Robert Plant: The Voice That Sailed the Zeppelin

This is a serious 256 page biography of Robert Plant’s musical journey to date. Gossip and tabloid press angles are intentionally excluded. Those readers seeking solicitous details of the artist or his current and previous bands should look elsewhere. The book is a crisp and concise account of Plant’s early life, his subsequent association with LZ and most importantly, his solo career. The author devotes a great deal of the book detailing and defining the singer’s post Zeppelin career. It’s an area that most would agree has been under covered in music book publications. Mr. Thompson has developed a unique design, devoting even number chapters to his subject’s origins and his association with LZ. The odd number chapters capture, in chronological order, Robert Plant’s post LZ career. There is a great deal to cover when one considers his solo career began in 1981. The book’s chapter design enables the reader the option of focusing on one aspect of the singer’s career by exclusively reading just the odd or even chapters. The other option is reading the book in order and looping back and forth through Plants musical life. Either way the reader will be equally rewarded. Overall, the book makes the point that Plant’s solo career (with emphasis on the 21st century) should receive equal critical acclaim as his work with LZ. It’s evident that his critical/commercial LZ success was enabled, from his perspective (for better or worse), through a series of musical compromises. Plant’s solo efforts, on the other hand, are a product of strictly his artistic vision. The author has included several pages of photographs documenting the various stages of Robert Plant’s career. Additionally, a very detailed discography of the artist’s recording history is also included. This book is both informative and a pleasure to read. Highly recommended and guaranteed not to disappoint.

I love this book, I love Robert Plant very informative almost feel you know him.

Been a Zeppelin fan since a kid. Always found Robert Plant an intriguing character with a lot of depth that ran deeper than the confines of Led Zeppelin. Indeed, this book covers the reasons why Plant holds off on a Zeppelin reunion with its guaranteed financial windfall. Plant is all about his roots as a soul infused singer with a diverse range. Zeppelin pigeon holed him in a way that left him questioning his contributions to one of rock's greatest bands. I learned much about where Plant came from, his time with Zeppelin and post Zeppelin. The man is truly fascinated with music and has followed the road of musical curiosity wherever it took him. This book solely covers Plant the singer and doesn't get into the tales of debauchery from the Led Zeppelin days. In fact, it actually downplays these stories as exaggeration and outright falsehoods. Yes, they were a rock band and partied as such but Plant always remained a singer and gentleman Welch farmer. That, in itself, is why I found Plant a rather interesting fellow. Enjoyable read that goes back and forth from the heady days of Zeppelin to Plant's solo career. The author very poignantly covers Plant's devastating loss of son Karac and also the Led Zeppelin ending death of best friend John 'Bonzo' Bonham. For serious Robert Plant fans only. Others looking for dirt and tabloid material will be very disappointed.

The book was shipped before due date and was shipped with no damage ! The book itself was an awesome detailed history of Robert Plant's life as akid through present. I highly recommend it!

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1080036689 Not exactly a cohesive 'review,' but here are some thoughts I shared with the For Badgeholders Only Led Zeppelin email list over the course of two separate messages... I don't recall any other accounts claiming that Chris Dreja (of The Yardbirds) rehearsed with Plant, Page, and Bonham. This book specifically places him in that room, playing Train Kept a Rollin', and says Jones was the last of the four brought into the mix. Thompson doesn't offer any proof or details as to why he would diverge from the well-established timeline of Dreja removing himself well before that point (and subsequently photographing Zeppelin for the back cover of their first LP - something that most Zeppelin biographers mention). Thompson dates the first show in Denmark as September 14, 1968 - not September 7, 1968, even though he has quotes from photographer Jorgen Angel about the show. Those are two problem areas, and there are others (and probably will be more, since I'm only halfway through). The book has an interesting structure, moving back and forth in time with each chapter (1980-1981 is followed by 1948-1961, and 1988-1994 is followed by 1970-1971, for example), and each chapter is titled by a song that Plant has performed and/or recorded during his career, but not necessarily during those years the chapter is covering. A couple things in the book weren't really *new* to me, but they were things that I needed to be reminded about. Among these were some of the negative reactions to Plant's first solo record that he received from Peter Grant and John Paul Jones, as well as Plant's initial intent to put Pictures at Eleven out under a band name (not just "Robert Plant"). Thompson quotes Plant saying that JPJ told him, "I thought you could have done something a little bit better than that, old chap." Grant is presented as trying to get Plant to put something out that sounded a lot more like Zeppelin, and to exploit his "former Led Zeppelin frontman" image as much as possible - something that Plant in those days of "no Led anything" was trying everything to avoid. There's an index and a selected bibliography, but no footnotes, so in some cases, you don't know where certain quotes were obtained. Thompson, as he admits in various interviews about the book, is not the biggest Zeppelin fan. He's particularly partial to recent Plant offerings, and in some cases favors them over some of Zeppelin, which obviously won't endear him to many (any?) LZ fans. Nonetheless, it has been an interesting read so far, and as Brian Gardiner said on the Ramble On Radio podcast [http://www.spreaker.com/user/6493586], the author does seem to have a handle on Plant's mindset and conflicted/complicated mindset toward Led Zeppelin and everything that goes with it. Thompson echoes something I've heard Gardiner elucidate on his podcast in the past, which is that the conventional wisdom about punk music being a massively disruptive force in ~1977 is simply not true. He writes that beyond the punk clubs, the Sex Pistols and their brethren did nothing to dislodge the "dinosaurs" like "Genesis, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, Yes, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer" who "all released albums during 1977 that proved to be among their biggest British hits yet..." The section about the aftermath of Live Aid was intriguing, because Thompson paints Plant as being taken aback about the enormity of the meaning of those fifteen minutes: "here's the band, here's the crowd. Now give them absolutely everything that Led Zeppelin ever meant, that it ever stood for, that they ever dreamed it could be. And you have a quarter of an hour, starting now." Thompson writes that Plant "froze, and he has continued freezing ever since." _____ Part II I have now finished the book, and a succession of instances where Thompson fails to get the details right have further downgraded my regard for this work. I'm sure these things might seem trivial and unimportant to many people, but they bother me... it's one thing to get something wrong in conversation, but getting easily-verifiable facts wrong in a book that you're writing is something that an author of Thompson's standing should be able to avoid. Thompson writes about "Hearing the so-distinctive cry that ignites 'Immigrant Song' rising over the crowds at the 1996 Glastonbury festival remains a precious memory for all who were there, no matter that it quickly resolved itself into a performance instead of 'The Wanton Song.'" Well, Page & Plant did not perform at the 1996 festival - they were there on June 25, 1995. They only performed ~20 dates in '96, and none were in Europe/UK or North America. Secondly, neither the introduction of Immigrant Song or the full Wanton Song were performed at the '95 Glastonbury show. Third, I'm not even sure if Plant ever did the Immigrant Song wail of "aaaahhhh...." at any point during the 1995-98 Page/Plant shows when the Immigrant Song riff was used as a transition into Wanton Song, but if he did, it was rare (and again, never happened at Glastonbury), so I don't know if Thompson imagined this or if he got an erroneous account from somewhere else and failed to double-check. Later, writing about the 1995 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction, Thompson claims "a first-ever live performance of 'For Your Life'," but the song performed was actually The Yardbirds' For Your Love (really just a snippet lasting less than 60 seconds tagged onto the end of Train Kept a Rollin' anyway), and it's available to see on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9w8z... Thompson makes a point of saying that Plant refused to play Stairway anywhere else, so of course he and Page didn't perform it on Andrew Denton's The Money or the Gun show (where performing the song was an obligation and a rite of passage for musical guests), but fails to mention the abbreviated acoustic rendition that Page & Plant played in 1994 for a television show in Japan. This next passage (apparently all of which is attributed to an exchange with (eventual Led Zeppelin biographer) Barney Hoskyns in Tracks magazine, though it's difficult to tell for sure - talking about Sixty-Six to Timbuktu) may be of interest here, and I think it's worth transcribing... Robert Plant: "There was so much stuff of mine that had never seen the light of day. If anyone were to say to me, 'Well, your solo career has been a bit patchy, and you've been a bit schizoid with the way it's danced around,' I would say, 'Absolutely so, and merrily so.' I know that historically, and in quality of material, there's no way I could ever touch the legacy of Led Zep. However, I am having a good time with my life, and these are the sorts of things that I think were quite a hoot." Obviously, almost everyone feels that way, but I'm not sure I had ever seen Plant state it so plainly. It's not clear Thompson agrees with this assessment though; he writes, "Priory of Brion never recorded an album, but if one counts the best of the circulating live tapes as one, and then adds Dreamland, Mighty Rearranger, and Raising Sand to Plant's twenty-first century tally, he had now cut four albums in succession that rated among the best he had made. And certainly added up to his most consistent streak ever." I suppose it's possible that Thompson is just talking about Plant's post-Zeppelin output here (and not RP's entire recording career, including Zeppelin), so he may have a decent argument. I have some questions about the next part of the Season of the Witch 1999-2004 chapter, in terms of timing. Thompson seems to indicate that Plant was offered an appearance on CMT's Crossroads as far back as 2004, and that his collaborator was already announced as Alison Krauss (they wouldn't record their appearance on the show until October 2007). Thompson makes a point of mentioning a specific date (November 3, 2004) when Krauss agreed to perform with Plant at the Lead Belly tribute in Cleveland (which I attended), but then doesn't state the actual date of the performance. It seems odd to include the former and not the latter. Anyway, my impression was that the idea of actually making an album together only came after the November 7, 2004 performance, and that the actual Crossroads booking didn't happen until after the album was underway, but I don't know that for sure. Beyond the quibbling over details and missed opportunities to include factual information, there are a fair share of things to irritate a Led Zeppelin fan in the book. Dave Thompson doesn't like Presence and he doesn't particularly like In Through the Out Door either. Thompson argues that rushing back into the studio to cut these albums before the band had fully written and developed the songs to include on them was a case of Peter Grant leading the band astray. At many points, Thompson alludes to Grant's favoritism toward Page, treating Zeppelin as Page-plus-three other guys, and the author specifically wonders "whether Grant would have hurried Page back into action so soon after an accident" like the one Plant had in Rhodes. The book certainly is not a Page love-fest either, with Thompson including numerous anecdotes about Jimmy sequestering himself in his hotel room while the others socialized (both during Zeppelin's time and later in Page/Plant), and descending so far into his own addictions that he failed to write much in the way of substantial new material while Plant was on the mend (physically in 1975-76 after the car accident in Rhodes, and mentally in 1977-78 after Karac's death). Thompson argues that Plant should have left Zeppelin before Bonham's death, either after the accident in Greece, or after Robert lost his son, writing that Plant had never done anything he didn't want to do, with one exception: "The time he went back to Led Zeppelin, when he really should have quit." Overall, I think Thompson has a pretty good grasp on Plant's attitude toward making music since John Bonham's demise and the end of Zeppelin, and perhaps about the way Plant looks back at his time in Zeppelin. The book is well-written in terms of language structure and flow, but there are too many errors included that should have been easy to correct, and too many times where Thompson's opinions differ sharply from my own for me to recommend the book very highly. The definitive Robert Plant biography has yet to be written.

Ok I have read the other two books, for some strange reason its not in chronological order, no problem the chapters are arranged so I read it write.Hmmmm....Excellent job brings us up to date

A great book. Thoroughly enjoyed it....

best book I've read on mr.plant

Better than previous books written about Mr Plant .but again a few mistakes ,and remember don't believe all you read ,

Love the book