Robert Plant said the Eagles continued touring “because they’re bored”
Rock and roll was never about living the life of a millionaire for Robert Plant.
He knew how the industry operated long before Led Zeppelin had called it a day, and even though the band would have been paid millions of pounds to carry on and make the occasional reunion tour, Plant didn’t want to live out the ‘Percy’ persona for the rest of his life. He had a lot more to offer the world, but he did notice when more than a few artists were looking at everything but their artistic integrity every single time they played.
Then again, it’s not like the reunion tour is necessarily a bad thing every single time a group gets back together. There are more than a few times where people look like the older and less interested versions of themselves whenever they play, but there are also people like Blur and A Tribe Called Quest that have actually managed to reunite and sound pretty damn good whenever they go back into the studio.
And it’s not like Plant had lost a step when he started working with Zeppelin again in the 2000s. They might have had more wrinkles, but if you listened purely to the music, you would have sworn that they hadn’t aged a day since Physical Graffiti, even managing to make ‘Immigrant Song’ work in a new context. But that was nothing compared to the never-ending run of dates that the Eagles have been doing since the 1990s.
Despite everyone in the band hating each other by the time 1980 rolled around, Don Henley and Glenn Frey did at least have a safe idea for how to bring the band back. Travis Tritt may have come in handy when getting the band back on the same page, but considering the “reunion” tour has included all new members of the band and Don Felder being kicked to the curb, Plant started to look a little bit sideways when seeing how Henley was operating.
While Henley had encouraged Zeppelin to get back together and do the touring circuit again, Plant felt that the California rockers were tired of being cooped up in their mansions every single time they decided to put a tour together, saying, “Do you know why the Eagles said they’d reunite when ‘hell freezes over,’ but they did it anyway and keep touring? It’s not because they were paid a fortune. It’s not about the money. It’s because they’re bored. I’m not bored.”
At the same time, the fact that they haven’t released a record in years is a better indication of where they see their music – Henley is comfortable treating the band as a nostalgia act, and there’s no way that they were going to keep playing tunes from Long Road Out of Eden because they felt like it, they knew what their audience wanted to hear, and they were going to give it to them.
But compared to everyone else in the band, you can’t say that Joe Walsh isn’t putting everything he has into it – the man is in his 70s and still tearing it up every single time he performs, and when he does take the microphone, he’s more than happy to play the rock and roll grandpa role by talking about getting old and still trying to kick as much ass as he can while he’s still alive and kicking.
So while Plant might scoff at the money that he would be offered to reunite Zeppelin, it wasn’t just about the massive paychecks every time they performed. He was more than happy making music that followed in the footsteps of his favourite artists, so he had no business trying to give everyone a version of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ for what must have seemed like the 1000th time.
