The musician Robert Plant called his last musical love: “My last real connection was severed”
No one can spend as much time in the limelight as Robert Plant has without picking up a few soulmates along the way.
The music business isn’t exactly the business to make friends in, but there are always going to be those few people who will be able to stick by you no matter what, whenever you come out with a record that doesn’t work out or try to help you realise the right idea every time you walk into the studio. But after a while, Plant started to see a lot of the biggest names of his generation fall by the wayside more often than not.
But that’s really the nature of the beast when it comes to the music industry. No one can manage to play those same songs for the rest of their lives, and even if Plant has found his niche working with artists like Allison Krauss, there are bound to be times when he misses the same kind of camaraderie that he had with his bandmates in Led Zeppelin when he first started singing with them.
The kind of relationship that he and Jimmy Page had as a songwriting duo was a match made in rock and roll heaven, but it was also never meant to last that long. It was abundantly clear that Page called the shots throughout the band, and even when they collaborated well after the fact for records like Walking Into Clarksdale, everyone understood that it was a one-off project rather than the kind of Zeppelin reunion everyone wanted.
And, really, Plant felt that he had moved on from Zeppelin at that point. He never liked the idea of having to sing songs like ‘Rock and Roll’ and ‘Black Dog’ up until his twilight years, and it wouldn’t have been fair to hold him to that standard forever, either. But maybe Plant’s cageyness about never going back to Led Zeppelin had more to do with the respect that he had for John Bonham after he passed away.
While drummers can be seen as expendable in rock and roll, no one could replace what Bonzo did. You have to give Phil Collins credit for at least trying to match what the drumming maniac could do at Live Aid, but when he passed away, it was about more than just the heaviness that was sucked out of Zeppelin. Plant had grown up with Bonham, so hearing about his passing was practically like a death in the family.
And Plant doesn’t shy away from speaking about it in those terms, either, saying, “John had been incredibly supportive to me. So when I lost John, that was the end of any naivety. It was evident that my last real connection was severed, really, as far as affairs of the heart in a confederacy and all.” What’s even crazier is the fact that Plant’s words about him being one of the last great loves isn’t that far removed from how everyone else felt about him.
Sure, Bonzo could pose quite the intimidating figure, but Plant remembered the kid that helped him realise the kind of singer that he wanted to be by the time that Page gave him a call to form Zeppelin. There was a lot more heart behind the band thanks to him, and since Plant had already lost one of his kids during Zeppelin’s time together, to have one of his musical brothers pass away so suddenly wasn’t going to be something that he could move on from all that easily.
So while Plant has been able to preserve himself by moving on to different forms of music at every opportunity, not going back to Zeppelin isn’t only a choice; it’s a necessity. Jason Bonham did his best to make his dad proud and even managed to match what his old man did more than a few times, but Plant was much more interested in carving out a new path for himself after losing one of his best friends.
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