After a time, Plant embarked on a solo career. Page recorded and toured with The Firm, then released his own first solo album. Jones continued to arrange and produce. All have maintained a stance defiantly apart from “Zeppelin nostalgia.” They had accomplished the rarest of feats. Led Zeppelin were the most popular group in the world, and there would be no downward slide, no selling of “Whole Lotta Love” to a detergent company.
On July 13th, 1987, the band performed at Live-Aid, at JFK Stadium. There were priceless moments, but I’ll remember Page’s smile when Robert sang his familiar added-line to “Stairway to Heaven”–”does anybody remember laughter.” It was a look that came from way down deep, and it carried with it a memory of a hundred Zeppelin shows gone by. In subsequent years the band would sometimes perform with Jason Bonham on drums, popping up at the 40th Anniversary concert for Atlantic Records or at Bonham’s own wedding party.
“I look back at it all and laugh,” Robert Plant says today. “I was just 19 when I got off the plane. It’s like having a child, and I am part of that child. Shit. The answer to it all is growing up, developing a balance. So much of the time was like being in the middle of a knitting pattern which hadn’t been finished. There were no instructions, and the pages were re-written every day….”
Still, the sound on the Zeppelin CD catalog had been bothering the members. Two years ago, on tour with his own band, Plant had traveled to Robinsonville, Mississippi, hometown of blues legend Robert Johnson. Sitting on the porch of the post office, looking down the dusty street of Johnson’s youth, Plant slipped on a pair of headphones and listened to “Preachin’ The Blues.”
“The romance was great,” says Plant, “listening to the scratchy recording. But the same thing wouldn’t work for Led Zeppelin. In real terms, Zeppelin is as competitive now as it was in 1980. So it should be heard right. What we did back then was always make sure it sounded good. It was time to put Zeppelin, sonically, in their rightful place. For me, it’s timeless stuff and it needed a Million Mile service.”
For Page, the job of remastering and choosing a running order was a delicate matter. “You don’t want to tamper with it,” he says, “because the music means so much to people. But I’ll tell you, it was great to hear it all again. I sort of re-lived every second of my life over those years. I could really tell why it was what it was…or is. On any given night, we played with our whole hearts. There was never a routine. There were always areas, within all the numbers, that challenged us. We had to be there totally, with everything….”
And Page is particularly fond of the new recording, an ingenious layering of Bonham’s “Bonzo’s Montreux” with his earlier solo “Moby Dick.” “I had an internal whim that it might work,” says Page. “When I tried it, I felt it was meant to be. It’s a fitting tribute to John Bonham. I’m very proud of it.”
“Some day,” Plant says “I really want to write with Jimmy again. I’d like to see if we can get back to ‘In My Time of Dying.’ That would be amazing. But I’m not sure we should call it Led Zeppelin. Once it happens, it becomes something so much bigger….
“Really, Led Zeppelin was Jimmy. I was a great foil. He was very much…there’s a word, not ‘perpetrator,’ but definitely he had a premeditated view of the whole thing. Even though with my lyrics and some of my melodies it took off in directions he might not have been ready for…a couple times later on, when I got more confident I might have turned his head around a little…but the big role was his. The risks were his. The risks made it memorable. Without Jimmy it would have been no good. When people talk about how good other guitarists are, they’re talking about how they play within the accepted structures of contemporary guitar plating, which Pagey plays miles outside of. He plays from somewhere else. I like to think of it as…a little left of heaven.”