Led Zeppelin members all working on solo albums

This news originally appeared in an edition of the newsletter "On This Day In Led Zeppelin History."

As announced in October, Robert Plant and the Strange Sensation will have a new album out in the new year. The title of the record to be released in or around March 2005 will be Another Tribe, according to an interview for Mojo magazine summarized by Siarl Davies for Tight But Loose [Update: This working title was subsequently changed to Mighty ReArranger].

Plant's eighth solo effort since the breakup of Led Zeppelin has been described as "a mixture of Delta blues and North African stuff, with a nice fireside lute-driven ballad too." These are the influences Plant spoke of in liner notes he wrote in August 2003 for Sixty Six to Timbuktu, a career-spanning double album.

The singer from the British Midlands expounded on his admiration for a lifetime of influences, stating: "I heard the voices of the high Atlas and pre-Saharan Morocco, the sound from the last juke-joints of south-side Chicago and the buzz of after-hours backstreet Bombay, performances so beautiful, remote and contrasting that I was never to recover."

In that message, Plant also stated that more creative output was on the way. "With abundant new material developing rapidly and connections in Morocco and West Africa moving at a pace unimagined back in '71, the future is ahead - bright ahead," he wrote. For that, he credits his diverse and powerful band, currently made up of Justin Adams and Liam "Skin" Tyson on guitars, Clive Deamer on drums, John Baggott on keyboards, and Billy Fuller on bass. "The musicians make this thing work," said Plant.

Also as recently announced, Robert Plant is not the only ex-member of Led Zeppelin hoping to release a new album in the new year. Both Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones are said to be working on separate recording projects. A brief clip of a new Jones opus can be heard in the Flash intro to his Web site, www.johnpauljones.com, where a Nov. 7 posting updates his progress.

"I have now started to write and record for the new album," he said. "I'm sort of doing both things at the same time, a new approach that I am hoping will make for a more organic process." After detailing a mandolin festival he'd taken time out to attend and participate in, Jones concluded his message: "So, all of my instruments have been restrung, no small matter, and I am writing / playing / practising / listening / singing / recording / walking, anything and everything necessary to get the music flowing!"

Meanwhile, sources say Page's project will pit the guitarist alongside several guest musicians with a different guitar for every song.

So, my dear friends, if everything goes as planned, there will be three new albums from the ex-members of Led Zeppelin in 2005. [Update: Only Plant delivered a solo album in 2005.] Many years have passed since the days that group walked this earth, and their music has evolved with that time. It would be impossible for them at this stage to try to recreate their earlier moments. However, as Robert Plant would attest, it is great fun to look back at it.

John Paul Jones working on projects including next solo album

This news originally appeared in an edition of the newsletter "On This Day In Led Zeppelin History."

This summer, I had the pleasure of once again meeting John Paul Jones. He was on tour with Mutual Admiration Society, as had been announced at his official Web site, www.johnpauljones.com. I met up with Jones for the last two shows of the tour and was happy to spend some time with him backstage. He remembered me clearly from our four-hour interview in 2001, and when somebody backstage mentioned my name, he asked for security to let me in!

The concerts I saw were sensational. For me, the highlight was not that the band played two familiar songs from Jones' past; it was the top-notch playing of all six musicians at each show, along with the obvious camaraderie they all have for each other. There truly is no better name for the group than Mutual Admiration Society.

Jones raved about the tour when he returned to England. "The whole experience has been immensely enjoyable and I have found myself inspired by the great musicianship (and energy!) of my fellow bandmates," he wrote on his Web site Aug. 25. "It is a pleasure to work with people who are not only extremely talented but who have a great enthusiasm for any and every kind of music, and they can play it!"

The six-member touring group was a conglomeration of all three members of the modern bluegrass band Nickel Creek, fronted by Toad the Wet Sprocket's Glen Campbell, plus Attractions drummer Pete Thomas, who played on all of Jones' solo albums and tours since 1999. In my opinion, the star of the band turned out to be Nickel Creek's mandolin player, Chris Thile, who told the audience that he wants to take lessons from John Paul Jones on how to rock. But Jones countered that he, himself, needs to take lessons from Chris Thile on playing mandolin.

Jones' Web posting also thanks all the fans who turned up to support Mutual Admiration Society. He wrote: "It was so nice to be appreciated by Zep, Toad, and NC fans, rock and bluegrass fans alike. Diversity and the crossing of borders has for me always been one of the most interesting aspects of making music, (something those that know me may have already guessed!) but we need a ready, willing and open-minded audience to complete the experience, thank you for being just that."

Jones then said something really juicy (and The Lemon likes juicy): "I hope now to spend the next few months writing and recording for my next solo album and attempt to turn all this inspiration into hard currency whilst the fingers are hot and the brain is buzzing."

Since 1999, Jones has released two self-produced, full-length solo albums, setting the tone of his performing career as a multi- instrumentalist dabbling in hard blues-based rock, down-home folk, and everything in between. The first of these albums, Zooma, was all instrumental, but Jones sang on four songs of his 2001 follow-up, The Thunderthief. There is no official word yet as to the direction Jones' new album will take.

A run of 'Thunder'; overview of latest solo album from John Paul Jones

This news originally appeared in an edition of the newsletter "On This Day In Led Zeppelin History."

As promised, here is a description of the music on John Paul Jones' new album, The Thunderthief, slated to be released Tuesday in the United States and later this month in Europe.

The full-on rock explosion of the opener, "Leafy Meadows," contains Jones' catchiest instrumental melody to date. While the artist lays down a punchy bass line resembling the "Macarena," Nick Beggs uses his Chapman stick to play the complicated main theme. Drummer Terl Bryant keeps a straightforward rhythm and medium pace. Halfway through the song, King Crimson leader Robert Fripp joins to provide the guitar solo. That opening track definitely works here, and it would have also felt right had it been on Jones' 1999 effort, Zooma.

The most obvious difference between this album and his previous is that Jones sings on a few songs here whereas Zooma was strictly instrumental. On Dec. 10, 2001, I asked Jones why sing?

"Well, as you probably know, I've always said that I didn't want a person on lead vocals," he told me. "It's like walking a dog. All of a sudden, he becomes the producer and I'd end up [not in charge anymore]."

Jones continued his rationale, saying, "And I didn't want to rewrite Zooma. I had this idea that instead of having the riffs as the melody, I thought I would have the riff and the melody on top."

After some thought, he arrived at his ultimate conclusion: "So I thought, I can do it."

Cleverly, Jones' title track begins with the sound effects of thunder and rain. The verses contain a call-and-response between his vocals and a hard rock line represented by doubled basses. The lyrics, written by Peter Blegvad, describe the legend of "The Thunderthief."

Jones tells how that came about:

"So in fact, Peter Blegvad came to me, the singer-songwriter who also did the artwork. And he also handed me lyrics that he hadn't set to music. And he gave me two [pieces], one called 'The Thunderthief' and one called 'Ice Fishing at Night.' And I put them to music and just tried to experiment to sing on them, and if I liked it, I'd put it on. And I thought it was OK."

In "The Thunderthief," Jones' first lead vocal since his Scream for Help soundtrack in 1985 is muffled and distorted. The song really has the feel of a playful track by the Butthole Surfers. After each repetition of the chorus is a lengthy, complicated piano line played in multiple octaves at a speed beyond humanly possible. Somehow, for me, it evokes images of the Addams Family.

Next, the instrumental "Hoediddle" begins with no less than 2:52 of multilayered yet unaccompanied soloing, in the same style as Led Zeppelin's "In the Light" from 1975 and Jones' "Nosumi Blues" from 1999. What follows the long intro is an electrified bluegrass melody. During the song's last 49 seconds, the electric instruments fade out, revealing only mandolin, koto and ukulele. They all continue playing a bluegrass jingle reminiscent of Afro Celt Sound System's "Colossus."

Jones plays "Ice Fishing at Night" exclusively on a multi-tracked piano. The second song with lyrics (also written by Blegvad), it speaks about some things in nature. The darkest part of the song is perhaps the instrumental break. Jones' piano playing here is just a step above George Winston. He limits his improvisation to within a modal scale. However, the brighter major chords in a lyrical section about "springtime" and "dawn" suggest just what the lyrics do: brightness. The song starts and fades with some gentle soaring noises.

The sound of an old vinyl record, complete with pops and cracks, ushers in "Daphne." Jones follows with a bass line played on one of his many-stringed bass guitars. Soon, it seems as if the melody is going to be provided by more piano, but the 88 keys take a back seat. The main instrument then is a Keith Emerson-inspired synthesizer part that sounds like it was modeled after a section of ELP's "Tarkus."

The piano takes over again while vocal samples come to the fore in the mix. A female says "hello," and a male says "yes." These two samples repeat as Jones plays a funky four-string bass solo. (The male voice on "Daphne" is generated by probably the same speech synthesizer employed on "Fitter, Happier," from Radiohead's OK Computer.) The vocal samples escalate into a two-line exchange. "I really wanted the sound of the voice," Jones explained to me. "I even made the sound of the voice in 'Grind' on Zooma, just sampled, because I like the sound of it."

Jones said he felt that using only vocal samples "was cheating myself," which helped him decide that he should sing too. He does sing on the next track, "Angry Angry." If "Wearing and Tearing" was Led Zeppelin's brush with punk, then "Angry Angry" is much the same to John Paul Jones. But the song lasts seconds short of the six-minute mark, and so it lacks the brevity of
most punk music.

Already, Jones had recorded his vocals for the two other songs whose lyrics had been written by Blegvad. Jones liked them but thought he should have a few more songs with words. "I thought, I've tried singing, now I'll try lyric writing!" Jones told me.

"So I tried it, and it was great fun! Got the word processor going, and -- 'Ah, this isn't so bad!' You look up, and you've written three verses. 'Oh, OK, that's all right!'

"'Angry Angry' started off as a guitar solo. There's a friend of mine whom I met in New York, called Adam Bomb. He calls up one day and says, 'I'm at the Borderline, tonight!' 'Oh, OK.' So I went down, saw him, and I was blown away, it was sort of 'glam punk.' He was brilliant. It was amazing, I really liked it.

"The next day I called him up, I said, 'Come up, come to my house, bring a guitar.' He said, 'What, the acoustic, Jones?' 'No, bring your electric guitar.' I wanted to play him a track. He said, 'OK,' so he came over.

"But I hadn't actually got a track. So I mopped up like 24 bars on the drum machine with a bass riff and just put that down and just said, 'OK, this is all there is. Play over it.'"

Adam Bomb recorded a "screaming solo," as Jones called it. It continues through the fade of the song, at times adding harmonics not unlike ZZ Top's "La Grange" and quick firepower fretwork not unlike the electric guitar solo in Led Zeppelin's "Heartbreaker."

At that point in the recording process, Adam Bomb had left the country, and Jones was left with an instrumental track that needed more. "So I thought: Lyrics! Turn it into a song."

The lyrics, an example of Jones' own writing, are told from the point of view of someone who is simply angry all the time. Progressively through each verse, his vocal line sounds more and more angry. (He actually starts out quite monotonous and understated in the first verse.) Following the furious guitar solo, Jones is able to pull off the proper emotion through a groaning,
straining yell.

Jones took me through the process of picking a topic for the lyrics of this song. "Maybe I'll write a protest song of some sort," he said he'd originally thought. "And then the more I thought about it, I said, 'Ah, that's kind of corny.' And I thought I'll write a protest song about people who are always protesting!"

Laughing, he continued:

"You know those people who are always angry. You know, what happens? Nothing's right for them. I thought, I'll write a song about that. And that's what it's about. And that was loads of fun being completely removed from it. It's sort of autobiographical in that I know people like this. But everybody knows people like this. When you're in your car, there's always some arse going, 'Grrrr!' The day must be miserable for you."

I asked whether any bit of "Angry Angry" was written as a response to his former Led Zeppelin bandmates for having not included him in their reunion. He immediately said no. "I'm not that sort of person at all," he said. "But as soon as I finished that, I thought, people are going to read stuff into this. But you can't."

The only track on the album not written or co-written by Jones, "Down to the River to Pray," is next. This traditional folk song was used in the Academy Award-winning 2000 cult film O Brother Where Art Thou? and on its soundtrack. Here, Jones handles for the first time an arch-top triple-neck mandolin, made by Andy Manson and mentioned here Feb. 3.

"Shibuya Bop" has the feel of most tracks on Zooma. It is also probably the most intricate piece on the album and thus Jones' career. The musical styles of King Crimson and Rush blend together for the first and third parts of the song. During the second, Jones improvises, both using the Kyma sound design workstation and a Hammond organ. After this, the first part reprises once again, courtesy of Jones' koto, which takes the song to a near-collision halt.

To finish off another nine-track collection, Jones recorded a simple track called "Freedom Song." In this little Celtic ditty, the protagonist proposes a leisurely trip to his lover. In each of the verses, he mentions such vacation plans as seeing Carnegie Hall, renting a bike, letting Mum take over to watch the kids, calling in sick to work. Jones sings his own original lyrics here, backed not by any band but just his own ukulele. Andy Manson made that instrument for Jones back in 1979.

John Paul Jones explains trend of including bonus tracks on some international CDs (interview part 21 of 22)

This is the 21st part of the transcript of my interview with John Paul Jones, conducted Dec. 10, 2001.

SPS: How about some of the stuff that you did, like with "Easy," with Scotty Moore and D.J. Fontana, that you recorded last year [in 2000].

JPJ: Oh, for the Sun Records thing.

SPS: Yeah. Whatever happened with that?

JPJ: Not a clue.

SPS: It’s just, you’re gonna be on, you’re gonna be on, [clap] you’re not on?

JPJ: Yeah. Yeah, and it was good too, but, you know…

SPS: "I Ain’t Got the Blues," that you recorded for The Thunderthief?

JPJ: I didn’t think it was good enough.

SPS: No? Might it come out?

JPJ: No. I don’t think. The song was good, but [I] didn’t like the performance as much. If it doesn’t get past me, it doesn’t get on the record. [laughing]

SPS: How about "Fanfare for the Millennium"? It came out on the Japanese edition of Zooma.

JPJ: That’s right, yes.

SPS: But we didn’t get it over here.

JPJ: Yeah, well… See, the Japanese thing is very strange because I think it’s to do… I think it’s the fact that if everything’s released at the same time everywhere, by the time it gets to Japan – because of their distribution or whatever, just the sheer distances – it arrives in Japan like weeks after it’s released everywhere else. So then everybody who orders it in Japan, it’s actually cheaper if you get the money for it, they buy the imports. In order to stop this, the Japanese record companies will not release it unless they get A.) either an extra track or B.) have it early. And what happened on The Thunderthief is that we had it set up… This particular record I both recorded and mixed, so I did everything, and I just ran past the deadline, and they’d done all the work on the promotion and everything in Japan. Of course it was gonna come up early anyway, and then I missed the deadline for that... So we said release it now or we’ll never hear from them again, because they simply won’t stop it short. That’s what happens. You know, when all the Christmas stuff comes ... then you get completely swamped. So I said, "Well, we know…" We couldn’t stop the Japan record, the Japanese release, because they’d done all the work. We couldn’t say, "Sorry, guys, stop and do it again." Now, if I were Prince or Michael Jackson, I could do it, but I’m not. [laughing] So what happened is…

SPS: But to me, you’re better than them.

JPJ: Thank you. So what happened is this got put forward until after Christmas, you know, in February, where in Japan it had been released already. [laughing] I guess you just have to live with it. But "Fanfare for the Millennium" I really liked! I thought it was a great piece.

SPS: Were there other ones that you recorded for Zooma that didn’t come out?

JPJ: No.

On to part 22: John Paul Jones on his management and record label.