Robert Plant Interview on Charlie Rose (2005)

mighty rearranger is his eighth album and by all accounts this is his best solo effort today the delta blues third world rhythms and just enough of that famous voice to satisfy the zeppelin fans i'm pleased to have robert plant at this table for the very first time welcome thank you great to see you london is still home i mean england is still home england yeah yeah you live in the country you live i've always lived in the middle of england a little west of the center towards the welsh borders and american music though rhythm and blues was an influential for you from early well yeah when i think there's a huge movement towards black americana in the british pop scene um i was just perhaps two or three years behind the rolling stones and the pretty things and there was an amazing sort of uh the impulse on the ground listening to black rhythm and blues listening in your cities you had music from new orleans philadelphia chicago um you know so many different cities had so much absolutely different music to offer us and i never realized that you knew you loved the sound yeah i was uh absolutely spoken to you and the voices spoke to you well you know there's a kind of saccharine sweet thing about british pop music it was somewhere between johnny ray and pat boone it was something that was happening yeah all right and with presley mimicking the black voice and bringing a little lift of black music into the mainstream that was the first that was the sort of uh hors d'oeuvre and then a little later on you've got all these black american bands who started to they did permeate yeah it did presley influence everybody over there when he in the 50s i would say so because he was totally unique i mean he took a lot of the sort of elements of uh the johnny ray approached the kind of sobbing voice and that sort of thing but he mixed it with the music that he was surrounded by when he was a kid in memphis you know if you had if you listened to presley and didn't know anything about it would you know he was it was a white voice i think on some of the very early songs i wouldn't have known that wouldn't know no no the stuff which he was taking uh the arthur credit music that that's all right mama mr train which was junior parker's blue flames i mean the whole deal of presley was that he he was he was the original hep cat you know and what we got on the radio in england it cut through all the drizzle and it really gave us something everybody's heads turned and our parents as you can imagine the same thing in america rejected it wholeheartedly you know they saw something coming around the corner they couldn't understand and i guess that was about their understanding yeah i think our call to arms and you know and the black music that followed it that we managed to get i mean there were ports like liverpool and london where you had merchant seaman landing off boats from the states who bring records 45s yeah that's why the beatles were so hip to a lot of the the black um soul music of the earliest because they poured into liverpool and so they heard it sure see i never knew that it was port cities that it first began to resonate off the boats yeah yeah let me talk about this album and come back to some of this stuff mighty rearranger what is that why that title because because there is a song i had a block i had an entire lyrical block i thought i'd reach the age that i had nothing left to say i was a comfortable guy i've got my life my children my grandchildren everything was is set and i i felt that maybe my whole persona or maybe it was a little bit obsolete and then suddenly out of nowhere i was armed with all this detail and mighty rearranger is one of the songs that relates i think to the passing of time and the way that fate deals its hand you know so basically mighty rearranger i guess is the is fate chance all right let me talk about some of the things you you called it recently a group of statements from a guy who didn't think he had anything left to say that's right which is what you just said exactly yeah all of a sudden you had something you wanted to say i think that the musicians that surround this project come from such a variety of backgrounds that the the sort of melons of the whole life put together was so sparkling it was so vibrant that i i dived into it i found a new personality within it all and i found a kind of honesty and uh it was almost like a key to open up my old gift you know it's voice the voice and the ability to to create something that goes with three minutes 40 seconds of music that is substantial enough for a person at my time alive is three minutes 40 seconds the magic time i guess it's becoming the magic or yeah but these these songs came in like that accidentally you make your point and you've gone some of the greatest songs in the history of popular music are under three minutes you know and uh i never in led zeppelin we we our songs were deliberate they were extended musical pieces sometimes they went on for seven or eight minutes and live you know you could take a short course in sort of serbo cross right on the side of the stage while it was going on i know i know you know that yeah the the um have you found i mean what's interesting about you is that it seems to me that you have been able to incorporate within your sense of who you are that i in fact was the lead singer for the led zeppelin and therefore people want to at least stay connected to that whatever else i may do they want to hear that they want to talk about that but they also want me to maintain that memory and that connection i guess that's where i came from i would say so and i think that if there is any memory at all from that period then the people who if there's any memory left at all people would know that the beauty of that particular period of music and led zeppelin's contribution was that we continually changed that our music digressed due to the visitations that jimmy page and i made to north africa to india right because you were exposed to new ideas in music and you incorporate constantly yeah and it wasn't about some kind of tin pan alley moment of keeping the thing going right repetition at all costs just to remind the listener the variety and the the constant change was the thing that gave us our strength and that's what i've tried to do since the demise of led zeppelin and is is the is i'm going to talk about some of the things that are in here including brother ray but are the things that it has this solo career is it as satisfying to you because it comes at a different time in your life as that led zeppelin was at that time well as you say it's a different time because you can't compare one to the other but and because of that i'm much more hip to the way it works now in led zeppelin i was 20 years old and i was rolling with this kind of momentum which it just had no end and the amount of conjecture that surrounded the group and the sort of myth is way way off course but it had its own it had its own kind of speed and tempo since then i've traveled extensively in southern morocco and in west africa and i finally love morocco i love it yeah but it's a new place to go in my heart and in my soul and i've learned that the variety that was the strength of led zeppelin has to be my kind of standard that i carry through the rest of my career could there be anything better than being a 20 year old lead singer for one of the great rock and roll bands in the history of rock and roll well it was a very very uh disquieting time because the momentum and the growth of the success took us to places in stature and in in attention and in in not power but the public went for this thing which was reviled by rolling stone which was ignored by the media and wrote on the magazine yeah right at the time january uh remember this well and um he reviled led zeppelin the whole process of an english group coming along and just you know the sort of carousel across the states was amazing because venues weren't like they are today there weren't that many big venues i mean the garden i don't know whether that was used there was a place i guess and that was 2 000 seats yes so the beatles have played shea stadium but with the equipment and this sort of inferior technology at the time as you know if you see a clip it was a mass of screaming girls right right well we had a lot of guys in the audience which was a bit of a letdown in a way but we why was that you think i think the music the actual stature of the music is a very masculine musical form i think the power of the guitar and the percussive elements of the the music yeah were quite masculine um and i think that the momentum of the thing it had quite a momentum and it took a 20 year old singer into a world that you know would just it just gambled constantly developing more and more and we didn't really ever take stock of it probably until about five years in and then we began to take stock of who you were and what was happening around you we were we were conscientious believe it or not yeah kids sitting on the side of the hill trying to write songs that had some substance that's that's what it was with young families with hopes and you know i mean far different to how you and i are now yeah because you know we've gone through all these changes so for me to be a musician and you to be a rack on tour to get to where we are we had to go through all those things exactly right you couldn't be here without having gone there so i think that where this takes me now um is a really fantastic place because it's at my own tempo more or less is the voice significantly different you think yeah i think so mellow wiser more what well i i hear demonstrations i hear the the sort of character of my voice in the very early days and i think i was overtly concerned with filling in gaps in in instrumental sections i found myself you know i thought i didn't know whether to do a card trick or take a rabbit out of a hat or there was a lot of times when i preening around you know flicking my hair like you know i remember yeah yeah it was just a little bit lacking so i did over overcompensate in those days did you did you did you watch anybody did anybody instruct you no i listened i listened i listened to the music i listened to the music i did have a good uh kind of fairy godmother for a while in the united states in the form of janice joplin really yeah because we played a lot of those festivals back then with the doors and the jefferson area those fantastic times when the youth culture actually had it it thought it had a responsibility to help to change society and remove corruption if you can believe that and that whole movement i was so infatuated by the idea of americana taking a a very sharp turn to the left and um in the middle of it all there was this wonderful vulnerable little bird charles joplin who used to look after me and say hey you know drink this you got to keep quiet in between the shows do this do that and then she's that kind of influence she was really quite amazing yeah because she didn't do that she was exactly what i was going to say i mean but for me she said no no come on call it you know now why was that when she had this thing for you or what well if it was if there was a thing i can't remember it but that would be quite per se i suppose but no she was just uh she was just kind she knew i was quite naive and i was so in love with the whole idea of this great movement of energy and and artistry and hope that uh and she was you know for all intents and purposes you would have said that she was the queen of the whole movement 60s was the greatest decade well for me it was yeah because you had hope because you believed everything was going to change because you believe there was a force you know in music and civil rights and in literature and everything and there was much more i think maybe there was more responsibility or whether it was known or thought of as considered to be a responsibility but i think that music played a bigger part much bigger part uh in the whole sort of development and of awareness at that time and i think now we're in a hugely uh much more of a spread of of music which is coming at us from every single and angle and maybe part of the the beauty and the mystique of music and the musician and the muse itself has gone because we're all there now yeah trying to get on your show or trying to you know the stones played on you know on the upper west side on on the balcony of some place at lincoln center or whatever it was to an answer to her i mean you never did that sort of thing in those days you just the whole thing had its own legs what countries have influenced you i mean i know you love morocco why morocco well many years ago i went on a vacation with my wife and uh it's three hours from the united kingdom to marrakech and it's three thousand years behind sideways or it's three years ahead every street and every alley in the medina has got ambition and it's forward thinking or it's you turn to the it's fantastic it's the most amazing uh melange again of so many fantastic ideas and so much artistry and music and clamor and humor and kindness yeah and much maligned and hardly understood by a lot of um english people who but it's it's now becoming i suppose you know quite chic to get off to america but over the you go over the atlas mountains and into the the sort of pre-sahara and you leave the kind of arab world entirely behind and you go into the world of the berber the people who are there in the beginning you know um and it's it's just a phenomenally warm experience and i'm very pleased to uh to found that you know in the middle of all the chaos and all the years and all that stuff how long do you stay there when you go maybe a month a month or maybe a week or no you know you go in the spring yeah spring is the best time that's what i hear yeah uh tell me about some of the songs here stop me when you want to talk about any of them another tribe shine it all around well another tribe uh is the opening title it's uh i'm asking the question how can the meek inherit all the earth when we are absolutely bombarded from left right and center from the chaos and the sort of the effects of greed and uh and i suppose suspicion and uh suspicion yeah between the lack of trust between peoples and races and religions and so on comes a lot of out of fear insecurity yeah uh shine it all around china all around is a song that's been quite big on the radio here and then and in the united kingdom and uh actually i found out today we're number one in malta thanks to that yeah how did that happen i heard a giggle in the background i did too in the green room somebody's thrilled i think i've got a family out there yeah all right okay freedom fries is the 911 song well i think that uh it's not so much 911. uh that would be far too vague it's the fact that that blair has made decisions on behalf of in a democracy on behalf of people and he's now being called to uh to answer for them in the general election last week he uh the the huge majority that the labour party the new labour party had has reduced to such a degree that now they're 61 seater which is great normally but much more than thatcher or yeah but the thing is the climate in britain there's no trust and yet and we want everybody wants to know where the truth has been and how all these smoke screens have appeared and and nobody knows what to do the electorate on that day everybody was saying to each other well you know the conservative guy we don't trust him right the liberal democrat he's a good guy but we don't know what they've got to offer and blair he's a statesman but people are beginning to think that he's written roughshod over the national well there are arguments coming out now that the laborer is in revolt against him in part and wanting him to to designate a time that he's going to leave it sooner rather than later and uh if gordon brown isn't the natural successor then there could be chaos within the party but the back benches i would assume he's going to be the successor wouldn't you i would think so yeah because he campaigned side by side yeah yeah probably if he hadn't done that we would not have done nearly as well but if you think about it the the whole twist of this is is that the infighting that has been there within the party and within between brown and blair has been quite something and then the what you would loosely call the sort of uh spin doctors and the machinery that's been used to give the british public an idea in advance which has been manipulated by blair for such a long time is now turning on him so the headlines in the sunday paper and this is broad sheets that are you know quite cerebral i'm just saying you know that finally the mechanism that he's created and nurtured is now saying enough do you mean the spend machine yeah yeah yeah and the the and the the guys who are putting the strings behind this machine you know now they're feeding it into the media and it's working against him rather than for him yeah but did you did you as a citizen did you vote yeah okay i mean did you feel like you had any alternative i mean because on balance you did yeah you thought you had alternative well there were two elections running side by side there was a local election depending upon which area of the country you're in and there are independent uh you know mps members of parliament who who do actually and are uh proactive within the communities number one and on a national level you know there's only so many uh gray areas that you can take before you have to just use your vote to reduce a majority yeah now early on i mean i i think this is true you kind of combined sort of the soul of rhythm and blues which you heard in memphis in in the delta with something coming out of sort of west coast psychedelic yeah and and and fused them together i tried the lyrics came from san francisco and yeah well it was that that era that we were talking about that generation of uh of good intent yeah and i i mean my lyrics were always i never really had a great deal of uh self-esteem i suppose about but occasionally it worked and the rest of the time it syncopated some pretty hard music you may not want to do this but i beg you to do it for me tell me what your 10 favorite rock and roll songs are just what comes off the top of you okay uh big hunk of love elvis presley big hunk of love yeah all right yeah yeah big hunger love just before he went in the army 1958 fantastic song um i think i would have to say smokestack lightning by holland wolfe it's not really rock and roll but it was the basis of a lot so much uh beautiful uh extravagant music and we we hammed it up trying to get as black as we could and as they say in england the miss is as good as a mile but occasionally we got there you know i think uh you got it's all american for me yeah i think the rumble by link ray and the raymen was a big instrumental i think dionne who was from new york had some fantastic music he had a song called lovers who wander which is on uh whatever label it was um if i go to the west coast there were a lot of bands out there i think jefferson airplane's white rabbit was really you know strong did you know gracie no you never knew no what else comes to mind there was a group from california from l.a called love with arthur lee yeah he made us an album called forever changes and there was a song called a house is not emotional he was fascinated by this i'm not sure this is a selection if i'd asked rolling stone magazine to commission me and tell me what the ten biggest rock and roll songs of all time where they they would have ten others oh absolutely yeah dylan would be number one probably well dylan's gotta be one more cup of coffee i think for you yeah from dylan i think it's such a fantastic song uh he's i mean i you asked me i forget how can i forget about dylan's contribution when he was the guy who woke us all up yeah he took this sort of because their lyrics were authentic or yeah well i mean there was a reactionary musical scene uh on the college circuits with rambling jack elliott woody guthrie odetta you know dave van ronk all those people who were around but dylan made it sexy and he also brought it home in uh in such a vital way can you imagine that great pro that there's a great uh thing on broadway now hairspray and the thing is that the great end to that program that uh great moment is that after all the rock and roll and the philadelphia sound with the all-ons and cameo parkway bobby rydell all that stuff suddenly you cut to a room and there's a guy sitting there playing an acoustic guitar sing in the first protest song and that's the end of the show because it's the end of the era of the schmooze and the schmaltz you know and it's the beginning of that sort of reflective um social conscience so dylan yeah you're right yeah he sang some songs i don't know how he actually survived the way that he sang about the lynchings in oxford mississippi and uh you know he was he was a true poet yeah he wouldn't like anybody to say that i know why not just because he doesn't believe he's been awkward that's what i think exactly what are you proudest about from i want to get to today but from led zeppelin i think uh the variety of music and the constant intention to stimulate ourselves rather than going after the kind of the beautiful underbelly full of greenbacks i think that was the thing about the band was that we we went off places that i suppose now with the history of the band becoming part of the kind of american pop culture people see it now as an established entity yeah but at the time every turn that we made was well it wasn't even risky because it didn't matter if you don't do what you're supposed to do you shouldn't be there you know so i think it was the the perseverance for change and and to stimulate ourselves rather than you know to join the cut and thrust of an of an era and maybe that's why there's some that it retains its popularity because it is such a variety of music bonham's death you still feel the pain of that well you know it's american tv i mean the pain i felt pain through my life you know and uh his passing was was just a waste you know uh 25 years in september since he passed away he was 30. he was 32 32. 25 years yeah i know so that was that was the end of everything really as far as our uh kind of combination as a as a four-piece band there was no real because everybody's contribution was so critical for the thing to make sense you know there was no point in going anywhere else and drafting anybody else in you know it's okay to redress and enjoy the music individually but to actually call a group led zeppelin without his power would be folly really but there is it's not pain now it's just no no it's wrong i didn't phrase the question well but i mean the idea was it yeah that you don't forget something like that because it's such central to your life and it's a vacuum and more probably most importantly above all things is that he and i started playing together when we were 15. yeah i know and uh we we were so obnoxious in the town that we lived or where we worked a lot that people would see the two of us coming down the street and they crossed the road to avoid us we were so busy telling everybody how good we were yeah yeah yeah that's right uh well you said we could clear a room very quickly just by telling them how good you were exactly yeah and trying to show them not even showing them just pursuing it for a couple of hours yeah oh that's great and and today uh this album yeah this album is a place that i could never have believed that i could have found quite honestly it's an absolute uh moment for me in my all my life of being trying to be creative because the whole thing works the combination of music lyric vocal and the intention of each song there's no slack there's nothing to do with trying to join the big time again trying to get back into some kind of groove you know it's just about being in the right place again after a long time of considering and trying and you know what's the right place symmetry some kind of cohesive state where music and lyric and the whole lot comes together and it's a sort of it's not a compromise on any level at all you know you can't sing songs about love at 56 years old and without really scrutinizing how you actually deliver deliver this because you've been around a while you know so it's a good place to be i'm very pleased to be there good for you i should mention two people one is i'm an erdogan you you were on atlantic records yeah the rolls royce exactly recording well you know john bonham and i were very green we were very young we were 19 when we we actually began rehearsing with what was to become led zeppelin and when our management and jimmy page came to new york they saw several different you know record companies and uh ultimately the tapes and the deal was done with atlantic and when they came back and said you know that we were now going to be atlantic artists i think i cried because never mind the stax period and that sort of thing it's just the whole idea of of armour and jerry and arif and all the whole deal of i mean to have phil spector as a house producer on all those early drifters well not early early 60s drifters records and all that fantastic sound you know when you become an obsessive music musical character you start quoting b-sides and and matrix numbers of vinyl and you can do it's it's an insane place to be my girlfriend when i go past a shop that's got some serious vinyl she just looks at me and says shoes and goes but i'm i mean so if i go back to them the idea of being on a label that had had clyde mcfatter and the drifters and you know and brother ray and brother ray ray yeah yeah what a guy the last cut here yeah well you know i didn't see ray charles when he came to england in uh i think it was 1960 after what i say came out i was 12 years old and and i was too young to go and see him just too young but i've seen him a few times since then and he went in through the kind of modern sounds in country and western he got sweet he had an orchestra but sometimes he really let it go again and uh those sounds that he did with armit with the railettes i mean how can anglo-saxon people get moved so much by something they don't even understand so the last cut on the album is a sort of a farewell to brother ray and it sounds like some piano playing taking place somewhere in the back streets of morocco mixed with a little bit of gospel chant wow thank you for coming that's a great pleasure really i'm very pleased to have been here thank you we'll be back stay with us [Music] so so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] you

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Views: 78,389

Keywords: 2005 charlie rose, 2005 robert plant, bob dylan, charlie rose, charlie rose interview, charlie rose pbs, charlie rose robert plant, elvis presley, jimmy page, john bonham, john paul jones, led zeppelin, mighty rearranger robert plant, robert plant, robert plant 2005, robert plant charlie rose, robert plant elvis, robert plant influences, robert plant interview, robert plant mighty rearranger, mighty rearranger, charlie rose interviews, classic rock, elvis, band of joy

Id: lraco0aBMCQ

Length: 33min 15sec (1995 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 26 2021