by Rees, Paul
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.
The chemistry between them was instant, Plant and Krauss nailing three master tracks on the first day in Nashville. For Plant, who had rarely sung harmony vocals before, the experience was a new and testing one.
“The thing I remember most from that session was that Robert was confounded and then delighted with what Alison was teaching him about harmony singing,” recalls Flanagan. “As he said, in Zeppelin and his previous solo work harmonies were things that’d be addressed if there were a couple of hours spare at the end of the session. He’d never been in a group like the Beatles or the Band, where they were such an important component.
“Alison really showed him a lot of ways to go. As a great singer, that excited his ear. That’s got to be interesting to one of the great vocalists, doing something with his voice that he hadn’t done before.”
“Before I met Alison I’d never known how beautifully eerie and evocative white American mountain music is,” Plant told me. “I don’t mean country music or bluegrass but the things from which a lot of that contemporary stuff has developed. Stuff that guys like Clarence Ashley were churning around at the start of the last century. Guys that worked in the lumber mills and made this spectacular music.”
The record, its title Raising Sand plucked from a lyric on Mighty ReArranger, was Plant and Krauss’s very own Wrecking Ball. In common with that Emmylou Harris album it had a unique and timeless atmosphere to it, hushed and whispering. The sound of it was spare and spacious, the texture dry and with the snap of old bones. The sense of darkness that T-Bone Burnett spoke of was there, too, like shadows at the edges of a sepia-tinted photograph or a chill breeze blowing in the dead of night.
The
cast of songwriters pulled together on it was just as fascinating. Among them were the maverick Tom Waits and Gene Clark, who was behind some of the Byrds’ most elevated moments, a tortured soul dead of a heart attack at 46. And also the late Townes Van Zandt, the great lost son of country music. Like Clark, Van Zandt was an alcoholic and a drug addict as well, Dylan, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard among the many to have covered his aching songs.
Theirs and other compositions on Raising Sand were ballads, slow dances and hoedowns, each one as pared as the next, a skeletal framework for the two lead voices, both of them gentle and intimate like lovers on a first date. Krauss otherworldly, Plant not just emoting the words now, but crawling down inside each song and inhabiting it. He sang exquisitely, perhaps better than he had ever done—as convincing on the playful Everly Brothers track “Gone, Gone, Gone” as he was on Van Zandt’s desolate “Nothin’ ” or his own “Please Read the Letter,” reworked here as the softest incantation.
It would be another year before Raising Sand came out, and then it was amid all the fanfare of another Led Zeppelin reunion, although it would not get lost. Plant had written a line in the album credits that read: “Gratitude to T-Bone and the Blue Glow who steered an old dog to new tricks.”
“How much Mr. Burnett was able to say, ‘No, sing it like this,’ I don’t know,” says Benji LeFevre, Plant’s old friend and sound engineer, laughing at the thought. “I’m sure that he did but I’d loved to have been a fly on the wall at those sessions. Either way, it was the first thing Robert had done since Zeppelin that really blew my socks off.
“It was like he’d found something at last. He’d had the courage to sing songs that were in the range of his voice now, because he can’t do that wail any more, and he sounded fantastic.”
“Making that record was incredibly nerve-racking,” Plant told me. “Because the challenge of it was just that, can an old dog ever really learn new tricks? Hey presto! I was born again.”
20
GONE, GONE, GONE
What better way to sign off? Twenty million applications for tickets.
In 2007 pop culture’s Richter scale got nudged hard and often. By the unveiling of Apple’s iPhone and the 400th episode of TV’s The Simpsons. Or by Spanish actor Javier Bardem’s Oscar-winning portrayal of sadistic killer Anton Chigurh in the Coen Brothers’ film No Country for Old Men. From music there was the rise of Amy Winehouse and a spate of reunions by British groups—the Police, the Spice Girls, Pink Floyd at London’s Live Earth concert, and also Led Zeppelin.
Of them all, Zeppelin’s comeback had the most seismic impact. The band’s return for a single concert at London’s O2 Arena at the end of the year sparked an almighty scrum for tickets, many millions around the world entering an online ballot for the 18,000 available. The gig itself was a worldwide news event. Zeppelin’s myth had inflated exponentially in the two decades since Live Aid and the Atlantic Records concert, the memories of those rotten performances all but forgotten. Having once been reviled by critics, they were feted now as one of the greatest rock bands of all time, if not the greatest.
In that intervening period nothing had served to burnish the band’s aura more than Plant’s repeated refusals to regroup with them. The more he put it off and the longer Zeppelin remained silent, the more substantial they seemed in hindsight. Of course, bringing a version of Zeppelin back to life was one thing, living up to a legend quite another.
The challenge of doing so was the furthest thing from Plant’s mind as 2006 slipped into 2007. Having completed work on Raising Sand with Alison Krauss he went home to the Midlands and resurrected another of his former bands, although the Honeydrippers came back without fanfare for a couple of concerts in the Black Country. The first of these, at Kidderminster Town Hall in December 2006, Plant had organized to raise money for one of his neighbors to have life-saving treatment for a brain tumor. Two months later the band played JB’s club in the town of Dudley to mark the 60th birthday of Plant’s long-serving sound engineer Roy Williams.
Plant had called up his former guitarist Robbie Blunt as well as Andy Silvester for these gigs, both of them members of the original Honeydrippers whom he had toured with in 1981. The line-up was completed by keyboardist Mark Stanway, a friend of Plant’s who played in a local rock band, Magnum, and a rhythm section made up of two part-time musicians whom he knew from his village pub. There was a familiar ring to how Plant prepared this group. Rehearsals took place in the barn adjoining his house, the set of vintage rock ’n’ roll and R&B tunes they worked up pulled from his record collection.
At the Dudley gig Jeff Beck turned up to do an unannounced opening slot. Just like the previous date in Kidderminster, the venue was heaving that night and the vibe intended to be knockabout, although Plant’s idea of such things extended only so far.
“Robert wasn’t all that chuffed after the JB’s show,” reveals local journalist John Ogden. “He didn’t think it had been good enough musically and he was a bit grouchy about the band not hitting the standard he’d expected.”
“The size of the audience doesn’t matter to him but it’s got to be of a certain quality,” agrees Mark Stanway. “Robert’s got too much of a reputation to protect. He’s a perfectionist and he’ll let you know if it’s not what he wants—straight away. Robbie, Andy and I are long in the tooth now, so he was never on our case, but bear in mind that the bassist and the drummer weren’t pros.”
Plant remained sequestered in his Midlands sanctuary as winter turned to spring. He cajoled Stanway, Blunt and also Roy Williams into joining him in another of his local endeavors, the team he entered for his village pub’s weekly quiz night.
“There was us, a table of regular guys from the pub, and a team of women that won the quiz every week,” Stanway recalls. “If the question was on football or music, Robert was the man. He’s got such a wealth of knowledge of pre-’65 music. He can name all the players in each band and every B-side. Although oddly, he can’t remember a single word of any song he has to sing. Everything has to be written down for him. He’s got a hell of a library stashed out at his house, too, all the original classic sides. It must be worth a fortune.
“One week, I remember there was this question: ‘If you add up the numbers on a roulette table, what do they come to?’ The answer is 666. I just happened to know that and wrote it down straight away. Robert went, ‘Really? I’ve got to tell the Dark Lord!’ Next thing, he’s got his mobile out and he’s on the phone to Jimmy Page.”
Plant and Page were already in touch about another matter, that of Led Zeppelin’s return. Ahmet Ertegun, their champion at Atlantic Records from 1968, had died the previous December following a fall backstage at a Rolling Stones concert in New York. The eighty-three-year-old’s widow, Mica, intended staging a tribute show in her late husband’s honor and asked that Zeppelin headline it. Even in death Ertegun’s influence was enough to persuade Plant to do things others could not.
To begin with the band’s principals envisaged doing something as terse as their previous comeback sets had been, a handful of songs and off. They got together in London that June for a first rehearsal, Jason Bonham again joining them on drums. Plant, Page and Jones had rust to shake off, but the younger Bonham had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Zeppelin’s and his father’s work.
“I’ve known Jason since he was 18 months old, when his dad and mum were living in a caravan,” Plant later told Phil Alexander of Mojo. “We go back a long way. He came to the rehearsals without any of the trappings, except for the fact that he’s historically obsessive, which to me is such a yawn. I mean, who cares what the fuck the difference is between night one somewhere and night two somewhere else? You just play it and then go away.”
Plant fled such irritations later that month, taking off with his Strange Sensation band for shows around Europe and North Africa. After these were done he called time on that particular group. He might then also have reflected on how he had never been able to do the same with Led Z
eppelin.
The O2 show was announced on September 12, 2007 and originally scheduled for the end of November. The following month Raising Sand was released. Expectations for it were slight, a measure of Plant’s standing at the time being the fact that it was almost cursorily, though positively, reviewed in Rolling Stone. The magazine afforded it the same amount of space as records by the Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour and an American indie rock band, Les Savy Fav, focusing much more on the Eagles’ first new album in twenty-eight years and on Radiohead’s In Rainbows.
Raising Sand eclipsed both of those records. It entered the U.S. and U.K. charts at Number Two and by the end of the year had sold over two million copies, driven as much as anything by the old-fashioned phenomenon of word of mouth. Plant had not enjoyed a success like this for more than twenty years and he was as surprised by it as anyone. Zeppelin’s rehearsals for the O2 show had been ongoing and the idea had expanded to it being a full-blown set. There had also been discussions about a tour.
Yet if Plant had been hedging his bets to begin with he was soon enough resolved as to what to do—and not just by the acclaim being heaped upon Raising Sand. Within the Zeppelin camp old tensions had resurfaced. He and Page were bickering over the proposed set list, and the prospect of there being greater riches to follow had lent the whole enterprise an unsavory edge.
“The early days were very hush-hush. Other than the band and the crew there was no one else about,” says Roy Williams, running the sound at rehearsals and later the O2 gig itself. “When they decided to do a full show that all changed. Not among the group, but the various managers started coming in and vying for position. Part of that was that Bill Curbishley had once managed Robert and Jimmy, but Jimmy had now moved to another company, Q-Prime, with Peter Mensch.
“I remember driving past Wembley Stadium with the crew one morning and one of the guys said, ‘This time next year we’ll be in there.’ I was thinking, ‘I don’t know about that.’ With Robert the nature of the beast is to be inquisitive.