his 60th bash Plant accepted an invitation to become an honorary Vice President of Wolverhampton Wanderers, the football team he had supported for fifty-five years. His fellow Vice President, Steve Bull, a former Wolves player and England international, recalls Plant turning up to the first game in his new role.

“The job is to be an ambassador for the club, to meet and talk to people in the executive boxes at the ground on match days,” explains Bull. “We’re supposed to come to the home games in a suit but Robert rolled up in his jeans, his hair tied back and with an old satchel slung over his shoulder. He said, ‘That’s me, I’m not going to change.’ He’s a scruffy git but underneath that a top man.

“He tends to let me do most of the talking. He’s quite a self-contained person, keeps himself to himself. He’s very opinionated about football, though. He calls me at home to talk about every game. I can get through a full bowl of spaghetti while he’s ranting on; I just put the phone to one side on the table and let him get on with it.”

The following July Plant was made a Commander of the British Empire for his services to music, attending a ceremony at Buckingham Palace in the presence of Prince Charles. At this time I was Editor of the British music magazine,
Q
. Later that year I asked him to accept an Outstanding Contribution to Music honor at the magazine’s annual awards in London. He told me that such garlands made him uncomfortable since they suggested he had died, but he agreed nonetheless. On the day itself, a frigid October’s afternoon, he was the center of attention and it clearly fitted him well.

Turned out in a maroon suit for the event, which took place at the Grosvenor Hotel on London’s Park Lane, Plant held court. In the hotel’s ornate ballroom, younger acts such as Arctic Monkeys and Muse flocked to his table, sponsors and fellow guests queued up to shake his hand and have their picture taken with him. He obliged them all, eyes twinkling and always ready with a joke at his own expense. Bob Harris and members of the Tuareg band Tinariwen presented him with his award, the prelude to which was a film of Plant through the ages, as rock god, pop star and now the singer of haunting country songs.

“In 1963,” he began his acceptance speech, “most bands passing through my town worked off the same sheet—Chicago R&B and early Motown identikit—packed with mail-order arrogance and a taste for our local girls. No social commentary, just cash and penicillin.

“One day, the singer in a school beat group got sick and I stepped in. Singing the songs was OK—what do you do with yourself during the guitar solos? Stare at your shoes and think of Elvis, or preen? What a blast. I was in heaven and ignored with a vengeance.

“Well, time passes, creating shapes while styles and fashions come and go, nothing too self-conscious, blissfully slogging on through the blacked-out worlds of Mods, Rockers, beatniks, the ludicrous elite and the hazardously psychedelic. Then one day all the walls, the doors and the floor dissolved. The Pan Am airliner taxied to a halt. The door flew back to reveal a subculture of wild, vulnerable, joyous, pained messengers, shamen, antichrists and hustlers, genius and trash. All ministered by a support system of bogus medics, seers, cheap perfume and sweat: vivid, glorious and now all but gone.

“The world is smaller now and a new world of music continues to confirm its beauty. Africa, for example, now telegraphs its distress, its anger and its corruption to a universal audience, as did the far-off prophets Lenny Bruce, Dylan, J. B. Lenoir and Billy Bragg.

“Down the years, as much or as little of this whirlwind has been mine to connect with. I have drawn a beautiful wild card that enriches my days and allows access to all the worlds of music and people and energy. A card for naïvety, a card for learning and a card for saying thank you.”

With that, and to a hushed room, he thanked those he said had helped him along the ride. They included Page, Jones and John Bonham, Elvis Presley, Howlin’ Wolf and Arthur Lee. He mentioned Ahmet Ertegun, Peter Grant and Zeppelin’s former tour manager Richard Cole, Sandy Denny and Alison Krauss, too. He also referenced the old Welsh rebel king Owain Glyndŵr, Stourbridge Town Hall and the Chicago Plastercasters. Last of all he thanked the Dansette Conquest Auto, his first record player, bought for him by his parents in the far-off mists of 1960.

Plant was not given to reflection, however, nor was he idle for long. Earlier in 2009
Raising Sand
had won a Grammy for Album of the Year, beating off Coldplay and Radiohead among others. Plant, Alison Krauss and the record’s producer, T-Bone Burnett, attended the Grammy Awards ceremony at the Staples Center in Los Angeles that February. By then they had begun having discussions about making a follow-up album but these had not progressed far.

“T-Bone hosted a dinner after the Grammys and was nice enough to invite me,” recalls VH1 executive Bill Flanagan, who had first put Plant in touch with Krauss. “The three of them were hanging out and talking about the fact that they were supposed to have started a second record. It felt as though each of them thought it, but no one wanted to actually say that they’d captured lightning in a bottle, and did they really want to try to do that again. Earlier that day, T-Bone had said to me it might be better if he just produced a record with Alison, one that didn’t have that weight of expectation on it.

“I also think that each of them felt that he or she had bent a little to accommodate the others on
Raising Sand
. With the next one, each of them wanted to do it more their own way. You get three people thinking that, then it’s going to be so much harder to pull together.”

Burnett was leaning more to repeating the
Raising Sand
formula, and he was Krauss’s preferred producer, although she was set on a less antiquated sound. Plant was angling for change, too, suggesting a broader range of material and also working with a different producer, Daniel Lanois.

“Alison and I were thinking of contemporizing our thing really quite radically,” Plant told me. “I said we had to find someone that was crazier than us and really nuts for music, and Daniel Lanois was that guy. Alison went to see him separately. I wanted to do my own thing.

“I knew that Dan was so driven. He’d just then done an album with Neil Young,
Le Noise
, and everyone was telling me that I wasn’t going to believe it when I heard it. They said he’d really put Neil through it. But then, Neil needed to get on the fucking program. We all do, otherwise we’d end up at the Playhouse in Nottingham.”

It was Krauss who eventually pulled the plug on the project, stating there was nothing wrong with killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Plant agreed and they parted amicably. She went back to her band, Union Station. With them she released a new album in 2011,
Paper Airplane
, a critical and commercial success, although T-Bone Burnett was not its producer.

Plant had been spending more time with Buddy Miller, guitarist in the
Raising Sand
touring band, at his home in Nashville, where he lived with his wife, the singer-songwriter Julie Miller. An avuncular man, Miller shared with Plant a dry, sardonic sense of humor and also a boundless curiosity about music. The two of them had started sifting through songs, looking for different things to interpret. These days Plant showed little inclination for writing new material.

“I gave up writing,” he later told Stephen Rodrick of
Rolling Stone
. “The last time I lifted a pen was when Tony Blair became a Roman Catholic. Soon I’m going to need help crossing the street.”

Plant asked Miller to help him put a band together, the two of them recruiting from the cream of Nashville’s session players bassist Byron House, multi-instrumentalist Darrell Scott and drummer Marco Giovino. Looking for a vocal foil to replace Alison Krauss, and at Miller’s suggestion, Plant called up Patty Griffin. A fine singer-songwriter, and also an accomplished pianist and guitarist, the forty-five-year-old Griffin had started out performing in coffee houses in Boston as a teenager. She had released her first album, the acoustic
Living with Ghosts
, in 1996. Four more records followed, each corralling together her country, folk and gospel influences, and establishing her as a formidable talent.

Toward the end of 2009 this group began rehearsing in Nashville. Plant had put together three CDs of material that he and Miller had picked out, asking the others to learn the songs in advance.

“It’s all really in the seeing what happens,” Plant told me when I asked how he went about starting each new adventure. “I’m a singer. I don’t have any of the problems that musicians do—I can try things with people and if they don’t work out it’s not too bad. I don’t walk in a room with the sort of huge historical reference that Clapton had, when it was ‘Eric Is God.’ Imagine having an off night with that.

“I just stay close to kindness and really good people. You can afford to be naïve and out of place, because everybody comes to meld in. That’s what happened with this group. There was so much apprehension in the room but within four hours everybody’s shoulders were as low as they could possibly go and we were playing in a very special way. It’s a great band and it’s all Buddy’s doing.”

“At that time Robert wasn’t thinking of doing anything definitively,” explains Marco Giovino. “He just wanted to go into a room and see what happened. He’d picked out a bunch of songs, old folk and mountain tunes. We ran through them, deconstructing them and adding alternative instruments, giving them legs. After a week he turned to us and said, ‘Well, fellas, I guess we’re making a record.’

“Buddy was absolutely his musical director. A lot of their musical paths crossed. The two of them have a deep love of the stuff that happened in San Francisco in the ’60s and psychedelic music in general, bands like 13th Floor Elevators. Robert definitely has an idea of where he wants something to go, though, and how it should sound. And if he can’t physically play that on guitar he will sing it to you.”

To make the album the band hired the singer Gillian Welch and her partner David Rawlings’s studio in Nashville, the two of them charging Plant a negligible fee. It was a big room, wide and with 25-foot-high ceilings. In keeping with the spirit of the songs, Plant shunned digital technology, recording instead the old-school way direct to 16-inch tape. He referenced his own past, too, giving this new group and also their record the same name, “Band of Joy.”

It proved to be Plant’s second great album in a row, although it didn’t have the surprise factor of
Raising Sand
or that record’s extra dusting of magic. Like it,
Band of Joy
conjured a singular mood, this one melancholic but tinged with hope, the atmosphere it suggested being that of a Deep South town in the dead of a hot summer’s night, the crackle of neon and the buzz of fireflies.

The songs ranged from such archaic pieces as the traditional song “Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down” and an Appalachian folk ballad “Cindy, I’ll Marry You Someday,” to more contemporary selections such as “Angel Dance” by the L.A.-based Tex-Mex band Los Lobos, and a brace of brooding tracks by Minnesota drone rockers Low, “Silver Rider” and “Monkey.” Plant sang with restraint and assurance, his voice slipping in to each song as if it were a favored old suit.

“On a practical and absolutely workmanlike level I’ve learned more in the last five years about what to do and not to do than at any point,” he told me at the time. “People say I can’t sing ‘Immigrant Song’ any more. That’s bollocks, I can, but it’ll take me a couple of weeks to get my register open like that again. The point is that singing is about all aspects of the weather, all of the gift. Both these women, Alison and Patty, have taught me that.”

The ebb and flow of music being cyclical,
Band of Joy
fell in with one of the strongest currents of the time, a shift toward more rustic and traditional sounds. Bands such as Fleet Foxes, the Black Keys, Band of Horses and Midlake had risen to prominence in America, each of these groups delving back to the roots of rock, blues and folk to fashion their own thing. In Britain the band Mumford & Sons and a teenage singer-songwriter, Laura Marling, were fronting a new folk movement. Longer-in-the-tooth songwriters such as Tom Petty, John Mellencamp and Elton John, in partnership with Leon Russell, had also made records that looked to an earlier era for inspiration, acting their age and sounding all the better for it.

Plant was on a creative roll and he found himself back in step with the times as well. Released in September 2010,
Band of Joy
was a Top 5 record in the U.S. and the U.K. It was preceded by a series of low-key theater dates in the States and a one-off show at a 2,000-capacity venue in North London, the Forum. This last show was among the very best Plant had done in years, singing with relish as his band painted a vivid, changing musical landscape peppered with rock, blues, folk, country and gospel landmarks.