"ROBERT PLANT’S HISTORY OF LED ZEPPELIN (PART TWO)" (Guitar Magazine, Dec. 1983)
Led Zeppelin’s music is among the most enduring of the rock era. Directly or indirectly they are still the prime influence for hard rockin’ bands in the 80s. In last month’s issue, former Zeppelin vocalist, Robert Plant, spoke with GUITAR’S Steve Gett about the early days of the band. This month he continues the conversation.
Led Zeppelin III included some beautiful acoustic passages like That’s The Way and Tangerine. It came out in October 1970 and Robert once said that the album saw him singing more, rather than screaming. Does he still consider this to be a fair assessment?
“Well, although it was great to do all that gymnastic vocal work, it was a bit too rough. In retrospect, it was very exciting, nice to do it - a lot of people do it better than I did it then, because they’ve probably perfected the ‘primal scream’ or whatever it is. But I think you have to move on and add a touch of gentility to it.”
A song like That’s The Way from the third album evidenced a more subtle approach to Robert’s singing.
“Yeah, maybe,” he interrupts, “but it was also present on the first album with Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You.”
Even that went suddenly manic though!
“Yeah… (laughs) … but also What Is, and What Should Never Be is a remarkable song. It’s a case of creating dynamics vocally and I’m still doing it, but my style’s just moved along a little bit.”
Following the release of Led Zeppelin III, the group continued to tour extensively around the globe. Towards the end of 1971, their fourth (Untitled) Lp emerged and contained the classic Stairway To Heaven, which has since become something of an anthem for the band.
“Yeah, well Whole Lotta Love did as well for a long time,” interjects Robert, “and I think probably Kashmir has done since Stairway. It was just one of the better songs we wrote. As you go along you have little milestones and that was one of them. It was a nice song and a lot of people enjoyed it but beyond that…”
Is he saying that it didn’t really mean that much to him?
“Well yes it did, it meant a lot. It was a great achievement to write a song that constructionally, musically, had that many changes of mood. And it had a great symmetry, great balance, as a song.”
How does Robert feel when he hears it nowadays?
“Well I’ve heard it that much that I don’t even know that it’s there when it’s on, you know. If one was fortunate enough to hear Carouselambra or Achilles Last Stand I should be ten times more proud. Because when people talk about Led Zeppelin now, they talk about Stairway To Heaven and Whole Lotta Love and they’ve missed things like Achilles Last Stand, which to me was equally important lyrically and musically. And you’ve actually got such great dynamism and great musicianship on Achilles. Everything was right there and there was a story weaving right through it.”
Although Zeppelin continued to tour after the fourth album was released, the pacing was a little more relaxed. Was this intentional?
“Well, like you say about writing on the road for Led Zeppelin II. That’s one extreme. I guess we’d worked for three or four years and it was high time that we took stock of everything we’d done and thought sensibly about what was going to happen next.”
The next vinyl output was Houses of the Holy in March 1973 which, with its highly diverse selection of material, always struck me as Zeppelin’s most off-beat LP.
“Oh, I like it,” proclaims Robert, “I think it’s a very innocent and clean album.”
I didn’t say I didn’t like it!
“Yeah, I take your point, but I like it because it was a very crisp thing, to the point - there it is, take it or leave it.
“There was a seriousness that people has assumed about the band and it was nice to be able to do whatever we wanted to do. I thought The Crunge was an excellent sort of alternative approach to being able to play well. It’s a great track, I play it now and it’s still really good.
“And D’Yer Maker is really funny. We were all into reggae and dub, and it carries the same motives as I’ve got now, and Jimmy’s obviously got. And that is that you’ve got to keep moving around and dodging about.”
During the 1973 tour, Zeppelin’s three-night stand at Madison Square Garden was filmed and subsequently they shot the individual ‘fantasy’ sequences that were to be seen in the 1976 movie The Song Remains the Same.
Robert’s fantasy footage saw him appear as an Arthurian knight figure traveling in quest of a mysterious lady - at least that’s roughly what I could make of it! To be blunt, the whole thing echoed strong hints of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and I asked Robert how he looks back on it these days.
“With a reasonable amount of embarrassment I suppose!” he laughed. “My sketch was taken completely wrong - the search for the ultimate female and it wasn’t really anything to do with that. I suppose now it’s nice to watch it and smile with pleasure and think ‘Oh well, we tried.’ It’s very hard to try and put across a rock ’n’ roll band onto film. Maybe we succeeded in parts of the film to put across exactly how we were and maybe we took it a little too far in other parts.”
Nowadays, of course video has become a very important medium for artists - Robert has often been seen on MTV. Would he liked to have worked in that field with Zeppelin?
“Well, it would have been great to have found some director who could have latched onto the subtleties that were afoot in the band. Now, in retrospect, we were hailed as being the forerunners or the people who began ‘this, that and the other’ and really we were always out there on our own - just alongside everything else that was going along, but completely separate.
“And if there had been video guys around, or that medium has been accessible as an art form, it would have been nice to see what could have been done with songs like In the Light, Kashmir, The Rover, or even The Wanton Song.”
Those four numbers are featured on the sixth Zeppelin album Physical Graffiti, a double studio platter, which was the band’s first release on their own Swan Song label. It was an excellent Lp, full of variation, but wasn’t it rather ambitious to release four sides of studio tracks?
“It was done at Headley Grange, so there wasn’t the sort of studio feel about doing it,” counters Robert. “In fact it was easier to do than my solo albums. It was a great record actually. I mean if I’m going to blow my trumpet about anything at all I’ve been connected with it would be Physical really, because at the time it was a particularly good combination of tracks. Even old Down by the Seaside, which actually comes from Bron-Y-Aur days with the tape machine, where the batteries used to run down and you used to stick them on the fire grate to warm them up to recharge them! Physical was a great album and it sounds really good today. It wasn’t really that ambitious. Like Jimmy should say, it was a case of getting it off your chest.”
Physical Graffiti surfaced in March ’75 and in May of that year, after yet another stateside slog, Zeppelin returned to five triumphant sell-out dates at the 17,000 seat Earls Court in London.
Shortly afterwards though, Robert and his wife were involved in a car crash in Greece, which left the singer with multiple leg fractures and resulted in him being confined to a wheelchair for quite some time.
One would imagine that this must have set him back quite a lot, but according to Robert: “It didn’t really, because after I left England, which was about 10 days after the crash, we started rehearsing and writing in California (Malibu) and just carried on. Benji (LeFevre) pushed me around in the wheelchair for six months and during that time we recorded Presence. So, all in all, it was no setback really.”
The Presence Lp, with the infamous ‘object’ featured on the sleeve work, was released in April ’76 and still ranks as one of my all-time favorite Zeppelin albums, although I’ve always felt it’s been sadly underrated.
Robert agrees: “For me, it was a kind of important record because I was pretty angry about being stuck in a wheelchair after the crash - I had to get a few of my frustrations off my chest. So maybe it was just the emotional content that makes me go for it. The lyrics are very poignant on a few of the tracks and I think it was a really good album. I still don’t quite understand why it was underrated.”
Although there were to be no live appearances from the band in 1976, Zep fans were at least able to see The Song Remains the Same, which opened in the fall and also spawned the double-live soundtrack LP.
Towards the end of the year, the group started rehearsing for an American tour, which eventually kicked off on April 1st, 1977, in Dallas. The U.S. concerts were scheduled to run through until the beginning of August but in the end the last seven dates were cancelled following the tragic death of Robert’s five-year old son Karac. Not surprisingly, there was a protracted gap before Robert was motivated to start working again.
“I just didn’t know whether I’d had enough or not, and time will have told everybody I hadn’t had enough - I just needed a break.”
Robert was finally reunited with the ret of the band at Clearwell Castle in Wales in the spring of 1978.
“I went back down there and started to play again,” he reflects, “and I realized that I still possessed something that really turned me on. And also the guys I was playing with were very understanding and patient … and they were my friends too. We all owed each other something and that combination of characters, personalities and music just worked a treat.”
However it wasn’t until the end of the year that Zeppelin began recording a new album at Abba’s Polar Studios in Stockholm.
In Through The Out Door eventually came out in August 1979 and in fact turned out to be the band’s final studio release.
How does Robert rate that record?
“I think that Presence, maybe Houses of the Holy, and In Through The Out Door were all good albums in that they were all very spicey. One track was clear from another and that really is a nice way of making a record, rather than having a mood and a central theme going through the whole lot.
“I still agree very firmly with what Jimmy said about albums - that they’re a statement of what you do there and then in time. In Through the Out Door was a very fresh-faced, clean, ambitious sort of project, which was done very quickly and there wasn’t so much self-consciousness about it. Things like Fool in the Rain were really great - in fact that was a nice little song.”
Immediately prior to the album’s release, Zeppelin played two massive outdoor concerts at Knebworth Park in Hertfordshire. Fans flocked from around the world to see the band’s first live performances in over two years and few seemed disappointed by what they witnessed. The atmosphere on the first date on August 4th was magical and this day is generally considered to be yet another milestone in the group’s career.
There had been talk of playing a bullring in Ibiza shortly afterwards, but in fact it wasn’t until the spring of 1980 that Led Zeppelin re-emerged for a European tour, which sadly turned out to be their last ever road outing. I was fortunate enough to catch one of the final shows in Munich and witnessed a gig that I’ll certainly never forget.
The band appeared to be enjoying themselves as much as the fans and as Robert confirms: “It was a really great tour. We cut everything down tremendously, hived off any extended sort of passages and just made it a very immediate and instant kind of thing. It was a good sort of breaking-in period to find out whether we’d got the complete hunger and capacity to go out and rock one night - live the life we like to in-between - and do it the next.”
The 1980 Continental trek certainly rekindled the band’s enthusiasm for live work. In October of that year they were planning to embark on their first American tour since 1977. When I bumped into Jimmy Page at the group’s London offices at the beginning of September, he seemed raring to go. But sadly, on the 25th of that month John Henry Bonham died, thus drawing the group’s twelve-year career to a close.
Robert has made few comments to the press on Bonzo’s death and I certainly didn’t think it fair to raise the issue. After all, let’s face it, what can he say? He not only admired Bonzo as a musician, but above all they’d been close friends for many years. Suffice to say, John Bonham was one of the finest drummers - if not the best - that the rock world will ever see.
The legend of Led Zeppelin still lives on though and their music remains as popular as ever, a fact evidenced by the success of last year’s Coda album, which basically comprised a series of studio outtakes. - by Steve Gett
