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Robert Plant has a simple reason for filling his new album, Dreamland, with U.S. 1960s acid-rock covers such as "Darkness, Darkness" by the Youngbloods, "Morning Dew" from the Grateful Dead's first LP and "Skip's Song" by Moby Grape's tortured genius, Skip Spence. "I can't write songs as good as these," the ex-Led Zeppelin singer says with a true fan's awe, sitting in New York's Central Park on a sunny afternoon. Dreamland is also, he adds, "the blueprint of my life." Plant's 1966 debut single with the U.K. band Listen was a freak treatment of the Young Rascals' "You Better Run." Zeppelin's early live medleys included Spirit and Buffalo Springfield tunes. In 1999, Plant took his obsession full-time, playing Love and Tim Buckley songs with a band he now calls Strange Sensation. "It's the idea of music being more than a weekly fad," Plant says. "It was that way with Zeppelin, and it's the same with this record."
Your acid-rock project was first called Priory of Brion. Who or where was Brion?
Brion was the original bass player. He didn't have any other name. He lived alone with two kittens in a dodgy area of Wolverhampton. He was amazing, but he resented any form of adulation or success. He played, then sat in the dressing room and said nothing at all. So we were the Priory of Brion.
Another early member was guitarist Kevyn Gammond, who played with you and John Bonham in the pre-Zeppelin group, Band of Joy.
Kevyn and I have been friends for years. He used to write me and analyze, in a loving and brotherly way, where I was going wrong with my solo work [laughs]. I said, "Kevyn, fuck off. Why don't you get your guitar and play with me, show me how it should be done?" It was week to week, month to month. "Where should we go?" "It's nice in the Lake District this time of year." We went to Tromso in Norway, inside the Arctic Circle. We dined on seagull eggs and played the gig in the hotel where we were staying, which was right on the fjord. It was superb to just carry the guitars on the plane and pick up equipment from the local music shop.
Were you tired of playing Zeppelin songs after the "No Quarter" tour with Jimmy Page?
No, it was a pleasure. I just left the game. I said, "I love you, production office and backstage catering. But I've gotta go now." I wanted to do these songs. When I came home from rehearsals, I would play these songs in the car, and my kid -- he's only four -- would hear the guitars in Love's "A House Is Not a Motel" and go, "Dad, did you write that? Is that one of yours?" I said no. But it is mine, because it's inside of me.
Is Zeppelin finally over -- no more reunions?
I don't want to be the scoundrel or the catalyst. There was talk not long ago of Jimmy and I doing a blues album. We could do one really well, yet the quality of what we might do would be lost in the fact that it's an area that's been exhausted. But these things come and go. If Jimmy rang and said, "Do you want to come and sing on something?" I can't see any reason why I shouldn't.
What was it about U.S. acid rock that hit you as a teenager in England's industrial Midlands?
You had this beautiful thing: Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti pointing the way through Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan into that electric jingle jangle. The Yardbirds had three of the finest guitarists Britain has ever known -- I worked with the best one, without question -- but it was a different style, based on Otis Rush and Freddy King. I liked that jingle jangle, the Indo-rock mix that bands like Kaleidoscope had. A lot of the time, it was played wrong. Big Brother and the Holding Company were so out of tune. But I saw them two months ago in England, and they were great.
Did Band of Joy play West Coast rock covers?
We did Buffalo Springfield's "Rock and Roll Woman" and "Expecting to Fly." There was no point in playing "Tired of Waiting for You" by the Kinks. It was like selling out. But I used to play outlandish places in Scotland with Kevyn and Bonzo [Bonham] where if you didn't play Kinks songs, you had meat pies thrown at you.
Is there an audience now for Dreamland?
Some of the songs are almost forty years old. It will be interesting to see what kind of radio stations touch it and what kind won't, because I'm supposed to be part of some other history. Remember, I signed to Atlantic with Led Zeppelin thirty-four years ago, when Three Dog Night were with Pacific Gas and Electric somewhere doing great gigs, Lee Michaels was happening, and the whole world of running a record label was more haphazard and beautiful.