Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant discussed recording of the 1976 Led Zeppelin track “Achilles Last Stand” in Morocco on his ‘Digging Deep’ podcast, and he made a mysterious Jimi Hendrix revelation in the process, Alternative Nation transcribed his comments. Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler recently revealed surprising Led Zeppelin reunion news.
Co-Host: Tell me a little bit about that first trip to Morocco then as it was a place that still has a considerable pull on you.
Plant: Well I was there three weeks ago for my birthday.
Co-Host: Well I guess that first trip wasn’t as easy as anything on a B.A. [British Airways] flight?
Plant: No, no.
Co-Host: And getting off a duty-free airport and getting taxied to an over-the-pointed hotel was a bit different.
Plant: It was 1972 and John Anderson talking about tales of [inaudible]. John had been to Morocco and when I left home, I spent a lot of time in the city areas in the middle and so on. So I was pretty close proximity-wise but nowhere near close to understanding and comprehension to Gujarati, Punjabis, west Indians, etc. I could hear all these different musical forms with obviously the jolt of culture because I came from the cult-de-sac of some national trust land, I went to grammar school. So, I whooshed into this really colorful world of sand and vision, if you like.
Plant continues:
Plant: So, I was at home with the musical scales, the whole idea of a vocal line and I was quite prepared to not ever understand what a singer was talking about but just be taken with what was going on.
Co-host: If you think about it, the number of people who sing Beatles songs or whatever it is and they don’t sing English, it’s the same sort of thing.
Plant: So it goes, with Morocco it was a bit of a gamble because it was kind of a closed shop, not a lot going on but there was a hippy culture going there.
Plant’s co-host then asked if Led Zeppelin and other “long hair, rock types” were seen as interlopers during his stay in Morocco. Plant responded:
Plant: I don’t think anybody [there] was really that impressed by us. [Jimi] Hendrix had been in [that area] on there Atlantic coast. There had been some stuff going down there that to this day hasn’t been solved, he went to a valley on the way to [somewhere else] from there. There was also supposed to be a waterfall thing. Loads and loads of mythical stuff where European hippies have been, somewhere, implicated in some skulduggery. It was basically culture being sensitive and you know, “what’s going on with these people, why are they like this?” Quite rightly, why? They missed Woodstock in Morocco, they never actually had that on the TV so the whole move was a different thing out there. Anyway, by in large I found it to be the most amazing experience I’ve ever had.
