Robert Plant: His Reunion With Jimmy Page Kicked Off His Next Phase
In the summer of 2002, I found myself, improbably, sitting face to face in a huge but otherwise empty conference room in a hotel in New York City with Robert Plant. We were there to talk about Dreamland, his first solo album in nearly a decade. I’d never interviewed him before, but I knew that he could smell a Led Zeppelin question coming from a mile away. Still, he hadn’t started doing press for the album, I was getting to him early in his cycle, and I had to ask.
“You’d been working with Jimmy Page since 1994. Why did you stop?”
“‘Cause I ain’t got much time,” he said. What he meant was that he was in his mid-50s. He may have worried: how many great records did he have left in him? He felt he was too old to keep banking on the past.
But Plant’s ’90s era reunion with Jimmy Page is probably what set him on his course for the next few decades of his unprecedented solo career. Let’s backtrack a bit to give some context here: Robert Plant became a solo artist by necessity after the dissolution of Led Zeppelin in 1980, following the death of John Bonham. He knew what a long shadow that band cast, and for the first few years of his solo career, he mostly avoided performing Led Zeppelin songs at his concerts.
He got a bit more comfortable with his legacy in 1988, with the release of his Now and Zen album. Jimmy Page guested on two tracks on that album: “Heaven Knows” and “Tall Cool One,” which sampled a number of Zeppelin classics. Plant returned the favor, singing on Jimmy Page’s “The Only One” from his Outrider album. More importantly, Plant started adding Zeppelin songs to his setlists. Plant, Page and John Paul Jones even played a brief Led Zeppelin reunion set at Atlantic Records’ 40th anniversary concert at Madison Square Garden in May of 1988. (Plant played a set with his solo band earlier in the night.)
If you’re of a certain age, you’ll recall that seemingly every rock band was shamelessly ripping off Led Zeppelin during that era (recall the guitarist taking out the violin bow during the solo in Whitesnake’s “In The Still Of The Night”). Plant was not amused or flattered. And he was likely alarmed to see his former bandmate put out an album with Whitesnake frontman David Coverdale a few years later in 1993.
Plant’s own 1993 album, Fate Of Nations, had a very Led Zeppelin III vibe, and in the first single, “Calling To You,” he seems to be reaching out to his former bandmate. At the end of the song he wails, “Just fadin’ away…. oh Jimmy!”
And by the next year, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page were back together. At the time, MTV Unplugged was a very popular format, particularly for legendary rockers. And MTV was likely excited about having half of Zep reunite for their flagship show. But they probably had no idea what they were in for. This wasn’t going to be veterans grabbing acoustic guitars and cranking out mellow versions of the hits.
Plant and Page wrote some new songs for the session, “City Don’t Cry”, “Wah Wah” and “Yallah” (later retitled as “The Truth Explodes”). They were recorded in the spring of 1994 in Marakesh, Morocco with local musicians. Happy with their new material (regardless of how it would be received), Page and Plant then set out to revisit Led Zeppelin songs, some of them quite radically. In August, they recorded some songs atop a slate heap in Wales, a few more in a forest in Wales, and a couple in front of a small audience at a TV studio in London, accompanied by an ensemble of Egyptian musicians. The whole thing aired in America as an MTV Unplugged episode but was nothing like any other episode of the series. Led Zeppelin was incredibly ambitious in their day, and Page and Plant’s reunion had that spirit of adventure and experimentation.
Some of the songs, notably “Thank You,” were close to the studio versions that were still constantly on the radio. But most of them were radically reimagined, including “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” and “No Quarter.”
No Quarter: Jimmy Page and Robert Plant Unledded was released on October 31, 1994, and was much more challenging than Hell Freezes Over, the Eagles reunion album released just one week later. In 1995, Plant, Page, their band, a massive string section and a group of Egyptian folk musicians hit the road. Their set was filled with Zeppelin classics, and a few odd covers, including the Doors’ “Break On Through” and the Cure’s “Lullaby” (former Cure member Porl Thompson was part of the band).
The bond between Page and Plant was strong; following the tour, they decided to make a new album with a stripped-down rock band. Walking Into Clarksdale was released in 1998 and they hit the road again, this time with the smaller combo. But this marked the end of their union. While Plant clearly loves his history with Led Zeppelin, and has warm feelings for Page, he also clearly does not want to live in his past. He also doesn’t like playing in hockey and basketball arenas.
After my interview with Plant in 2002 ended, he actually hung out for a while; that’s rare for any artist, particularly one of his stature (and particularly one who didn’t seem to love the press). We talked a lot about music: everything from the bands who mimicked him to some of the “Americana” artists who we both enjoyed. He said he was trying to figure out a way to play to audiences who weren’t just there to hear him sing Zeppelin songs.
I swear to you that I suggested he reach out to “someone like Steve Earle or Emmylou Harris.” As we know, five years later, he and Alison Krauss released their first duo album, the wildly successful Raising Sand (which included a reimagined version of Walking Into Clarksdale‘s “Please Read the Letter”). Ironically, it came out right around the time he played one final concert with Led Zeppelin on December 10, 2007. It was a final wave goodbye to his past, as he was about to move forward.
But I have to mention that on October 18, 2016, I went to New York City’s Town Hall where I saw Robert Plant, Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, along with Buddy Miller and a few other musicians sitting in a circle, taking turns singing their songs at a benefit show.
That show and his concerts with Alison Krauss are just two of the contexts that I’ve seen Plant perform in over the past few years. There was also his Band of Joy (featuring Buddy Miller and his one-time paramour Patty Griffin) and then the Sensational Shape Shifters. And he has another new combo called Saving Grace, who he has not yet brought to the U.S.
In the past four-plus decades since Led Zeppelin’s demise, there has been no shortage of artists who are influenced by (or straight-up rip-off) their sound. Plant seems content with watching them from a distance and sometimes having a laugh at their expense. He still seems to possess the spirit of exploration and the desire to try new things as he did when he was in Led Zeppelin as a much younger man. He doesn’t deny his past; he embraces it, but on his own terms. It’s a balance that very few of his peers have been able to manage. Unledded may have been the point where he learned to tie all of this together.
