Led Zeppelin was unobtainable and unattainable and we very seldom talked about it. Basically, the myth propagated itself.
ROBERT PLANT TO THE AUTHOR, MAY 2003
ON A WHITE-HOT MORNING in Twentynine Palms – the Mojave desert town namechecked on Robert Plant’s 1993 albumFate of Nations – I can see a number of the strangely shaped Joshua trees that lend their name to the nearby national park; the same place where, on Cap Rock in 1969, Gram Parsons dropped acid with Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg.
Ever since Parsons OD’d and died in Joshua Tree itself –twenty-five miles east along Route 62 – the whole area has become one of California’s holy rock sites. So it’s fitting that, as I fill up my rental compact in a Twentynine Palms gas station, I hear the booming strains of a rock song approaching. Within seconds I know it as a staple of classic-rock radio – an evergreen ofeasy-riding highway rock – and the pop snob in me groans. Pulling up next to me is a mirror-shaded dude astride a black beast of a motorcycle, its wheels flanked by vast speaker bins that punch out the song I know so well:“Babe babe babe babe babe babe ’m bayeebee I’m gonna LEEEEAVE you …”
The owner of the song’s strangulated male voiceain’t joking, woman, he’sreally got to ramble – rather like this man in his sunglasses. The voice soundtracks the guy’s chrome-horse freedom on a song recorded almost four decades ago, and he is making sure we all know it. I look at him and want to dismiss him as an idiot. He’s at least as old as the song, and if he took the shades off he might be old enough to have seen Led Zeppelin in their pomp, maybe at the LA Forum, possibly at the Long Beach Arena or the San Diego Sports Arena – the huge venues where the west was won. Perhaps he saw Zep’s last US show, which remains shrouded in mystery, at the Oakland Coliseum in the summer of ’7