ROBERT PLANT, TECHNOBILLY

A few months back, Robert Plant walked into Atlantic Records’ London offices and played “Scream,” by Ralph Nielsen & The Chancellors. Now, I dunno if you’ve ever heard “Scream,” but it’s on Crypt Records’ Back From The Grave, Vol. 2 garage compilation, and trust me when I say it rages nastily—five adolescent Jersey Link Wray fans in shiny suits waxed it on Route 1 not far from Princeton in the summer of ’62. Here’s how Tim Warren described it in the catzine Kicks a while back: “Imagine the Burnettes’ Train Kept A Rollin’ 45 played at 78 rpm with frantic, non-stop, burnin’ guitar breaks and a voice yellin’, ‘C’mon and scream, yeah yeah yeah’ over and over; a scream howlin’ throughout the 1:56 the song goes for—I counted 63 of ’em— that’s more than one scream every two seconds!” Plant told the Atlantic honchos that this was gonna be his new record.

“All I got was a look of disbelief,” he recalls, “like I’d gone out of my mind.”

Robert Plant turns 40 this August. He’s divorced, has a couple kids, and hasn’t played much tennis lately. He enjoys reading Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas McGuane, because “they’re so funny you wake up smiling, and how can you beat that?” Also, he used to sing (like guitar feedback or a scatting Martian, depending on who you ask) for Led Zeppelin. And between his Zep career and his (now four-and-a-half LP) solo career, he’s amassed a body of work which, in terms of wide-rangingly prolific weirdness and new-fangled innovation, is unmatched by anybody of comparable commercial standing (and anybody of any commercial standing, except for George Clinton and maybe Captain Beefheart) in the annals of rock ’n’ roll. Lester Bangs once dismissed him as an “emaciated fop,” which just goes to show that sometimes that fatso didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.

Plant’s new album, Now And Zen, has a song called “Tall Cool One,” which quotes Charlie Feathers and Gene Vincent, and which shares its title with a late ’50s instrumental hit by Seattle’s Waiters, who (seeing how they predated the unruly Northwest scene that begat the Sonics,

Kingsmen, Paul Revere & the Raiders, etc.) could perhaps be considered the first hard rock band ever.

“ Tall Cool One’ is like tipping my hat to the original song, and that whole Ralph Nielsen kind of approach. The sentiment in that song, like where it goes, ‘I’m so tall and you’re so cute/Let’s play wild like the wildcats do,’ that’s what the Waiters tune always reminded me of. Also, the original always reminded me of ‘Move It,' the B-side of ‘Pipeline’ by the Chantays,” Robert explains. “I think I retain the attitude that got me into rock ’n’ roll in the first place—I haven’t fallen for the way rock has deteriorated over the years, the way it’s become so corporate again, just like in the early ’60s, this situation where David Coverdale’s mainly concerned with how he wears his sunglasses or whatever.”

Plant agrees it’d be impossible, in a modern hi-tech studio, to get that gloriously horrible sound-quality you hear in “Scream,” or the Waiters’ ‘Tall Cool One.” So I ask him if the horrible sound isn’t a big part of what makes that music so powerful now. ‘‘Yeah, it makes it more

romantic for us—it adds to the mystery of listening. But I’m too much a technocrat not to use what’s available to me. Or a technobilly—that’s what I am, a technobilly! My Tall Cool One’ has, I think, the same intention as the original, but done in a contemporarily descriptive way.

‘‘I’m trying to do something that’s not been done before, even at the risk of not making that extra buck. There’s so much I want to get in there on my records—it’s hard to get in everything that I’d like to. And it hurts trying to do it that way. I mean, about the only encouragement I get, except from the band while we’re working on the songs, comes from the record company. And it’s like, they’ll come up to me and say, ‘Robert, why don’t you use this song, it’s got your name all over it.’ And meanwhile, I’ll be raving about Let’s Active one minute and the Swans the next. I want to cut through radio with a hot knife, this idea where they say, ‘We’re only gonna play stuff guarant teed on being a hit,’ I wanna stretch it out | some. People like Tom Verlaine and | Husker Du are making quite important j music now, and people aren’t hearing it, because it never gets played.”

Yeah, well, there’s no accounting for taste (the guy’s talked up Visage and Alt Moyet in the past, and he told me that he really likes ‘‘the early Del Fuegos when they were on Czech Records” and that “apart from a few Goth bands here in England, things really are looking quite sad again”), but you gotta admit it’s cool that some superduperstar’s keeping a finger or two on the pulse of the under(wear)ground, even if the Swans and Let’s Active should’ve stuck with their day jobs, and even though the Huskers have been churning out silly sea-chanteys of late. At least he ain’t failin’ for Live Skull or Megadeth, like some college program directors I know. I told him he oughta get the Swans to open his American tour (I mean, forget the music—think of the sociological implications), and he said it sounded like a good idea (though I dunno if M. Gira would go for it).

Anyway. Pictures At Eleven, Robert Plant’s.first solo album, heavily inspired (sez Hammer Of The Gods) by Egyptian classical crooner Om Kalthoum, came out in ’82. The Principle Of Moments, prob-

ably inspired at least in part by Ennio Morricone, came out in ’83. The Honeydrippers/Volume One EP, a cheap nostalgiamove featuring Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck and lots of moldy oldies, came out in’84. Shaken ’N’Stirred, Plant’s best solo LP and some of the most structurally outlandish commercially successful white rock this decade (blows Lou Reed out of the water, believe me), came out in ’85. The second side had nods to the Human Beinz and the Police, plus a creepy hit single (about shedding Zeppelin, perhaps) that went, “the air clears, I can breathe again”; the first side was mainly abstract soundscapes with bizarro changes, stutters, skids, and added-andsubtracted-tracks. The most expressionist cut was “Too Loud,” and had Plant released a 12-inch hip-hop version of it in the South Bronx, I expect it would’ve sold like Filas.The only sounds I can imagine comparing it to are Afrika Bambaataa’s “Looking For The Perfect Beat” and certain Mark Stewart and the Maffia obscurities (but with all the funk.drained out, not necessarily a great thing). Mostly, it’s like Plant was making some kind of music that

doesn’t have a name yet.

Can’t quite say that about Now And Zen, which completely disappointed me at first, though now I think of it as Zepas-an-MTV-era pop group—sort of the animal you’d get if you crossed In Through The Out Door (Zep’s last) with Panorama (the Cars’ strangest). Robert’s backed by a whole new band (’cept for Page’s appearance on a couple tracks, the importance of which should be clear later). It is his most rockingly Zeplike solo LP, and his most “accessible,” as they say; it will probably also be his most successful, sales-wise. There’s three midtempo-ish AOR-type rockers, two postPolice ’80s-style prog-pop things, one subZep off-kilter fusion-hop, and four highvelocity ravers, which are simultaneously the album’s farthest-out, gimmicky, and (initially, at least) intriguing cuts. I’m impressed, but (like all of Plant’s post-Zep work, especially compared to Zep), the LP still strikes me as emotionally restrained—too cold, too clever, too calculated. Too ’80s, I guess. This is Robert Plant, and fans are gonna buy his records and radio’s gonna play ’em no matter what, so he might as well scream, right?

Not that I’m accusing the man of anything unscrupulous, y’understand. “I haven’t really, ever in my career, thought about what would make money and what wouldn’t,” he says, and I believe him. (The “calculation” I’m talking about has to do with “art,” not cash.) ‘‘For now, I wanna get into something you can really put your arms around, something that kicks ass. Shaken ’N’ Stirred is a record I’m very proud of, but you gotta remember that you and I love music—we pay attention to details. But I want people to still have a handle on what I’m doing. I mean, my daughter is so happy that I’m finally making songs she can sing along to!”

Three cuts on Now And Zen have what I deem to be doo-wop referents, so I pose the obvious query. “Well, I listened to the Jive Five a while back,” Robert replies, “but I haven’t heard much since then.” And I also asked him if (unlike me) he could imagine kids dancing to “Dance On Your Own,” which has teen-type lyrics about lusting over a girl on your block: “Well, I guess I can imagine Puerto Ricans in uptown New York dancing to it. Ahmet Ertegun took me to this club out on 79th and Nowhere, and there weren’t fat guys doing the executive trot; there were just all these incredibly sexy young people looking so cool, and they’re who inspired the song. It’s also sort of a sequel to ‘Doo Doo A Doo Doo,’ on the last album.” Now how come I didn’t figure all that stuff out on my own, I wonder?

Mainly, as maybe you’ve deduced by now, Now And Zen is Robert Plant’s attempt to make a Led Zep album in 1988. ‘‘I think this music is how Zeppelin would have sounded, had Zep been in a slightly different situation at the time,” he says. ‘‘It isn’t Led Zeppelin, but it is contemporary, young, virile music.” I ask if he really believes Now And Zen is as young and virile-sounding as Zep, or if that’s just something he’s trying to convince himself of. It was an unfair question, probably: Plant’s never embarrassed himself in the self-parodic Jagger/Ozzy/Yes/Floyd oldster-trying-to-act-coltlike sense. And I’m just 27, and / ain’t as young and virile as Led Zeppelin, and I never have been, and neither have you. Rightfully, Robert seems rather annoyed: “It is what I say it is.”

As “Tall Cool One” concludes, Plant samples in vocal and guitar segments from “Black Dog,” “Whole Lotta Love,” “When The Levee Breaks” and (most hilariously, given the Beastie Boys’ use of the same riff in “She’s Crafty” last year) “The Ocean.” He’s been dazed and confused for so long, like he’s wanted to disassociate himself from that entire period in his life, refusing to perform Zeptunes live and all, that this comes as something of a surprise. “I’ve denied it for so long, but then I thought to myself that, if Def Jam can do it, so can I— maybe Rick Rubin will sue me for it,” he chuckles. “I think it’s time to eat a few of my words. Maybe I seemed like I was ashamed of that music—I guess I figured that if I made enough noise, just continuing on my own, people’d stop asking me about the past. But I was always grinning inside, really. I mean, people tell me those old records still sound pretty great. So this time when I tour, we’ll be playing bits of ‘Custard Pie’ or ‘Misty Mountain Hop’ or whatever—we’ll be playing the songs / like—at least at the end of Tall Cool One.’ ”

So, sad to say, it’s not like he’ll be encoring with “Stairway To Heaven”: “No way will I do that bloody wedding song! It was nice for it to have been so popular—I mean, it was a consolidation of love and peace and utopian feelings and everything. But I really wish ‘Kashmir’ would have become what ‘Stairway’ did.

"David Coverdale could be the next Glen Campbell, l guess."

Though I guess you can’t really march up the aisle to the words in that one, can you?”

No, I can’t. But then I grew up in the ’70s, so I never listen to the words, and anyhow, it’s time for a soapbox-break. Lots of people, mainly the kind who write about music, have always hated Led Zeppelin. Heck if I can figure out why—guess it has something to do with their stomping all over a counterculture that was pretty silly to begin with (a counterculture which, not incidentally, gave birth to “rock criticism”), but I always thought that’s what made ’em good. They weren’t “political,” and they made hippies feel like old-timers. Or maybe not. Here’s part of a letter my fellow CREEMcrit, Richard Riegel, sent to me last year: “I hate Zeppelin even more than Lester ever did, and I’ll continue to attack their pernicious influence as long as I can draw critical breath.. .A lot of us really got involved in the blues the English bands had taught us in the ’60s, and like the way the Animals taught it, we thought the blues should get more bluesy and more black all the time. And Zeppelin come along and not only steal the blues musicians blind, but erect this superblooze skyscraper that’s as white as possible.”

Well, alright. The Four Zeps may well not have been the most perfectly upstanding young people—they took credit for music they didn’t write, and they apparently did disgusting things with sharks and black magic. Their shows were supposedly “impersonal” fascist indoctrination sessions, or something like that. (Think I read that one in Rolling Stone once.) And they did do a bunch of boring boogie numbers on their (ridiculously overrated) ffrst two albums. But usually, they improved on the blues—try playing their “When The Levee Breaks” back-to-back with Memphis Minnie’s! Purist regurgitation is the easy way out; Zep acted white because they were white—honesty counts for somethin’, don’t it? And so do humongous, avant-grunge hooks that letcha know you’re alive, and so does that sound, the splendiferous Mesozoic immediacy of which I’m pretty certain nobody’s ever gonna equal: Greil Marcus once wrote that Zoso “meant to storm

Heaven,” and if it didn’t pull it off, it came closer than any other music (before or since) ever has. As for siring an atrocious amount of fraudulent imitators, so did the Velvet Underground. And so did Lester Bangs.

What makes Bangs’s take on Led Zeppelin especially absurd, given his aesthetic criteria, is that they may well be the only band in history that truly expressed the full range of human emotion in a sonic | context. They did not hold anything back. I Jimmy Page once claimed that this music was meant to be a return to the direct emotion of early rock ’n’ roll, after years of Beatles/Dylan-type detached intellectualization. Think about it: “It’s been a long time since ‘The Book Of Love,’ ” sez the singer. “We just thought rock ’n’ roll needed to be taken on again. So we had all these little rock ’n’ roll nuances, like in ‘Boogie With Stu’ (Zep’s pre-Lobos tribute to Ritchie Valens!) or ‘it’s been a long time since I walked in the moonlight.’ And I was finally in a really successful band, and we felt it was time for actually kicking ass. It wasn’t an intellectual thing, ’cause we didn’t have time for that—we just wanted to let it all come flooding out. It was a very animal thing, a hellishly powerful thing, what we were doing.

“This was such a deep and meaningful time, and everybody was smoking too much marijuana, and they could only see us making.this intense and dramatic music, like Wagner or somebody, and nobody could see the fun in it,” Plant continues. “I mean, Zeppelin was all sorts of things—some of it was dance music, some of it was music for folk clubs, some of it was music to play in hippie bookshops.” And there was rockabilly (“Hot Dog”), skronk experimentation (“Whole Lotta Love”), reggae (“D’Yer Maker,” and if you don’t hear humor in that title, you better read it again) and all-the-way wound-up punk-rock (“Communication Breakdown,” with a riff the Sex Pistols slowed down when they recorded “God Save The Queen”!).

Finally, it’d take more space than I’ve got to explain why, but one thing that flew right over everybody’s heads is that perhaps Zep’s most important contributions were rhythmic: “Good Times Bad Times,” “Whole Lotta Love,” “Heartbreaker,” “Immigrant Song,” “Out On The Tiles,” and so on throw down some warped kind of heavy Euclidean funk. Which is to say that maybe Zep weren’t quite as “white” as Richard Riegel thinks they were.

In the last year or so, people have finally started to get the point—in the wake of Beasties/Cult/Soundgarden/Scratch Acid/Golden Palominos/Hose/Flaming Lips (not to mention U2’s “Bullet The Blue Sky”), it seems about half of the world’s “post-punk” population spent ’87 trying to master Houses Of The Holy and Physical Graffiti licks. Plant says he wouldn’t consider hiring Rick Rubin to produce a Robert Plant album, though: “I haven’t heard him do anything good yet. I guess you could make a case for the work he’s done with the Cult, though I don’t know if that’s the producer or the band you’re hearing on there. And besides, Zeppelin did it better.” And then there’s the case of one Johnny Rotten, whose Sex Pistols were supposedly (among other things) a revolt against every excess Zeppelin stood for, despite that “Communication Breakdown” connection. “I have no comprehension as to what the hell happened, whether he ran out of ideas, or what,” Plant perplexes. “All I know is all of a sudden one day John Lydon calls me up and asks for the lyrics to ‘Kashmir’.” Public Image Ltd., who haven’t released a decent album since Reagan was elected president, ended up using the tune as a set-opener. “I actually met Lydon about two months ago, and he seemed like a very nice chap—he’s just a real manipulator of the media, that’s all,” Plant observes. “I told him he really could have accomplished a lot, but he blew it.”

Needless to say, the present is not Robert Plant’s favorite rock ’n’ roll era. Here’s what is: “About 1959 or ’58, when people were locking into the whole culture of it, around the time of ‘One Hand Loose’ by Charlie Feathers. What came after often missed the point of it. But I like anything that hasn't got too much selfhad an intention of ‘Love Me’ by the Phantom and actually, when we were recording the album, I did record a version of this song ‘Don’t Look Back,’ by the Remains.” He says the Remains cover could end up as a non-LP B-side. ‘‘And also, I’ve recorded an instrumental for some invisible surfing movie.” Whatever that means.

‘‘White, Clean And Neat,” the last cut

on NOW Ana zen, starts out,“Thirteenth day of August, 1954/1 was five years old”; the words talk about Johnnie Ray, whose “Cry” in ’51 was (ironically?) one of the first major R&B hits by a white man. “It’s about how, at this time, Debbie Reynolds, Eddie Fisher, and people like that were offering this completely new way of living, where everything’s clean, where you’d never fart while you were screwing. Pat Boone was playing whitened versions of Little Richard songsllln Cleveland, you had the Moondog, and he was playing this black rock ’n’ roll, and in America you also had local radio in Memphis and New Orleans or wherever. But in England, we were getting this watered-down version of rockabilly from Tommy Steele and Frankie Lane, a very faraway version of this guy Elvis. I was growing up submerged in this whole socialized Valium experience. But then we started hearing Bill Haley and Gene Vincent, and suddenly the whole situation changed. Problem is, before you know it, you’ve got the next generation of Pat Boones.”

So I ask whether David Coverdale is the newest generation’s Pat Boone. ‘“Well, he’s old enough to have been influenced by the same music that influenced me, but I guess it didn’t sink in, somehow,” critiques Plant. “Incidentally, he says he talks to me all the time, but I haven’t spoken to him in about three years. He could be the next Glen Campbell, I guess. His makeup’s real good, though. One thing he’s not is Howlin’ Wolf.” I ask Robert if he was Howlin’ Wolf, kinda taking him aback, it seems, but he says no. What we decided is that Plant sounds like somebody who’s listened to Howlin’ Wolf (or Muddy Waters or somebody—you get the idea), and Coverdale sounds like somebody who’s listened to guys who’ve listened to guys who’ve listened to Howlin’ Wolf. Same with Ian Astbury. And neither the Cult nor Whitesnake sound like Led Zeppelin so much as they sound like guys who want to sound like Led Zeppelin. They’re kind of an /ctea: “Led Zeppelin.” In quotes.

A few months ago, I wrote a Village Voice article entitled “Whitesnake Can Eat Puke.” I received a letter from some guy who had “been a guitarist/musician for more than 12 years,” so if anybody oughta know he oughta, and here’s what he said:/‘Whitesnake happens to be the best rock band to come around since Zeppelin. Both their album and live lineups are composed of musicians who happen to be among the best in rock today, and they form a chemistry not to (sic) many bands can achieve... You probably were never talented enough to pick up an instrument, so now that you have the privledge (sic) of writing to the public, you’re getting your revenge on society regardless of what the charts and record sales tell you.” He’s right, of course. But as Robert Plant says, “David Geffen’s probably real pleased with himself about that one, but just wait and see what happens to Whitesnake when Zeppelin gets back together.” WOW!! A scoop!!?? B:j$ like, when’s that gonna happen, Bob? . ! don’t know,” he laughs. “Not for another year or so, at least.”