Stephen Presents: Robert Plant (Extended)

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Hey, everybody. You're listening to The Late Show Pod Show with Stephen Colbert, who is here with me in this little booth. Yep. Happy to be here with you, Becca. Okay. So today on the podcast, we're continuing. We're rocking and rolling with Thanksgiving Rock and Roll Week. Yep. This is, you know, my guess the guests are getting weaker and weaker as the week goes on. What? Really? Not a blimp, but a... Zeppelin. Yeah? Who is he? Oh, it's Robert Plant. Yeah. But the guest isn't getting weaker.

No, no, no. Your quizzes. My quizzes are getting much worse. You're getting weaker. No, the guests are staying all the way at the top. Robert Plant. Robert Plant. Yeah. This was an incredible interview where you guys learned a lot. You have a lot in common.

It was really nice. I was really excited. Well, I already knew a little bit that he was down with the elves and the fairies and all that kind of stuff. If you listen to NFZEP, you know that there's Tolkien references scattered, littered throughout there. Kind of, you know, Western.

British Isles, Occult Ephemera. Okay, cool. I feel like I've heard a lot of Zep and I wasn't listening for that, but I got to. Now you'll hear it. Now I'll hear it. Yes. I love some Zep. Second time I've met Mr. Plant.

Oh, really? Third time I've met Mr. Plant. I think I interviewed him on the old show. Oh, yeah, you did. I did interview him on the old show. I also met him at the Kennedy Center Honors one night. Oh, cool, cool, cool. He was there. Zeppelin was being honored with the Kennedy Center Honor the same night that Letterman was.

Oh, yeah. And I got to present Dave the night before. There's a party the night before at the State Department. And I got to give the speech like honoring Dave, which was one of the greatest. One of the great joys of my life was that I got to get up there and say nice things about Letterman that Dave couldn't do anything but listen to.

You're like, it was, I mean, it was wonderful. Everybody was laughing at his agony of being complimented. It was better than any joke I could tell. Awesome. And a plant came up to me afterwards and he goes, you really made the room jump.

I'm like, wow, I can leave now. That's a really cool thing for Robert Plant to tell you. You really made the room jump. That's awesome. So anyway, I didn't even know I'd have a better conversation with that. It was only one sentence. And then to have Plant on and us to like.

Completely bond over Tolkien. Yeah, yeah. Amazing. That's awesome. He had no idea who he was dealing with. Yeah, you can hear the surprise in his voice. He was like, oh. He walked into the chopper blades of my adolescent obsession. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, so sweet.

Like, really cool guy. And he talked a lot about in this extended interview on The Late Show Pod Show. Oh, this is an extended exclusive. Yeah. He talks about what he was listening to as a teenager. Yep. And sort of the whole pirate radio scene when he was growing up. Sure. How cool that stuff is. Yeah.

So this is Robert Plant on The Late Show Pod Show. Hit some ZEP, you know, get some Hey Hey Mama roaring on the speaker right after this and enjoy The Late Show Pod Show's extended interview with Robert Plant. My next guest tonight is an eight-time Grammy Award-winning Rock and Roll Hall of Famer who is the lead singer of Led Zeppelin. Please welcome to The Late Show, Robert Plant!

Nice to see you again. The last time we actually talked to each other was on the Colbert Report. You were a different guy. I was a different guy. I was a different guy. You, my producer, reminded me today that you came on and you gave me some weed, which I did not remember, possibly because I accepted it from you. You performed on this show in 2021 with Alison Krauss. Now you're here with a new album from your new band, Saving Grace. Here's you and the band right here. How did...

How did this band come together? Was it really just meeting a guy in a pub? Well, yeah, it's exactly that, yeah. I'd spent so much time jetting from England to Nashville and having these remarkable experiences with... stupendous American musicians. And I'd go back to the club in the pub.

and talk about soccer and talk about the Misty Mountains and talk about all the stuff that you do when you live near the Welsh borders, all that magnificent sort of abstraction. And a guy came up to me and he said, do you know... And he started reeling after these amazing English, British, folk, Irish artists and my heart.

took flight. I went, somebody knows what I feel and what I talk about. Because I more or less live in this dream world where it's very difficult to find people that have the same affinity. So I grabbed this guy. And a gallon later... We started saying, well, you know, maybe we can do something with that old incredible string band song or whatever happened to Burt Yanshaw. How about if we just take somebody else's song and change the name?

As you do with folk songs. Yeah, that's what they're for. God knows where they came from in the beginning. So it began like that. It was really good, and we gathered people in the community. The great thing was, or the interesting thing was, that nobody was really tuned in to a particular style or approach. It developed...

between the musicians, between us all, as the thing began it opened up like a beautiful concept of sound. So it went from just fooling around into being something that you could record. Well, you did. You have a new album here, Robert Plant, Saving Grace, with the band. And... I'm curious, where did the name Saving Grace come from? Well, what do you do in between big things? You sort of calm down and somebody's got to be your saving grace. Somebody's got to get you off yourself.

And I've always been frenetic and I've always worked really hard. People say, you know, you've got to take it easy now. You need to find some way of... you know, checking out for a bit. So I found a bunch of musicians who were my saving grace and did the same thing all over again.

Got frenetic again with that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, just keep going, yeah. You say you spend a lot of time sort of in the dream world of your imagination and your enthusiasms. Do you need any room in that dream world? Because I...

I'd love to visit your dream world. Well, it all began with Kirk Douglas. And Tony Curtis. What? From Spartacus? No, better than that, from the Vikings. Oh, sure. My daddy used to take me to the movies and I saw all this. the technicolor or what cinemascopic color whatever that exactly I don't know whether you ever saw films where it looks like it's what I gave you last time I saw you yes

In VistaVision. Yeah, yeah. And the guys were so adept, they could throw things and they could jump chasms and climb. Oh, right. And they have the girls' braids like that, and they throw the hatchets to cut her braids in the Viking. Remember that moment? Oh, I thought that was a band I was in earlier. I've heard some stories. I've heard some stories. I mean, bottom line was it was just, I guess...

In the early 1950s, we didn't really have much exposure to television in England, and we certainly didn't know too much about a lot of stuff. So my childhood was really collecting stamps and reading books on history.

And my parents used to have this old Ford car and take me into the Welsh hills and into the mountains, into the very misty mountains, and then find these castles and stuff. And I started reading about this stuff. And then... I started writing songs a little bit later on, got rid of the stamps.

Goodbye, postage stamps. Who were you listening to when you were a young teenager? Who were you into? I mean, you guys were a genre-defining act of your own, so what kind of music were you listening to before that you existed as Led Zeppelin? Well, I think, really, I was taken by black music, and I, again... Like Delta Blues, that sort of thing? Well, yeah, and in parallel, the work of Smokey Robinson in the beginning, that's incredible.

The very early stuff he did with Barrett Strong, The Shop Around, Way Over There, What's So Good About Goodbye, all those beautiful songs. And in parallel, you had this sound, this...

remarkable music coming out of the Delta and taking its trip up to Chicago. So it was coiffured from Clarksdale, Mississippi into Chicago, into Chess Records. And when that music landed in England... with Little Walter and Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, anybody who could pick up a guitar, really, was either going to sound like the Hollies or something and very sweet stuff, or they were going to dig into that music.

And that's where we went. We dug into that Delta stuff. And it was remarkable, really, because I'm old enough to have seen quite a lot of those artists who were born at the turn of the 20th century playing because... Delta Blues was really big in Europe, and so it would travel through England to Scandinavia, and it was just so inspiring, really. Your work with Alison Krauss really...

Another Delta Blues singer. Yeah, shift, like, it really connected you to, like, roots music, American roots music. How did that change you as an artist? Well, obviously along the way... I came to America when I was just 20 years old, and so I was suddenly exposed to American radio. And it was a very healthy time for American radio. And very different than the radio in the UK, which was only rock and roll like a certain time of the day. Yeah, there was pirate ships out in the English Channel.

That's true. And they were DJs on there getting seasick, you know. Broadcasting into the island. Just sending it back into England with commercial radio. It was banned by the government. So you've got that stuff going on. What was your question? What's your favorite flavor of ice cream? Working with Alison Krauss, how did that change you as an artist? With Zeppelin, we picked up the different radio stations. You started hearing different music.

Getting exposed to what rock and rollers turned, as they turned Charlie Rich, people like that, I started to dig into all that. And then... At one point, somebody said, have you ever thought about singing with somebody from another genre completely? And I said, well, I never thought about singing with anybody because I'd always been on my own up at the sharp end.

Yeah. And when my voice didn't work, it was a great instrumental band, you know. So I got the invitation. Did that happen often? Yeah, it did. It did, yeah. Or if it didn't, don't listen to the bootlegs. They're terrible. So I contacted Alice and we got together and we tried that. And as we began to develop our own sort of conglomerate style...

Every day I learned more and more stuff about American music. I'd been always listening to black blues and R&B and all that. And suddenly I heard all this other beautiful music, you know. Many of the songs lived in both cultures, if you like, cross-cultural. So you could go from Lead Belly to, I don't know, Ralph Stanley across all this beautiful exchange of one song.

It was great. So I learned a lot. Picked it up and brought it back to England. And now it's called Anglicana. Anglicana. Yeah, yeah.

You lived in the West Midlands of the UK and still live out there, right? Okay, that's where J.R.R. Tolkien was from, from like 3 to 19. He lived around where you are. And I'm curious, what's in the water up there? Why... Why do you people live in a dream world up there? How the dream world again, yeah. Yes, exactly. The misty mountains and all that kind of thing. Well, I blame my mom and dad for J.R.R. Tolkien.

Yeah. You know, there's some sort of melding there. Did they introduce you, Sam? Yeah, we used to meet in a pub in Oxford. We were called the Inklings with C.S. Lewis. No, you didn't go to the Inklings, did you? No. Oh. Did you go to the Eagle and Child? Yes, yeah. You did? Wow, the bird and the baby? Yeah. You know, the thing is that Tolkien was a master.

And have you heard his recordings? Yeah, I have. Old Tom Bombadillo. Tom Bombadillo. Bright blue, his jacket and his boots are yellow. Yeah, he fell in love with the River Man's daughter. Exactly. Goldberry. Yeah, exactly. You got it. Yeah. Oh, slender as a willow wand, oh, clearer than clear water. Oh, reed by the living pool, fair river daughter. Oh, springtime and summertime and spring again after. Oh, wind on the waterfall and the leaves laughter. No.

I've put some thought into it. You can't top this stuff, can you? You'd be a good Bombadil. You've got a bit of a Bombadil feel. First, you have a fantastic lady there, giving it large. Then you've got... Tolkien's shadow comes through the door. It's really great, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but Tolkien was a really, he opened the door to all that sort of dark age meander of history, which... There's some Tolkien in lyrics and some Zep songs. Yeah.

And I'm just curious, did anybody pick up on that at the time in the band, or was that just you? It didn't exist at the time. Talking that he'd had his moment, I guess, but, you know... I guess The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings had subsided. 1936, The Hobbit, 1954, The Lord of the Rings. Jeez. Fancy a drink afterwards. Oh, I do. I do, 100%. I've got a spear in the car. I've got a shield up there. But I'm worth more than that, and so is he. Yes. Yes, exactly. Magnificent.

Because what did you love about Tolkien? Why did it speak to you? Well, it spoke to me because he lived and his points of reference were very close to where I live and very close to where my parents... unwittingly used to take me through this landscape where you began just like you can here from another culture that's still around you can read what the landscape

gave you from the old times before there were highways and stuff like that. So it becomes quite evocative and I think Tolkien had it down and it's so remarkable. I mean, this is the end of my career, by the way, but it's so remarkable that you can have a culture that's shunted into the west side of Britain, that has absolutely nothing to do. with the English at all. It's that the Welsh are British. And so the mix of all the legend and the space shifting and...

All that stuff, it's there. It's 15 miles from where I live. Start going, and you can feel it all. And then they come and take me away. Well, not just yet, thank you. Saving Grace, the album, is available now. Robert Plant. Thank you for listening to The Late Show Pod Show with Stephen Colbert. Just one more thing. If you want to see more of me, Come to the Late Show YouTube channel for more clips and exclusives.

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