On December 4th, 1980, Led Zeppelin issued a single statement that dissolved the band. It said that they could not continue as they were. It was signed by all three surviving members. It was released to the press and that was the end of the official communication between Jimmy Page and Robert Plant for what felt to both men and to the people who worked around them like a very long time.
The statement was agreed upon quickly in the weeks following John Bonham’s death on September 25th. What was not agreed upon in those same weeks was anything about what came next. Paige had specific ideas about what should come next. Plant had entirely different ideas about what should come next. And the gap between those two sets of ideas, which had not been visible as a gap during 12 years of Led Zeppelin, because the band’s ongoing existence had bridged it without either man needing to acknowledge it directly, suddenly became the central fact of their professional
and personal relationship. What happened in the years between that December 1980s statement and the moment in the early 1990s when Paige walked into a venue in Boston where Plant was performing and the two men looked at each other and understood without saying anything directly that [music] something was possible again.
What happened in those years is one of the least documented stories in Led Zeppelin’s history, precisely because it was happening in the space that Led Zeppelin had previously occupied, a space that was now empty. If you’re new here, this channel tells the real stories behind Led Zeppelin that nobody talked about. Subscribe so you don’t miss what’s coming next.
This is the story of what it actually cost Jimmy Page and Robert Plant to be in each other’s orbit without the band that had connected them and the specific moment that made reconnection possible again. The friendship between Paige and Plant had been formed over 12 years of extraordinary shared experience, but it had also been formed in the specific context of Led Zeppelin’s The two men had not known each other before Paige drove to Birmingham in the summer of 1968 to hear a young singer perform at a teacher training college. They had not been friends before they became bandmates. The friendship, in other words, was not anticedent to the band. It had grown inside the band, shaped by the band’s conditions, sustained by the ongoing shared project of being Led Zeppelin.
When that project ended, the friendship had to find a way to exist outside the only context in which it had ever operated. This was not straightforward for either of them, but it was considerably more complicated for one of them than the other. Paige, in the aftermath of the dissolution, had a clear idea of what he wanted. He wanted to continue making music as Led Zeppelin or as something that was functionally Led Zeppelin with a replacement for Bonham.
He had said versions of this in multiple interviews across the years. The idea that the music existed independently of any individual member that a suitable drummer could carry it forward that the specific creative partnership between him and Planton Jones was what needed to be preserved. He had been saying versions of this since before Bonham’s body was cold.
The live aid conversation that eventually produced the 1985 disaster. The approaches to various promoters about reunion tours. The publicly stated belief that Plant was playing games. All of it flows from the same position Paige had held since December 1980. That Led Zeppelin should continue in some form. and that Plant’s refusal to engage with that was a personal choice being made against the band’s interest and against the wishes of Paige and Jones.
Plant’s position was different, and it was shaped by things that had happened before Bonham’s death. The channel has covered several of those things in separate episodes. [music] the absence of Paige and Grant and Jones from Carak’s funeral in 1977. The tax arrangement that had kept Plant in Malibu rather than at home with Moren during his recovery from the roads car accident.
The series of decisions across the late 1970s in which Pa’s judgment about what was good for Led Zeppelin had consistently been prioritized over Plant’s judgment about what was good for Robert Plant. Bonham’s death had been the final event in a sequence that had already moved Plant toward the conclusion that whatever he had owed to Led Zeppelin had been discharged and that the next phase of his life was going to be built around different priorities.
Plant began working on his solo album in 1981. He did not call Paige. The silence on his end was not exactly a decision. It was more the absence of an action that Paige had expected and that Plant simply did not take. Paige, waiting for a conversation about what came next, found that the conversation was not being initiated.
Leave a Reply