Interviewer: Deborah Frost – Spin, September 1993

“CAMION! CAMION!” comes the cry from the front seat of the rented Mercedes wagon. “I don’t have time to die!”

If it’s Saturday, we must be somewhere in the ear-popping realm of the Alps between Geneva and Milan. The convoy of semis heading directly toward us, however, on a rain-slicked hairpin turn from which there is no escape, is not featured either on the snowcapped picture postcards of the region or on our tour itinerary. “Aaayaaaala!” cries the driver, which translates roughly from the Arabic into “as God wills it” and sounds, especially issuing forth from the unchartable fathoms of the individual’s particular tonsils, lungs, and balls, rather like the opening bars of ‘Immigrant Song’, modified only slightly for interjectional purposes into ordinary life-and-death conversation.

Not that there is too much that is terribly ordinary about Robert Plant. At 44, he’s probably the only man on the Alps or elsewhere who can coyly twist his golden ringlets (as if to more rapidly access the 25 years of bad behavior that spawned most of the rock fantasies strutting across Sunset Strip), ask “Have we fucked?” (instead of, say, “Do I know you from somewhere?”), and sound more like Prince Charming than a frog. Even without the Celtic Crocodile Dundee-cum-lovebeads fashion statement or the odd tic of spouting Arabic to hotel personnel regardless of their (or his) native tongue, Plant’s six-foot-four frame makes him appear larger than life in the dressing room. Onstage, particularly backed by the spectacular band of lunatics he’s assembled to promote his surprising sixth solo album, Fate of Nations, Plant assumes something closer to Twin Tower proportions.

If anything, this current brief jaunt across the continent, opening for Lenny Kravitz (who seems to have no idea what effect a serious backdoor man has on Euroglop-fed preteens), testifies to Plant’s general lack of pretense, as well as the extraordinarily sharp mind that only his closest associates really know. (Like the accountant he almost became, he doesn’t seem to have ever missed or forgotten a number, from the chart position of the Northern soul song he and his teenage sweetheart Maureen danced to the night they got engaged, to what Fate of Nations is doing right now in Brazil.) “Funny,” muses Plant, reflecting on the fact that Kravitz’s Swiss ticket buyers were not even born the last time he played the country, “nobody sees this as a career move!” Then again, Plant has always stood alone among a generation of English rock stars – Pete Townshend, Mick Jagger, his former colleague Jimmy Page – who have been virtually defined by their fame. It’s no wonder that as their fame, or perhaps their power to continually renew it, has waned, their relationship to it has become more obsessively neurotic. Perhaps, as the son of a civil engineer, Plant is less materially needy. Perhaps he has always been more devoted to his blues than his stardom. And perhaps he more readily acknowledges that, rather than his own narcissism, a “group consciousness” dominated his early fame as much as his early oeuvre.

He was still a teenager when he and John Bonham were plucked from the anonymity of Dudley, 160 miles northwest of London, by the older, well-seasoned professionals Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones to rise to the occasion of Led Zeppelin’s historic debut. Now 44, Plant is motivated by a mature, if relentless, personal vision determined to encompass not only the greatest highs, but deepest lows of an unusual life – not only the publicly acknowledged loss of his bandmate Bonham, but the 1975 car accident that he, his then wife, Maureen, and two children recovered from, only to suffer the tragic death of his five-year-old son, Karac, to illness two years later. He refers to his loss for the first time on record on ‘I Believe’, the tender cry of love and fierce wail of mourning that convinces you that Fate of Nations is anything but a career move. It may be this acute acquaintance with a variety of sorrows that fuels his intense delight in the smallest pleasures (from a clever pun to a good plate of raclette) and his insatiable desire for the greatest pleasure (which, for the moment, he prefers to label under the general, if somewhat curious, heading of “Wisconsin”).

Just consider how he’s spent the last 24 hours: At midnight, for instance, OPEC delegates to the left of him and UN conferees to the right, Plant waltzed through the lobby of his Geneva hotel with the life-size cardboard cutout of a traditionally costumed Air India hostess. This after a day that began with a drive up to the mountaintop screening room of the promoter of the Montreux Jazz Festival to view vintage, highly inspirational, rare footage of live Freddie King (Plant will appear later in the month at Montreux with, as he roars, “New Order!“) Also during the 24 hours, he’s leafed though a coffee-table book of Arab pornography; pondered if the problem with John Mellencamp and Bruce Springsteen Is that they don’t sing the blues; discussed the medicinal properties of Hungarian condoms; recalled an encounter last week in Prague with a street busker phonetically singing ‘Stairway to Heaven’, blissfully unaware that the curly-haired guy who jumped out of his car to join in on the chorus was the coauthor of he song; downed a double Scotch-and-soda; shared a wad of chewing gum with a 22-year-old, en route to a modeling job in Zurich, who claims to have known assorted members of the entourage more or less intimately since the age of 14 (and who, in the Interests of all involved, will hereby be referred to as Ms. Colorado); thought a lot about the ineffable Wisconsin; and, among other business obligations, blown headliner Lenny Kravitz right off the stage of a hockey rink in Lausanne.

So, after steering us down an alleyway, Ms. Colorado generously offers to share her acyclovir prescription with anyone who feels a cold sore coming on (she says she had Evan Dando popping, like, seven, whenever he was feeling kind of stressed). She also shares fond memories of a night in Greece when Rex the road manager punched someone in the nose, the police threw their guns in the sir, and she threw up on Plant’s shoe. She is attempting to stick her tongue in my ear when Plant warns us to hold on to our wallets: We are at the Palais Mascotte. The Palais is what might exist if you threw together the sets of Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel and Saturday Night Live‘s “Cheeseburger, Cheeseburger’ joint, and added an accordion oompah band and the oldest, fattest, saddest strippers in the world. The dive is empty except for our party and two young men who appear to be working, feverishly, on a crossword puzzle. One potbellied “dancer” walks back and forth across a drum riser-size platform dragged onto the dance floor by two schlumps who could be Hans and Franz’s deflated cousins, and performs an act consisting entirely of pushing a drooping red bra strap back up beneath the sleeve of her cocktail dress. The next, toothless and wrinkled, waves a cheesy chiffon scarf with one hand while holding on a horrendous wig with the other. “Oh, the pathos,” sighs Plant “I think I may have to do a video for ‘If I Were a Carpenter’ here.”

“For years, in Led Zeppelin, I went all aroundthe world and never saw a thing.” Plant is saying this in between cassette blasts of the greatest hits of Fairuz, the second best singer in the Middle East (the best was Plant’s model, the late Oum Kalthoum). He’s at the wheel as we pass the Valle d’Acosta vineyards on the road to Milan. “And now, whatever I’ve turned into,” he laughs, “I like it all the time. There’s a perpetual motion inside of me which makes me move, think, sing, create, argue, gesture in this way. It’s like I’ve grown up into this, this character.” But the perpetual motion that fuels one’s professional artistry may be less appreciated on the private home front “When Carmen,” Plant says, referring to his oldest child, who married bassist Charlie Jones last year, “used to say ‘Daddy,’ a thousand people would turn around and say ‘Yup!,’ because she used to rely on a lot of people, all my friends, because ‘Daddy’ was permanently away on the tour that time forgot “The real deal is love,” he continues. “First of all, you have to work on it. But second of all, if you’re in the position to give it, you’ve got to give it so it’s not forgotten. And with all my wives….”

Wives? One wonders. Perhaps his fascination with Arab customs has little to do with the Moslem religion, which, he claims, he “doesn’t understand at all.” “But seriously,” Plant goes on, “you’ve just got to give enough love so that people can know what to expect in return. I have the greatest time with my kids because they know that when I come beck I’m a full-fledged dad. I don’t like sound checks, you know what I mean? And I don’t like the whole idea of being a parent, the sound-check vibe of being a dad – come home every night at five o’clock, six o’clock, sit down, have your tea, begin to take everything for granted.” Still, whatever kind of schoolboy-in-short-pants character he was prior to discovering Howlin’ Wolf, sound-checks, or a multitude of non-Western influences (via his ex-wife, Maureen, who is of Indian descent), he prefers to keep to himself. He would rather discuss the broader topic of Wisconsin or the finer points of foreskins, topics that he and guitarist Francis Dunnery, former leader of English cult faves It Bites, cover fairly thoroughly before we cross the border.

“We both went to Catholic schools and were inhibited!” exclaims Dunnery. “Why else would we do this?” The solo career of the 30-year-old Dunnery, who recently signed to Atlantic, is temporarily on hold while he plays Plant’s onstage foil – and he may be the only guy uninhibited enough (or maybe just plain crazy enough) to try. The band also contains Plant’s son-in-law, Jones, on bass, 23-year-old phenom Michael Lee on drums, Kevin MacMichael – whose previous band, Cutting Crew, died soon after they hit number one in 18 countries with ‘(I Just) Died in Your Arms’ – on guitar, and ‘Tall Cool One’ composer Phil Johnstone on acoustic guitar. Dunnery allows the band not only to invent Plant’s musical present and future, but to reinvent his past. Combined with Plant’s increasing refinement of the subtleties, rather than the shock value, of his instrument, the effect is such that those who’ve only seen or heard Led Zeppelin have no idea what they’re missing. “Listen,” says Plant, “if I had to play ballrooms again in Detroit, I wouldn’t care. I sing better and more lively than I did because there’s less powders going up my hooter. There are so many things that are different about the way I do things now.”

“One thing you should understand,” says Dunnery, seriously, “he’s such a strong person, a powerful person. But” – he turns to address Plant – “if you get in a bad mood, the whole world’s in a bad mood.” “I know, I know,” Plant agrees. “It’s very difficult to give myself wholeheartedly. But when I do, as I have to this project and to this group of musicians, then I’m vulnerable. My feeling of vulnerability is as acute as my power is.” “Psychologically, this is a hard gig,” says Dunnery. “It’s a 24-hour gig.” This psychic seesaw stays safely tucked away in performance. Plant, in a diaphanous pink silk shirt that makes him look like the mutant child of Isadora Duncan and Erik the Red, literally bounces on stage in Milan, radiating a palpable, pure joy that never existed in the famous part of his career. The crowd of young Italian hunks and hunkettes, all of whom look as if they’re auditioning for a Guess Jeans ad, greet everything, new and old, as if it’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’, which, in fact, closes Plant’s set.

Then, before Lenny Kravitz gathers his tribes to muster up some hippie love vibes, Plant is out of the building. A helicopter is waiting at a nearby airstrip to take him, MacMichael, and Dunnery to a live TV show in Bologna, where they’re supposed to perform an acoustic set. Noting that Bill Curbishley, who also manages Pete Townshend and the Who (when they convene every four years for a “farewell” tour), is not volunteering for the helicopter trip, and having had enough adventures in the mountains for one day, I head to the hotel with the other band members to contemplate the dual complexities of Italian remote controls and Italian television. It’s confusing enough, because no one seems to know the name of the live show the helicopter is carrying Plant to, only that it goes off the air at 11:00 P.M., a moment which is drawing close enough that we’re beginning to wonder if the helicopter is going to show upon the news show we’re watching (which for some reason is showing continual clips of Jurassic Park in Italian). The only other TV options include something we decide must be an Italian dating game, due to the glittery numbers pinned to the hips of various young men gyrating like Elvis, and another show where, surrounded by 20-year-old remnants of Anglo-American rock culture (a Woodstock poster, a visibly creased magazine centerfold of Roger Daltrey as Tommy), audience members appear to be passing around an acoustic guitar and singing folk rock.

As it turns out, this is the show to which Plant, Dunnery, and MacMichael are headed, for we suddenly see a shot of the helicopter landing, with Dunnery, looking seriously motion-sick from his first-ever helicopter ride. The camera follows the trio onto the set, where Plant, who hasn’t had time to comb his hair or take off his shades, demands an espresso from the machine onstage (turns out the show is called Roxy Bar, and this is the producers idea of a swinging Hollywood coffeehouse), which he drinks while walking up to three acoustic guitars waiting on little stools.

“To all our new friends in Milano – and Wisconsin,” begins Plant, before gamely plonking out a blues in E on his guitar. The camera pans to the floor, where we see Plant and MacMichael tapping out the tune, and Dunnery’s foot simply shaking uncontrollably. Plant sings ‘I Believe’, perhaps for the first time to a live audience. Maybe it’s just as well that this one doesn’t understand English, and doesn’t stop bopping blissfully even as he is singing about his son’s cremation. But when he gets to the first chorus, all too naked without the supporting noise of a band or the comforts of his familiar echo, he chokes on the line that recalls how he told his daughter her “little brother is in the sky.” Practiced performer that he is, he salvages the moment by tossing his hand past his sunglasses, through his hair, in what will pass for yet another extravagant, campy rock gesture, but is really the brushing away of a tear.