Why Robert Plant keeps three quaaludes in a little brown bottle at home
While sex, drugs and rock and roll wasn’t just an apt catchphrase for the lifestyle that the stars of past decades indulged in, it seemed as though it was more of a motto that they lived by, and the likes of Robert Plant will no doubt be able to attest to the fact that it was taken to the extreme.
For plenty of musicians, this was a lifestyle that they chose to adopt, but for others, it proved to be a slippery slope whereby the constant intake of all of the above eventually began to take its toll. Therefore, there comes a point where the choice of substances will have to change after a considerable amount of time spent abusing the hard stuff.
It eventually reaches a point where the drugs that were once slowly killing you aren’t going to work to their initially desired effect. After a few trips to your specialist rock and roll practitioner, they’ll advise you that you’ve got to start taking a different cocktail of drugs that will keep you alive, rather than the ones that made the strain of constant touring a little bit more bearable.
These are, of course, still incredibly dangerous when not used in the right context, and the tragedy that comes with some artists having passed away as a result of abusing prescription medication is alarming. You only have to note how an addiction to painkillers took away the lives of the likes of Prince and Tom Petty, as Plant noted in a 2018 interview with Mojo, to realise that the excessive use of these supposed wonder drugs that were meant to help individuals eventually ended up doing the opposite.
However, despite his own dalliances with hard drugs during the height of Led Zeppelin’s fame, Plant now looks back on his time of having done this with a casual smirk, even going so far as to joke about the tragic losses of the aforementioned artists.
“Been there, done that,” he laughed when asked about the respective demises of his contemporaries, before noting that he still keeps a bottle of quaaludes – a strong sedative that was frequently used during the 1970s by the rockstars of the era – stashed away at home as a reminder not to touch the dreaded stuff.
“The label on the bottle says, ‘Robert Plant – for sleepless-ness,’” he continued. “It looks like an album cover. Three Rorer 714s, from Schwartz pharmacy in LA, and I often think to myself, wow, there they are – poison!”
Not only has he previously dabbled with taking quaaludes, and judging by his reaction to the substance being brought up, presumably doesn’t want to return to them ever again, but he hinted at partaking in the use of Ambien, another sedative usually used for the treatment of insomnia, as a way of celebrating his 70th birthday. “If ever there’s a day for opiates, I might drop an Ambien and see what happens,” he quipped, before humorously paraphrasing a line from ‘Stairway to Heaven’: “If there’s a bustle in the hedgerow, it’ll be me, snoring!”
While he clearly doesn’t condone the use of such substances and acknowledges the dangers that come with them, these off-the-cuff remarks go to show just how dicey his drug use was back in the day, and the lengths he’ll go to ward off any possibility of a return to his old ways.
