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Unlike almost everyone else in the music business, neither Jimmy Page nor Robert Plant wants to refer to their latest project as a Led Zeppelin reunion. Granted, the bulk of what turns up on their MTV "Unledded" special and the No Quarter album comes from the Zep catalog—from such album rock chestnuts as "Kashmir" and "The Battle of Evermore" to reconfigured blues like "Nobody's Fault but Mine" or "Since I Been Loving You." It's not meant as a faithful and profitable resurrection of the old sound—as Plant puts it, "There's no point in going around and having a huge Rolling Stones stadium type of deal"—and it doesn't come off that way.

Instead, No Quarter and "Unledded" suggest that Page and Plant are becoming even bolder musically than when they first hooked up, some 25 years ago. Their new "Battle of Evermore" swaps Sandy Denny's Celtic flourishes for the raga-bred ornamentation of Nadjma, while "Nobody's Fault but Mine" avoids the electric blues treatment found on Presence, and offers instead a banjo-and-hurdy-gurdy arrangement that comes across like seventeenth-century bluegrass. Then there's "Kashmir," which shifts the musical geography from Central Asia to the Middle East, fleshing out the tune's hypnotic signature riff with Egyptian percussion and a violin solo of heartbreaking lyricism. There are also several new songs, including the gorgeous ballad "Wonderful One" and a collaboration with Gnawa musicians in Morocco titled "Wah Wah."

At best, Plant contends, this project has only a tangential relation to the past. "We're going to talk about our music and our ambitions. But they are very present tense and future tense. The fact that we played together before is just convenient, because we can get a lot of formalities out of the way when we're writing new songs."

Convenient, yes—especially the convenience of being rock legends whose slightest hint of a reunion has been enough to set fans, promoters and label execs drooling with anticipation. Page credits "MTV Unplugged" with setting this project in motion. The TV show's interest should come as no surprise to Musician readers. As MTV's John Canelli noted in these pages last year, "speaking for everyone who is involved with the show, a Jimmy Page and Robert Plant reunion… would be the ultimate."

Of course, as Page points out, "By the time we applied ourselves to the overall project, and making it work, and getting numbers together, it was totally 'plugged.' I mean, there wasn't anything that was unplugged. But that made it far more interesting and far more of a challenge to ourselves. Because then you can talk about it with enthusiasm, and not feel that it's hackneyed."

Over the years, Page and Plant have steadfastly resisted notions of a true Led Zepp confab (see sidebar, page 60), even while teaming for such disparate one-offs as the Honeydrippers, the Atlantic Records anniversary show and each other's solo records. This time they've finessed the reunion issue by simply not inviting along Zeppelin's other surviving member, bassist John Paul Jones. To hear Plant tell the story, that decision had more to do with communicating with efficiency than protecting a legacy.

"We can reach conclusions musically and decisions very quickly, 'cause the two of us can work it out very fast," he says. "That's probably why there's just two of us doing it, and not three-or four or five or six. Also, we don't have to patronize each other. A decision is a decision, and if you can do it real quick, you can cut a lot of the pleasantries out and say, 'Yeah, that's good,' or 'No, that's not.' Just by having it one-to-one."

At the moment, though, it's two-on-one, as Page and Plant sit on comfortably overstuffed sofas in a posh Manhattan hotel on a clear October afternoon. Plant, his golden curls glinting in the sun and a handful of wrinkles on his well-tanned face the only real evidence that it has been 25 years since he joined Led Zeppelin, looks obscenely healthy. Page looks rather more as a veteran rocker should, but his face retains a familiar cherubic charm. When these two start talking, virtually any musical topic is fair game, from rai star Cheb Khaled to bluesman Sleepy John Estes to French crooner Sacha Distel. "I'd got this complete obsession with Italy, where I believed I was going to be the next Sacha Distel," said Plant at one point. "'29 Palms' was a major, major wah out there."

"Sounds a bit more like distant sashaying than Sacha Distel," Page cracked back.

"Yeah, it was a bit of distant sashaying. She wasn't pleased," Plant said. "But I'm sure we'll get there now."

Get there we did. Though what it had to do with Sacha Distel I'm still wondering.

MUSICIAN: Shall we start with the way you reconfigured the old songs, or should we talk about the new material?

PAGE: Well, let's start with the new material, I think. When we decided to get back together and see what would happen, Robert had prior to that, maybe, called Martin Meissonnier in Paris, who made up some tape loops for us of North African drums. Which was pretty evocative stuff, really. It was good to be working with these sort of rhythms, which didn't involve a normal drummer as such, with bass drum, snare and hi-hats, all this sort of thing.

And it was pretty instant, actually, as far as getting inspiration from these things. Because that's exactly what they were—inspirational. Two of the numbers which were employed on this TV show were things with the tape loops: "Wonderful One" and "Yallah."

PLANT: I think the loops, really, were what gave us the green light. Meissonnier is a French producer who has produced people from Iggy Pop to Cheb Khaled—

MUSICIAN: He's the guy who introduced King Sunny Adé to America.

PLANT: Is that right? He's a good guy, a crucial guy. Married to Amina, an excellent Tunisian singer who's had a lot of relatively across-the-board pop success in Paris. And because of his links with Amina, he was invited to the University of Tunis, and he was introduced to the head of music there, who virtually opened every single door for him to go exploring the sort of vast varieties of musical differences in Tunisia.

All across North Africa, you've got this incredibly vibrant music scene that's really exciting. Every street pumping out music at every street corner, loud as loud can be, that's what it's like in the average get-down medina area of a North African city. It's vibrant, and it's happy and it's chattery. He'd been exposed to that, and he got a lot of drum stuff.

I thought that the best thing that we could do, Jimmy and I, was to start without the confines and restrictions of a rock group situation, and just see what we can do. The drum loops, they were like a kind of third party that didn't speak, so we were there in a room with this tape loop and with a huge P.A., and we just turned the whole thing on.

It was kind of a bit odd and uncomfortableish, because we knew that if we couldn't write, we didn't have any career, really, together.

MUSICIAN: Now I know Robert has spent a lot of time in Morocco; what about you, Jimmy?

PAGE: I've traveled with Robert there, and then I've been on several occasions during the '80s. But this is the first time that I've actually done anything musically there. There was one time when I went around with a tape recorder and stuff, but we seemed to get sidetracked.

PLANT: That's a very nice way of putting it. [laughs wickedly] I think I was there, too. We went all out, thousands of miles, and went without a mains lead!

MUSICIAN: So you went to Marrakech; what then? "Yalla" looked to be a pretty impromptu performance.

PAGE: Actually, we were going to do a little soundcheck, and stop and start again, but we didn't. We just did it. Just went for it. And that was it. That was a one-shot.

PLANT: You have to get the picture that the Jamaa I-Fna in Marrakech is one of the most renowned squares in the whole of the world for storytellers, soothsayers, musicians, jugglers, fire-eaters, blokes with snakes. I mean, the whole place is like a mayhem of artisans of one kind or another. I'd been there that many times, and been intimidated into emptying my pockets of dirham, because they've got kids, and as soon as they spot a tourist, they just give the kid a nod and the kid runs over with a hat and asks for money.

So we thought we'd reverse the process, and take our loop, and set up and play. And see if we could get any dirham out of them.

MUSICIAN: And?

Sidebar

Over the years, Musician has published many interviews with Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and members of their bands, with the question of a Led Zeppelin reunion inevitably arising. What's interesting, in retrospect, is the consistency of response:

ROBERT PLANT (March 1988): "Page and I get offered everything: women, little boys, money, cocaine, the lot, to just go back and do that again. I don't think it would be a good idea at all. [But] I reserve judgment to change my mind in five years' time."

JIMMY PAGE (November 1990): "I'd be prepared to do it, but who knows? I think you said it: Robert doesn't want to do it, so there you go."

And the winner is … PLANT'S GUITARIST PHIL JOHNSTONE (March 1988): "If this album [Now and Zen] sells as much as Led Zeppelin III, the worst-selling record they had, I think you might see Robert and Jimmy back onstage together. It would have to be along the lines of, 'Hey Jimmy, would you like to join my band for a while,' not Led Zeppelin. He's never said it in so many words, but my sense is that he isn't going back unless it's on his terms."

PLANT: We got a lot of claps.

PAGE: Yeah, but there might have been people going 'round with hats. I'm sure there was a bit of that, because at one point, we had these speakers up on stands, with the loop coming through, and the speakers started to move back into the audience. Hurriedly, people ran in and rescued it. So I'm sure, if a speaker was going to disappear and be sold off at the other end of the square, some stray hats went around. Who knows?

MUSICIAN: Having only heard it once, I couldn't swear to it, but I had the impression that at least some of what Robert was singing was not in English.

PLANT: No. There were some bits of Arabic here and there.

MUSICIAN: You know enough Arabic to improvise lyrics?

PLANT: I know enough Arabic to wind people up a little bit, and get them clapping louder. I don't know how I learned it, but I guess I always wanted people to clap. What a sad boy! [laughs] I'd rather have a Scotch now than talk about it, to be honest. But I go there enough now to know that I want to communicate, and the more you can communicate with people in their home, in their natural tongue, the more responsive they are. And they're very, very nice people, the Moroccans, and they're very keen for you to get into their vibe, you know. So "yalla" basically means "this is it, let's go for it."

MUSICIAN: I'm assuming it was a different situation working with the Gnawa musicians on "Wah Wah." Did you know what you were going to do before you got started?

PLANT: When we got together with Ibrahim and the other Gnawa, we didn't have a clue what to do. We just arrived. Jimmy had a guitar, I had a vocal. We set the P.A. up. We had some hand-held cameras. We jammed with these guys who we couldn't speak to; we spoke through a translator to begin with, and then we spoke with our eyes after that.

We started doing a song called "Chevrolet," which is an old field holler from North Mississippi, recorded by Alan Lomax in the '60s, and then a record called The Blues Roll On, on Atlantic. We tried to take back the blues to these guys who were descendants of black African slaves who were brought up into Morocco. And they responded, and they jammed against us, and they had their own songs that we sang against our songs.

So "Wah Wah" was a development of Jimmy and I having a plot, and them responding with one of their songs. And they're singing about how much they love the Sudan, and how much they miss their homeland, which is great. So they clocked into one of their standard blues, while we were developing the other side of it.

MUSICIAN: It's interesting that they should have felt it the same way. From a playing standpoint, I notice that you're playing the six-string mainly on the lower strings. Was that to get a similar resonance to the gunbri, or was that something that just felt right?

PAGE: Well, I mean, just as much as I wanted to fit in and make them feel perfectly comfortable about what they were doing, I checked out what tuning he was playing in, and then accordingly tuned the guitar down to that, you know.

MUSICIAN: What was he playing in?

PAGE: Well, it was like an A, so in other words, like the E string went down to an A, which is quite fun.

PLANT: There were a couple of things that aren't on the film or anything, that will probably come to light later on. We brought these girls, these Berber singers. I like Berber female singing because it's so upfront and so outrageous. It doesn't have any problem with itself, it just comes out and howls. Not in a bluesy way, not in a Staples Singers way, just in a kind of bang-bang-bang-bang.

PAGE: It's dissonant, dangerous. The sound of really dangerous women, let me tell you.

PLANT: Yeah, they would be dangerous if you took 'em home. I said to Mustafa, "What are these people?" He said, "Ah, these are called the free people." They are Berbers from north of the Atlas, not far from Fez. But they've never succumbed to anybody who passed through, never the Arabs nor the French nor anybody at all.

But they howled, and they were howling, I was singing, Jimmy was playing the guitar and the Gnawa were playing. We were doing all this, it was like a spontaneous, it was like three or four express trains crossing each other.

PAGE: Yeah. Rhythmically, everybody was doing these counter-rhythms. The whole train of it was wonderful.

PLANT: It's really out there, but it's not—I mean, you can't put it on a record, really, or whatever this format music follows these days.

MUSICIAN: So much of the Moroccan influence on your past recordings has been Berber music, I'm surprised there isn't any here. Had you expected to not have any Berber music on this?

PLANT: It was just the luck of the draw, to be perfectly frank. We just couldn't find enough Berbers. [laughs] I mean, if we go back there—

PAGE: We didn't have enough time to work with the Berbers, probably. We only had a short period of time there in which to come out with whatever. If we'd have worked with the women on their own, we might have come up with something. But as it was, we just didn't have time.

But there's always the possibility of the future.

PLANT: You must be aware, on Real World, there's a CD called Passion Sources—not the Peter Gabriel thing, but the one where there's Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and all that. I think track nine is a Berber wedding track. And if you listen to the drum intro on that, and that whole thing, that's where we're going next. Into that vibe, I think. 'Cause the drums—I think this whole thing about the drum and the chant and the sort of mantric, tribal thing, if we can make the most of that, it really brings out the best in us two as writers, instantly.

So the Berbers are holding their breath. Unwittingly. [laughs]

MUSICIAN: Apart from the Moroccan performances, there's quite a lot of Arabic influence in this music. On "Kashmir," I noticed that Robert does quite a nice Arabic turn during the introduction.

PLANT: I've been trying to make it a part of my style, where appropriate. The only thing is, I can't include it in a line of lyric yet, I can only use it as a kind of punctuation at the end of a line. I want to try and make it part of the melodic structure of a song, rather than just a sort of afterthought, like an "Ooh yeah" of a blues thing or a Ray Charles shout. Maybe I can do that.

PAGE: I remember when I saw you in Boston at the end of one of the numbers, I can't remember what it was, you did some of these great trills, you know, Arabic trills. I said, "That was great." He said, "Yeah, I've got a lot of that inside me."

PLANT: That's right, yeah. Nadjma, the Indian singer on this project, she rehearses, she practices. It's very serious, the Indian thing. It's far removed from the North African. But she practices against ragas and weaves so much of a voice into these amazing areas. And it's quite amazing that at this point in my singing time that I've got now so much ambition to expand my ability. I'm really pleased that I've got something that I've got to try and learn to do, which I can't do just like that. [snaps fingers] I could learn to sing like a Western singer, you know, the way people mimic other people, but this is different.

MUSICIAN: The other thing that struck me about hearing Nadjma on "Battle of Evermore" is that it reminded me that the Celts actually started around Scythia before they eventually wound up in Ireland and Wales, and there really does seem to be this connection between Indian music and Celtic music. Was that something you all were aware of?

PLANT: Well, about three years ago, there was a great Cheb Khaled track from the Kutché album with Safy Boutella, which was produced by Meissonnier. I took it and I worked the chords out, and I got Phil Johnstone to play the chords slowly. And when he did, and we put a kind of regimental army drumming on it, and it became a Fairport Convention track. It was exactly the same chord progressions as Sandy Denny might have sung over with Richard Thompson. It's amazing, really. It's exactly the same, the way the chords shifted, where they shifted. The only difference is that voice.

PAGE: Some of that Bengali stuff I was telling you about, the female singers on that, they're very Celtic. Like the Fairport Convention thing. Very similar.

MUSICIAN: Speaking of odd connections, how did you come up with that treatment of "Nobody's Fault but Mine"? I mean, almost everybody who hears the Blind Willie Johnson record wants to play the bottleneck riff. How did you manage not to play it?

PAGE: You mean this time around? Well, we went to Wales, really down in the slate quarry there, to do "Gallows Pole." We had a couple takes of "Gallows Pole," then we just started jamming. In fact, that came from a jam. It was no more structured than just jamming, really, was it?

PLANT: No.

PAGE: It was just one of those things that came out that way that day. Another day it comes out somewhere different. But even still, you can leave the bottleneck behind.

PLANT: I think what was great about it was, it reminded me of when I was a kid, I was really into Sleepy John Estes. At that time, in the late '30s, there was Yank Rachell on mandolin and Josh Altimer on piano, Ransom Nolan on bass, and John Estes playing. They did all that stuff like "Milk Cow Blues" and "Drop Down Momma" and loads of Led Zeppelin songs. [laughs] And you could hear that kind of sloppy fire about the whole thing, which makes "Nobody's Fault but Mine" a real triumph on the film, because it really is just right in the pocket.

And I think that sometimes, you know, in my time, I've been so concerned with getting things spot on right, and having little places where you can go off and ad lib. But the great thing about it is that working with those guys, it was anybody's game. We let the hurdy-gurdy sort out the drones and stuff and give us a bit of melody, and then we'd give him free range and free wrist to do stuff.

Really, the amount of jams and tapes I've got of stuff in between rehearsals are, they're actually hit singles. Unbelievably commercial. It was amazing, because the more people you bring in, the more of a celebration it is. And they really wanted to work with us, and they colored our music.

MUSICIAN: Let's talk about the bit in London with string orchestras. How much of those were the old arrangements, and how much of them were done especially for this? Did the Egyptians write that themselves?

PAGE: During the point of rehearsals with "Friends" and "Four Sticks" and "Kashmir," we were actually rehearsing with separate orchestras. We did some stuff with a Western orchestra, and, you know, got some string arrangements and changed those around. Then we started working with the Egyptians and moved things around there.

There were a couple of rehearsals, three rehearsals into it, into the Egyptians, they actually came along with something that they'd written as an introduction to "Friends." You could see how they'd been caught up in the spirit of the whole vibe. But it wasn't until the day before we actually shot this whole thing on video that we heard the whole thing in its entirety. It was really a bit dangerous. But good.

MUSICIAN: Kashmir, at the end—

PAGE: At the end, we're jamming at the end of that.

MUSICIAN: That's what I thought. The only thing that sounded like it had been planned at all was the bit of "Achilles' Last Stand."

PLANT: The rhythm section part of that last jam is something that was taken from the Fate of Nations tour as well.

PAGE: I haven't heard that, so I did my own bit.

PLANT: That's right, which was great, because you were playing right across it.

MUSICIAN: The other thing that just floored me was the violin solo.

PAGE: Oh, yeah. It's moving.

PLANT: I do really hope this comes across to an audience in America that's used to having malleable, pop-formulated music rammed down its throat. Because as you say, that violin solo is so unreal. It's absolutely fantastic. The man is playing for himself, for his style, for his culture, for his country, for his life, and you can see it all. And he's such a nice guy. But man—it's beautiful.

MUSICIAN: It brings tears to your eyes.

PLANT: Well, it has done to everybody who's seen it.

MUSICIAN: I must say, as soon as I saw it, I wanted to rewind the tape and watch it again.

PLANT: Yeah. Everybody who sees it goes "Wow! Where did he come from?" And he plays nightclubs in London. Starts at four a.m. Plays until nine to Saudis. And hates it.

PAGE: But they usually can't wait to go down there, though. "Must go to the club."

PLANT: Yeah, "Gotta go to the club." It's either that or go home.

PAGE: There's a twinkle in their eyes. We haven't been to the club to witness this. We didn't have time. We're doing other things. But we kept promising to go. I wanted to see what it was that brought the twinkle to their eye. Apart from the music. 'Cause there was something else there, right? [laughs]

PLANT: Yeah. And it wasn't the wife.

PAGE: No.

MUSICIAN: The other question I had about the orchestra, was the string arrangement on "Since I Been Loving You" sounded so Isaac Hayes to me, although what Robert was doing on the vocal seemed more Bobby Bland.

PLANT: Hm. Well, I don't know. I think we'd have to say that Ed Shearmur, who plays keyboards and was in charge of string arrangements, we'd discussed how to do "Since I Been Loving You," and we were talking about things like "The Thrill Is Gone," where B.B. had a sort of small string section, but it did the job.

PAGE: I mean, we went over the string arrangements for this, like I said, when we were teamed with the Western orchestra, and we heard what he'd got together.

PLANT: We pared down a lot.

PAGE: Yeah, that's right. Then we sort of finessed it and honed it.

MUSICIAN: Also, Jimmy's solo on that was amazing, because it was like how to play a blues without playing the blues. You didn't play all the obvious licks.

PAGE: Well, I try not to.

PLANT: Well, that's always been Jimmy's forte. If you listen to "Tea for One" on Presence or whatever, that's the great thing, for me.

I think it's fair to say that we were suffering quite a bit from nerves when we made this film. Because it was like we had two shots at it—the one on the one night, and the one on the next. And we were a bit jumpy, because there were so many parts that we weren't sure—I mean, it's great to be nervous.

PAGE: But there was so much to remember.

PLANT: So some of our rehearsals were much better, and I think my vocals were better on some songs at rehearsals.

PAGE: My playing was definitely better.

PLANT: And "Since I Been Loving You," one night we did a run-through for the strings, and the introduction—I've never heard Jimmy play like that. I have, but not, I didn't ever expect I would again. But it was beyond where it was in the '70s. You know? I mean, we were quite impressive at times way back then, but you know.

PAGE: But that's the luck of the draw of trying to change your playing every night within a solo or an introduction section. So that's the luck of the draw.