The 1979 show Robert Plant could have done without: “It didn’t really work”
The entire journey of Led Zeppelin was always going to end in tears after John Bonham passed away.
Even though every single fan expected the band to go on forever and keep taking chances, the only reason why the band ended up calling it quits is because you never can truly capture the same energy that Bonzo did on the kit with anyone else. There was no one more brokenhearted than the band, but Robert Plant already could tell that things had started to go off the rails just a little bit.
Granted, it’s not like the music ever really survived. They had pretty much peaked during the Physical Graffiti period, but even if records like Presence and In Through the Out Door didn’t sit well with Plant after a while, you could tell that they were at least willing to take some chances and try new things that didn’t have to necessarily cater towards the typical blues textures that they kept doing.
They could evolve if they wanted to, but a lot of the problems weren’t just afflicting Bonzo, either. Everyone was hitting their vices a little too hard, and when you look at the state of Jimmy Page from around that time, his eyes were a lot more vacant than before. He had been dabbling with heroin around this time, and even by the dark standards that they had behind the scenes, things were about to get absolutely pitch black.
Plant had already known that things weren’t going to be getting much better with Page being strung out, but the fact that they could scrape together the right tunes for their Knebworth concert was all that he could have asked for. Plant knew that he could deliver the best songs that he knew how for a live audience, but as soon as the band called it a day, he remembered thinking that he could have done without those performances if it meant getting everything back on track.
He knew that there was a way to keep going, but he also understood that things weren’t exactly looking up like they were back in the day, saying, “For me, then, it didn’t really work from ’77 onwards. However, there were moments at Knebworth that were spectacular. But the price you have to pay to get to those moments, I didn’t think was worth it any more. It wasn’t my idea of constructive open‑heart surgery.”
Because when you look at the kind of struggles that everyone had gone through, no one seemed to have suffered more than Plant in the past few years. Bonzo was already a dear friend that he had to deal with passing away, but after also losing his son during the making of In Through the Out Door, it wasn’t like he was in love with the idea of continuing on if it meant him getting hurt at every opportunity.
The rock star life wasn’t worth anyone else dying, and their breakup seemed to be the healthiest option in its own way. Page knew that he needed to find another outlet to help get over Bonham’s death, and by venturing out to his solo career, Plant was free to find the kind of sounds that he wouldn’t have been allowed to make with his old band when he had the chance.
Zeppelin didn’t really deserve to go out with a whimper instead of a bang, but there are a lot more silver linings to their body of work than most people realise. They understood why they couldn’t carry on, but the fact is that now people will never forget the way that those tunes made them feel or worry about whether or not the band was flogging a dead horse if they had decided to carry on.
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