radio-and-the-road

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Misty Sunrise by Kuba Szymik

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Robert Plant on stage

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Krauss provides a nearly nonstop laugh track during some of her musical partner’s digressions — and occasionally shoots a look to a visitor that says, can you believe this guy? — but in the breaks between the comedy, she can cut to the quick with a precise statement that says in 150 words what Plant might get around to in an eloquently footnoted, highly entertaining thousand. No assumptions should be made about who’s more alpha in this pack. (“I always think Alison really is the leader of this outfit,” Burnett says in a separate interview.)

The generational difference (he’s 73; she’s 50) is apparent only once, when asked some of their initial impressions of each other’s music before joining forces. One song of his that Krauss cites as an all-time favorite is “No Quarter.” “That was great, yeah — that was a John Paul Jones moment,” Plant says, giving credit where credit is due. But she’s not even thinking of the Zeppelin original; Krauss really came to love the version Plant and Jimmy Page cut in their post-Zep years as a duo, on a 1994 live album that was also titled “No Quarter.”

Plant, of course, knew of Krauss’ prowess as a renowned fiddler who’d gone multiplatinum crossing over into pop in the ’90s. But the track he brings up is Alison and her brother Viktor’s 2004 version of his 1983 modest solo hit “Big Log.” “Alison’s bluegrass world is tantalizing and really beautiful,” he says. “But when I heard her singing ‘Big Log,’ I was so flattered. It was on your brother’s record, wasn’t it?”

She replies, “My brother and I loved when that song came out on MTV. We thought it was the most incredible thing.”

Plant confesses, “I couldn’t believe that anybody could take my [solo] songwriting seriously, so I was just amazed. I used to play it over and over again, saying, ‘Look, people know me out there.’ The fact that a luminary like Alison would be singing a song about my torrid love affairs … And you did the outro ad lib as well.”

"Krauss adds: “Through the years we were always sending songs back and forth, saying, ‘Oh, this would be a good one.’ … [But] I try not to do anything that I don’t feel inspired to do — to stay away from anything contrived. And sometimes that’s years and years and years between records.” (She doesn’t mean just Plant-Krauss albums; she’s released only two of her own in the past 15 years.) “I just want to do it at the right time, or things don’t last for you and don’t keep growing in your mind.”

Plant provides a more elaborate travelogue of the road he’s been on between sand-raising and roof-raising. There was a brief attempt to record a second album together in the late 2000s, but the wanderlust that made Plant interested in exploring American roots pushed him into panning for global gold. “I wanted to go back to North Africa,” he says. “I wanted to stand on the Atlas Mountains. I wanted to hear the Berbers singing in the fields. I wanted to hear that thing that I have no understanding of. And I wanted to do something that didn’t have a structure, particularly. So that’s the way it went: some time with [his group] the Band of Joy, and then off into the desert with my British mates [his other group, the Sensational Shape Shifters]. We were playing around Marrakech, and I was traveling down the Moroccan coast, because I needed somebody to knock me about musically. And I don’t know whether I learned anything from it — or just ate a lot of really good food — but then Alison and I were ready to get together.” The two of them sharing a bill with Willie Nelson in 2019, and Plant enjoying hanging with Krauss’ musicologist dad and her band, reminded him: “Oh. My other family. My sister, almost.”

Says Burnett: “They very much make all the decisions between them. But I think Robert would say too … she’s a very strong woman, and we both have great respect for her. She’s brilliant. On the first record, she was always pushing for it to be dark and slower: ‘Intensity doesn’t have anything to do with tempo.’ And it leaves you a lot of space in the slower tempos for the darkness, you know?” But why did Krauss, seen by so many as an angel of light, want to use this teaming to emphasize the dark side? “I couldn’t hazard a guess,” Burnett chuckles, being someone who’s just fine with a woman maintaining a little mystery."

“She’s much more pristine, so I think her goal is to get it to a certain level of excellence that you don’t really aspire to in the blues. And Robert is the other way: He’s loose like the blues,” Burnett says. “She’s much more rehearsed and he’s more improvisational; she’s much more clean and he’s dirty.”

***

“When she takes the lead, I tremble,” Plant says, as counterpoint. “Because it’s setting me a task for which I’m not very well equipped. I mean, I know how I can hear myself singing underneath, alongside, behind, to the left of what Allison’s doing. But invariably, it’s wrong.”

Krauss laughs, then inquires seriously: “How is it wrong?”

“Because you say, ‘Well, yeah, that’s very nice, you know, Robert — but perhaps you want to do this.’ And then she gives me some kind of upside-down bit of vocal, and I go, ‘Ah, I can’t even imagine how that works against that absolutely pure, magnificent, feminine, Alison Krauss voice. I’ve got to jump through a hoop, get over a fence, come back round and stand on my head. She teaches me a lot, which is great. Because I want to do things where I’m not really properly equipped for it. I make a hash of it, but somebody can mop it up. I’m quite frightened of it all, to be honest.”

***

Can lightning strike three times? Producer Burnett, for one, eager to keep the band together this time. “You know, Robert’s mentioned that he wants to do this again. It would be fun just to do the next one as a straight-up rockin’ record, too, so I’m lobbying for that. We’ll see what happens. They’re hoping to be able to go on the road, but I would love to get in (back into Sound Emporium) as soon as we can. So maybe this one will happen in just five or seven years or something,” he laughs, then corrects himself. “No, I feel this is the time to do it. If we’re going to do it again, we should just do it and get after it.”

"Clearly, Plant can wax quite eloquent when his old band arises in the course of conversation, but the documentary about the group that premiered at film festivals this fall, “Becoming Led Zeppelin,” is the one subject brought up that leaves him at a loss for words. “I just don’t know,” he says, amid some long pauses. “I recognize some of the sentiment of it, but … I was there, and to see a group of people try to bring some perspective to it now is very odd. I’m not sure it’s not just too vast to be solarized and polarized like that.” It’s clear he’d rather be talking about something else.

Like, say, his early solo career, as something that represented some bumpy road blocks on the path to a peaceful present. “I had to get a new voice,” he explains. To his later chagrin, a new wardrobe was involved in that, too. “I had to wear Katharine Hamnett silk jumpsuits and ballet shoes. I had to have a moment” — of self-embarrassment, he means."

“But how do you think I feel? I wore paisley jumpers on ‘Top of the Pops’! I just wanted to get the hell out of there. I was young enough to actually make a break for it, to see if I could get past the perimeter fence, but I kept falling into the quagmire more and more. I needed some strength around me, and I didn’t have it. I could sing, I could write, but I was almost writing for somebody I didn’t know … called me.”

Plant finally found his new voice, in Marrakech and other far-flung climes … but also in Austin and Nashville.

So here it is, Robert's decided to collaborate with Alison – almost his sister – after his ego was flattered that she covered his solo song rather than Zep 🤣

Also it's kinda funny to read about Robert liking to be teached and then compare it to Scarlett Sabet's words about liking Jimmy to be her mentor.

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Blink-182 at the Showcase Theater in Corona July 18,1995

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Mateusz Majewski

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XAVIER - intersticiel

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The world you live in. Credit: jabisanz

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Siouxsie Sioux, London

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Upper Lena Lake, August 2017

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Immerse ღ

Laguna Sofía, Puerto Natales, Patagonia Chilena.

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Stevie Nicks at the American Music Awards in 1983

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