When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  One suspects that, for Jimmy Page they always will be.

  Epilogue

  Gone, Gone, Gone…

  In the nearly two years that have passed since the O2 show, the legend of Led Zeppelin may have continued to grow exponentially, but the possibility that the band might reconvene in some very tangible sense – so fervently hoped for by Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and Jason Bonham – has now all but disappeared. At least for the foresee-able future. And yet it should all have been so different; certainly as far as Page was concerned. For him, the O2 concert had proved ‘that the essence of it, the energy, was still there’. But for Robert Plant, things were clearly less easily defined. ‘Bear in mind that we’re old guys now and we’re not supposed to be hip-shrugging teenage idols,’ he joked in an interview with Uncut. ‘It was pretty – I’m not sure “sincere” is the right word. But it was as real as you’re going to get. And Jimmy was on fire at times.’

  It was not enough, however, to deflect him from his new, more compelling musical mission with Alison Krauss. Within weeks of the O2 show, the Plant and Krauss world tour was announced. Still, though, Jimmy clung to the vain hope that Robert might have a change of heart once he’d got his latest solo venture out of his system. In Japan, the following January, to promote the new Mothership and The Song Remains The Same releases, Jimmy had told a packed press conference in Tokyo how delighted he’d been by the O2 show. That what was ‘so thrilling’ was ‘to come together after all this time and find that there was so much chemistry and so much electricity involved in these four characters’. He continued in hopeful fashion: ‘We’d all agreed to take it very, very seriously and have a really good time at the same time. We worked out the songs we were going to play, and it was exhilarating, it was fantastic. Every week was a week to look forward to. I can assure you the amount of work that we put into the O2, for ourselves rehearsing and the staging of it, was probably what you [would] put into a world tour.’

  However, when pressed on the exact nature of the band’s possible future plans, Page could only comment: ‘Robert Plant has a parallel project running and he’s really busy with that project, certainly until September, so I can’t give you any news.’

  So there it was in nutshell: Jimmy wanted to, Robert didn’t. Not while he had his ‘parallel project running’. The mention of September was also telling. Plant, keeping his options open as he always did, far more shrewd than the happy-go-lucky figure he liked to present to the world, had successfully negotiated enough space for himself to embark on a world tour which, right then anyway, would take them up to September. Maybe after that he would be willing to get back together with Jimmy in a full-on, or even a nominally one-off series of O2-alike shows. Maybe…

  The media remained undeterred and kept the pressure up whenever it could, sensing the story wasn’t over yet. In April 2008, four months after the O2 show, both Q and Uncut magazines again ran Zeppelin on their covers, even though in the case of Q, the interview they had was with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, with barely a mention of Zeppelin from the crinkle-eyed singer, and then only in the vaguest possible terms. Meanwhile, in Uncut, all three former members were quoted on where they thought the O2 show had left the group. Plant, true to form, appeared to be leaving as many doors open as possible. ‘Hopefully one day we could do it again for another really good reason,’ he said. ‘Our profit is metaphysical,’ he added gnomically. ‘I’m not too sure about anything at the moment; I’ve got no idea what’s going to happen. But I’d certainly like to play with Jimmy again,’ said Jones, doing nothing to dispel the notion that he was along for the ride, wherever it took him. ‘If you’re talking about a tour, other dates, recording together – there’s only one thing that’s going to be a common denominator with that and that’s commitment,’ said Jimmy.

  It was a familiar theme he would return to. Until the Raising Sand album’s unforeseen multinational success, Plant had given every indication to his old boss that the O2 would be a stepping stone to much longer-term ‘commitment’. But Raising Sand was continuing to sell in large quantities, and tickets for the Plant/Krauss world tour, announced in the spring, were fast selling out. Robert knew he’d quashed Jimmy’s dreams but, hey, that’s showbiz, even if he did want to at least be polite about it in public.

  Describing his relationship with Page in the wake of the O2, Plant said: ‘There’s unfinished business definitely. And I don’t think there’s any need for it to be finished. There’s going to be something to do some time.’ Really? But then what else could he say? Plant, in particular, could not escape the question wherever he went. When, in January 2008, he turned up at a Knicks vs. Sixers basketball game at Madison Square Garden, cheerleaders danced to ‘Rock and Roll’ as the singer sat uncomfortably courtside, smiling sheepishly. Introduced at halftime for a televised interview, a female sportscaster from MSG TV asked him: ‘Do you think you’ll be back here with your bandmates?’ He played the usual straight bat in his reply: ‘Oh, I don’t know. I’m getting ready for a tour with Alison Krauss and that’s what I’m focusing on.’ Did he have any plans beyond that, though, she persisted? ‘Not really,’ he said, ‘It was just great to play with those guys again.’ And if he had to pick one song to perform right now, ‘to knock this crowd off its feet, what would it be?’ Again, straight bat, usual answer: ‘A song called “Kashmir” from the Physical Graffiti album. I’m most proud of that one.’

  Meanwhile, when he wasn’t accompanying Jimmy on a round of awards shows – Mojo in June; GQ in August – Jones was now turning up all over the place in a series of ‘guest’ appearances, not least a two-song bash with Page through ‘Rock and Roll’ and ‘Ramble On’ at a Foo Fighters show at Wembley Stadium that summer. He also agreed to produce a solo album in Nashville for Nickel Creek singer Sara Watkins, and in February 2009 was a ‘surprise’ guest at the BBC Folk Awards in London, where he presented the Lifetime Achievement Award to John Martyn. He also performed with Martyn on two of his own old Seventies’ classics, ‘May You Never’ and ‘Over the Hill’, playing mandolin. Asked in an online interview about the future of Led Zeppelin, he would only say that they had ‘had a meeting’ but that ‘none of them knew what was going to happen’.

  A week later, he appeared in LA at the Grammy Awards alongside the Foo Fighters, where he ‘arranged and conducted the orchestra’ for a special performance of their hit, ‘The Pretender’. In May, he could be found attending the Bergen Music Festival in Norway, where he performed with Robyn Hitchcock and Patti Smith. He also attended a pre-festival press conference performing two songs with Robyn, again on mandolin. The event was dwarfed as a news story in Britain by the ‘revelation’ in the Sunday Mirror that Robert Plant had ‘reportedly turned down a $200 million deal to revive the legendary band for a world tour’. The story went on, quoting a ‘source’ claiming that the deal ‘did not come down to money’. Although Page had ‘enjoyed the concert in December enough to want to tour again’, feeling they ‘still had something to offer’, Plant ‘wanted to leave last year’s concert as their legacy. They had proved they could still do it and that was enough.’

  Certainly, Plant had never seemed happier than when on tour with Alison Krauss. The master of having his cake and eating it too, among the selections from Raising Sand that the duo performed live when the tour began at the Palace Theater in Louisville on April 19 were a number of Zeppelin tunes, including ‘Black Dog’, ‘Black Country Woman’, ‘Hey, Hey What Can I Do’, ‘When the Levee Breaks’, and even ‘Battle of Evermore’, with Krauss now taking the vocal part Sandy Denny had made famous. Still, though, rumours of a full-on Zeppelin tour continued to surface. In May, Whitesnake were the latest band to be said to be in contention for one of the opening slots on the tour, joining previous contenders The Cult, Velvet Revolver and the Stone Temple Pilots. Coverdale was quick to quash the story, telling Classicrock.com, ‘What fucking world tour, we ask ourselves?’ Indeed. But then the same week in June that Page and Jones had appeared a
t Wembley Stadium with the Foo Fighters, it was reported in the Daily Telegraph that Page had told one interviewer after the show that Zeppelin were ready to re unite and perform at more live events, but that fans might have to wait until Autumn 2009 as band members (i.e. Robert Plant) had to tie up individual projects first.

  Speaking to XFM radio the week after that, in the wake of yet another awards show, Jimmy replied to a question about whether he’d tried to persuade Robert to rejoin the band by saying, ‘I’m not going to persuade anyone to do anything. It’s just like the O2; you do it in the spirit of your heart, don’t you? You either do it or you don’t.’ He also took the opportunity to pour cold water on the rumours, still circulating, that the ‘broken finger’ which had delayed the O2 show by three weeks was merely a ploy to buy some more much-needed rehearsal time, to cover for the fact that Plant had spent longer in the US promoting Raising Sand’s release than any of them had anticipated. ‘Broken finger?’ he said. ‘Damn right! It broke here,’ he said, showing XFM the now-repaired digit. ‘This one that looks like a knuckle on the end. It seriously was, it was broken in three places.’ Three weeks was an awfully short time for it to heal, though, wasn’t it, they persisted? ‘I gotta tell you, that was the kind of focus that there was on behalf of everybody towards that O2 gig.’ In fact, he said, the finger hadn’t fully healed by the time of the gig: ‘But my personal focus was that broken finger. It didn’t matter [about it]. It was just steering ahead. It didn’t get better in three weeks; it’s just that I played in three weeks.’ He also stated that he remained positive that the O2 gig would eventually see the light of day on DVD, the first real public acknowledgement of the fact that the original plan had been to have a DVD of the O2 ready for sale when the Zeppelin tour proper kicked-in, originally intended for the summer of 2008, now postponed indefinitely.

  Plant, meanwhile, was a world away, figuratively and metaphorically. The UK and European dates with Krauss had been overwhelmingly well received; the US tour was going even better. In June, the same month Jimmy was talking of tentative future Zeppelin plans, Plant and Krauss received three nominations in the prestigious annual Americana Music Honors and Awards Show in Nashville: for Album of the Year, Song of the Year (for ‘Gone Gone Gone’), and Duo or Group of the Year. Raising Sand was also one of the 12 albums nominated for the 2008 Mercury Music Awards. It was around this time that they also offered the biggest hint yet that not only would Plant not be considering a return to Zeppelin any time soon, but that he and Krauss were seriously considering a second album together. Quoted in the US music industry bible, Billboard, Robert said pointedly: ‘I’m in no hurry to go anywhere. I want to stay very close [to the project with Krauss and T-Bone Burnett]. This is a font of knowledge, and I’m sticking as close to it as I can.’ Alison was also quoted, saying: ‘We’re all having a wonderful time, and I hope and I think all three of us are hoping to continue this and that it go on and on.’ Though, perhaps out of politeness, she did add that the duo’s association shouldn’t bring the curtain down on any of their other projects. ‘That doesn’t mean we’ve lost any love for whom we’ve played for and play with,’ she said. ‘The guys in [her previous outfit] Union Station, that’s like home. So I hope to continue this and go back home, too.’

  Producer T-Bone Burnett also confirmed in a separate interview, ‘I feel like we’re just starting to know what we can do with it. The two of them [Plant and Krauss] are so incredibly good that I would hate to not continue to work with both of them.’ Plant put the icing on the cake when he added that performing the album’s rootsy music along with the revamped versions of various Zeppelin songs had ‘become quite an illumination, really. What has been created with the chemistry between the three of us has its own kind of genre, really. I’m a very fortunate man. I couldn’t wish for anything better than this.’

  The tour, meanwhile, was now extended into October, with follow-up UK dates added. Raising Sand, released a full year before, had now sold 1.03 million copies in the US, according to Nielsen SoundScan, and more than 600,000 copies in the UK. According to data from 17 shows reported to Billboard Boxscore, nine of which were sell-outs, the US tour alone had also now grossed more than $5.2 million, drawing more than 77,000 fans.

  Returning from his farcical appearance with X Factor winner Leona Lewis at the Olympics Closing Ceremony in Beijing, Page finally seemed to acknowledge that his wait for Robert to return from his ‘one-off’ project with Alison Krauss was not likely to end any time soon and he quietly began making plans behind the scenes to do what had previously seemed unthinkable: re-launch Led Zeppelin without Robert Plant at the helm. Suddenly new rumours began circulating about a possible launch show at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium, apparently pencilled in for some time in 2009, with a Wembley Stadium show to follow. Then, on August 26, Jason Bonham gave an interview to a Detroit radio station that seemed to confirm the new plans. He talked of having been working in the studio recently with Page and Jones, helping them come up with new material. He confirmed, however, that Plant had yet to show any interest in the project. ‘At the moment, all I know is, I have the great pleasure to go and jam with the two guys and start work on some material,’ Bonham was quoted as saying. ‘When I get there [in the studio] I never ask any questions. If I get a phone call to go and play, I enjoy every moment of it. Whatever it ends up as, to ever get a chance to jam with two people like that, it is a phenomenal thing for me. It’s my life.’ Pressed on details of a possible album, he stressed that ‘lots of politics [would need to] get ironed out first before an album could be considered. But that was clearly the idea.

  How would Plant react to this latest development? In the past, it was thought by insiders that Page’s reemergence with former Free and Bad Company frontman Paul Rodgers in The Firm had been the spur for Plant expressing interest in the first, later aborted Zeppelin reformation, in the wake of Live Aid. It was also no coincidence, surely, that Plant had again extended an olive branch Page’s way – though not for a Zeppelin reformation but the nearest thing to it in the Nineties with the short-lived but hugely profitable Page/Plant project – after Jimmy’s success with his Coverdale/Page album with the former Whitesnake and Deep Purple singer. Would Page openly discussing going ahead with a Zeppelin reformation without Plant now work in the same way – force the recalcitrant singer to curtail his extracurricular outing with Alison Krauss, or at least make some sort of longer-term commitment to a Zeppelin project, perhaps for 2009 or after?

  The answer came all too quickly for Jimmy’s liking: no, it would not. In an official statement released via robertplant.com on 29 September 2008, Robert stated unequivocally at last that he had no intention of touring with anyone ‘for at least two years’. In case anyone still didn’t get it, the statement went on to say that, ‘Contrary to a spate of recent reports, Robert Plant will not be touring or recording with Led Zeppelin. Anyone buying tickets online to any such event will be buying bogus tickets.’ Plant was quoted directly as saying: ‘It’s both frustrating and ridiculous for this story to continue to rear its head when all the musicians that surround the story are keen to get on with their individual projects and move forward. I wish Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and Jason Bonham nothing but success with any future projects.’

  So that was it. If Jimmy bringing in a replacement singer for Plant had been some kind of bluff, Robert had now very publicly called it. Attending the Mercury Prize gala in London on 9 September, although Raising Sand eventually lost out to Elbow’s The Seldom Seen Kid, Plant – who had not attended Jimmy’s Living Legend award at the Classic Rock awards the previous December, nor Zeppelin’s Best Live Band award at the Mojo awards in June – said that this was the sort of award he was proud to be nominated for. ‘This record has provided me with two of the happiest years of my career. Then again, I can’t remember much of what I did before.’ Ouch. He added: ‘I’ve loved working with Alison and the rest of the band, and it’s provided me with so much freedom. It’s great to get th
is recognition.’

  Six days later, he and Alison joined Levon Helm of The Band on stage in Nashville, where they performed ‘In the Pines’, the song they first performed together for the Leadbelly Tribute where they had first met two years before. The concert was part of the Americana Music Honors and Awards that were held the next day. Taking place at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, a beaming Plant and Krauss stepped up to receive Album of the Year for Raising Sand, then again a short while later for Duo of the Year. Robert was one of the ‘surprise’ performers for the evening, singing with Buddy Miller on ‘What You Gonna Do Leroy’. (Robert and Buddy had actually recorded this new song just a few weeks before in a dressing room in Toronto during the Raising Sand tour; a version later included on Miller’s next album, released in March 2009.) Plant and Krauss also found themselves nominated for an award at the 42nd Annual Country Music Association Awards; broadcast live on national American TV from the Summit Center in Nashville on 12 November. The category: Musical Event of the Year, for their performance of ‘Gone Gone Gone’. Alison was also nominated for Female Vocalist of the Year.

  Page, stoic in public but privately seething, was now determined not to be outdone. With the ever-faithful Jones and Bonham still in tow, he began auditioning new singers in London, veering from the tried and trusted to comparative unknowns, even those, it was said, who had at one time sung in Zeppelin tribute bands. A fact confirmed by John Paul Jones when he appeared at the Manson Guitar Weekend in Exeter, in October, and took part in a question and answer session. Talking about the possibility of a full Zeppelin tour he said: ‘As you probably know, Jimmy, Jason and I are actually rehearsing and we’ve had the odd singer come in and have a bash. As soon as we know – which we don’t – we will let you know. But we really hope that something is going to happen soon because we really want to do it and we’re having a lot of fun, actually, just rehearsing. Jason is actually tremendous…And what we’ve done so far sounds absolutely fantastic. When it does come, it will come, and you’ll know about it.’