by Rees, Paul
After the funeral Plant, Page, Jones and Zeppelin’s crew flew to Jersey for a long weekend. “Just to be together,” says Benji LeFevre. “I never thought that it was anything else but the end.”
Back in London the remaining band members and Grant met at the Savoy Hotel. The short statement they agreed upon was released on December 4 and read: “We wish it to be known that the loss of our dear friend and the deep respect we have for his family, together with the deep sense of undivided harmony felt by ourselves and our manager, have led us to decide that we could not continue as we were.”
“There was no way with the loss of John Bonham that the thing between us could ever be re-created,” Page told me. “But Robert had a voice, which is easier to project out than a guitar. It took me a while to recover from the shock of it. When I say recover, I mean to at least get standing up again.”
“I was a young man when Zeppelin finished,” Plant said to me. “I was 32 and I didn’t know what the rules were. ‘No more singing, maybe I should write a book.’ I thought I was all washed up.”
PART THREE
SOLO
Hey presto! I was born again.
© Camera Press/Perou
13
EXORCISM
It was almost like a spiritual quest . . . like we were all walking five feet off the ground.
In the immediate aftermath of Bonham’s death, vultures were soon circling. Plant and Page were each approached through Peter Grant to form a new “supergroup” with bassist Chris Squire and drummer Alan White from the prog-rock band Yes. This proposed group was to have been called XYZ, which signified ex-members of Yes and Led Zeppelin. Page met Squire and White, and even went as far as sitting in with them. Plant ignored the offer.
As he’d done after his son Karac had died, Plant instead collected himself at Jennings Farm. Once again, the route he charted back to music started from far off the beaten track. He was sparked into it by Benji LeFevre, who was still living on the farm and had assigned himself the job of clearing out one of the barns, as much as for having something to do.
That job done, LeFevre next occupied his time in setting up a small four-track studio in the barn. At LeFevre’s urging, Plant began using this new resource, inviting local friends around to jam with him, setting these sessions down on tape for the sheer fun of it. First to drop by were Andy Silvester and Robbie Blunt. Both men hailed from down the road in Kidderminster and had known Plant since he was a grammar-school boy.
An unassuming character, Silvester had met Plant at the Seven Stars blues club in Stourbridge in the early ’60s. He played bass and guitar, both equally well, although others had a higher opinion of his abilities than he himself did. The teenage Robbie Blunt was a frequent visitor to Plant’s family home at 64 Causey Farm Road. There, the pair of them had sat up in Plant’s bedroom listening to blues records. Even then, Blunt was a gifted guitarist. He’d gone on to play with a couple more of Plant’s old Kidderminster posse, Jess Roden and Kevyn Gammond, in a band called Bronco, and also with Michael Des Barres in Silverhead.
These get-togethers at Jennings Farm were relaxed affairs and a regular group of musicians formed around them. Joining Blunt and Silvester were Jim Hickman on bass, Kevin O’Neil on drums, Ricky Cool on harmonica and a saxophonist, Keith Evans. Belting out old R&B and rock ’n’ roll standards with this collective, Plant seemed happier than he’d been in years, his love of music rekindled.
“He found a freedom again to do what he wanted, rather than what was expected of him,” says LeFevre. “Underneath it all, I think that was how he experienced the last few years of Zeppelin. He had all these confused thought patterns—this feeling of responsibility to the other members and their families. This was something that he could enjoy doing. It was just about playing music and it wasn’t to do with self-indulgent, 30-minute guitar solos.”
“I was living in the West Country at the time, and I went up to see Robert quite often when he’d decided to get his life together again,” recalls Dennis Sheehan. “He knew he’d never again have financial worries, and he had his family and a new son, but it’s not as if you fall into a band as momentous as Zeppelin by accident. He needed to fill his life with something else, too.
“I remember in Zeppelin, he often told me about this American rock ’n’ roll singer from the ’50s, Ral Donner. Robert thought he was the greatest. I can’t help but think he was trying to model himself on Donner when he went into his own career.”
Plant gave this makeshift covers group a name—the Honeydrippers. His inspiration was an old American blues pianist, Roosevelt Sykes, who went by the nickname of the Honeydripper. Early in 1981, he called in a local promoter, Roy Williams, and asked him to book some low-key gigs for the band. He had two stipulations: that none of the venues could advertise his name, and he wouldn’t play south of Watford, the satellite town that is a gateway to London.
The Honeydrippers played their first show at Keele University in the East Midlands on March 3. During the next four months, pub and club gigs followed in such Midlands cities as Wolverhampton, Derby and Nottingham, and further north in Manchester, Middlesbrough and Sheffield. The band traveled in a transit van driven either by Roy Williams or Plant’s mate, “Big” Dave Hodgetts, with LeFevre following behind in the three-ton truck that carried their PA system.
“It was great fun,” enthuses Williams. “The band were doing R&B stuff, the shows were hot and sweaty. Robert was trying to get over the fact he’d lost his mate and this was one way of doing it. Of course, people would find out he was playing because of the network of fans that Zeppelin had got. We took 90 percent of the door, the same deal Peter Grant had done with promoters.
“We hadn’t used to bother booking hotels; we’d just get to a town and ask people if there was a good place to stay. I remember we couldn’t find anywhere in Sheffield and ended up driving around the city. Eventually, Robert spotted another Transit van parked outside of a pub and said, ‘I bet there’s a band in there, let’s go and ask them.’ He went up the staircase at the back of the pub and, sure enough, there’s a group of kids rehearsing. They were open-mouthed—the Golden God had walked in on them. His opening line was: ‘Excuse me, lads, do you know where I can find a cheap bed and breakfast?’ ”
Dave Lewis, founder of the Zeppelin fanzine Tight But Loose, traveled with Plant and the band to some of these shows. “Robert was used to being ferried around in limousines and here we were, driving around the Midlands in an old van,” he says. “It was a brave thing for him to do.
“People would be asking him where Jimmy was and shouting out for ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ and he was up there doing rockabilly tunes. They’d turn up with Zeppelin album covers, wanting him to sign them, and he wouldn’t do it.”
In all, The Honeydrippers did fifteen shows, the last of them on June 15 at a pub called the Golden Eagle in Birmingham. By then the band had served its purpose, getting Plant back on his feet. Establishing the pattern he would follow from then on, he put them to one side and moved on.
All told, 1981 was a particularly bleak year in Britain. With the economy in the doldrums, riots flared through that spring and summer in two of the U.K.’s most deprived inner-city areas, Brixton in London and Liverpool’s Toxteth. The musical movement that blew up in the country that year offered the promise, however vicarious, of an escape from such grim realities. Although they had formed in Birmingham, Duran Duran seemed to have come from another world altogether, one more glamorous and hedonistic, as fabulous as it was ridiculous. As much as the music itself, it was this sense of artifice that held the appeal of the New Romantic scene that Duran Duran fronted. A blitz of flamboyant fashion and outrageous characters, it had an unabashed gaudiness to it that stood in brilliant contrast to the stark, gray mood of the day.
Robert Plant turned 33 that summer. By the youthful terms of pop he belonged to an older generation, one far removed from the pulse of the time. Yet Plant was curious enough to see if he could use what wa
s then happening in music to signpost his next move. Since the prevailing sound was electro-pop, coming from the New Romantics and acts such as Depeche Mode and Soft Cell, he bought a Roland drum machine. By the end of the year he had begun using it to work up ideas with Robbie Blunt, the one member of the Honeydrippers he had retained.
“It was uncomfortable to begin with and I wasn’t sure I could handle it,” he told Tom Hibbert of Q magazine in 1988. “Page and I had known each other back to front in that area. It had been a bit twitchy at times, because of all the drugs, but basically comfortable. And so to start again with anyone else was a very, very odd feeling.”
Gradually, though, he settled into a new routine, he and Blunt and LeFevre gathering in the makeshift studio out at Jennings Farm. As things progressed, Plant brought in Jezz Woodroffe to write and play keyboards with them. Woodroffe had recorded and toured with Black Sabbath, and also ran a popular music shop in Birmingham. Plant came by the store one afternoon in the spring of 1982, ostensibly to buy a Moog synthesizer.
“I vividly remember Robert walking in that day,” Woodroffe says. “He looked really well. He was sun-tanned and wearing a Hawaiian shirt. As much as anything, I think he was checking me out to make sure I wasn’t some kind of nutcase.
“I went out to the farm and Robbie Blunt was there with him. Robert had just bought him a guitar amp for a thousand quid. Robbie was struggling at the time, he hadn’t got any money and he was living in a council house.
“We worked out in the barn. Robert christened it Palomino Studios. His daughter, Carmen, had a Palomino horse in the stables next door. Benji and Robert were very close, like brothers. It was a very up, family-oriented vibe. Robert’s son Logan used to come running into the studio as we were playing. Maureen was around a lot, too.”
Soon, the communal mood was further enhanced by the presence of John Bonham’s fifteen-year-old son, Jason. Plant had asked him along to help out on drums.
“Jason used to arrive from school on the back of his friend’s scooter,” says Woodroffe. “A lot of the numbers on that first album were worked out with him. He was a natural, sounded just like his dad.”
“The whole thing was like a big experiment,” says LeFevre. “I had set Robert up in the home studio so he could overdub his vocals without anyone being there, because he is technically hopeless. He talks as if he knows everything, but really he has very little clue about that side of things.
“During that time, he also asked me to manage him. He said, ‘I don’t want to be involved with all that big bollocks in London.’ I told him not to be so silly. But I did love the music.”
The first song they completed was a spare, syncopated track titled “Fat Lip,” rooted in the blues, but with a light feel to it that suggested the weight of Zeppelin falling from Plant’s shoulders. It sounded like nothing so much as an exhaling of breath.
“I wrote that as a tribute to Bonzo,” Plant told me. “He had gone and I had the drum machine, so what better thing to do than fall in love with automated rhythm? It was so far away from that kind of fantastic force that Bonzo was. After that, I was off. And every time I moved another step, I got freer.”
Plant continued to work off the grid, both Grant, his nominal manager, and his record label, Atlantic, being left in the dark about his new project. In the summer of ’82, he moved base to Monmouth in rural South Wales, there hiring out Rockfield Studios, a residential facility set within miles of open countryside.
Different musicians came and went. Andy Silvester returned on bass, until his confidence failed him and Paul Martinez, a seasoned session man, stepped in. Bad Company’s Simon Kirke tried out on drums, but didn’t click. Two tracks were recorded with Cozy Powell, who’d drummed with the Jeff Beck Group and most recently in ex-Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore’s band, Rainbow. The rest were done with Phil Collins of Genesis, who completed his parts in just three days.
“To begin with there was no idea of doing a record or putting a band together,” insists LeFevre. “Robert was just interested in pushing this thing further to see where it went and what it felt like.
“Eventually, it turned into the making of the first album and then it became a real fucking gas. It felt like a socialist situation, where everyone was equal. Of course, everyone was aware that Robert was funding it, but that wasn’t the point. It genuinely felt as if it was all about the music.”
“Certainly to start with, Robert kind of let us get on with things,” says Jezz Woodroffe. “The main structure for most of the songs came from Robbie Blunt and me. When we’d got a basic arrangement, Robert would develop it from there. Though I never heard the finished vocals—he’d always sing them when the rest of us were off down the pub.”
The finished record, Pictures at Eleven, did sound like a fresh start, one divested of Zeppelin’s heaviness, both musically and in terms of the emotional baggage that had been carried through the band’s last two albums. If anything, it was too well mannered. It now sounds very much of its time, clean and neat but with no hidden depths.
Plant’s singing was assured and unburdened, although he cut loose just the once, on “Slow Dancer.” The album’s best track, this was also the one that most echoed Zeppelin. An intense, exotic swirl, its driving guitar line was lifted from an Arab song, “Leylet Hob” (“Night of Love”). This had been most notably sung by the famed Egyptian vocalist Oum Kalsoum, a tape of which Plant had picked up in Morocco in 1972 and carried around with him ever since.
Once the record was finished, Plant at last reached out to Peter Grant and Phil Carson, who ran Atlantic Records in the U.K. He invited the two men up to Rockfield to hear Pictures at Eleven. It was a tense occasion, with neither man showing much enthusiasm for the music or the musicians that Plant had surrounded himself with.
“Phil Carson wasn’t particularly happy about Robert’s new direction,” recalls Woodroffe. “He was always telling us to go back to that Zeppelin sound, because he knew the kind of money that it generated. He was a supermarket manager before he went to Atlantic. I remember him telling me that if he could sell beans, he could shift records.”
“I think that Peter said something to the effect of, ‘You’d better just pay these guys off, because you’ve got a career here,’ ” says LeFevre. “He wanted Robert to be in a supergroup situation and not playing with unknowns, because then they’d all make lots of money.
“Robert’s reaction to that was two-fold: ‘I take your point,’ and, ‘No, this is my thing.’ I think it’s true to say that Robert’s respect for Peter had diminished during the previous five-year period, and for obvious reasons. The camp had been split and Peter had come down on one side more than the other. It had always been, ‘Jimmy’s done this, and Robert’s sung on it and written the lyrics.’ Robert didn’t want to go back to that, because he’d tasted a bit of freedom and intellectual satisfaction outside of the machine.”
Grant and Carson were reluctant for the record to come out and there was a standoff. Carson contacted Ahmet Ertegun in New York, asking him to intervene on their behalf. Plant told me years later that he felt as if Grant were trying to sabotage his solo career before it was begun. He turned to Phil Collins for advice and was urged to stand his ground.
“I had a meeting with Ahmet, Peter and Phil Carson,” he told me. “I went into the room and said, ‘I’m going to do this on my own now and if anybody here doesn’t take me seriously, then all we’ve known between us is over.’ The doors had been flung open and I wasn’t going to hang about.”
In reality, the resolution wasn’t that clear cut. When Plant returned to Rockfield, it was evident things had changed. Beforehand, he had contemplated calling the project the Band, or something similar, to suggest that this was a meeting of equals. That was now forgotten and Pictures at Eleven would be released as a solo record under his own name.
Robbie Blunt and Jezz Woodroffe had also been led to believe that there would be an even split in the publishing monies for songwriting, a pot
entially lucrative arrangement. This, too, was no longer the case.
“Up until that point it had been, ‘This is a co-operative and we’re going to share everything,’ ” recounts LeFevre. “Then all of a sudden it wasn’t. Everybody went, ‘Uh? That’s not what we were talking about last week.’ Yes, he was funding it, and he was the star and without him none of it would have happened for them. But it put a sour taste in everyone’s mouth.”
It also brought an end to Plant’s professional dealings with Grant. Yet he remained fiercely proud of the record itself. He took a tape of it to play to Page at his house in Windsor. It was an emotional meeting and one pregnant with meaning, the last cutting of the ties—and in the very place that Zeppelin had come to such a dreadful stop.
Page had been working on a soundtrack to the sequel to the dismal vigilante movie, Death Wish. He was otherwise living in a land of shadows. As much as Plant had been emboldened, Zeppelin’s passing had left him bereft. Plant also sent a copy of Pictures at Eleven to Jones.
“He said, ‘Well, ah, I thought you could have done something a little bit better than that, old chap,’ ” Plant told Steven Rosen of Guitar World. “So I said, ‘Well, thank you.’ And yet again, I was just the singer of the songs.”
Plant floated the idea of taking his new band out on tour but was talked out of it. He didn’t have anything like enough new material and he was unwilling to fall back on Zeppelin’s songs. He instead decided to get on with a second album.
Before doing so, he took off with Maureen and the children for a holiday in Morocco in the spring of 1982. It was a bittersweet time for the couple, the last trip they’d share as man and wife. They had clung to each other through the hardest of years, but doing so had exhausted their relationship and the wreckage resulting from Karac’s death was still between them.