LED ZEPPELIN: Rolling Stone Interview Excerpts Posted Online

On November 6 and November 7 — while they waited for guitarist Jimmy Page's broken finger to heal, so they could resume preparations for their December 10 reunion concert in London — the three surviving members of LED ZEPPELIN all sat down with Rolling Stone in London for extensive, individual interviews about their unexpected resurrection. Page, bassist John Paul Jones and singer Robert Plant also spoke at length about their past and speculation as to their future together. It was the first time LED ZEPPELIN, as a band, had spoken to the magazine since the late seventies. Drummer Jason Bonham — the son of original ZEPPELIN drummer John Bonham, whose death in 1980 broke up the band — also gave a revealing interview about his father and the emotional weight Jason carries into this reunion. A few excerpts follow:

Rolling Stone: How would you characterize the way LED ZEPPELIN rehearsed for concerts in the Seventies? How would you get ready for a tour?

Page: "We would just go in and jam. The hardest part of the LED ZEPPELIN set list in those days was actually taking numbers out, to put in new ones. Inevitably, we'd want to play some new numbers from the current album. But sometimes we'd only play one of them, because we didn't want to lose the old numbers. As a result, the set kept getting longer and longer and longer. That was one of the reasons the shows were so long — we just enjoyed playing so much. If we had a rehearsal to go on the road, we'd go over some links within the set, segues between numbers — then afterward, just jamming, coming up with new things that would disappear into the ether. Of course, it was work. But it wasn't a chore. It was something to enjoy and savor."

Rolling Stone: Watching you now in "The Song Remains the Same" — the swagger, the posing, is still a great thing to see.

Plant: "But I didn't know it was posing. It's only now with an older head, I go, 'Oh, God, did that actually work?' But of course it worked. It was as genuine as the day is long. I didn't preen in front of a mirror. My mother said, 'You shouldn't pout, it looks stupid.' But I pouted because I wanted to be like, 'Come on!' I wanted to be Steve Marriott, for fuck's sake. But in that environment, I was way past all that. I was part of some kind of new animal that included everything you see in that film. And I can't get embarrassed by it. At that point, in the film, I was yet to be twenty-five years old. And the group was dead when I was thirty-two. How can any of us have any critical overview about what we do? We were just on fire, rolling and tumbling — and most of the time, incredibly civil to each other."

Rolling Stone: How different are you from your dad as a drummer?

Bonham: "Probably not much. You should ask this the other way around — what don't I do that Dad did? When I get to play this music, I can pick and choose key moments that were phenomenal, from the catalog of what I have on bootlegs and live things. I have this blueprint in my head of what I want to use where. Before we knew what songs we were going to do, I had to make sure I had everything covered for every part, in every year. I have to have certain things down that I would miss if I was watching the gig.

"I have a great blueprint to look at. Occasionally, I'll do something that is in the mold, although it might not be something Dad did in that song. I might even take something that he did in 'Presence' and put it in something off 'Led Zeppelin II'.

"One of the greatest feelings I had, after the first day [of rehearsal], was when we all went out for dinner together. We sat in a crowded restaurant — we had to share a table with another couple — and nobody knew who we were. They were telling me some great things about Dad, funny stories. And to see them laughing and interacting together, I was like, 'Wow.' I didn't feel like I was a kid looking up to them anymore. [Smiles] It was very weird."

Read more at www.rollingstone.com.