In their "post-rock"careers what have Robert Plant and David Lee Roth (a la the Crazy From The Heat EP) shown that Brian Setzer and David Johansen have not? "Their asses", you say? No, but thanks for playing.
The word I was looking for was "restraint", which is not a word you see in the same sentence as the lead singers for Led Zep and Van Halen.
You normally don't attach a word like "restraint" to those monolithic, hedonistic, bigger-than-life rock stars who flew around the world in their own private jets while you and I were waiting for our trains to the bone factory.
Yet it was Robert Plant who recognized, with a little help from the dude who ran his record company (the late great Ahmet Ertegun, of course), that the time was right to go full big band on America.
With enough "fuck you" money to swear off anything remotely Zep-sounding, his solo career was best enjoyed on an album-by-album basis, with Plant at the mercy of whatever partner he'd aligned himself with now.
When your first partner is Pagey, of course, all others are bound to pale by comparison. Thus, his writing with Robbie Blunt (who?) on Pictures At Eleven made the whole affair sound like he was a guest singer on another guy's solo record.
There was enough of a Zep swagger to "Burning Down One Side" but, in the end, both tune and album fail to deliver anything remotely resembling a chorus. Was this new Plant as ambitious as he pretended to be, we wondered? Perhaps, but "bored and eager to get out of the castle" is probably closer to the truth.
The Principle Of Moments arrived one year later like the sequel to a movie you'd already forgotten. Even so, it managed to deliver on the promise of Pictures At Eleven with a more refined and focused visual and sonic presentation. Plant knew what he wanted now and, on standout tracks like "In The Mood" and "Big Log", it all comes together.
As far back as 1981, Plant had began playing 50's rock standards in low-key club dates with his own side band The Honeydrippers. If he'd had the seemingly good sense to release a throwback album then, he could have beat Stray Cats to the rockabilly punch, but Plant wasn't thinking about exploiting the music of the past as much as simply blowing off some steam with musical friends.
Enter Ahmet Ertegun with an offer three years later to record a handful of his favorite standards and Mr. Plant suddenly knew what he had to call it: The Honeydrippers, of course.
Part of me still wonders if Plant did it to make Ahmet happy (something all artists would be keen to do, within reason) or if anything recorded for Volume One was of Plant's own choosing.
Would Plant have chosen "Sea of Love", you ask? Not if it meant that the oft-covered tune would become the most successful chart single of Plant's long and storied career, but "Rockin' At Midnight (Good Rockin' Tonight)" proved to be just as popular, so it wasn't all bad.
By the way, whose idea was it to record only five songs?
You would think for all the talent involved - Jeff Beck, Nile Rodgers, Paul Shaffer, and some cat by the name of Jimmy Page - you'd want to keep the tape rolling once you hear how sweetly Plant's voice breathes new life into material that is, quite frankly, just a wee bit long-in-the-tooth.
In hindsight, there probably could and should have been four or five FULL volumes - none of this EP crap - but, instead, the field was left wide open for Rod Stewart to come along and croak his way through endless volumes of "crap written before color TV".
Darn Robert Plant and his restraint.