Why Robert Plant Refused to Play Led Zeppelin Songs Live

Robert Plant knew John Bonham’s dying in 1980 had introduced Led Zeppelin to an finish. “There’s absolutely no point. No point at all,” he mentioned in his first post-Zeppelin interview in September 1982, two years later.

“There’s certain people you don’t do without in life,” he added. “You don’t keep things going for the sake of it. There’s no functional purpose for keeping things going. For whose convenience? Nobody’s, really.”

His solo debut, Pictures at Eleven, had arrived in the summertime of 1982. His second, 1983’s The Principle of Moments, moved nonetheless additional away from Led Zeppelin’s heavy-blues sound. As far as Plant was involved, wanting backward wasn’t useful. He nonetheless cared about his former bandmates, after all, but it surely was necessary to Plant to preserve transferring.

“I miss Jimmy [Page] a lot,” he mentioned, “but we’ve been pals for years and years, and we had a relationship that was built out of certain standards. Although we’re totally dissimilar, totally unalike, we knew exactly how far to take each other. When you’ve been with a bloke for 14 years, you naturally miss certain parts, musically and personality-wise. But there’s a long way to go before I stop singing, and right now I’m having a great time with my own guys.”

This forward-thinking mentality prolonged to his set lists. Plant would play his first live performance as a solo artist on Aug. 26, 1983, on the Peoria Civic Center in Illinois, launching a tour in assist of The Principle of Moments. He did not carry out any Led Zeppelin songs that evening. The identical would maintain true for the following 5 years, with solely a few exceptions – “Whole Lotta Love” in Manchester, U.Okay., in December 1983, and “In the Evening” in Stourbridge in December 1987.

Watch Robert Plant Perform ‘Black Dog’ in Concert

By then, Led Zeppelin had already endured an objectively disastrous reunion at Live Aid. Still, Plant had a change of coronary heart. He lastly started incorporating a extra Zeppelin-esque really feel into 1988’s Now and Zen, which additionally included direct samples of his former band’s songs and a visitor look by Page.

“I’ve stopped apologizing to myself for having this great period of success and financial acceptance,” Plant advised Rolling Stone again then. “It’s [time] to get on and enjoy it now. I want to have a great time instead of making all these excuses.”

Plant lastly started common performances of Led Zeppelin songs on the Now and Zen tour. “I feel regenerated singing them,” he added. “It’s very powerful stuff.” Much better-received reunions together with his former bandmates would comply with, as Plant continued to re-interpret numerous Zeppelin songs with others throughout his solo reveals.

He even managed to shock himself: During a live performance in Reykjavík, Iceland shortly earlier than the COVID-19 pandemic started, Plant determined to spontaneously launch into “Immigrant Song.” The vocally difficult opening reduce from 1970’s Led Zeppelin III will not be precisely for the faint of coronary heart. “They’d never done it before,” Plant later advised the Los Angeles Times. “We just hit it, and bang — there it was. I thought, ‘Oh, I didn’t think I could still do that.'”

Watch Robert Plant And Alison Krauss Perform ‘When the Levee Breaks’