“Why don't you take off your clothes?” asks Robert Plant, grinning, clutching at the bare white towel wrapped around his waist.

Sheesh.

It didn't seem so funny at the time, but Plant’s polite query, addressed to the three of us—one interviewer and two record company VIPs—seemed very logical, considering that we were soaked to the skin by a late afternoon downpour. The Scene: a superswank hotel suite at the Plaza, in Manhattan, the sort of room where three “Magic” Johnsons might stand on each other’s shoulders and still not touch the ceiling Plant, himself soaked by the same sudden shower, grinned at the irony as he went to the room attached to change.

When Big Guns like Robert Plant come around, you can bet it isn’t just to make funny jokes. Our rendezvous signaled just one more stage in Robert Plant’s re-emergence : since the demise of Led Zeppelin —the point somewhere in the chain of events between where he starts recording again (as he did with last year’s Pictures At Eleven come; back), begins a massive international tour, and finally—who knows?—maybe goes off and lays low again for a while. It’s a cliched cycle perhaps, and certainly one his former band had no small part in establishing, but nevertheless de rigueur for Robert Plant circa 1983, veritably part of the gameplan.

Yet it isn’t all bullshit. Plant’s new career as a solo artist has none of the air of desperation, of floundering, one might expect from an artist of his stature who’s trying to start all over again because of, say, financial necessity. Whatever need Robert Plant has to go it alone, it reflects instead the finest and noblest sort of motivation: the man simply wants to create. From him you’ll get none of the pathetic last-tour-ever spiel that’s indelibly marred the Who’s continuing “career”; you can also bet that Hal Ashby won’t be making a movie of his current tour or that we’ll be seeing Robert Plant designer jeans in 1984. Say what you will about Led Zeppelin and the excesses of the ’70s, but Plant’s contributions and intentions have never been less than of-the-highest-order since that very first Zep LP emerged back in 1969.

Think about it: of all bands, Zeppelin could have exploited their audience much more than any other—yet in retrospect there really hasn’t been that album they’d just as soon forget about, that tour undertaken (or album released) for purely financial gain so screw the fans. Last year’s Coda seemed more an interesting artifact than a grapple for dollars and, personally, left me admiring the band for not milking their audience dry with other, more sub-standard material, many years earlier. Zep—and obviously Robert Plant—maintain a dignity and pride that very few of their contemporaries can still decently claim. They have yet to compromise their name.

In speaking of his new solo career, Plant attaches importance to the concept of “carrying on.” He apparently means it on a personal level more than in carrying on the “Zep tradition”—in fact, says he, he initially worried Pictures At Eleven leaned “too heavily” on Zeppelin, until many things, not least his bringing it around to Jimmy Page to hear, convinced him he was very much his own man.

Most important is his current songwriting partner, guitarist Robbie Blunt, an integral part of that album and The Principle Of Moments, the newest.

Blunt’s rise to prominence with Plant is interesting, in theory, because on paper he’s basically just another British blueser. He spent some time with Jess Roden’s Bronco (their second album, Ace Of Sunlight, is an unsung ’70s classic), flirted with Silverhead, and went off with Chicken Shack’s Stan Webb to form the short-lived Broken Glass (one LP, Capitol), which also featured the Keef Hartley Band’s guitarist/vocalist, Miller Anderson. I bring all these dire Anglo connections up for a reason: there are more British biuesers than I’d care to count who’ve marked time in bands, both bad and good, that ultimately didn’t make it like Led Zeppelin did. The Hartley Band, Colosseum, Chicken Shack, Savoy Brown, oodles more related to John Mayall and thus Fleetwood Mac, etc., all of them deriving their music from American blues and R&B and attempting to forge “new” music, some of which is remembered, most of which isn’t. Plant, obviously, shares all these roots—yet for him something clicked, something he’s been able to share with Jimmy Page and now Robbie Blunt— who might’ve just as well languished in obscurity until the Plant connection. It’s this tradition Plant is ultimately carrying on, taking his British blues boom roots of the ’60s and making them relevant in the ’80s; Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Fleetwood Mac and very few others have managed to make viable music in the ’80s, yet of them all, Plant—without ever really changing direction, or winding down, or taking that one hit and recycling it to death—has managed to stay relevant almost 20 years on.

He’s been very lucky.

Motivation?

“Well,” says Plant, “you do it to please yourself. This...” he gestures at me, at the hotel room, “this is a forced situation, which

"...why not brag when you're surrounded by mediocrity?"

you go through all the time and 1 go through very seldom. But with Pictures At Eleven and Principle Of Moments,”he grins, “these are new days. This is a new approach, and I’m really proud that the things are really that good, you know? So I’m prepared to do this, to gain some communication with some people ”

Confidence?

“I didn’t know if I was leaning too heavily on Zeppelin the first time around. I didn’t think so, but...I didn’t know. I hear my voice—I mean I’ve heard it for years, right?—I hear my voice and I always listen to see if there’s the right amount of top, whether the graphic equalizers and limiters sound right. 1 listen to it in a technical, as well as a sort of...soulful manner. And after Robbie puts on the tenth or eleventh guitar part, say, I no longer hear it as a song. I hear it as you might when you take an X-ray. You can see bones, you know?” He laughs.

“So it was a boon to take it to Jimmy. It was also very emotional. This one,” says he, referring to the new LP, “I haven’t had time to knock on the big gates. This time I just kept going. My self-confidence is on a different level. I know I can do it. Before, I didn’t know if anything was going to happen.”

Something does happen on The Principle Of Moments. Robert Plant has, for better or worse, demonstrated that he has no real need of Led Zeppelin to make the inspired music his former band made. It’s a surprisingly good album, the sort that sounds better with each hearing. Like Zeppelin’s, it’s got a “timeless” air about it, making it difficult to pin down any sort of realistic timeframe about it—it might’ve been recorded 10 years ago, and that’s meant as a compliment.

Don’t know about you, but I don’t think Zeppelin have gotten just recognition for the really spectacular production work on their albums. To non-fans, “Led Zeppelin” is a two-word cliche basically signifying what the band sounded like on two historic tracks— “Communication Breakdown” and “Whole Lotta Love”—yet this remains the fault of those hundreds of HM bands who took that sound and based entire careers around it. Zeppelin rarely descended into cliche; they were witty, caustic and always striving for new paths of expression. It showed from the beginning, became increasingly clearer on Physical Graffiti and probably came to a head on the underrated Presence, on which may be the band’s finest moment: “Achilles’ Last Stand,” 10 minutes and 26 seconds of Plant, Page and John Bonham using the HM cliche they almost singlehandedly devised and taking every screeching excess and tension to new, sometimes ridiculous, heights. From that point onward it became ridiculous to speak of Led Zeppelin as sounding “like” anything at all. And, to make it as concise as possible, this quality has carried through to The Principle Of Moments, and that’s pretty much it.

Though the Zep albums weren’t exactly received with open arms by the press—isn’t it almost the cliche of cliches?—Eleven got a surprisingly warm reception. Plant himself feels he was treated fairly: “In Britain, I got one bad review, from one paper that takes pride in, um, a sort of building-anddestroying style, you know? Everybody else said, ‘Well, we’ve had solo albums from soand-so and so-and-so, but they’ve all gone under the carpet, so we’re naturally gonna expect Plant’s album to do the same thing. But we’re here to tell you otherwise.’ And when I read that, I cut it out and my old lady’s still got it hanging up. It meant,” he says proudly, “that I was carrying on.”

Plant’s polite reference to that “one paper” is significant. Zep’s career was rarely shaped by anything ever written about them—it was the music, first and foremost, the audience, and the relationship between both that made his former band the phenomenon they remain today. If anyone might be living in a dream world of hippie success—where it’s still peace ’n’ love because, hey, the money’s here and where did everybody go?—you might expect it to be Robert Plant. But it isn’t. I remark that he still sounds like he’s trying to break new ground.

“Well,” he grins, ’80s-aware, “I wouldn’t like to think I’ve sort of dropped into the AOR bracket completely, you know? Where you mix, in the studio, along certain predestined paths...”

Oh yeah. What do you think about that stuff?

“I think it’s...,” he pauses, searching for the word. “Comfortable. Too comfortable. And boring. That’s why the Human League are good. That’s why the English Beat are good, you know? That’s why the Stray Cats are good, why Heaven 17 are OK.”

Who do you think is good nowadays? “All those artists I just mentioned. Because they all sound different. Yazoo [Yaz in America] are excellent— I mean, they just split up, right?—but her voice, combined with those modern techniques. . .The B-side of their latest single is incredible, it’s brilliant,” he enthuses. “It’s a masterpiece of modern technology with a voice that’s singing. It’s not deadpan, not a real boring, semi-suicidal vocal—which, well, there’s a-lot of that about, you know? It’s got all those incredible swirls and the brassy, cutting edge of the blues voice.”

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Zep weren’t exactly conservative in their own arrangements; how much synthesizer is floating around on those records?

“Zeppelin didn’t,” he says—almost to'o fast—and then thinks again, reconsidering. “Jonesy was actually far ahead of his time, using synthesizers in The Crunge’ way back on Houses Of The Holy. And there were synths on things like ‘All My Love’ and ‘Carouselambra.’ But it was a different approach than the sort of... mathamatical synth approaches, though nonetheless very good in its time.”

And what’s he doing today?

“Synthing himself into paradise,” he laughs.

Oh? Is there a record due?

“1 believe so, yeah,” Plant says. He looks away. “I don’t hear from him. Very much.”

Yeah. Well, I know you guys never really hung out with each other.

“Yeah,” he says. “Well, you can saturate relationships, if you’re not careful.”

In case you haven’t figured it out, Robert Plant is an entirely affable, very positive personality. He doesn’t have to be, he just is. It’s nice. In the short time I’m with him, it’s the little things, those not worthy of discussion, that most impress. Like when after the interview, when I’m in the next room while a woman from the Associated Press grills Plant, and I dutifully peek into the suitcase lying on the ground. It’s Plant’s. Inside ate the personal things which, I suppose, he doesn’t want anybody to see. The cassettes he’s listening to on these trips to the States: the best of Marvin Gaye, a Gene Vincent reissue, even Soft Cell. Pretty neat. I mention seeing Stan Webb with Chicken Shack, long ago, he of the 30-foot guitar cord. “Yeah,” Plant says as an aside. “Yeah, well of course Buddy Guy used to do that.” And you must know Plant sang “Little Sister” with Dave Edmunds on that Kampuchea album; I mention I’d just spoken with Edmunds in Detroit that week. “Yeah?” he wonders, genuinely curious. “What does he have to say about it all?”

There’s a respect that Robert Plant has for the music—all forms of the music—that maybe a lot of people wouldn’t think he’d still have. Maybe that a lot of people have even forgotten about, these days. Like I said: It’s nice.

Robert Plant knows enough about Biz ’83 to have wrapped up a brand new videoin this case the very nifty “Big Log,” put together by the biggies at—where else?— Hipgnosis. “Old habits die hard,” says Plant.

I wonder if he thinks his appearance in The Song Remains The Same — you know, Plant as mythological folk hero aside from the Zep concert pizazz—might be viewed as a veritable first in rock video ancestry.

“Well,” he says, very reluctantly. “Maybe.”

How do you look back on that?

“With a great deal of humility. ” He clears his throat. “And some embarrassment. It was a moment in time, and we tried to capture the moment, and I think we did, more or less. I find the actual mood of the film good, but”—here he digs in his rock-crit bag—“from my point of view, I find it overindulgent.”

Plant’s willingness to speak about the past may, in part, be due to the fact that he hasn’t had a whole lot of pressfolk asking him about it. But, I find, he’ll pretty much answer anything you ask him. When I nabbed him for a quote he once made about Zep being simply “the best” there was, he doesn’t hedge: “I think what’s happened over the years is that what sense of humor I’ve got has passed over the top of most people’s heads. So when I’m stating things, maybe at a time when I’ve been fooling around, it’s been taken quite seriously.”

You mean talking about Led Zep?

“Oh, no, no, no,” he protests. “Because actually they [interesting choice of words, no?] were a brilliant band—and, I mean, why not brag when you’re surrounded by mediocrity?”

OK. Robert Plant 1983, confronted with a question inspired by one too many Super Session albums—a musician who’s been around long enough to actually answer the question without a quick, flip answer. If Robert Plant were God (his eyes widen) and everyone in his current band was busy, and he wanted to put together the best band he could, bar none, is there anyone he’d like to have play with him he couldn’t ordinarily have, due to “other” commitments?

“Oh God, ” he sighs* eyes leaning upward at the too-tall ceiling. “I couldn’t start to think about it, really. It’s not so much a question of how good these people are, it’s a question of how easy it is to get on with ’em^, wherever they are, whatever they’ve come from, or wherever they’ve gone to. I mean, primarily, my nature as an individual is changing, and, I suppose, it would be nice to think that as long as I can have a nice time, working with no idiots around me, I think by working with anybody we can reach a reasonably good sound.

“So,” he says, playing the game, “...I’ll start with Brian Setzer. I dunno, I mean the sky’s the limit, really. I don’t think I’d feel uncomfortable working with anybody. I mean, I’d never like to take the ‘famous musician’ and make a band, because that’s the very thing I avoided doing in the first place. 1 always think that everybody’s got their styles, and I think that I was able to dictate to these people, in,” he stresses, “a very righteous and friendly way— that I also brought across the mood and dynamics that you might find it very hard to do with, say, Jerry Lee Lewis or someone like that.”

He laughs. “Or Willie Nelson. So, whatever the circumstances, I’d like to find people that are good, but who aren’t in the Hall Of Fame.”

What.you don’t realize, of course, is that at this point, the very moist tape recorder I borrowed from Atlantic Records, that I innocently marched over to the interview, actually ate the tape, and thus 20 minutes I spent with Robert Plant, at which time he screamed like a banshee, jumped around the hotel room nude, declared that yes, he and Jimmy spent hours sneaking those little satanic messages on all the good parts of his records and that, in fact, he thought all he stood for was a total waste and that his favorite band was Uriah Heep, that his plan was to eventually buy the world and leave all his earthly possessions to me—all of this can only remain a shared experience between the former lead singer of Led Zeppelin and myself, which of course would never hold up in a court of law, so why I even bring it up is beyond me. Nonetheless, it would help me carry over to you, the reader, that despite all the bullshit you read here or in other mags, USA or otherwise, Robert Plant and Led Zeppelin have already left a legacy that, as far as I’m concerned, would’ve left them legendary had they never recorded a second album. But they have, of course, and a third, and a fourth, and they haven’t been together in many years, but if you were to put one of their many albums on the stereo you wouldn’t even notice.

And Robert Plant’s new album is more of the same, in a way, but it’s 1983 and maybe now, more than in a very long time, these few years will make a difference. “There has to be a sense of humor in all this,” insists Plant. “That’s why all the titles are so stupid and don’t have any relevance at all.”

Like “Hot Dog?”

“Yeah,” he says, thinking. “She was a dog,” he mumbles, and if I didn’t get it then

I don’t get it now—but I’m glad Robert Plant gets it, and I think he’ll be getting it for a very long time, and if you don’t, you probably haven’t been listening. |||.