'Rearranger' Chronicles Plant Evolution

NEW YORK (AP) -- Outside of being the title of his newest release, "Mighty Rearranger" serves fairly well as a neat synopsis of Robert Plant's career evolution.

After all, of all the blues mutations that form rock history, it was Led Zeppelin's witch-brew of sweltering plantation angst and black magic world psychedelia that was the most compelling. Compelling enough, at least, for many musicians to sit back on their couches in a pool of their own congratulation and slowly dissolve into the self-parodies that the rock gods have coupled with infamous expressions of their distaste for longevity.

Yet despite his documented reunions with Jimmy Page and, congruently, his Dylanesque willingness to revisit his pantheon of hits in a live context, Plant, 56, has never been much for what he calls "the old pals act." He might, however, be less sensitive about the issue than some think.

Weeks before sitting down with Plant in a small, velvet-colored room in the offices of Sanctuary records, I'm issued a series of warnings about Zeppelin questions, as well nebulous allusions to a curmudgeonly distaste for journalism in and of itself. Yet the Plant I encounter -- turning an album over in his hands with wide-eyed, boyish admiration for the record stores he had plundered during his stay in New York, giddy over an opportunity to catch "Monty Python's Spamalot" -- is decidedly less imposing. He talks uninvited about the Zeppelin days in equal parts easygoing self-deprecation ("We had every Spinal Tap moment imaginable") and quiet reverence, and calls his Honeydrippers outings with the man he calls Pagey "a mistake, like singing in a karaoke bar," only to immediately double back and suggest that they might do it again, "only wilder this time."

"The past is dissolving into the right place for me," he says, grinning, "moving back out of the main picture. Things are coming into really good focus."

Surprisingly tall, facial features a bit more haughty with age, Plant speaks with equal enthusiasm about his upcoming U.S. tour, while lamenting the fact that it will prevent him from "watching the first almond trees blossom in the Atlas mountains," which is indicative of the spontaneous romantic poesy he will launch into while discussing his affection for North African music.

"Morocco came as a kind of, as a gift really," he says over a cup of coffee. "A friend of mine was a singer in a band, and he'd been to Marrakech with his wife in about 1971. He said, 'You've got to go to Marrakech. You've just got to see this place.' Marrakech is quite tidy now. But then, it was an incredibly romantic place to be. It was a cowboy town, great, very exciting. I went there, and I walked into the markets, with a guardian, a guide -- because the hustlers are so vivid, you know -- with my wife at the time, who is Indian. And I'm walking along, and suddenly I'm completely bowled over by the sound. The smells, the colors, the powder-blue sky. The sounds that were around me were amazing. And that was it. I was done for then. And you know, English singers, really, most of us just wanted to be blues men. We just wanted to play, we just wanted to be in that era. It was like a bunch of cowboys trying to be Howling Wolf."

Sitting between the excesses of the '60s and the convoluted debacle of the '80s, it was a trip that Plant at one point called a reintroduction "to the basic theory and principle of music."

"Well, I suppose theory and principle is a bit of a swanky way to say that," he laughs between sips. "That wasn't the right term. It's just a country which has no commercial gain from music -- it's just music, there's no structure, there's no business, there's no mechanization of selling stuff, there's no record companies. You make cassettes, and the cassettes are sold in the medina, or in the markets, for a dollar, whatever it is. There's no royalties. So when you go to the desert and you see these people, they carry this music, they use it for everything. For telling the story of what's going on, for shrouded information about political conditions, for all the things that the troubadour would have used in the Middle Ages.

"I mean, they'll have a stage with no lights. It's just this fantastic weave of stuff. And I've been through everything. We were the first people to use lasers, you know, and we had explosions on stage. And I'm sitting on the top of a sand dune in Timbuktu with a big bottle of clear Martinique rum in me hands, and I'm like, ... THIS IS AMAZING."

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"I live on from a glory so long ago and gone" Plant whispers over the bubbling electronica of "Mighty Rearranger's" "Tin Pan Valley." Lamentations of "late night conversations filled with 20th century cool" ultimately give way to the proclamation "I've found a new way out" before the song ironically bursts out of its futuristic atmosphere into a quintessentially Zeppelin, riff-heavy workout between Clive Deamer's shuddering drums and some of the first real vocal histrionics on an album that leans more towards controlled intensity.

Plant seems to appreciate the absurdity of being one of the few rock demigods to be alive amid his own accrued mythology, treading lightly around the debris of anthologies, tribute bands and a "heavy metal" legacy that becomes more fractured with each subsequent death trip.

He speaks purposefully about "taking the challenge of being relevant rather than some 50-year-old jukebox," and believes that it's possible for an icon to have a past, present, and future like anyone else.

Thus, with the Led placed firmly in a subconscious from which it emerges in all the right moments, "Mighty Rearranger" finds Plant still walking what he calls the "fantastic, straight beautiful diagonal from the desert of Mali to Clarksdale, Mississippi." Embroidered with the singer's perpetual folk fascination, the album builds off his Moroccan obsession while maintaining the sex and swagger, light and shade of Zeppelin's deep blues, working less to juxtapose those sounds than to cleave into what Plant sees as a shared soul.

"I heard the blues in the musical scales of Morocco," he says. "Especially in the country music from the mountains, I heard the blues. I heard it, but I didn't know. I was going, 'Why am I so emotionally attracted to this music?' I mean it's not because the people were great people, although they are great people. It's not because I knew what they were saying, because I hadn't got a clue what they were talking about and still don't know. So I just started collecting cassettes in the medina. And I got it. I mean, I got it, but couldn't play it. I couldn't sing it. So gradually over the years I've tried to make it so that I sing me, and the music accosts and seduces. It kind of becomes a hybrid between rock 'n' roll and desert music."

He pauses, smiling again. "But those guys have just got it down, it's amazing. And in the middle of it all, they plug these instruments that we use, called a gimbri, a three-string, catgut-driven granddaddy of the guitar. They plug it into an old amplifier that's powered by a car battery, and then they put the thing behind their neck and play, like Hendrix. Amazing.

"There was one guy I knew, Ibrahim, who played in a band and worked in Algiers. He never heard the blues. So when he first heard John Lee Hooker, he could not believe it. He said, "But this is what we do."

"The Enchanter" offers a compelling instance of that synthesis, conjuring up barren, mirage-inducing heat over a whispering Delta interior. Decorated with riffs that begin evoking Mississippi slide maestros only to morph abruptly into snake-charming vamps, the track comes off like Ravi Shankar covering "When the Levee Breaks." The introductory "Another Tribe" finds drum circle percussion dissolving into broken spell-cast waves of metallic Kashmir. Simultaneously, Plant's vocals weave a breathy narrative delicacy above that groundwork in one of the more subtle examples of his willingness to allow his voice to exist symbiotically with his band's instrumentation, as opposed to the sharp, blues-driven counterpoint it is accustomed to. Meanwhile, tracks like "Takamba" and "Freedom Fries" approach the Moroccan influence from an alternate perspective, wedding syncopated desert rhythms to anvil-heavy, riff-driven explosions.

"Freedom Fries is in 9/8 time," Plant notes, "and that rhythm is straight from the desert. The word Takamba means the rhythm that is created by the running of a camel. "So the camel..." He pauses and, running his hands through his hair, begins to laugh while looking out the window. "It's ----ing crazy being in Manhattan talking about the running of the camel."

Despite it's eclecticism, "Rearranger" does concede to some nostalgic moments. "All the King's Horses," weaving Plant's familiar hippie leanings into ancient pastoral romance, conjures the epic acid-folk of Zeppelin III gems like "That's the Way" so well, it could pass for a box-set outtake. The title track, for it's own part, cuts deeper into primitive blues. Built around the melody of an old-time, cum-John-the-Revelator spiritual, the track boils down to a cheeky riff that doubles Plant's hymn like meditation on his own muse, tweaked by drunken saloon keys and irreverent harmonica breaks and infiltrated by ethereal background chanting that retains the Eastern aesthetic.

Pervaded by glossy, polished surfaces that emphasize it's atmosphere and detail, the record does manage to frequently regress into Zeppelin's pure sound innovation, puncturing the slickness with something visceral.

"It's very textured music," Plant notes. "There's a kind of wildness and recklessness that comes from Justin (Adams') guitar, but instead of it being rock oriented, it's very North African. Then he has these delicate arpeggios. So with things like that, there's a seesaw between trying to make it beautiful and fragile, and being bombastic as hell, with power chords and France Goes to Hollywood meets Adam and the Ants."

Later that evening, standing at the exit of the building, he talks about a series of small club dates he will perform in the ensuing weeks to preview the album and warm up for the summer tour. Plant asks if I will make the New York gig, and I say I will.

"It's not Madison Square Garden," he says almost apologetically. He is silent for a moment, then, looking up, smiles a slightly fractured, vulnerable smile. "But one gets tired of singing into the darkness."

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Two weeks later, I'm standing behind the sound board at Irving Plaza. Plant appears to thunderous applause, wearing a plain white oversized T-shirt and jeans, looking as if he's strolled directly onstage from his back yard. The band launches into a bruising, mystical "No Quarter," one of several tweaked arrangements of Zeppelin classics woven into the set list, which smooth out Page's distinctive riffs in favor of sinuous, exotic flourishes of Moroccan sorcery.

"When the Levee Breaks" emerges in a blast of darkened Americana, sex and catastrophe, a testament to the monumentality of Zep blues dragged through the strange marketplaces of Marrakech. "This one's a happy, optimistic number, as all of my tunes are," Plant quips as the band slips into the murky trance introduction of "Tin Pan Valley." The focus is taken off the history of the songs and placed on their presentation, showcasing the band's chops and their compositions.

Eventually, though, we run into the encore buzzsaw of "A Whole Lotta Love," which refuses to be anything than what it is, a twisted, sex-deprived love letter wanting nothing but to possess its object and destroy everything else. The riffs return in accord; seismic and centering, the sinuous North African spirituality of the show is abruptly punctured. Plant, newly brash, seems to notice the transition, and slips into a playfully disdainful swagger.

He's conceded, it seems, to drive the crowd -- oozing mid-life crises, industry goo, and missed-the moment youth -- into the howling, rapturous fit of nostalgic revelry they've been dying to indulge in since they slipped on their 77 US tour shirts earlier that night. And maybe, in the process, he begins to make one more peace with the past, seeing it reduced to the simplicity of a room full of people singing a song in unison, all the way up to the inevitably sustained "Laaaaaooouuve!"

A woman who looks disturbingly like my mother screams in Banger Sister bliss, middle-aged men with bulging disks between their L4 and L5 vertebrae fling themselves drunkenly at each other in ill-executed high fives, and the kids get another momentary glimpse into a bygone era that no crackling romantic album recording, even from one of Plant's tattered record-shop haunts, could conjure up in smell and touch and sound.

There are a million places each of us could be in the moment, sensory associations of back seats of cheap automobiles and gypsy psychedelia, yet the wail, anachronistically whole, abrupt, demands that the moment be respected as its own, occurring in its own place and time. After all, it's made it through the rock minefield -- through Honeydripping karaoke and the '80s, through art-rock bastard children like "In Through the Out Door," through the experiments with reggae and funk, through P. Diddy's co-option of "Kashmir" for the "Godzilla" movie, through the road, and, for that matter, through the car commercials. And ultimately, this is a new Plant, maybe even, in some respects, a better one, more humble, less confined. But he still does a damn good impression of a golden god-era rock star.

Thanks for this!