by Rees, Paul
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 he
ard 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.
“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.’ ”