Still Driven

If it's not irony enough that Cadillac uses a thirty-year-old Led Zeppelin song to peddle a mesmerizingly ugly new car, consider this: That commercial's ubiquity means you're a lot more likely to hear Robert Plant's voice while flipping channels than while tuning a radio dial. Not that Zeppelin doesn't echo constantly through the arid canyons of classic-rock radio. Not that Plant's old band doesn't continue to exert a monumental force on fledgling four-on-the-floor outfits and high-school notebook doodlers on at least two continents. But whereas it has indeed been a long time since the average Caddy driver rocked and rolled -- and Cadillac has arguably never accomplished either -- Plant's latest album is the work of someone who doesn't require an advertising séance to stay in touch with his inner bare-chested screamer. Dreamland is at least vital and exotic enough to make it into a Jaguar ad.

For the record, Plant, 54, drives an Audi S8. And he tends to race along listening to a Charley Patton boxed set (or other staples such as Primal Scream, the Youngbloods, the Five du-Tones and Gustav Mahler) rather than, say, Black Sabbath. Because, notwithstanding any gripes you might have about hearing "Rock and Roll" erupt behind scenes from a luxury-sedan-narcotized midlife crisis, Plant is anything but commercial in his tastes -- the most elegiac of which are reflected deftly on the alternately ethereal and forceful Dreamland. And he's unapologetic about his commercial.

"When it comes to corporate decisions," Plant says by phone before a soundcheck in Grand Rapids, Michigan, "there are several ways of looking at it." Reminded of Coca-Cola's 1988 ad incorporating Plant's then-current hit "Tall Cool One," Plant says that, contrary to longstanding reports, he has no regrets. "I drank so many cans of Coke in my childhood that I deserved to get something back," he jokes before aligning that frame of mind with Cadillac's recent spots. "There's a lot of fifteen-year-old kids who don't know who [Led Zeppelin] were," Plant says. "If I were listening to that piece of music for the first time, I would jump up quickly and say, 'Who the hell is that?' The music is a lure, and I want that lure to work." Not for Cadillac but for Zeppelin, for Plant's legacy.

"Isn't it amazing? Cadillac was deemed the exquisite mark in the United States, driven by wise men, senators, bishops and potentates. Now you're appealing to the fat, nauseous underbelly of self-abusers from the rock generation who are now middle-aged."

Plant told Spin recently that he's never read Hammer of the Gods, Stephen Davis' infamous Zep tome purporting to catalog the excesses of rock's most revered debauchers. Listening to the singer's crisp English accent politely dismiss David Bowie's new album ("It's not organic"), announce a longstanding disdain for "Living Loving Maid" and drolly recount a visit to a New Orleans piano bar with Jimmy Page as though the pair were rock's Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole, just a couple of slightly sodden ne'er-do-wells, it's hard to picture a man who did anything more than tickle that nauseous underbelly.

Maybe that rejection of personal mythology has something to do with what makes the otherwise legend-courting Dreamland so powerful. The disc's eight covers -- from the sepulchral backward-guitar parts of Tim Rose's Celtic "Morning Dew" and the ceremonial congas pulsing through Bob Dylan's "One More Cup of Coffee" to the throbbing bass that turns Jesse Colin Young's "Darkness Darkness" into a hymnlike recessional -- also include numbers by the late Skip Spence and the even later Tim Buckley, two of rock's most spectral figures. (Though Spence died only recently -- Plant met him for the first time just seven years ago -- his post-Moby Grape songs never seemed to originate from an earthly plane.) Perhaps not coincidentally, these are two examples of talent that has lasted in spite of a strong self-destructive impulse. Taking over "Song to the Siren" and "Skip's Song," Plant sounds not possessed but omniscient. In this crystal-ball psychedelia and black-hearted folk, Plant finds survival.

"I hear in these songs an America that had a vast array of popular music, a vast array of heart and soul," Plant says. "When 'Song to the Siren' came out, maybe you'd hear that on the radio alongside Solomon Burke and Ravi Shankar. But these aren't standards. I'm not taking some soft golden-circle route to middle age."

Burke just released his own new album, with songs written for him by Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and Elvis Costello. Like Plant's Dreamland, Burke's new music has largely been consigned to NPR and the middlebrow ghetto of piggybacked Amazon.com recommendations. Plant seems to understand that what now becomes a legend most is apparently self-boutiquing.

"I thought [Burke's] album was good but just a little plain, which is a shame," Plant says. "I really want Fat Possum [the indie that issued Burke's disc] to do well. I like what's going on with that label. It's different from other coffee-table world-music labels."

Plant says he thinks "every day" about his own future on a major label. "This is my first adventure at Universal," he says. "I have a relationship with [label exec] Doug Morris that goes back to knowing him under Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic. But it's different for them to find a suitable format to play my record and market it." He pauses and asks only half rhetorically which of the smaller labels is profiting with rosters not dominated by bombastic rock acts and lip-glossed teen pop.