Dali's Visual Adventures

The Circus Magazine Interview — Robert Plant: 'I've Always Flown The Jolly Roger, But With A Twisted Smile'

Robert Plant is rock 'n roll's definitive front man, a lion-maned athlete and beauty who struts and sings the wares of the world's mightiest band, Led Zeppelin. Already possessed of a remarkable blues voice, he helped shape the vocalist's role as a visual focal point and energy catalyst in the huge arenas the supergroups faced by the early seventies.

Even so distinguished an idol as Jimmy Page, founder and musical director of Zeppelin and generally acknowledged one of the top two or three guitarists in rock history, has found it prudent to delegate much of the spotlight to his golden-haired compatriot. While the black velvet suited Page prowls ominously in and out of the shadows, powering his musical wizardry like Merlin calling the shot behind the throne, the radiant Plant is galloping along the footlights like the Once & Future King himself, charming and exhorting the citizenry. Page and Plant go together like thunder and lightning.

When Swan Song Records V.P. Danny Goldberg entered the lobby of Los Angeles' Continental Hyatt House during the last leg of Zepelin's 1975 American tour, he vowed to Circus Magazine's Steve Demorest, "I have entered the Dark Forest and I shall stalk the Mighty Plant." It was two days before the valiant veep landed his quarry though, because Robert was staying with friends in Malibu to avoid the "negativity and clamor" of L.A. nightlife. But after checking out the pink and purple "Physical Graffiti" billboard across from the infamous hotel one afternoon, the virile vocalist finally presented himself at Danny's door.

Circus: Let's start with how you work out your lyrics. Everyone abdicated responsibility to you a couple of albums back, right?

Plant: No, apart from “Tangerine,” which Jimmy wrote lyrics to, and apart from the blues things from the early days, I've always done ’em. It isn't a case of having a monopoly, but most of the time I'm concerned with the melody of the words, singing down instead of up or whatever. It's become my department. I mean, if anybody writes a song and it's complete and great I wouldn’t start going “hey, I do all the lyrics . .”

Circus: What do you read?

Plant: Well, I have a heavy leaning toward the Romantics . . . Shelley is really heavy. Every time I think I've written something good I start reading “Prometheus Unbound” or something like that, and Christ! Just any book I can pick up and open any place and find I'm intrigued or that my day lightens by reading what they've written. It could be anybody at all, really. Cummings I like.

Circus: Because of the sensuality of the words, or the attitude behind it?

Plant: The attitude, yeah. But this is with reference to the pastoral, more ethereal side of the lyrics. A lot of the stuff that we do, like “Trampled Underfoot,” just appears; we'd got together to do something entirely different and it just came out. I immediately thought the drive and pace of the thing resembled a car, so I started and wrote two verses while the band were running through it to get it into some order. Then I disappeared upstairs into a bedroom because we were recording at a house, and I wrote the rest of the song in about half an hour. It’s a wordplay: “Greasy slick damn body, groovy leather trim/Like the way you hold the road, momma it ain’t no sin.” Chuck Berry really was the master of that sort of thing.

So that was composed virtually on the spot, whereas things like “Kashmir,” the lyrics of which I'm really pleased with . . . I went to Morocco. It was the first time I started gettin’ away to other lands without an entourage of people or as a member of a band. It was just over a year ago, and the nearer I got to the Sahara, this atmosphere beckoned me to open my eyes in another way. I wrote the first verse before we had any music, I just started to write a poem: “Let the sun beat down upon my face, and stars to fill my dreams/I am a traveller of both time and space, to be where I have been.” The people in the mountains, the Berbers and the people beyond there, have all these dances to Pan and I knew they were there. Occasionally you could ride into the hills and see these people watching as you went by and you got this fantastic feeling, as if you were going through a no-man’s land between Kashmir and India. There's an area there, a no-man’s land between the borders, where all the Bhutan warriors sit with their horses and muskets, waiting for the tourists.

Circus: Did you ever read about the first English explorers who went down into the Middle East and Africa in the nineteenth century? Like Burton, the first white guy who snuck into Mecca?

Plant: No, but I'm into that. Anyway, after 6 o'clock at night, nobody’s allowed from India to Pakistan and there’s about three miles of road they just don’t let you through, but you can see these circles of guys on horseback. . .

Circus: Bandits?

Plant: Yeah, yeah, they're bandits. That really fires me off, because since I really got into what I’m doing, I've always flown the Jolly Roger, y’ know? I've always had a skull and crossbones flying above me, but always with a twisted smile. I really dig adventure. So lyrically something like “Kashmir” extends that. And at the end of the song I'm almost satisfied as if I've just done the whole trip. To me, it's just like painting pictures, like “Stairway To Heaven.”

Circus: Was there something you’d just been doing, like reading or tramping on the moors, which sparked “Stairway”?

Plant: No, not really. I was sitting with Jimmy and I was feeling really, really tranquil. Jimmy and I have a fantastic rapport which seems to be building more and more and more. We just spent some time down in the bottom of the West Indies on an island called Dominica that nobody goes to which was ridiculous. Talk about pirates! This was on mid-tour break, the end of February; we didn’t go back to England.

Circus: What did you do down there, was it civilized?

Plant: Ummm, civilized yeah, but only to a degree. The English had gone in there and put up a flagpole with a Union Jack and a cannon, and then they’d blown the English out and said ‘Right, man, from now on we'll do it ourselves.” And henceforth all the roads have fallen apart. You got a fantastic feeling as you drove down through the rain forest. The people were quite content in their plane of existence, they have Catholicism on a Sunday and the rest of the time they revert to their beliefs from way, way, way, way back. So you got a fantastic collision. There were things in the air and you could feel it all, but nobody would say anything. Seventy-thousand black people, Caribe Indians, and about a hundred whites, and Page and I suddenly arrive at the airfield. It’s so fantastic to arrive at a place that so mumbley-jumbley loose and silly, pot-holes in the road, boulders rolling down the mountains, an old queen of a DJ who runs the radio station for the island who bids us good morning on the radio, not mentioning any surnames, just “Morning, Robert and Jimmy.” It set us into a great mood to meet the rest of the band getting back from England for the second half of the tour. It’s the first time I haven’t gone tootling back to the farm in Wales trembling. Instead I went and really enjoyed myself.

Circus: Do you have a room at home where you do most of your writing?

Plant: No, it’s sporadic really. When it doesn’t come then I have my '48 Chevv pickup to bomb around in. Sometimes I go out collecting scrap metal, second-hand car batteries . . .

Circus: What for??

Plant: To sell to the scrap metal people with my gypsy friends. I just like to vary my life, to step back to where all my friends were before this part of my life began. I step back with them, and at the same time I can write down my observations. Because I am not the special person, they don't take me as that and it’s really good.

Circus: You actually have real gypsies in the area where you live?

Plant: Well, they're called didi-coi, it’s a gypsy word, and they thrive on the industrialized areas where they can collect scrap metal and things. When it’s fruit-picking season they pick fruit and then they move on with their trucks. They've always got burning tackle on the back to cut up a bit of metal. Some of them have great caravans and trailers. There’s still a bit of spirit there. Sometimes I drive into an encampment on the side of the road. I've got a Range Rover which is an equivalent of a Chevy Blazer. It’s painted like a piece of oak, the whole car is like a piece of wood, which is like the old cattle trucks. So the didi-coi come out to have a look at my machine, and I get out to have a look at their fantastic trailers with all the chrome on them. There's always a sort of vibe when you approach them, because anyone who's always lived in one place and never moved around, their parents always warn them ‘watch the gypsies.” It’s like ‘lock up your daughters’: people just don’t understand their lifestyle and they fear these wandering folk. The real gypsy areas are down in France. Ronnie Lane has been hanging out a lot . . . that’s a horrible phrase to use . . . he’s dealing with horses, goes to all the horse sales, lives in Wales and looks more like a didi-coi every day. It’s a good life, y’ know, ‘cause they're no more settled than we are. They have a lot of taste in the things they collect, the things they’ll pull out from under some seat in the caravan to show you.

Circus: Do you feel like you're plugging into another tradition of the country? It's almost medieval that they should be roaming around like that. Do you think you'd have been comfortable in previous centuries in England?

Plant: Oh, for sure. Although it was survival of the fittest, there was always the bard, there had to be the man to bring the news and sing it out under the oak tree. And in England you go past oak trees that have been planted many hundreds of years ago on a man-made conical mound. As you drive through the mountains in Wales you can’t miss it for miles. It's been put there on purpose, this conical hill which comes right up like a Christmas pudding where they all met to hear the news.

Circus: It's like history’s watching you go by. Was it the Druids who did that? Have you studied them much?

Plant: Not too much, no. But it all came from the media in those days. The bard was a guy who had to know his way around a big country—Britain’s a small country now, but it was big then—he possessed white magic and news of what went on over the hill. It started well before the Druids. I believe the Druids came to England because of the vibes in England. They travelled from Iberia (Spain). They reckon that before these waves of people like the Angles and the Saxons and the Jutes came across, there were these people who were so attuned to nature that they could vanish, and they called these people the “green men.” When the British first came they were frightened to death of them because they couldn’t communicate with them. They were like will-o’-the-wisps, one minute they're there and the next minute they are gone. Even now you've got a lot of pub signs, like the Green Man, with these strange man-type figures on them.

Circus: Sounds like leprechauns and brownies. Maybe that’s where that folklore came from.

Plant: Yeah, yeah, that's probably what it was—the people who were so hand in hand with nature they could become a part of whatever they wanted to become. That’s all British myth and folklore.

Circus: Even back in the “Beowulf” days the scops used to be welcomed and honored, they were so glad to get news. It was like the Pony Express, and he got the best seat in the dining room.

Plant: Yeah, I suppose he was in quite a ridiculous position really. I mean, he could start all sorts of trouble. He could dictate the attitudes of people by what he said and cause disruption. As it is today. I suppose there are a lot of bands who haven’t really known why they’ve done it, but have tried to advocate revolution with no cause, trying to create the energy amongst the people because they couldn’t create it positively and properly with what they were doing.

Circus: Have you studied much about early English history? Are you into King Arthur and did you ever look at the differences between myths and reality?

Plant: Well, yeah, I've gone to a lot of lectures trying to break down the Arthurian legends into fact, trying to place Camelot and do away with the idea that Arthur was a guy on a horse with armor on, because it was impossible. He was just a boyo, he was a bandoliero, y' know? He had a bunch of guys, and it turns out in the end that instead of the Richard Harris type Camelot with jousting tournaments and chivalry, Arthur was one of the last educated Britons from the Roman standard, and after the Romans sank back around the Fifth century, a slight tradition of the Roman society was maintained by a few people although all the buildings fell apart. So as the waves of the Danes and the Saxons came in, there were a few guys who had still got it together and could still, through the chaos, hold an amount of command over men: and he was one of those guys. But from the bits that I've pulled from the Welsh Triads, I think if he fancied a chick or a box of gold bullion he’d just go to the monastery with his mates and say ‘Alright, stand exactly where you are, I need that bread,” under the auspices of the fact that his men needed weapons to fight the Saxons. That is what you draw from a lot of the Cornish poetry.

And then you go into the myth side of it. The fact that nobody will concede to Arthur's death is fantastic, that is the great part. There’s still the belief that when Arthur returns, Albion will return to its past tranquility. There are tales of Arthur lying asleep in the mountains in Wales. There’s the tale of a small boy about 20 years ago who ran into a cave to get out of the rain and came into this open cavern that was lit by torches, and there on a stone lay Arthur with Merlin standing by. And the boy freaked and ran out and blurted this story of these two men surrounded by torches up in the mountains.

Circus: Too bad he couldn’t find his way back.

Plant: Of course he couldn’t, yeah. And that wasn’t that long ago. So you've got all these things bubbling underneath. It's a great p.r. job for keeping the vibe high, the unification of all the people on Midsummer's Day. That one day England won’t be in such a state of chaotic social turmoil, because tranquility will be brought about by the spirit of the people.

Circus: Yeah, America doesn’t really have that. We had the hell-raisers, the Boston Tea Party, Davey Crockett, Billy the Kid . . .

Plant: Yeah, see it's spiritualistic, and as the white people and the black people have moved in, the spiritualism doesn’t belong to the country itself. It belongs to the civilization that came along and took the country over, so it’s Christianity and how strong is that? A guy called Lewis Spence wrote a lot in the Twenties on the folklore and legend of not only England but the Inca and Maya tribes.

Circus: Do you do a lot of anthropological studying?

Plant: Well, not studying as such, it’s just that there’s nothing else I'd rather learn about than the mysteries of other times that will not be accepted by the masses. I mean, the masses will not accept U.F.O.’s because they haven't been conditioned to accept their presence. But in fact everyone who works in a space research place, if you get them to break their seal of secrecy, will openly admit that everyone there knows U.F.O.’s are alive and well. So my motivation in reading and general interest doesn’t lie in finding out about the brand new Corvette Sting Ray coming out next week, but with what has been forgotten, and is being denied validity now, and what is to come.

Circus: Do you like Erroll Flynn, do you identify with him? Maybe he was a little too urbane and polished.

Plant: Well, there you go, yeah. It must have been terrible doing all those things in front of a camera. I'd rather have been Magellan or Amerigo Vespucci.

Circus: If you were a Norse god, who would you want to be?

Plant: Ah . . . the god of fertility I think, although I don't know his name. Perhaps it was Plant. Well, that’s it, I said “The hammer of the gods will drive our ships to new lands to fight the horde and see men cry/Valhalla I am coming . . .” That’s Led Zeppelin. Yeah, it's gotta be real adventure, whether it be wandering around the back streets of Bangkok at 2 A.M. looking for a whorehouse or staring across the new frontier . . . what do they call it in Hong Kong? . . . the new lands that the English rented off the Chinese where you can just stare into China . . . or to desire to get to Lhasa from Katmandu.

Circus: There’s a book called “The Wilder Shores Of Love,” by Lesley Blanch which is about four Englishwomen in the nineteenth century who just went down around Arabia and fell into the life there and left Europe behind. They decided they’d rather bestow their favors on sheiks or camel drivers and wander around behind camel caravans.

Plant: Sure. See, if you give yourself long enough away from western culture, how long does it take before you realize you're wasting your life following so many patterns you could do in your sleep, they're so mundane. Seeing so much increases my appetite. That’s probably what I'll end up doing, wandering somewhere like the northern hills of Siam or Thailand . . .

Circus: You really like eastern Asia.

Plant: Umm. Yeah, I do. 'Cause it frightens me. 'Cause I get scared there ‘cause it’s not my land.

Circus: Stephen Davis just told me how hard it is to get accepted in Morocco, having to get somebody to say you're all right. He went and did some work with the jou-jouka people and said you hang around the village for a while before they decide you're trustworthy.

Plant: Umm, sus’ you out, yeah. I thought of them when I was writing the lyrics of “Kashmir”—“to sit with elders of a gentler race the world has seldom seen/who talk of days to which they sit and wait when all will be revealed.” Brian Jones went up there, didn't he, and did that recording. There's so many places still where you can go . . . I mean it’s OK being the swashbuckling rock ’n roller, but who got the best, who dug it the most, Elvis Presley or Marco Polo? You've always got that vibe of waiting for the acceptance, which you do onstage too, I suppose, to a degree, as you wander into another port, another town or station to rest or express yourself.

Circus: Are you interested in outer space?

Plant: Space is so endless, and there’s just so much to know about your garden, y' know? So much to watch, ant colonies and all. I think I'll contend with the earth for a while. Communication from another planet in the past which is related to us through the legends of our different civilizations, the fact that they’ve been here before, interests me. I like legends. 'Cause every civilization has its own legends which relate to the coming of the dragon, the fiery orb from the sky. The Chinese will not build a house or bury a human on the dragon path, which they relate to the lines of cosmic force.

Circus: You sound very religious sometimes.

Plant: I do?! Oh, I don’t know about that. I know abuse of nature is wrong and you mustn’t tangle with it. All magic should be white.

Circus: Sometimes there’s such a dichotomy onstage at your shows because Jimmy has a sinister side to his image with that conical purple light on him, and the tortured violin solo. And there is that ominous or portentous “Lucifer Rising” film score he did. Whereas you seem pretty steadily radiant. White magic and black magic.

Plant: Well, I love Jimmy immensely, T love him with my whole heart, really, because we’ve shared so many of these experiences that I've mentioned and we are akin in our thoughts towards them. But he’s far . . . he’s a very wise man, he knows so much more than I know about the things that mystify us all. He's a true scholar along many lines. Some of them I haven’t even gotten into with him yet. 'Cause we've got years and years to go.

Circus: But you find yourselves leading each other?

Plant: Oh yeah, for sure. Sometimes my motivation will take him by the arm and grab him and pull him and say ‘Come on, this is it.’ Sometimes it's his turn. I think we do augment each other, that is the essence of it, and we do highlight each other in a much more subtle way than can ever be written down.

Circus: Did Shelley travel a lot?

Plant: I believe he did . . .

Circus: He must at least have gone to Italy. I think Keats died in Rome and Byron died trying to swim the Bosphorus. There are a lot of whirlpools there.

Plant: And those guys were always frowned on weren’t they?

Circus: It was always whether they would be allowed to come to the social functions or not.

Plant: Yeah, and when they did get there they had to toe the line. As long as you didn’t paint a picture they weren’t ready to see you were #1. But if you allowed them to see you were what you were, the masses went ‘Ohhh-ohh.” I believe that Shelley died in Italy and his friends put him on a boat and set fire to the boat and pushed him out into the water and got drunk on the beach in his honor . . . He was born the same day as me . . . The only dreams I've ever had of being pushed out in a boat when I'm dead and being set fire to have been like in the old Kirk Douglas/ Tony Curtis movies.

Circus: It's Norse, yeah. I saw that movie too.