It’s been obvious over the years that Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones want to tour but Robert Plant keeps refusing. So why don’t they hook up with Jason Bonham (John’s son and a perfectly good stand in) and a Robert Plant soundalike and go on tour anyway? It seems to have worked well for Queen, who’ve been able to perform just fine with Adam Lambert standing in for Freddie Mercury. David Crosby and Graham Nash toured pretty successfully on their on too.
I’d be every bit as happy to buy a ticket to see Page, Jones and Bonham perform as I would the original lineup. Seems like they’re wasting a lot of precious time at their age by not fulfilling their desire to tour and perform Zeppelin songs, and they’re leaving a lot of money on the table in the process.
I don’t know if perhaps Plant could keep them from using the Zeppelin name but I doubt it; the band was Jimmy Page’s creation and he hired everyone else. So I’d be surprised if he ever allowed Robert Plant or anyone else to gain control over the band’s name. But even if he could, they could still tour under their own names and do just fine I would think.
So, does anybody know what the fly in the ointment is here, if any? And would you be willing to pay to see Page, Jones and Bonham perform with a vocalist other than Plant?
This is something that’s been bugging me since I rediscovered Led Zeppelin a while back. I’d love to see those guys play even without Plant and I’m curious to know what others think. I’m about to call it a night so won’t be able to respond until some time tomorrow, so thanks in advance for any…ahem…feedback.
I don’t think they need the money, per se, and I love the thought of them honoring the band’s memory by limiting things, but there’s more to it than that.
So far as I know, there’s no bad blood, between them.
There was a Page/Plant tour, what, in the 90’s, and I think Dave Grohl got them up on stage for a song or to a while back.
As far as JPJ is concerned he still seems to tour as well, he just seems to keep to himself.
But that’s not why I quoted Wordman’s post. I did that to say that I caught the Page/Crowes tour, it was A-Mazing. Chris, as I like to say, embodied Robert Plant. Honestly, close your eyes and he sounded like him. Open them and he looked like a brunette Robert. I’m so glad I went to that show. I think they did about 75% Zeppelin songs and the rest Crowes songs.
They could divide it up any way they want. If Plant, Page, and Jones want to give less to Bonham, that’s up to them. Lorne would rather not get involved.
Yet in interview after interview Page never refutes it when the interviewer suggests he and Jones seem to want to tour but Plant doesn’t. What Page usually (but not always) does is say something vague about Plant having other projects, etc. Other times he’ll be more blunt and simply say that without Plant he and Jones can’t tour because he (Page) doesn’t sing.
Here’s clip of Page on Ellen Degeneres’ show where I think you can see what I mean. When asked about touring he tells Ellen she’s talking to the wrong guy. He then goes on to state that he loves playing Zeppelin music and will let it go at that.
All in all, it’s pretty clear he wants to tour but has to step on egg shells when asked about it out of fear of pissing Plant off and perhaps scuttling the idea permanently. It’s like he always has a faint hope it might happen some day but never will if Plant gets pissed off enough about it.
My own theory is that Plant doesn’t feel he can perform on the same level as before vocally (even though he’s still damn good) but dodges the issue by claiming creativity issues, etc.
One huge distinction between the Queen situation and the Led Zeppelin situation is that Robert Plant is still very much alive, and very likely has some level of control over Page and Jones using the LZ name.
Queen did very well touring with Adam Lambert (and, to an extent, with Paul Rodgers before that), but the surviving members of the band were in agreement about it – bassist John Deacon, who still has partial ownership over the band’s name and catalog, hasn’t played with them in decades, and he has no appetite for involvement with the band any longer, but May and Taylor still consult with him and get his approval for any new projects.
The name Led Zeppelin is a 1998 registered service mark in the US, under Plant, Page, Baldwin (Jones) and Joan Hudson (trustee of the Bonham estate). In the UK Copyright of literary, dramatic, artistic or musical works (written), lasts for 70 years after the death of the artist/author; Copyright of sound recordings last for 50 years after date of release. Back to that in a minute.
Plant sold his royalty rights to the back-catalogue albums* in the 1980s, which he reveals in an interview with Richard Skinner (wish I could find the link). Rumor has it Peter Grant negotiated it back to Atlantic at some point, but no one has any concrete evidence, Plant isn’t talking, and Grant has died. The important part is that he kept creative control of the band, i.e. he doesn’t have to pay to perform Led Zep songs, and if the band reforms he has rights to creative writing/tours/name use, etc.
So because he has creative control and has ownership of the name in the US (typically protected in other nations) the others can’t tour as Led Zeppelin without him. Why Page doesn’t just come out and say that may be a legal thing - not sure.
Beyond that, Plant has chosen to run his career as his career, not living on the memories of the past. I’ve been critical of Page not letting go of the past and making a career of his own, instead of just punching out remasters of history. Jones has had and still does have a successful career as a producer and writer.
In interviews he says he has fond memories of those days, but - you can sense some of the bitterness from the pain of the death of his son, Karrac, and the death of Bonham, his best friend, and tumultuous road leading to the divorce to his first wife - all point back to the Zeppelin days and has probably made him a bit bitter because of it. He didn’t play any Zeppelin songs for the first 7 years of his solo career, and his sound was markedly different.
He has, a few times, has told Page, personally and through the media, that if he(Page) had some acoustic material he would be interested. That gives me the impression he doesn’t think he can perform the hard vocals anymore, or at least not on long tours anymore. Also considering Plant’s short tours now, the idea of a long drawn out (years) tour may be a turnoff.
In 2014 in an interview with James McNair, when his latest album,* Lullaby and… the Ceaseless Roar*, came out:
It’s also entirely possible he is just not interested concerning Zeppelin anymore in any capacity.
all sales of remasters, or box sets, etc, Plant still does receives royalties for. Why he sold the original royalties is still a mystery as the others have not. Speculations of poor sales on 70’s rock in the 80’s is the most possible, and maybe even partly to his bitterness of the pain he suffered and impending divorce in 1983, to using the money form his* Es Peranza* label.
First of all, thanks for a very informative and insightful post.
Second, does having a service mark actually equal ownership and/or creative control? If so, I’m surprised like I said that Jimmy Page would give up ownership and control in a band he created, hired the other members and was producer in the studio for.
I remembered that someone here had been critical of Page for that in the past. Must have been you. Still, in accounts I’ve read of Page’s solo shows, it’s been said that 70% of the songs he performs are Led Zeppelin songs.
Perhaps these account for the fact he looks so much older than the other two despite being the youngest of them all. I think he’s around five years younger than Page but he looks like a worn out old reprobate. (Think Aqualung.) Or to be generous, maybe a pirate.
More and more I’ve come to feel that Page just doesn’t feel up to the rigors vocally of performing Zeppelin songs with the original band because the standards are so high. He put a lot of work into the band’s studio recordings but often took short cuts or just blew off the hard parts in live shows. This is one of the reasons Led Zeppelin has developed a reputation for sucking when they play live. I saw them live in 1970 and some of their songs were only just recognizable even then.
But I digress. I saw a video recently (with Charlie Rose I think) where Plant admitted to being “to the left of terrified” at having to participate in the (excellent, as it turned out) Celebration Day concert they performed in 2007.
Perhaps, but this just takes us back to the question I posed in the OP, which is why, given their desire and advancing ages, Page and Jones don’t hook up with Jason Bonham and a capable vocalist (the heavy lifting creatively has already been done; all the guy would have to do is mimic the brilliant vocalizing that Plant came up with originally) and go out on their own?
I absolutely would pay just as much to see Page/Jones/Bonham under their own names with a guest singer as I would to see a reconstituted Led Zeppelin with Robert Plant. Admittedly I’m more of a fan of Page and Jones that I am of Robert Plant, but still there has to be a ready-made market out there for those guys that most musicians would kill for. So the premise of the OP is, why the hell don’t they do it?
All four have equal ownership/control of the name. Creative control/license etc is inferred under ownership rights. Page hasn’t given up any control. In the last two decades or so, the others have given Page production control to produce the remasters, and they collect their checks on the sales. I’m not sure if Hudson has any direct control of the music outside of collecting the monies and protecting the estate.
Do you mean Plant? Jimmy Page doesn’t really tour anymore, in fact hasn’t toured in 20 years. In Plant’s case, depending on the tour, he does seem to play more Zeppelin then in the past, but typically it is the blues and ballads. Early in an album’s release he focuses more on his material, and then slowly evolves to more Zeppelin near the end.
I was a year old in 1970, so I’ll take your word for it…lol. (You meant Plant again right?) They did have a lot of studio mixing that couldn’t be done live. But, outside of the bootlegs and videos released I unfortunately never had the good fortune of seeing Led Zeppelin perform live, as I was only 11 when Bonham died. My appreciation for their music developed in the 80s. I can’t say I’ve heard that they had a reputation for “sucking” playing live. They did suck bad in 1985 for the Live Aid performance, however - that may have festered in some people’s minds perhaps?
Apologies SA, I meant to answer this in my last post and went off on a tangent. They have all the rights to play the songs, and creative license to edit and remix as they see fit. I don’t think they can tour as Zeppelin without Plant, but there isn’t any apparent reason that they couldn’t tour otherwise under their own names - or under a new band name. I would love to see them tour too - outside of Celebration Day, Page and Jones haven’t been on stage much at all.
It could be possible that they don’t because there has been some tensions between Page and Jones in the past, nothing earth-shattering, but Jones is much more classically trained in music and well educated in the art of music. Page is a self-taught guitarist, and is mostly only interested in guitars. As Jason Bonham put it in one interview, in a Pat Monahan podcast, concerning the rehearsals for Celebration Day:
