29 Palms

The Zoo Crew has "29 Palms" rolling across the speakers, and if you have been riding with THE ZOO for any length of time you already know this one sits in a sweet spot between desert heat and a love affair that never quite settled. Robert Plant cut it as the lead single from Fate of Nations, the record he put out in 1993, and it climbed to number 21 on the British singles chart, his second-best showing there as a solo man. Billboard heard "richly emotive rock with strong, spell-casting power" in the vocal, the guitars, and the percussion. That is a fair way to put it. The song does not shout the way the old Zeppelin records shouted. It leans in, warm and a little worn, the way a highway radio sounds when the windows are down and the town ahead is still a rumor.

The title points at Twentynine Palms, California, a small Mojave town sitting on the back road between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, one of the gates into Joshua Tree, and also home to one of the big Marine Corps training bases. Plenty of folks hear the name and figure Plant wrote a postcard to the place. He did not, not exactly. On his Digging Deep podcast he walked through the geography himself. He called it a crazy place with a lot of stories, Black Mesa and the kind of lore where friends of the inventor Nikola Tesla were told to build structures with no metal so the energy would come down. He talked about speed factories out that way, about Dick Dale keeping a place nearby, about Victoria Williams over in Palm Desert, and about singing country and western on a Sunday at Pappy and Harriet's. Then he said the plain thing the song is actually built on: the stories about a romance that kicked off and ended there.

That romance has been the gossip for years, and Plant has never been in a hurry to close the book. In a 1993 interview with Network magazine he would only say that "29 Palms" was written on tour, the last time they were in California. Pressed on the Canadian singer Alannah Myles, who had been out with him on the Manic Nirvana tour and who already owned the airwaves with "Black Velvet," he offered the kind of answer a road-wise singer gives when he wants the song left alone. They toured together. They were good friends. He thought the world of her. She was a great, powerful lady with one of the finest voices of the idiom, always kind, always warm-hearted. Then the line that still hangs over the record: the road is the road. Forget about all the rumors. Everything is true and untrue.

Listen to the lyric and you can see why the rumor stuck. "It comes kinda hard when I hear your voice on the radio, taking me back down the road that leads back to you." A little later he sings about the heat of a desert heart, and early on there is that line about her velvet glove. Plant has called the track his ideal-love-affair-gone-wrong song. He has also described the country around Twentynine Palms, in that slightly mystic way of his, as an electrostatic generator for the purpose of rejuvenation and time travel. Whether the woman in the song is Myles, or some other voice he caught on a motel radio, or a mix of both, he has kept the door cracked on purpose. The writing credit is shared with Charlie Jones, Doug Boyle, Chris Blackwell, and Phil Johnstone, the players who were in the room while the melody took shape, but the desert story is Plant's.

The video, directed by Nigel Grierson and shot out in the desert with little vignettes cut in, landed in April 1993, a month before Fate of Nations itself. That album was a turn away from the polished machines of the previous decade. Plant wanted something more organic, more folk and rock and less of the synthesizer sheen, recorded across RAK in London, Sawmills down in Cornwall, and Monnow Valley in Wales. Kevin MacMichael, late of Cutting Crew, played across the sessions. Nigel Kennedy brought violin to one track. And sitting on the same record as this desert love song is "I Believe," written for Plant's son Karac, who had died years earlier. Fate of Nations is not a party album. It is a man in his mid-forties sorting what the road cost him and what it still gave him. "29 Palms" is the single that carried that mood onto the radio, which is a fine joke if you think about the lyric.

None of that desert writing happens if a kid from the West Midlands does not walk away from a sensible job. Robert Anthony Plant was born in West Bromwich in 1948 and grew up around Stourbridge, singing Elvis into a hairbrush when he was about nine and getting hauled by his father to the Seven Stars blues club. The old blues records, Robert Johnson, Willie Dixon, Bukka White, Skip James, got into him early. School did not. He scraped through, drifted out, and at his civil-engineer father's insistence tried life as an articled clerk at a chartered accountant in Worcestershire. He lasted about a fortnight. What he remembers is a small adding machine, the worksheets of a local ironmonger, and a woman walking past the window with a beehive hairdo who looked like another Dusty Springfield. He knew he could not hack it.

After that it was odd jobs and loud rooms. He laid tarmac for Wimpey in Birmingham. He worked a short stretch at Woolworth's in Halesowen. He cut three obscure singles for CBS and sang with whoever would have him, including the Crawling King Snakes, which is where he crossed paths with drummer John Bonham. The two of them carried that partnership into Band of Joy, mixing the blues with the psychedelic stuff coming up through the Midlands. There was also a stretch with a band called Hobbstweedle. In 1968 Jimmy Page was looking for a singer for what was still being talked about as a new Yardbirds. Terry Reid turned the job down and pointed Page toward a teacher-training college in Birmingham where Plant was on the bill. Plant sang Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love." Page stopped looking. Their first rehearsal, with John Paul Jones in the room, was "Train Kept A-Rollin'." The live debut, still billed as the Yardbirds, came in Denmark that September. By the time the name Led Zeppelin stuck, the kid who had quit the adding machine had a voice that could fill a room and, before long, a continent.

That is the long road into "29 Palms." The same man who once sang for the door money in a pub ended up writing a California love song on a tour bus, cagey about the woman, honest about the heat, and still curious enough to talk about Tesla, Dick Dale, and a Sunday sing at a desert bar. Fate of Nations caught him between the old roar and the quieter records that would follow, and this single is the one Zoo Freaks keep asking the Crew to pull back out. If you want the rest of the trail, the official home is Robert Plant, with word from the man and the band on Facebook, Instagram, and X. Fans who have been keeping the old records in circulation, Fate of Nations included, gather over at Robertplantfanpage. Spin it again when the highway feels long. The desert heart is still in there.