Robert Plant on the 'Stairway to Heaven

DATE August 30, 2007 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Robert Plant discusses his career and Led Zeppelin
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Tune up your FRESH AIR guitar because this is day two of our hard rock and
heavy metal series. Our first guest, Robert Plant, almost invented heavy
metal singing as the lead singer of Led Zeppelin. Plant also wrote one of the
most popular and parodied hard-rock ballads, "Stairway to Heaven." Led
Zeppelin formed in 1968 and broke up in 1980 after the death of drummer John
Bonham.

Before we hear my 2004 interview with Plant, here he is with Led Zeppelin in
1969.

(Soundbite of song)

Mr. ROBERT PLANT: (Singing) Hey girl, stop what you're doin'! Hey, girl,
you'll drive me to ruin. I don't know what it is that I like about you, but I
like it a lot. Won't let me hold you, let me feel your lovin' charms.

Communication breakdown. It's always the same. I'm having a nervous
breakdown. Drive me insane!

Hey, girl, I got something I think you ought to know. Hey, babe, I wanna tell
you that I love you so. I wanna hold you in my arms, yeah! I'm never gonna
let you go, 'Cause I like your charms.

Communication breakdown. It's always the same. I'm having a nervous
breakdown. Drive me insane!

(End of soundbite)

GROSS: Robert Plant, welcome to FRESH AIR.

Now with Led Zeppelin, you were wailing over some pretty loud music.

Mr. PLANT: That's right. I had to wail. I had no choice really. The
equipment was pretty inferior in those days. And for PAs, the actual public
address system at gigs, was--I mean, I remember one night in Zeppelin, we'd
played Columbus, Ohio, the university with, I think, Jose Feliciano. And the
PA was actually a cluster of speakers right up in the apex of the room. It
was a circular building with the statutory '60s students sitting around,
looking suitably astonished or vacant or whatever it was. And the PA was
miles up in the air, and there was no chance on earth that the voice could
project. So I did have to kick in a lot throughout those early days.

I think it was not until about 1970 that Led Zeppelin actually purchased a PA
or, rather, I purchased the PA because I was the singer. And then I made John
Bonham pay some of it because he was the drummer. And we used two overhead
microphones, a bass drum and a snare mike. So I said, `Well, you use four
times more microphones than I do.' As it happened, we reached an amicable
solution as far as the cost of things.

GROSS: How come you still have a voice after singing that loud for so long?

Mr. PLANT: Oh, because it's all about dynamics, and it's also all about the
technique. The last thing in the world that you can do is just blast like
crazy. You have to work your way into a tour, as you work your way into an
evening of singing. You have to take it steady to begin with, make sure that,
if you can, that the introduction of the show is kind to you. That wasn't
always the case in Led Zep.

But, I mean, I've been in dressing rooms with lots of musicians where the
singers go into the toilet and start shrieking at the walls or the toilet, and
it's very painful to the casual listener and onlooker. But they seem to think
that psychologically--or psychologically is the answer--that it will make them
be much more warmed up when they go on stage. But I prefer Neil Young's way
of doing it. You stand in a circle, and it's almost like sort of a kind of
cosmic barbershop warm-up where you go...(starts singing scales). And you do
that for about half an hour and have a lie-down.

GROSS: Right, so you actually warm up? OK.

Mr. PLANT: I don't warm up, but he does, and that's a good way of doing it.

GROSS: Oh, so you admire it but don't really do it yourself?

Mr. PLANT: I haven't got time. I have a couple of hot cups of coffee or a
cup of tea, keep quiet, don't talk to anybody, sit in the dark for five
minutes and then go.

GROSS: Well, you know, with Led Zeppelin, you started singing a lot of, like,
blues and rhythm and blues-influenced material like, you know, Muddy Waters'
"You Shook Me." Did you feel like you had to change your voice when you
started singing music inspired, you know, by rhythm and blues?

Mr. PLANT: Not really, because I'd always been--well, not always but from
the age of about 14, 14 1/2, in the town where I lived, there was a huge, a
very strong, healthy movement towards a kind of subculture, a Bohemian culture
where there were poetry meetings, there was a lot of post-bebop jazz being
played and listened to. And the blues was, strangely enough, almost
mainstream in this particular town, thanks to the art colleges and the
students in the area. So I had been--I was very familiar with blues, with the
idiom of singing. And I'd been singing like that for quite a long time,
experimenting. I mean, if you listen to a lot of the early English and early
American white kids who were involved with blues--Mike Bloomfield, Elvin
Bishop, you know, I guess Dave Van Ronk, the people who worked in the coffee
houses alongside Dylan in the early '60s, everybody--and Dylan as well--I
mean, that first album--"Down the Highway" and "See That My Grave Is Kept
Clean," there's some great blues there. And everybody developed a style of
their own, which was accommodating and natural, I suppose, restrictions and
inabilities. So I was wailing all the time, and I'm sure that half the time
it was not as good as it could've been, but, you know, it got better.

GROSS: One of the things Led Zeppelin did was create a really, like, white
version of music that was based, in part, on African-American blues.

Mr. PLANT: That's right, yeah, and with varying degrees of success. I mean,
I think that on "Led Zeppelin I" there was some fantastic--there was "I Can't
Quit You, Babe," which was written by Willie Dixon, originally performed by
Otis Rush, was a great experiment. It allowed the band to perform and for the
personality of the band to come through. And at the same time, it did justice
to the original recording.

(Soundbite of song)

Mr. PLANT: (Singing) I can't quit you babe. So I'm going to put you down
for a while. I said, I can't quit you babe, I guess I've got to put you down
a while. Since you messed up my guitar, make me mistreat my only child.
Since you know I love you baby, my love for you I could never hide.

(End of soundbite)

GROSS: That's Led Zeppelin, Robert Plant. We'll talk more about being the
band's lead singer after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: My guest is Robert Plant. He was the lead singer of Led Zeppelin, one
of the most influential bands in the history of hard rock and heavy metal.

When we left off, we were talking about how blues musicians influenced the
band. This is Led Zeppelin's recording "Whole Lotta Love," which is based on
a Willie Dixon song.

(Soundbite of "Whole Lotta Love" by Led Zeppelin)

Mr. PLANT: (Singing) You've been coolin', baby, I've been droolin'. All the
good times, baby, I've been misusin'. Way, way down inside, I'm gonna give
you my love. I'm gonna give you every inch of my love, gonna give you my
love. Yeah! All right! Let's go! Whole lotta love. Whole lotta love. Got
a whole lotta love. Got a whole lotta love. Way down inside, woman, you need
love. Oh!

(End of soundbite)

GROSS: Led Zeppelin. My guest is singer Robert Plant.

Anything you want to say about your singing on that track?

Mr. PLANT: (Laughs) Well, I just, you know, that's a very expressive time.
I must say that I always would have liked to have thought that I could create
a vocal syncopation and punctuation in as many different ways as possible. I
mean, my voice is what it is. It's different now to how it was then. But it
was punchy, and it was joyous. And I guess, you know, my confidence was
building by that time; I was 20 years old. And I was really trying out all
manner of different things. The effects of my childhood and my background,
listening to Presley, listening to the Wolf, I tried to put them all into the
songs that called for some kind of sexual innuendo or whatever it would be.
It was partly blues, partly rock 'n' roll, and it worked.

GROSS: You were saying that when you started recording you were shy, and by
the time you're in Led Zeppelin you're singing about, you know, giving her
ever inch of your love. And so, you know, something had to happen to that
shyness on stage. Can you talk about the transformation from, you know, the
shy Robert Plant to the much more...

Mr. PLANT: Well, yeah...

GROSS: Go ahead.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. PLANT: There is so much innuendo in the blues, and we all--a lot of
English musicians were very fired by Robert Johnson, to whom we all owe, more
or less, our very existence, I guess. And the innuendo, whether it would be
"Terraplane Blues," where he was singing about the parallels between his woman
and an automobile, or "Traveling Riverside Blues" when he's mentioning the
famous `squeeze my lemon' line...

GROSS: Yes, which you made far more famous. Yeah.

Mr. PLANT: Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, it's all there; it's public domain.

GROSS: Right, right.

Mr. PLANT: "The Lemon Song." It's all about the sort of barrelhouse, bawdy,
juke joint aspects of Saturday night music. So I still--I think I was
probably still shy, but I was playing into character, if you like, with these
songs because it was such, "Whole Lotta Love" was such a kind of funky, sexy
piece of music at the time and had a fantastic lope to it. And taking the
original Willie Dixon lyric, you know, `You need coolin', I ain't foolin''--I
mean, that whole idea, it's not talking about cookery lessons or gardening
tips. So the whole thing was based on some kind of sexual innuendo, which I
think, at the age of 20, was OK.

GROSS: Can you talk a little bit about creating the visual image to go along
with this new Robert Plant that was singing these songs that were laced with
sexual innuendo?

Mr. PLANT: Oh, I could do it, but I--no, I don't know how many of those
songs particularly were aimed in that sort of free-form fashion. But the
image has got very little to do with the lyric. It had just got to do with
the times. And the whole renaissance clothing, the whole idea of the
beautiful clothes and the stuff that--the entire wardrobe of movie stars
deceased ended up on Sunset Boulevard. There were some beautiful clothes to
buy, and they just seemed to be absolutely appropriate. We were all very,
very skinny kids, you know, 160 pounds and not a lot of muscle, just a lot of
energy.

So there was a look, and that look was kind of universal, really. It didn't
have anything to do with the lyrics. I mean, we could just as easily have
been a kind of folk band...

GROSS: Right.

Mr. PLANT: ...or, you know, another Crosby, Stills & Nash perhaps, and we
still would have been dressing the same way.

GROSS: Listen, I want to play something for you. I know you must be asked
everywhere you go about the lyrics to "Stairway To Heaven" and what they mean
and so on and so on. Did you ever hear the Tiny Tim version of it?

Mr. PLANT: Yeah.

GROSS: I know everybody has their most, like, bizarre version they want to
play for you, but do you know the Tiny Tim version?

Mr. PLANT: I have a copy. In fact, I just chucked it away the other day
when I was going through some stuff. I think my favorite version is Little
Roger and the Goosebumps.

GROSS: Oh. Who are they?

Mr. PLANT: Well, it was a record that was built around the theme for
"Gilligan's Isle," the TV program. And our lawyer at the time in New York was
absolutely furious that anybody should touch this song, you know, this
pinnacle of endeavor and artistic creativity with, you know--and I thought it
was--that and "Hairway To Steven," which was by Deckchairs Overboard, I think,
an Australian punk band. He's pretty good. And the song deserved it.

GROSS: What do you mean by that, as its author?

Mr. PLANT: Well, I mean--no, no. Because of the pinnacle and the beauty of
the song, sooner or later that has to turn around and swing the other way,
like "My Way" or "God Save The Queen," you know. It gets--after a while it's
a great target for pointing a finger of--a skeptical finger in hoots of
derision, and that's what happens. I think Tiny Tim was perhaps one of the
more respectful versions.

GROSS: Oh, it's a great--it's like the lounge version...

Mr. PLANT: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

GROSS: ...the swinging lounge version. I'm just going to play a little bit
of it for our listeners.

Mr. PLANT: Yeah, OK.

GROSS: OK. Here it is. It's Tiny Tim with Brave Combo.

(Soundbite of "Stairway to Heaven")

Mr. TINY TIM: (Singing) There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold,
and she's buying a stairway to heaven. And when she gets there, she knows if
the stores are closed, with a word, she can get what she came for.

Unidentified Group of People: (Singing) Woe, oh, oh, oh, oh. And she's
buying a stairway to heaven.

(End of soundbite)

GROSS: So, you know, I'll confess to you that it wasn't until I heard Tiny
Tim singing the song that I understood exactly what the lyrics were. And, you
know, one of the lines is, `If there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be
alarmed now. It's just a sprig leaf from the May Queen.'

Mr. PLANT: No, that's spring clean.

GROSS: Oh, spring clean, as in spring cleaning.

Mr. PLANT: Yeah.

GROSS: Oh! It's such a proper-sounding rhyme.

Mr. PLANT: Well, sprig leaf sounds very suggestive. I can't imagine.

GROSS: Well, but May Queen and hedgerow and bustle and alarmed, it's so..

Mr. PLANT: Yeah. I mean, it's onomatopoeic.

GROSS: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. What was going through your mind when you wrote this?

Mr. PLANT: I was thinking about the need for a sort of more organic
relationship between our generation at the time, who were living faster than
fast, and our environment. And our times were very, well, I suppose,
harum-scarum. And "Stairway to Heaven" developed as a piece of music one
evening with Jimmy and myself and that that kind of tone, that idiom about
returning to nature to look for all the signs to be aware of our environment
yet again--I thought it was an appropriate idiom to move into because of the
sort of majesty of the court movement.

GROSS: Led Zeppelin was one of the bands that kind of created heavy metal.
Whether you'd consider their music heavy metal or not, it certainly led the
way for heavy metal. Are there things that you would like to and not like to
take credit for in the bands that came after and were inspired, in part, by
Zeppelin?

Mr. PLANT: Well, you know, the inspiration or the lift, if you like, was
multifaceted in many respects. So many drummers emulated John, and so many
guitarists emulated Jimmy. And I'm sure that John Paul Jones as bass player,
being what it was, you know, was studied by bass players everywhere. So on a
musical level, it was very flattering, I'm sure, for all the guys to see and
to hear the way that people have taken their style and taken it into their own
capability one way or another. And you did see a lot of guitarists leaning
back--their whole style of presentation was lifted, and that's fine, you know.
That's absolutely fine. It's a great compliment, if you like. Also, it is
quite simplistic. It's just full-force rock 'n' roll with some imaginative
writing and some great displays of creativity and power.

But the actual taking the music and the songs and then moving them around a
little bit, you know, people take a little thread of this, that and the other
for their own benefit all through time. Now I don't know too much about any
of that, and I don't have an opinion one way or another because I think that
the popular music, as a mainstay of sort of pop culture, is rather like a kind
of thieving magpie. You know, the nuances of Led Zep that they couldn't touch
were the beautiful parts that were just unattainable, I guess.

GROSS: Robert Plant, recorded in 2004. Guess what his forthcoming CD is? A
collaboration with bluegrass country singer Alison Krauss.

Our hard rock and heavy metal series continues in the second half of the show.
I'm Terry Gross and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of "Stairway To Heaven")

Mr. PLANT: (Singing) The tune will come to you at last. When all are one
and one is all. To be a rock and not to roll. And she's buying a stairway to
heaven.

(End of soundbite)

(Announcements)

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