Robert Plant and my part in his renaissance: CD Review Robert Plant and the Band of Joy

Sure, rock’s major influence was black American blues and related forms like Gospel, but folk music ran through its veins too.

Whether it was bands like Fairport Convention or Pentangle or Steeleye Span or more crossover rock/folk acts like Jethro Tull or Zep themselves, our ears and our hearts had been well trained in the form, and so when we heard it in its alt-country incarnation it fitted perfectly into the new-music shaped hole that I described above.

But it went deeper and wider than that. I mean, pick a band. Anybody who knew the Stones probably new Gram Parsons and Keef’s obsession with country. We were all Dylan tragics which meant Band tragics which meant, even if we didn’t know it in those terms, roots tragics. And we all loved Neil Young and he probably more than any other artists embodied that crossover between American country/folk and the sort of rock n’ roll we had always been obsessed with. His album Tonight’s the Night probably still stands as the classic alt.country album, a release that pre-dates the category by about two decades, and that is truer to the roots part of the equation than anything by, say, the likes of Poco or the Eagles, bands that are often cited as influential in such matters.

Plant himself entered the equation (or re-entered) when he and Page did an MTV unplugged concert, the so-called Unledded show, where, apart from showcasing classic Zep numbers — including folk/roots songs like ‘Battle of Evermore’, ‘Gallows Pole’ and even ‘Kashmir’ — they dipped into their own growing fascination with folk music from around the world.

Songs like ‘Yallah’ and ‘City Don’t Cry’ showed them mixing their talents in a new folkways environment, and in a way that is relevant to Plant’s latest album, as we will see.

Anyway, that barely scrapes the surface of the interconnections. But was it any wonder we were ready to hear what we heard?

Discovering rock music in your formative teenage years was like discovering the world – especially in somewhere like Canberra in those pre-internet days when the sense of isolation was almost the defining characteristic of living there (and please don’t feel free to lecture me on what a great place Canberra is; I’m not saying it isn’t; I’m just making the point that in 70s it was very easy to feel that you were precisely nowhere) — it was like discovering everything, it was the shock of the new writ large in our little lives and it changed how we viewed ourselves and the world.

Discovering — or, as I am really saying, rediscovering – roots music in our forties, although it had a similar impact, lit a similar flame of musical joy, was quite a different experience. If sixties rock was the shock of the new, then alt.country and associated forms was a fall back into the warm embrace of something familiar.

Rock spoke to revolution and newness and even destruction; roots spoke to continuity and community and recognition.

So when Robert Plant showed up on an album singing with Allison Kraus and produced by T-Bone Burnett it was as if our Generation Jones musical world had come full circle. Suddenly, unexpectedly but perhaps inevitably, here was the figure that as well as any typified the times and music we had lived through now in partnership with the people who were god-like figures in the form we had just ‘discovered’.

The fact that Krauss/Plant worked so well together on Raising Sand was almost a bonus in this scenario, because their very presence together on the album was enough in itself, at least in terms of appropriateness.