Since I first heard their music as a child, I did not understand Led Zeppelin. I’ve tried to unpack it. It’s not from lack of inquiry. And I’m not a denier. I fully recognize the otherworldly skill and power involved in making that music. But the circuitry of Led Zeppelin always felt so tightly oriented around the nodes of hormonal and electrical power that everything else was lost on me. Over the years, I think I began to understand what that “everything else” was that I was looking for. It was humanity.

I admire technical proficiency. I love great, thunderous riffs. And, just so it’s on the record, I’m all for hormones. But whereas I find the voltage of AC/DC to be fun and funny, I find it in Led Zeppelin to be a little showy. And, inversely, where I find the craft and playing in Led Zeppelin to be superb, I find it in The Rolling Stones to be rooted in humanity. As a result, Zeppelin was never my band. I listened and listened and certainly like a great deal of their music. But their music only moved me the way a massive ocean wave does. It’s sublime and impressive but not something I wanted to surf. 

All of the mysticism and fables and lionization of Zeppelin never landed for me. But if there was one of them in whom I could see a glimmer of something else from behind the facade, it was certainly Robert Plant. As a child mostly of the 80s, I got to see Robert Plant eschew his former band’s sound and earnestly struggle to reveal himself, while also embracing MTV, New Wave and his role as a solo celebrity (rather than as rock god frontman). I’m sure for hardcore Zeppelin fans, this evolution may have felt awkward or even blasphemous. However, my younger self saw a smart, self-aware, aging man searching for something new.

Based on his first three solo records, that “something new” was not going to sound or look like Led Zeppelin. Robert Plant was a tremendous singer, but he was not Zeppelin’s primary songwriter. So, this new role would take time. His early records are notable for their lack of lead guitars, the prominence of synthesizers and Plant’s vocal meanderings around rhythms that, most intentionally, sound nothing like his dear friend, John Bohnam’s. There are moments in each of those albums that evoke very professional and complex New Wave. There are moments that sound like early 60s rock played with the instruments and rhythms of the future. But, I think those records mostly sound like a man who has decided that he cannot make music that sounds like Led Zeppelin and is searching on the radio and in his voice for what the alternatives are. In retrospect, he did not find much.

1988s “Now and Zen,” Plant’s fourth solo album, promised to be different. For one, Plant was reuniting with Jimmy Page for two of the album’s singles -- “Tall Cool One” and “Heaven Knows.” This also marked Plant’s first (of several) collaborations with avid Zeppelin fan, Phil Johntsone, who had encouraged Plant to more openly embrace his roots. This nod was explicitly marked on “Tall Cool One,” wherein Page plays guitar, Plant imitates and mocks his former self and, most curiously, samples iconic Led Zeppelin songs in the outro. Having heard The Beastie Boys do this to much success on “Licensed to Ill,” Robert Plant wasn’t going to let the kids have all the fun with those gargantuan riffs. 

Cumulatively, fans and the press were all worked up in a lather at the promise of a “return to form.” There was no ill will against the first three Plant records. They were all commercially successful and critically respected. But there was a sense of, “get the experiments out of your system and go have sex with the Marshall amps again.” 

Unfortunately for those ardent fans, but fortunately for musical posterity, what we got with “Now and Zen” is a great late 80s artifact. Aside from the two professional, but relatively tame Page contributions, and the cheeky, meta-text of Plant’s sexual innuendo, the forty year old made an album that owed much more to The Talking Heads, Talk Talk and Tears for Fears than Led Zeppelin. The keyboards are mixed at or above the guitars in most tracks. When they are present, the guitars have a chiming, vaguely Eastern tone that sounds not unlike Television. 

Perhaps mostly notably, the rhythms on this album -- some man-made and many not -- are all over the place. Many songs do not stay on a single meter or find a groove at all. There is a herky-jerkiness underneath Plant’s very strong, but syrupy, vocals that is neither jazzy nor rhythmic like some New Wave. No, Plant seems to be endlessly searching for the beat. And the result is really more like the love child of Hans Zimmer, Talking Heads and the theme to Seinfeld.

I actually think this Wikipedia footnote reference from “Ship of Fools,” one of the more patient and evocative performances on the album, does sum up some of the vibe of “Now and Zen”

"Ship of Fools" was also featured on the final two-hour episode of Miami Vice, "Freefall". It is the musical accompaniment to Crockett and Tubbs return to Miami via motor yacht after rescuing General Bourbon from the fictional Central American nation of Costa Morada.

In retrospect, even Plant himself alludes to the tension he was having between his songs and his reliance on synthesizers:

"By the time “Now and Zen” came out in '88, it looked like I was big again. It was a Top 10 album on both sides of the Atlantic. But if I listen to it now, I can hear that a lot of the songs got lost in the technology of the time."

If this all sounds intolerable, it is not. “Now and Zen” was certainly a victim of its influences and technology, but it is also uniformly interesting and bound together by, inarguably, one of the greatest vocalists in Rock music. Moreover, I find “Now and Zen” provides a better glimpse into the humanity of Robert Plant than any of his previous albums, with Led Zeppelin or solo. Turns out he’s just a clever, super talented Englishman who loves to try new things with music. He loves the soul of the Blues. He loves the loins of Rock. He loves the textures of Middle Eastern guitars. He loves the rhythms of the world. You hear every bit of that on “Now and Zen.” And while I think the songs are less than the sum of their parts, oddly, I think that the album is greater than the sum of its songs. The effect of all of those rhythms and experiments does grow on you the way a Talking Heads album does, albeit without the unit’s cohesion or the very high points of the great Talking Heads’ albums.

Most of “Now and Zen” stays in that “Robert Plant doing soulful New Wave for discerning adults” mode. The best of these tracks is the album opener, “Heaven Knows,” which was a number one Rock radio hit, though I think any new Robert Plant song with the word “Heaven” in its title would have similarly succeeded. It builds upon an upside down chord progression that sounds almost exactly like a couple Tom Verlaine solo songs, but with the benefit of stronger vocals, more compelling rhythms and a catchy and insistent “heaven knows” refrain. Roughly two thirds of this album follows this “not too fast and not too slow but everything in between” outline to lesser effect. And while the mix muddles the synths, guitars and beats in a typically 80s manner, the vocals are so lovely that they separate. 

The outliers on the album are “Ship of Fools,” which is a more plaintive, genuinely Zeppelin-esque, acoustic ballad, and “Tall Cool One,” which is a pop collage that features light rapping, samples and the very memorable chorus “lighten up baby, I’m in love with you.” I’d say that time has not been kind to that hit song, but it shows me that Plant’s pop experiments can, at least, be fun. “Billy’s Revenge” and “White, Clean and Neat” find Plant using his voice to play with something in the vein of rockabilly or 50s proto-rock like Johnny Ray. Neither song is great but you can appreciate the great efforts in him trying to assimilate all of these disparate influences.

Objectively, it is hard to recommend “Now and Zen” as essential music. Plant’s follow up records would move on from New Wave and find him more comfortably operating in Folk, Roots and Middle Eastern sounds. That being said, it is, in my view, an important document of a middle-aged man, restlessly experimenting to find himself and to reveal himself. In 2013, I saw Robert Plant in a Whole Foods in Austin, Texas. I didn’t think “there’s Robert Plant from Led Zeppelin.” No. I honest to god thought, “he looks like a seventy year old version of that interesting guy from “Now and Zen.”

by Matty Wishnow