originally appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine December 4, 2006

By David Fricke

Now and again, you find these fantastic moments when what’s left of virgin Mississippi is still in place,” Robert Plant says with a pilgrim’s reverence. The singer is sipping coffee in a restaurant in Clarksdale, just south of the Crossroads - the spot where Highway 49 and the old 61 (now 161) cross and according to legend, Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in return for the musical prowess that made him the world’s most famous bluesman.

Fast-food joints and a gas station mark the intersection now. But Plant, who has driven down from Nashville after several days of recording there, has been a regular visitor to this area since the mid-Eighties, and he knows where the history is hidden. He has a mosquito bite on one hand from a visit the day before to Tutwiler, just to the east, where he played harmonica at the grave of Rice Miller, a.k.a. Sonny Boy Williamson. Plant recalls that he once passed through nearby Commerce, “Where Robert Johnson hung out, near the levee,” and where Plant met a man who was a childhood friend of Johnson’s. Plant later cited Commerce in the title song of Walking Into Clarksdale, his 1998 album with Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page.

“And in Banks, just up the road here,” Plant says, “Robert Johnson once played at a juke joint where Charley Patton and Son House were playing. All that’s left is a water tower. But those places became a coffee-table book in my head, because I know the music inside out.” Plant was in his mid teens when he saw Delta bluesmen such as Skip James and Bukka White on blues-festival tours that passed through his hometown, Birmingham England. “When I saw Sleepy John Estes and heard that voice - part pain, part otherworldly - I went, ‘I want that voice!’” Plant, 58, smiles proudly. “I can do that plaintive moan better now than when I was nineteen, in Zeppelin.”

Plant is in Clarksdale both for spiritual tourism and to talk about Nine Lives, a deluxe anthology covering his entire solo catalog, from the heavy modernism of 1982’s Pictures at Eleven to the Saharan psychedelia of 2005’s Mighty Rearranger. “I was up for anything,” he says of his state of mind after the death of Zeppelin drummer John Bonham in 1980, which ended the group. “That freedom allowed me to continue in what I thought was our band’s tradition of change and stimulus. I think Presence is the best Zeppelin album, because songs like ‘For Your Life’ and ‘Hots on For Nowhere’ weren’t trying to stroke anybody. That’s how I felt about my own creative twists. I don’t’ have to do this for anybody else.”

That explains why Plant - who lives in England near the Welsh border - arrived in Clarksdale via Nashville, where he worked with singer-songwriter-producer T Bone Burnett and bluegrass singer-fiddler Alison Krauss on a future album. Plant and Krauss had previously sung together in 2004 at a Lead Belly tribute presented by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. “Our harmonies were amazing,” Plant remembers. “I went, ‘Oh, I’ve never done this before.’”

In Nashville he says, “we were pushing ideas around. T Bone made a superlative record recently [The True False Identity]. The combination of my voice with Alison’s voice and T Bone’s spookiness - well, I’ll just say it’s very encouraging.” Plant is also working on his tenth solo album but can’t describe it because his band, Strange Sensation, is still busy with its homework: “I wrote down thirteen titles and gave them to each guy. No lyrics, no music. I said, ‘These are the names of the songs. Let’s write ‘em.’” Plan’s famous rock-god features light up in a devilish grin.
“Even early on, I was just having a laugh,” he says brightly. “On Zeppelin’s first U.S. tour, I remember hanging out with Rod Stewart when he was with Jeff Beck. We were like kids: ‘This is amazing! Look, there’s the GTO’s, Wild Man Fischer and Moby Grape.’ I was a supreme fan. I didn’t think I was special. I was just in the greatest band there ever was.

“But now I’m free,” Plant declares. “I can drive through Mississippi, use my credit card and nobody even looks at it. And it doesn’t matter to me if things are successful or not. Because I can walk away feeling I haven’t wasted my time.”
Plant responds to the standard reunion question with a qualifier. “I would love to work with him again,” he says of Page, “so long as it’s not a big deal - so long as it’s real.” But Plant’s dance card for 2007 already runneth over. In addition to the new albums, he is going to the Sahara to work on a British radio documentary on blues roots. And he is touring exotic pockets of Europe next summer, including Macedonia, Malta and Croatia.

“I played in Tunisia on the last tour, in Carthage,” Plant says, “and we had just reached ‘Sidi Mansour Ya Baba,’” the whirling Algerian song he performs in the middle of “Whole Lotta Love.” “Above this amphitheater of North Africans going mad, I could see the mosque and the moon behind it, illuminating the minaret.
“It was such a great thing, “ he says with that pilgrim’s awe. “It doesn’t matter when things happen to you. In the end, you make enough left and right turns to find you’ve done something substantial.”