Why won’t Robert Plant reform Led Zeppelin?
From the BBC
It’s just a wild guess, but the Rolling Stones’ recent run of paydays,
er, concerts, are not likely to have gone unnoticed by the former
members of Led Zeppelin. The Stones have been away for a while,
are all around 70 years old, and are playing songs from three and four
decades ago on their current tour. But with tickets going for as high
as $600, they’re pulling in millions of dollars in revenue each night.
Somewhere, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones are thinking: “This too
could be ours.” A 2007 Led Zeppelin reunion concert at the O2 Arena
in London with original members Page, Jones and Robert Plant, joined
on drums by Jason Bonham (the son of the late John Bonham), was
a success artistically and commercially. The show set a record for
ticket demand, with 20 million fans wanting in, according to the
Guinness Book of World Records.
But the reunion proved to be a one-off, largely because Plant wanted
no part of doing something more, despite tour offers ranging as high
as $200m (£132m) from concert promoters. Page and Jones even
started working with other vocalists in Plant’s stead in hope of
keeping Zeppelin afloat, but never took it beyond the rehearsal
stage. Plant instead focused on touring in 2008 with country singer
Alison Krauss and producer T Bone Burnett, with whom he made a
Grammy-winning album, Raising Sand. It didn’t sound anything like
Led Zeppelin – a guiding feature behind most of Plant’s music in the
three decades since Zeppelin imploded after John Bonham’s death
in 1980.
...
Part of his response suggests that it would be difficult to do
anything Zep-related on his terms; that is, to create and perform
new music rather than rely on rehashing the past. Even if Plant,
Page and Jones reunited to make a new album, would fans want
to hear them play it in concert at the expense of Whole Lotta Love
and Stairway to Heaven? And if the band was somehow persuaded
to crank up the ‘70s jukebox, could Plant hit those high notes and
conjure the bravado of the bare-chested “golden god”?
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Originally Posted by mugofbeer
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