By Michaela Gordoni
Robert Plant weaved in some J.R.R. Tolkien in his Led Zeppelin’s songs, and his bandmates never even knew.
“Tolkien opened the door to all that sort of dark age meanderer of history,” Plant, 77, said in his recent appearance on THE LATE SHOW WITH STEPHEN COLBERT.
The Tolkien fan confirmed the Lord of The Rings author inspired “Stairway to Heaven,” “The Battle of Evermore,” “Ramble On” and other songs.
He said his bandmates didn’t “pick up” on the references. “It didn’t exist at the time,” Plant explained. “Tolkien had his moment, but I guess The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings had subsided.”
Plant and Tolkien actually both grew up in the same area of England, known as the Midlands. He says you can “feel” the history and mysticism in the Midlands, which was shaped by ancient Welsh and British roots.
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“[Tolkien’s work] spoke to me because the 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,” Plant said.
One of his songs with more obvious Tolkien references is “Ramble On.” It’s lyrics go, “T’was in the darkest depths of Mordor / I met a girl so fair / But Gollum, and the evil one / Crept up and slipped away with her.”
Almost Ironically, Plant says he hated playing “Stairway to Heaven.”
“I truly loathed it,” Plant said earlier this year. “When we used to rehearse, we’d perform ‘Stairway’ as a reggae tune because [Jimmy] Page could never get me to sing it otherwise.”
He’s hated it for years.
“I’d break out in hives if I had to sing it every show,” Plant said. “I wrote those lyrics and found that song to be of some importance and consequence in 1971, but 17 years later, I don’t know. It’s just not for me.”
“No more ‘Stairway to Heaven’ for me,” he said.
His bandmate John Paul Jones liked the song.
“I know that’s really corny, but it encompasses a lot of the elements of the band,” Jones explained. “From the acoustic start to the slightly jazzier section, even, and then to the heavier stuff towards the end.”
Plant is still writing songs and just released an album in September called Saving Grace. Maybe the upcoming HUNT FOR GOLLUM movie will give him some more Tolkien inspiration for his music.
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