The musician Robert Plant was desperately in love with: “An incredible character”
Music always seemed to mean a little bit more to Robert Plant than the typical blues belters.
There were countless bands that were coming out around the same time that Plant started to adopt his signature persona for Led Zeppelin, but given how much he was indebted to the hippy scene, he appreciated every single note that he was able to sing. But being able to belt to the rafters on any song wasn’t going to matter if he didn’t have the right people behind him half the time.
Which probably explains why Plant went in so many different directions after Zeppelin broke up. He wanted the chance to add some variety into his music, and being able to function with a bunch of musical technicians was something he grasped with both hands when he first began his solo career. Working with Allison Krauss did at least give him other sides to his sound that he never knew were there, but the magic that Zeppelin had is the kind of chemistry that every rock and roll band dreams of at some point in their career.
And, really, the best songs that the band ever wrote came from how Plant and Jimmy Page worked off each other. ‘Percy’ had that massive status as one of the best frontmen who ever lived, but Zeppelin was always Page’s baby, and he was never going to rest until he found the right sound he heard in his head, and given how quickly the band wrote classics like ‘Stairway to Heaven’, it’s not like there wasn’t some magic at work in between them as well.
If you’re talking about the core of Zeppelin, though, John Bonham was always the beating heart of the band. John Paul Jones may have helped anchor the rhythm section with his bass playing, but when Bonzo got behind the kit, he brought the kind of thunder that most people only wish they could have in their prime. He was the epitome of an animalistic drummer, and according to Plant, he was the one that he felt closest to throughout his time in Zeppelin.
We’ll never know what Bonham could have done on Zeppelin albums in the 1980s, but outside of losing one of the greatest drummers in the world, Plant felt that he had lost one of the best musical soulmates of his life, saying, “He was an incredible character and so encouraging for me despite the fact he was always taking the mickey out of me and I loved him desperately. We really were kids and we grew up not having a clue about anything at all, just the two of us, loud, confident and mostly wrong and it was really good.”
But if the rest of the band tried their best to move on, Page seemed to be the one that was hit the hardest by Bonham’s death. He didn’t quite have the same shared history that Plant did with the drummer, but after building up his band for so long and having the drummer practically read his thoughts, having that connection suddenly cut was the reason why Page started up The Firm as a way to recover.
And while much has been said about how the former Zeppelin members felt about their subpar performance at Live Aid, it’s fair to say that Phil Collins gets a bit too much of the blame. No, they weren’t as good as they were in their prime, and Collins wasn’t nearly on top of the kit the same way Bonham was, but a lot of that may have come from the fact that a lot of the wounds that had from the breakup was still far too real.
It’s one thing to bring back to the sound of Zeppelin to celebrate the legacy they’ve left behind, but that connection is something that can’t be replaced onstage. So while Plant has been emphatic about not going out again as Zeppelin and leaving the legacy where it is, it also feels like as much of a testament to what Bonham did than trying to ignore what they’ve done together.
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