Any band that gets together after a long time will always be a bit rusty. As much as they might like playing together, there’s always a chance that things could go a little sideways, but Robert Plant and Jimmy Page made the whole thing look easy when they returned in the 1990s.
Then again, it would always be bittersweet listening to Page and Plant without John Paul Jones. While the bassist did have a good sense of humour about the whole thing and even joked about it when accepting his award at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Zeppelin duo took great pride in being able to twist their songs into something that they would have never considered before.
Even if it could be considered a proper reunion, Plant was never looking to play the nostalgic card by any stretch. He knew that he needed to evolve as a singer and not be stuck in the same ‘Percy’ tropes that he had been forced to live in for years, and when playing along to the blues songs that Zeppelin made popular, you heard an older and wiser version of him coming to the forefront.
And despite his work with The Firm, Page seemed a lot happier getting reacquainted with his old bandmate all over again. It’s not like he was looking for work by any means, but throughout the time that he bounced off of Plant, there had to be some wheels spinning in his head, wondering if he could get a few more songs out of the deal. Once Walking Into Clarksdale dropped, though, people realised they hadn’t even begun to dry up.
The whole sense of swagger that the band had in their earliest days was back in spades, and having Steve Albini’s dry production behind everything made it feel like sitting in the room and watching two legends at work. But it would have never come together had the duo not got the ball rolling with the first song, and ‘When the World Was Young’ was the first time Plant thought they had something special.
This was the first song written for the project, and judging by everyone’s reaction, Plant felt that they had dusted out all the cobwebs and were back to sounding like themselves, saying, “We knew that we could do it, and the thing was it felt better doing this than anything that I’ve done before. I’ve made a lot of fuss about not wanting Led Zeppelin to be the only thing I would ever do, or ever be associated with. But I had my time of going out and doing different things, and working with Jimmy now is a different thing.”
There are echoes of Zeppelin in the song, but there’s a lot more that’s going on that ties to where Plant would be going as well. Plant was more than happy to play one-off shows with Page and sing things from all over the catalogue, but since there was also a lot of acoustic-based instrumentation creeping into the mix, the road was slowly being paved for when he would eventually work with Allison Krauss on Raising Sand a decade later.
It’s not the Zeppelin that most people know or the one they were necessarily prepared for, but it still served a purpose as a damn fine piece of pure rock and roll. Every Zeppelin defender will always be holding out hope for that reunion that’s never going to happen, but this is probably the closest that the band will ever come to making a reunion album that actually sounds current.