Robert Plant

00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, y'all, it's justin Richmond. Today on the show, we have Robert Plant, someone whose voice I've probably listened to on record more than anyone else ever. Think about all the people in and around the UK in the late sixties who probably could have easily become the singer for Zeppelin, but of course just about any other singer would have grounded that band sound. Instead, by some miracle, they found Plant, who was able to expertly insert himself into their soaring, loud and hard dynamic, creating some of the last centuries best music. But naturally, we could only be lucky for so long. Zeppelin broke up in nineteen eighty after their powerhouse drummer John Bonham passed away. Afterwards, Plant set out on his own, recording songs that drew inspiration from North African music, The Blues and Foe the perfect setup for his next music collaborations with a wonderful fiddle player with an angelic voice named Alison Kraus. Producer T Bone Burnett paired them in two thousand and seven and recorded an album Raising Sand. That album sold over a million copies in the US, won five Grammys, including an album of the year, and if you're around at that time, you remember it received an incredible amount of praise and attention. A decade and a half later, the two plus TBone again finally reunited and released a new album, Raised the Roof. Let's hear some of the song Quatroll World Drifts in from their new project that came out last year. Robert Plant talks about this beautiful new collaboration with Alison Krause with Rick Rubin on today's episode. They also discussed Plant's life changing trip to the Sahara that inspired the riff for led Zeppelin's Cashmere, and he remembers Bonham declaring himself the best drummer in the world their very first meeting. This is broken record liner notes for the digital age. I'm justin Mischian. Here's Rick Rubin and Robert Blant. I was listening to one of your pre Zeppelin songs that I had not heard before, and I wanted to ask you about what singers inspired you when you were young, because what came to mind listening to it was Tom Jones, which blew my mind because I never made that. I never would have made that connection or thought that ever before. Yeah, it was a funny. It was like a kind of hefty tenor pitch that I created. There. I was listening to a guy called Otis Clay and another guy called Vernon Garrett, the Americans. Well, Otis Clay obviously moved over into gospel later on, but he cut some stuff on high records. As a kid, I didn't really know much about the history of anybody, and I was hugely inspired and could never get anywhere near Steve Marriott. He animated his inner turmoil. You know, he was like a wildcat really, but a great voice. And I think if you use the voice enough, bit by bit, you can expand the range. You can kick it up a bit, push it. Your high notes get stronger, and then you can move up the scale a little bit more. The more you work, the more flexible everything becomes. And so as a kid, I really love the guy out of the Temptations as well. I mean, what a great voice and smokey. But we you know, I was taking a hammer to the pearl or really I was just crashing everything around. But so my voice was very oh you know, it was an adventure. Tell me about the scene that you were born into. Tell me about what was the music scene at that point in time. What was on the radio. What would it be like going to an eight club as a kid, Well, there were no nightclubs. It's kind of really post Industrial Revolution Black Country stuff. So there were dance halls, ballrooms, and there was a very vibrant, very active gig scene going on. So in the Black Country and around Birmingham there would be three or four great rooms to go to with the beautiful sprung maple dance floors and coming out of the early sixties where everything was like imitation Chuck Berry, so you know that sweet little sixteen type of stuff. So the rhythms and the dance floor, the whole thing was just this motion of four or four time through those venues. I ended up getting a gig as a master of ceremonies, so I wouldn't introduce the groups that were coming on that night. Through those places came Wilson Pickett. I introduced little Stevie Wonder with his orchestra when Fingertips came out part one and two before the real explosion, and yeah, there's everybody, Johnny Kidd in the Pirates, the Beatles, and there was a town hall scene like here, I guess where the guy who used to run the net Worth concerts in the seventies. He captured the franchises of the local town halls in England, so yeah, you'd see some amazing artists come through, I mean, and the idea of actually packing a town hall with five hundred people dancing and a spot of fighting and pugilism in the corners just for a bit of spice was incredible. So it was a very active scene. But for me, I was younger than those guys, so a little bit younger. So I just used to stand in awe looking up at the stage, you know, watching these people make it work. How old were you at that time? Would you say? About fifteen? I was already in a group then, and we were murdering John Lee Hooker songs as only the English could. Did you think that this would be your professional life or was it just a passing fancy at the time? What was your guests? Well, I didn't have a guess, and I didn't I didn't see anything like the whole idea of a futurism at all. I was still in the cabins of learning, being educated at school and then are at college, so I didn't have any idea of anticipation. But I just knew that there were certain voices and chord structures and scales that did something to me that didn't have any nothing to do with anything that came before. I just didn't know what was happening to me when I heard particular musical notation, just some sort of heraldry, something that promised something at the beginning of a song that was like a kind of was showing me that there was a key to something that we didn't really have in England at all, but it was still going into my into my system and affecting my whole bloodstream with this kind of stuff. I didn't know what it was. It could have been John Lee Hooker just playing boogie chillen, you know, that kind of incessant one chord thing, which was so contra to the kind of sedate English popular themes in music. But it was almost like a funny, how ridiculous At forty fifty years later, I'd end up in West Africa with a bunch of Tuareg north of Timbuctoo who were playing that very deal. Unbeknown they had no idea about you know, John Lee Hooker at all, but it was the same groove. Yes, So as a kid, I just held these clarions of sonic clarions that came and arrested me, you know, much to the fear of my parents, who saw me as an academic icon. Do you remember any particular songs from that period that when you heard them, just sort of like blew your mind or felt different than everything that came before. Yeah. On a melodic level, I think it must be Alan Toussaint who played the piano lick that opened I like it like that by Chris Kenner. It's just that very the whole Crescent City intro because no sooner he created this introduction than the song kicked into a groove, very polished groove. I mean Chris Kenner's records really were well they were. It was a bad groove and about this soul thing, but they really polished up that track. But I didn't know anything about it really. I mean some of the John Lee Hooker stuff that I heard was, say, the opening of Boom Boom or Dimples that, the swing on that and the fact that the guitar I didn't know that at the time. I couldn't actually, I didn't have any vision of what was right, and what was wrong about people's playing But it just seemed so sort of random. Yes, there was no sign of Johnny Mathis. It was just this kind of wow, you know. Yeah, I was moved by this stuff, and I began to realize it was all black, you know that I could hear I could hear these chimes or whatever they were. But you know, so those were really sort of the bells that started ringing. I mean, really, it's a it's a that's a pretty profound question because if I think about it, I could also say that people like Snuff Garrett in La were producing for Liberty. I know this now. I didn't know then, but you could hear Johnny Bennett's Cincinnati Fireball on the flip side of Dreaming, and it was just everything was there, chick vocals, string parts, this guy who was somewhere near Elvis, you know, and it was a ditty. Yeah. But the word play in that kind of teen scene thing was right up my street then, because I was in love with everybody, you know, I had a dream about every girl on the street, and these songs kind of they spoke for me. So other than the bands that would come through, what was the local scene, Like, were many kids making music at that time? Yes, there were hundreds and hundreds of groups, and everybody was playing Bye Bye Johnny wrong. I mean the whole the chuck Berry rhythm sections, when we never kind of worked out that one part of the band was rocking and the other guys were swinging behind it the rhythm sections, and we just couldn't read that. Yeah, everyone was just playing the same part right. Yeah, it was awful. It was just like what wow. But then again, we were all making the same mistake. And people wore those jackets like you see with the Safaris now, the kind of surfbeat guys over here. So most people had a kind of maroon suit on with a black velvet collar and had those foot movements like Cliff Richard and the Shadows, that sort of strange choreography, which is really that's all we had. When did folk make its appearance, Well around the same time, I guess. You know the last clip in that Hairspray movie when the girl wins the dance contest and they're walking home down the street in Philly and some hipster beat nick knocks on the door and as they're walking past, the door opens and they're listening to Dylan and somebody hands them a spliff. It's that changeover, that moment where the teen scene just gave way because the generation half a generation older than me were already in the folk clubs singing Irish mournful ballads. And I was attracted to the whole deal because if I liked Chris Kenner and Two Saints production and I didn't know what it was, then I would go to a folk club and I'd hear some guy playing an eight string guitar. I didn't really recognize what it was at the time, but it was because it was kind of disheveled, was rough, and also it was an uncharted land for us to hear this, to try and play this music. So and the scene there, with that kind of folk club thing led to a whole different intellect. People were talking about wee free Kings, Roland Kirk and you know all the good looking girls. Now suddenly they didn't have a million petticoats, they had long hair, and they were carrying a buck, a white LP or the first Dylan album or whatever it was. So I suppose, really, if you think about Dylan's very first venture that Columbia record. It opened up for sure, all that buck a white stuff and fixing to die and you know, and the scene was amazing because that those people were again a bit older than me, but they had a key to stuff. They were employed, they had income so they could buy records. There was an RCA label in Europe called RCA Jazz. It was a French label that was putting out ten inch albums and six track EPs, which opened up the door to the original Sonny Boy Williamson, Elevated Woman and all that stuff. I'd take it home. By this time, my parents were really worried because it was all right, Johnny Bennett was palatable perhaps, but the idea of the blues thing must have been something else. Because I had one of those record players where you could lift up the central armor that you could just keep playing the same forty five over and again that yes, the playback arm would come back onto the where the stylus would come back onto the record for five hours or something, so you know, Spoonful or from the Howling Wolf that I think that's maybe something like that was the final frontier for my parents. And when I was when I went to school or I was doing a paper around us. Something. I came back and I cut the plug off the record player. That was it. That was open war. It's too much, too fine, too fine. Yeah, it was a plug too far. Yes, So that was it. Then I chose bohemia, you know, even though I could go home and have a nice, warm bath, that was not really And you know, people were carrying the literature the cam Albert Camu and Shatter and Darma Bum. You know that everybody suddenly was hip to this stuff. And then two German promoters, Lippman and Rao, who had been operating pre Second World War, representing well some of the main nightclub personalities then in the old days, they realized this bohemian scene was all over Europe, in all the main towns, and spiraling into small, smaller communities because pop music really in Europe didn't popular music was only the popular music that the program planners were prepared to give you. Oh, of course, that's how it always is. But it was so narrow an option that we all knew that there was something else, obviously, something else going on, you know. So I think this whole movement was inspired by the conservatism of our media and the fact that it seemed to me like the upper echelons of broadcasting and the British Board, I think, corporation whatever, we're waiting for this thing to pass over so they could get back to the audio volume that they knew and loved. So well, yeah, it's funny really, because the mainstream in Europe was augmented slowly by pirate radio that were ships out in the British channel English Channel who were transmitting programs which were sponsored by various record labels. So you know, when I was doing my homework at my grandparents house on a Friday, I could tune in to Tony Hall who had this amazing called the American Hot Ten, and it would be all London American Records, and London American as a record label was basically a conglomerate channel and filter smaller labels in the US who didn't have international deals. So it would you'd go right the way through from Shop Around by the Miracles to the Chimes or Dells, Alan or Chuck Berry was there on London, you know, and the whole Chess catalog from from Chicago came out through that label. So there was jazz, and there was Diana Washington, and there was that. So as time went on, more and more as an English kid, I was becoming more and more and more sort of engrossed and consumed by the variety of music from America. I'm surprised to hear about Dylan because I think of obviously, we all think of the blues coming from the States and then the British invasion kind of reacting to the American blues scene. But I never thought about that with folk, because we think of folk as being traditionally Irish music originally, so we don't think of the American connection here. But it's interesting to hear Dylan be the first name that you bring up. Yeah, well, girl from the North Country, what is that really? Is it Scarborough Fair or where does it come from? Of course, now I know a lot more historically. Now I can put people to sleep if they're feeling unsettled on an aeroplane, I can just give him a quick three hours About the conversation between the English Murder Ballad and Doc Bogs. I don't know, but I just think that there was so much romance about Dylan, so much enigma, and he was not on his own of course, but for us he was what he was the Dama bum. You know, he was bringing this, he was opening the doors. And then I suppose Leonard Cohen after him would be important in the UK. Sure, well, I don't know, you know I was. I think I could hear the sort of what everybody's opinion about music, that this very the very idea that we are doing this. You and I have to be both been aware of each other for a long long time, half a century. In my case, I suppose really to talk about music now is a bit It's a bit odd because I only know what I can tell you in this flurry of energy and a small coffee. But what's really happened to me all the way through was the causing effect, and one thing leads to another leads all the way through. Sir Dylan and his adventures opened up so that we knew about Dave van Ronk and you know Spider John Corner. I mean Canned Heat. Never mind the British bringing the blues to America, it was already that the young white kids were really doing, making a great job of it with Mike Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop and Canned Heat and seeing those clips of Newport Folk Festival and stuff that now or in nineteen seventy even looking back and see him our good friend armat Urtic and in the crowd. You know, it's the links. They are indelible parts of my DNA. They're fantastic in the true sense of the word, channels of stimulus. We'll be right back with more from Rick Rubin and Robert Plant. After a quick break. We're back with more from Robert Plant and Rick Rubin. When Zeppelin one first came out, did it take off right away or what was the reception right in the beginning, Well, we were playing before he came out, so we got to La December sixty eight, and it came out some time in January. And I guess Jimmy's reputation from the Yardbirds was powerful, and he threw some amazing shapes musically and physically. It was just there was a whole cavalcade of energy. And you have to be transmitting in the same on the same planet as that, otherwise you don't have there's no gig for you. Yes, and I really knew how to do that because John Bonham and I we already had our own similar but mysteriously obscure Band of Joy, which was nuts It was really stretching within the limitations that we had as kids, you know. I mean I was nineteen when I met Jimmy and John Paul. But the energy, the fireball that we developed and was created around us took no prisoners, with or without a success of an album or what everybody is. But it did kick in and it was a very stimulating, incredible surge because with the advent of FM, radio playlists were abandoned quite often. You know, it would just you could go from Voorjac to Kaleidoscope speaking from Mars or whatever it would be. It was just fantastic that, you know, people were just going, yeah, man, this is music. And then so we'd go places and they just put our record on and play both sides of it and then talk for a while and then they say, what do you want to play? You know, So they'd let us loose on the libraries in the radio stations, which was the wrong thing to do. Incredible, yea, so great though that you Yeah, so we were kind of passing them out through the toilet window. Look quick, take this, you know this thievery Yeah. Yeah, it was so much more, so much more freedom in the whole delivery of music to the people in those days. What was the feeling after bottom passes. Was there any talk of continuing or was it clear that that was not going to happen. Well, you know, as a four piece band, what are you going to do? I mean, I don't know how anybody could, ever, any group of people could find when twenty five percent of the driving wheel, which is so characteristic and really surges. I mean, it wasn't just that he was a magnificent drummer. It was just more of the point that he was. He could telegraph the turns in the songs. Yeah, he could make it all swear, and when he was tired of an idiom within the song, he'd go into Wolf's time for a minute and just look at me and laugh. Yeah. He was playing jazz, yeah, yeah, and he got fed up at one time. I remember in somewhere in New York, he just got up and walked through his drum kit. That's it. I don't want to do that. And we switched quickly to going to California or so what somebody lured him back onto the Riser. Well, it's funny, really, because last night I spent the evening with Jason Bonham, and it was fantastic. I mean, Jason's come a long way and he's he's fifty five, and I think I've known him since he was one. Yeah, so Bonham was crucial. Couldn't nobody could consider moving on? Since you played with so many great musicians over the years, would you say that the nature of playing with him was a particular thing. Was he unlike any drubber you've ever played with? Well? Yeah, Bearing in mind that we started playing together in one of those sprung maple leaf dance floors, and it's in a hall when I had a group caller Crawling King Snakes, And I mean we were too young to drive. We hadn't got driving licenses. We were just kids. And he said, you're okay, he said, you know, he said, but you'd be a lot better if you had the best drummer in the world behind you. I said, yeah, but I already do. And I said, well, okay, I know that you're good, but where do you live? And he told me. I said, oh, you can't join our group. We can't afford the gasoline to go and pick you up and drop you off. So so we did a bit of thievery and I got caught by the police for sucking fuel out of a gas tank one night, just to keep it going. I think most every drummer I've worked with in their own way has had a huge effect on me, really right up to right now, you know. But yeah, I mean clive'sma who played with us in the original post page plant times in strange sensations with Radiohead. Now when I met him, was just finishing off the Porter's Head era, and he in a totally different way. He'd done all that stuff with Runny size, the drumming bass stuffs from Bristol. He still is and at that turnaround of drumming and the incidental polyrhythmic stuff that which now you'd just get four good bars and loop it up and then drop an incendiary into it after a minute. It was brilliant. Let's talk about that for a good bars idea, because I used to collect Zeppelin bootlegs of live shows and they were so different from night to night, the dynamics of the song, the length of the sections, it was so improvisational. Was that unique to your band or was that what everybody was doing at that time? Because it seems so far and now, well, I think the flexibility was very interesting because John, Paul Jones, and in fact the three of them, I became just like a passenger, realio voyeur. I'd bought the ticket, not most of the time. Sometimes I could leave the stage and talk to members of the audience and come back on again. And I did start learning Welsh at one point at a little textbook. But they get into grooves like Alphonse Musan or Pretty Purdy. They just listened to stuff on the way to the gigs. We all carried these big record players with huge boxes of albums, and there would be all that late Johnny guitar Watson, all that sort of great groove stuff, and so that would make its way into extended instrumentals. But everybody I think was doing it the airplane in their way. We're doing it grateful dead for sure, you know. But I think there was something kind of unusual about the whole the three guys in zeppelins, where it was that they kick in immediately and we could write stuff like the Crunge on Houses, the Holy you know, we go and see James Brown's real hot bander Jay Bees, and just the stimulation and the stimulants of the time just oh, just taking it all in. I think that's the thing. I think it was a wide open possibility in those periods in the early seventies of writing, where we were leaning, borrowing, leaning, and developing brand new stuff in a very beautiful, haphazard way. Yeah, we didn't have a group chaplain, but it always came out like new music. Like you would be inspired by James Brown, but the theme that came out sounded like led Zeppelin. You'd be inspired by reggae music, and the theme that came out sounded like led Zeppelin. It never sounded derivative ever, it always sounded like new music. Yeah, I mean I used to take the stuff home. I mean I didn't have a stereo system until the end of led Zeppelin two. So the only time I ever heard any stereo interesting their stereo stuff was when I went in the studio and heard the panning on a Whole Lot of Love or something like that. You know, it's pretty primeval that my world. I had a simple tape recorder and I was able to work with backing tracks and stuff at home. But my contribution was really tough because these guys were taking it somewhere nobody had been before. And I had to make something melodically interesting. And also by that time, I was twenty twenty one years old, and I was still trite in my lyrical wherever it was, But here and there it started. I started shaping some opinions up. And having enough time as a as a as a parent, and still being around that bohemian scene I mentioned, and still living where I came from as I still do now exactly the same. Bonzo's houses like five miles from mine, still, Yeah, and it's there's nothing antiquarian about any of it, you know. We just blues rolls on, you know. So yeah, it was. It was a prolific time and a time of a great There was a great of mutual inspiration between the four of us at that time, and there was a lot of fun. Were there clicks within the band? Like, were there any people who hung out with other people more than other people? How did it work? The internal dynamics of the band, It would change. I mean the very very first times together was obviously Bonzo and I borrowing his mom's car to go down to an audition and siphoning the petrol out of somebody else's car while they were asleep to get there, that sort of deal, and it's time went on. I think really the sharing of musicality was the kind of beacon so John Paul and Bonzo made when we were working on stuff, when we were staying in these sort of what you'd loosely call residential places, which were basically houses with a staircase of stairwell where we could get that sound that the Beastie Boys borrowed. The whole deal was like we were there, so sometimes somebody would go to bed, or somebody would go somewhere, and some two guys might be left just playing rhythm parts, just grooving two of them, you know, and Jones's playing man, I mean, just huh. It was very funny and it's still funny now with John Paul because he used to say to me, well, yeah, it seems like a good melody on that track, right. I said, what do you think about the second verse of the lyrics? He said, oh, no, sorry, I don't listen to the lyrics. That was another brandishing of the war, you know, the tomahawk, right, Okay, So I wrote a couple of songs about him shrouded in some other character, and it's just just I said, you may perhaps you may need to listen to this John. So it was funny, you know, But Jimmy and I had this pastoral thing that we we traveled back from places through We had adventures in Thailand and India, and Jimmy went on to Egypt. I spent so much time in Morocco and got him to come down there and seventy two. We traveled a lot just off the beaten track, and we got pretty close to some times when we were very lucky to get out of some of these places. Well, we found ourselves in the wrong parts of nearly every city we went to intentionally quite often. But it gave us more savor for what we were writing and thinking and feeling. I mean, there wouldn't be a Kashmir without us traveling down to the pre Sahara in Morocco or whatever. But then again, Jones's contribution to Kashmir was strong, and he never went. Were the trips primarily designed for inspiration or was it just what you were interested in the time and the inspiration happened to happen now that we just didn't want to go home, yea. So we played in Japan and its ages to get home. No there was no, it wasn't We didn't go out to find the world for inspiration. It just we just went out to find everything for everything amazing. Yeah, it's insane. Yeah, interesting thing you said earlier about the jam band esthetic like Grateful Dead, we're doing it. We think of the Grateful Dead as a band that that's what they do, whereas led Zeppelin, because of the success and the pristine quality of the albums, we think of those songs as carved in stone based on the album version. We don't think about any Grateful Dead songs that way, do you know what I'm saying. So it's it's an interesting thing. You don't expect to see led Zeppelin on a good night and it'd be different than the thing that you're used to. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so it's a kind of shock. I think most irrelevance of that was it would be pretty dull to follow structure. I mean, that's the thing that takes We all know talking about music is like dancing about architecture. That's a little bit of a tired but here we are doing it. But the bottom line is, if you had to, if you were stuck in the Al Martino vibe, every night or whatever it is, and you knew where it began and ended. Well, surely accountancy wasn't such a bad idea. Perhaps it was. You know, I could have been working in the Forestry Commission or something like that, watching the changing of the seasons, and that would have been way more rewarding. In fact, I'm going now goodbye. Yea. So it was great, I mean, and that claret. That call goes back to the folk clubs, back to the guys singing the Irish murder ballads, unaccompanied singers rambling on all over the place with old stories and tales that had no end. And how many stanzas of the Hangman's Beautiful Daughter can you remember? I mean, it's almost like people quote from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Well, a lot of my friends we all quote from the Incredible String Band, you know, that sort of those places to go where it didn't matter about so much about structure or form. Yes, which is kind of interesting because look where I am now. How do you compare your relationship with music now versus when you were young? Well, when I was young, I knew nothing. I was a stolen child. It's like music came and swept me away in the Torrent and the flood, and I knew nothing. I knew no indication of anything. I could just as easily get excited about a colliery brass band from Yorkshire as I could from almost from Sleepy Gynestes until Sleepy Gynestes actually was Elvis. I could hear that in his voice, and I could hear this mournful thing come along. And I think my perspective, or the information's highway into me just grew and grew and crew. It's not my business to be opinionated, but I think this has been the great escape, this whole deal of my time to inquire into music. And yet, because you know I'm from England, I still don't know too much about certain departments of stuff, you know, certain categories, certain colleges of music. I'm like a kind of naive collector of beautiful sounds. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more from Robert Plant. We're back with the rest of Rick Rubin's conversation with Robert Plant. How did the first collaboration with Allison come about? She if she was sitting normally, sits just next to me over there when we do stuff together. And she has a theory and I'm going to use this theory as being it because it can't be hugely specific. I got invited somehow by the guys who run the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum in Cleveland because of my borrowing from Lead Belly to contribute to a night a tribute to him at the Cleveland Concert Hall or something some fancy hall which you'd have to approach with hushed tones as you go in. There was Odetta, Harry Bellafonte, Clarence Gatemouth Brown, and myself what would I do? And I had a communication with Alison and there was this idea, the whole idea of like, have you ever thought about singing with somebody else? And I thought, well, how on earth would I be able to sing alongside somebody else? Because I really don't know what I'm going to sing next? In the middle of a song that's got a melody, I maneuver melodies around like crazy. But anyway, she came to the rehearsals in Cleveland and it was a very very warm and endearing moment of meeting this new person. And she could play like a fiddle plane. I was insane we had this idea. I had this idea. Justin Adams was with me from the Space Shifters, and I had a word with David Hidalgo and he brought Lost Lobos with him and I asked him if he would bring his Marry Archiesque instruments, the quadra and all that sort of thing, so that we could do lead belly stuff. But we weren't going to hammer it, because the worst thing in the world, as British rock group can do, is hammer the blues into submission. So we did and Alison was very comical. We laughed a lot because she kind of straightened me up and said, yes, she with that sort of tone, of affected tone of boye, if you want me to sing with you, how can I sing with you if I don't know what the hell you're going to sing next? How can I harmonize with you when nobody knows what the hell you're doing, including you? I said, yeah, that's a very good point. So that's what happens in harmony, is then, is it? Because I thought in Zeppelin I'd just sing and put a third on top of it, or Jimmy would and John Bonham had a great voice, would just do some trial our las, but we were never going to be the Association or something like that. Sadly I wish we had. So it was a bit of a sort of roop, and I think it frightened Allison to death. But it was funny and it was a fantastic night. It was really really good, and she thought that there was some carriage in it, and I thought there was a possibility of moving along together in some form or another, or even just singing. And I was fully aware of the fact that because she's that much younger than me, I think led Zeppelin kind of. I wouldn't say it frightened her, but I think because of her time as a young girl, she was so diligent in her work and in her studies, if you like that. If she ventured into rock at all, it was that kind of eighties place where melody and pop was disguised with big guitars. Yes, there was no existential moments of spiraling into the vortex. So I don't think she really had any idea about what I was all about. Particularly, she probably did a better homework, but and so why not try and see what we can do? And I thought, what does that mean? I've got to sing the same thing. How am I ever going to actually hold a melody down? But so we came to this very studio, met up and discussed the in advance, the possibility of actually making some music together. And we needed a master magician because we were so radically different in how the way we bridge ejected, what we'd spent our lives of listening to and how we thought of anything. You know. We would just come from the other side of the world and she'd worked with t Bone Bennette on down from the Mountain and oh brother were art out Bone. He's a remarkable pistol, He's a cannon. He's got a head full of stars that fly out when you least expect him. As some the great Glove Idea and stuff like that, But I didn't know anything about I just knew who he was and what he did. I remember as a kid he was on the roll in Thunder review that sort of thing, but I didn't know what he was going to be all about. It was quite startling. So we agreed that we would try about four songs and if it didn't work, just give it up and just move on. Because adventures adventure and I got a load of songs off my jukebox. And the deal was that I would go to her house on the Sunday morning here in Ville and I would meet him and her and the door opened, flung open, and there's this sort of there's Allison being really charming, and they're behind her, this great imposing shape of John Henry Burnett. And I went, shit, So now I've got a There's two of them. So they said, come in, what key? I said what? I don't know what key? I don't know what key anything is. Normally I had to sing any so I had to go and train to be a castrati in Naples. Is that true? I've had children. I've had children since then at least I've gone through the motions. But no, it was like, okay, sit down and like a cup of tea and here's the song. And I went, well, okay, where's the microphone, where's the reverb, where's the slap back, where's that planty sound, where's the forty five million second delay? Where's my stuff that I lived on? You know, like a guitarist has a pedal. And there was nothing. There was just two couches and an acoustic and we just started muse him, and I felt so exposed and vulnerable. We tried to I think it was Doc Watson's Your Long Journey, and I mean there were harmonies that crossed over and did something else, like like you know, like the Living Brothers or Everly's or whatever. Jesus Christ, how do I get out of here? Now? There must be some burghers here or something. Something's going on somewhere. I could feel the moisture of my brow. But I's got to get out of his place. Anyway, time went on and these guys appeared at the studio. Who I mean. Allison says she never met Jay Belleros before the drummer, and she knew Dennis Crouch the bass player, and Marcaribo. I think these are all sort of, I guess, or running in the same posse as Tebow. And we just started kicking the things around. And so the four tracks came, and the four days came and went, and I got in the car and drove from here down the Natchez Trace, Alabama and through into Clarksdale, Mississippi, to see my friends. I always thought that I had friends in Clarksdale who were actually not there, but they were there because they'd helped me all the way through my life, you know, the musicians and singers and stuff. I wrote a song with Jimmy Carl walking into Clarksdale and the whole litany of that. Lyrically, it's all about that deal. And it's almost like I'd go back to the womb, back to the real mother of the whole thing for me. So I fled to Clarksdale and all the way down I played this CDs in the Crown vic I wow, this is really this is really cooking. I mean, this is like it's sexy in a kind of way that like it. It's not wiggering itself around with flashing lights. It's just it's just good. It's just good. Blew my mind when I heard it. Blew my mind and mine too, because you know, you know, more unlikely what kind of guy I am. This is like, I'm just so excited a bad stuff. I can take a spoonful of something and blow it into some other element of genre, whether it's a piece of Moroccan berber music or whatever it can be. And not being really a musician has helped me in that, you know. But here we are in the kind of font of groove and good taste. And yet we're also in Nashville, which is full of country music, which some of it needs to be taken off and a corner and talk to very severely. You know. Once the country guys started wearing ripped jeans and growing the hairlong, I was able to move around a little easier. But you know what I mean. But it's like, oh, so this thing, this sound came out and Alison and I looked at each other and went, poor, this is unusual, isn't it. And when we started doing things like that rich woman by little Millet, oh god, A will plenty of my and she was right on it, bang as if she'd spent all the time in the French quarter gigging. You know. She was like incredible. I was like, whoa a little boy lost on the hillside here. So that's that's how it started off. The blend of your voice is together. I would have never guessed it would be as magical as it is. But I guess you can never guess. You know, why certain voices blend and it makes a sound that's so specific, and it is so specific in the case of you guys. It's amazing, I know, and there's nothing worse than generalizing about somebody's gift and back there in nineteen seventy seventy one. If I think about the other voice songs like That's the Way or the Rain Song or wherever it might be there, then that voice was always there. But it depends on the melodic request of the song and how much space you've got in within the structure of the lyrical thing to let the voice have its character and put enough compression on it and stuff to make it in your ear rather than down your throat, you know. And I think that these songs, the actual structure or architecture of them, allows the personality of that other voice to work. Yes, and it was time that I made a break. I think you have to take leaps and again, especially as you're not trading on any particular worry about. The only bread you've got to put on the table is the bread within your own spirit. Yes, that's why I'm jet lagged, apau in sitting here talking a lot about I wanted to say your last solo album was incredible as well. It's a it's a beautiful album. And is there anything you do for your voice to keep it? What are the tricks because you consistently sound good. Well, first of all, I have to mean when I'm singing, I write those lyrics and I'm basically made errors. And I was, yeah, I don't know what it was. Really the whole those last two records were really just about basically coming back to somewhere that is so in me, the whole Welsh board of thing, the whole deal of It's not like coming from la It's it's like I was born with half of this history in me, this in my blood. And I had to leave circumstances here in America that was for my definitely for my betterment, and I didn't have the balls to stay and go through the decompression to change completely changed my time, so I went back. So I wrote a lot about the struggle. And I think when you write about something that's absolutely real and affecting your life and affecting the way you sleep, affecting the way that you think, that and your impression of how you are to yourself, you can't be a disappointment to yourself. As a contributor to other people's lives is a tough one. So it was that's Blues in a totally different form. Yes, tell me about your songwriting process. Does it start with music and then melody and then lyrics or is it different different ways? Well, I got a book this morning. I wrote some stuff down. I was listening to BBC Radio four this morning and the guy who runs the British Museum, he has a program, a fifteen minute program, and it's the World in a Hundred Objects, It's called and he was talking about Martin Luther and the Affirmation in Germany, and he was talking about the whole idea of Luther's quill and the very first sort of propaganda to renovate Christianity and get rid of the whole idea of actually paying for absolution, you know, like contributing to like you can skip purgatory if you just put in a few more y yeah, yeah, and all that stuff. And I just shut up immediately, whizz to my book, flipped it over and started writing, because how do I get absolution from my ridiculousness? You know, I like me, you know, i'd actually think I'm really silly. But at the same time, there's some other corners of the to be sorted out, and I think writing, I have this book and I can flip it over. Somebody else's got a groove, I can join it, or I can present a couple of couplets and see what people can do for that. We spend a lot of time in this space. Shifter is thinking about Goreski, the composer from Poland that mournful music and then creating huge blocks of guitar and all that. So, yeah, that's that world over there. And it was good this time because with t Bone I was able to extend that into a what you'd loosely call an original song on the new record. You know, it's just like, hey, that's good. This is a new one, but it's an old theme. Yeah, but maybe that's what Maybe the next Apple will be, all new songs with you and Alison. We were talking about it last night. Yeah, yeah, I think we've got some time in another studio in the next couple of days, and I think Alison might want to put on the Wonder Jackson outfit and see how mean mean man sounds or something like that. Yeah, she's ready to boom. Is it different singing a cover song or singing your own words? How does it feel different when you're singing of them? Oh? Yeah, it's radically different. How do I feel. I feel like if a song, if you can actually get into the original song and into how it was working. Sometimes, if they're ditties, you have to I consider that the best thing to do is to make them, give them some brevity. Yes. So, for example, a Mel Tillis song stick with Me Baby, was the flip of a heavily track and it was really great guitar sound on that original Warner's release. The electric guitars were great, but by slowing it down and turning it into this sort of love struck pastiche gave it some hootspa, gave it some nerve. Yeah, yeah, gravitas for sure, Yeah, which it didn't have, or which it did have, but within another era. And I think it's about making the journey across the ear with these songs. Otherwise they could end up, you know, like Seannar live, which is nothing wrong with that, that's great, but it's it's had to be something, And especially when you've got these guys grooving around you. Have you ever considered doing an album of popular standards like Willie Nelson did with Stardust anything like that. Definitely not, Although I love Stardust, it's a beautiful song. It's incredible. Are you a Sinatra fan or no? I like what he did, But at the same time, that world there is, it's magnificent within itself. I can't course, and that's phrasing and Nelson riddle and the whole Yeah, but I'm afraid I can't. Really. I mean, this really is the American songbook here, what we've been doing. It's not the kind of schmooze and the stuff that you might hear at you know, when your woman puts on her stilettos, And it's not something where you'd be sitting standing on a porch some fancy club in Chicago's West Side. America has so many more sides to it, and absolutely so I see some of these songs as being the real America. Yes, for me, as an Englishman, that's a bit of a rich thing to say. It's beautiful. It's something beautiful about the romantic vision of a place from an outside perspective that's different than if you grew up in Mississippi. It's just different. You can love it in a different way when you're looking at it from the outside, and there's a romantic vision that doesn't come when you grow up in. It's just a different thing. No, there's a lot of people flinching down there. And I must say that in all the years of traveling through America as a rock and roll sing over the Moroccan Lean, I never really knew any any acre of it at all. I didn't. I thought I had it covered, but I had no idea that every three miles you're another America, or even three hundred yards. So there's no such thing as generalizing. I've been reading travels with Charlie Steinbeck, and of course his vision he was disturbed in nineteen sixty right in that it's very humorous. But then I read this William Leese heat Moon book, The Blue Highways, and are just so impressed by the different cultures and peoples that came through and parked up in different valleys in Kentucky and the whole Appalachia thing. Amazing. Yeah, So the start of playing the addiction, the phrasing of everything. Never mind what happens when you walk down the street and somebody's coming towards you, you know, and you're going but I look at that, I would say that that guy is Russian origin. So you start going wow, when you get up into Oregon and places on that coastline. There you see the effects of the all the people that came around all those years from a different approach to this. To this beautiful country friend who's from the Appalachia region and he was learning to play banjo and they were explaining to him, this is the way we play it here, but if you go three miles that way, this is the lick there. Yeah. And it's and all the songs just like almost like you know, regional accents, right. The same is true with the music community. By community, they have their own sound. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's something else, isn't it. Well, it's a pleasure speaking to you. Thank you so much for doing this, and thank you for making such a beautiful album again. Yeah, well, thank you for getting me up so that I actually have a function today. Otherwise I don't know what i'd do. Yeah, but it's nice to see you. Same. Thanks the Robert Plant for chatting with Rick about his days with Zeppelin and more. You can hear his latest album with Dallison Krauss and all of our favorite songs of his on my playlist at Broken record podcast dot com. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast, where you can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced of help from Lea Rose, Jason Gambrel, Ben Taliday, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help from Nick Chafen. Our executive producer is Emil LaBelle. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription service that offers bonus content and uninterrupted ad three listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts subscriptions, and please remember to share, wait and review us on your podcast that Our theme music's by the Great Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond.