While Kiss kissed farewell to their touring career with pyrotechnics and make-up galore at Madison Square Garden in December, Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant has adopted a radically different approach to pensioner rock. If anyone can say they’ve been there and bought the T-shirt, it’s Plant. Zeppelin effectively created the blueprint for the epic stadium rock tour, with multiple legs incorporating dry ice, laser effects, and pyrotechnics to reach the gods. In 1995, the band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, in Cleveland, by Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, of Aerosmith. Bigmouthed Tyler recalled crying at the middle section of “Dazed and Confused” during Zeppelin’s Boston debut at the Tea Party ballroom, in 1969, before being brought to tears again an hour later when the young woman he’d been living with emerged from guitarist Jimmy Page’s dressing room. For a brief period, between 1967 and 1970, the Tea Party was a major hotspot for live music, but it became obsolete when major bands, Zeppelin leading the charge, began jettisoning intimate venues for larger and far more lucrative spaces.
Half a century has passed since Zeppelin chartered a plane for their landmark 1973 U.S. trek, which culminated with three nights at Madison Square Garden, recorded for The Song Remains the Same, both film and soundtrack album. That Robert Plant bought a sheep farm in Wales during a brief summer break between the two legs of the U.S. tour says much about the singer’s ambivalence about being a stadium rock god. If Page had his way, Zeppelin would reunite tomorrow, but the still impressively maned Plant believes the past belongs to the past. In 2017, he told the Daily Telegraph: “You can’t ever really go back. It’s tough enough repeating yourself with something that’s a year old, never mind 49 years old. I’ve got to keep moving.”
The three surviving members of Zeppelin (drummer John Bonham died of alcohol poisoning in 1980) last reunited in 2007, to headline a one-off tribute at London’s 02 Arena for the recently deceased head of Atlantic Records, Ahmet Ertegun. From his New York base, Turkish immigrant Ertegun nurtured some of the biggest talents in popular music: Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Led Zeppelin, and Kid Rock, to name just a few.
Kiss and Mötley Crüe were never musical heavyweights, but performances over the past year have hit new lows, with the bands somehow managing to lip-synch and sound out of tune at the same time.
After the reunion gig, Plant wandered off to a low-key Turkish bar and restaurant in Camden Town. The past was the past, and the reunion was a one-off tribute to a friend, not a glimpse of things to come. The singer was more interested in promoting the music he’d recorded and released with bluegrass/country singer Alison Krauss shortly before the Zeppelin concert. Their album, Raising Sand, did not initially set the charts alight, but excellent reviews and word-of-mouth resulted in a slow-burning multi-platinum success. That venture became too big for him, and he has since taken refuge in a new folk-rock hybrid collective, Saving Grace. After a rapturously received performance at a 2,000-seat regional theater last year in Halifax, Yorkshire, in the north of England, a beaming Plant told the audience that this was what real live music was about, not silly festivals. (He had somewhat reluctantly signed up to play Glastonbury, for all its hippie roots now effectively the British Coachella, with Krauss.) Last month, Plant returned to Yorkshire to play the even more intimate St George’s Hall, in Bradford. He introduced Portuguese singer Suzi Dian as the greatest voice he’d ever had the honor to share a stage with. The sold-out crowd, banned from using mobile phones, was similarly in the moment, enthusiastically clapping or singing along to key lines.
Might other heritage acts and audiences do well to follow Plant’s suit and turn their back on an antiquated model of arthritic stadium rock gigs? With dynamic pricing, Ticketmaster has lucked out on a formula for charging more, not less, for artists past their prime. Zeppelin’s bastard offspring, Kiss and Mötley Crüe, were never musical heavyweights, but performances over the past year have hit new lows, with the bands somehow managing to lip-synch and sound out of tune at the same time. Those who invested hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars to experience Aerosmith rocking New York this month, or the Boston Garden on New Year’s Eve, one last time (mind you, this is hardly their first farewell tour) now must wait until Tyler recovers from a vocal injury. Health problems have similarly derailed Springsteen’s and Madonna’s outings. Annie Lennox has opted to stay home whilst bandmate Dave Stewart hawks the “Eurythmics Songbook.” This year, Stewart hits the road, in arenas he once headlined, as support for Bryan Adams, the groover from Vancouver who claimed he would be 18 until he died.
Plant’s stance as a multimillionaire pensioner is more radical, embracing his age but refusing to go gentle into that good night. Emerging from the wings at St. George’s Hall, his physical gait betrayed his 75 years, but the performance was both masterful and age-appropriate. Zeppelin often stood accused of not giving credit to the original Black blues artists who provided the basis for so many of their hard-rock anthems for white American youth. A witty raconteur, Plant today makes sure to provide context for a setlist crafted from a diverse songbook and a lifetime of experience. Those early U.S. trips left a formative influence, to which he paid homage with a version of San Francisco band Moby Grape’s “It’s a Beautiful Day Today.” The closer for the main set, a cover of Los Lobos’s “Angel Dance,” brought the house down. There was no “Stairway to Heaven” (a song Plant revived for the first time since 2007 last month at a charity concert for the Cancer Awareness Trust, organized by Duran Duran’s Andy Taylor at a farmhouse close to Oxford), but a smattering of Zeppelin classics made the cut. “The Rain Song,” the sole song from the 1973 New York setlist to be played in full in Bradford, half a century later, was superb.
Other highlights included “Four Sticks,” a departure from Zeppelin’s signature pummeling aural assault. Included on their 1971 27-million-selling fourth album, the song was hardly ever played live, its restraint and subtle time changes ill-suited to inebriated audiences in enormo-domes. Plant, the original demon of screaming, can still deliver a formidable screech, but not for more than a few minutes at a time. During the encore, the rapt audience was rewarded with choice excerpts from the iconic “Whole Lotta Love,” interspersed into the traditional folk-and-blues-inspired “Gallows Pole.”
In eschewing the corporate heritage rock circuit, Plant’s musical voyages are as ahead of the pack as Zeppelin was in 1969 or ’73. If he brings Saving Grace to New York, make sure to grab a ticket — much imitated and often apocryphal tales of debauchery backstage are so last century, but Plant’s artistry might still make you cry. ❖
Duncan Wheeler is a professor and chair of Spanish Studies at the University of Leeds. His latest book is Following Franco: Spanish Culture and Politics in Transition.
