On a fairly recent early summer morning I found myself drinking bad American tea in the lobby of a moderately swish Manhattan hotel, waiting for Robert Plant to come down and find me. I was still somewhat flummoxed by the news of his solo LP Pictures At Eleven; Atlantic Records had sprung the information and hinted that Robert would very likely talk to us less than a week previously. But then, it should be noted this 15th anniversary of the Summer of Love, that CREEM and Led Zeppelin, born within a paisleyed year of each other, have had a happily symbiotic relationship yea these many years. In contrast to the bitterness generated by all the duff reviews given the band by most American record reviewers in the early years—notably those in Rolling Stone—writers for this mag may have given the band the occasional sucker punch in print, or had raging battles amongst ourselves as to which LP of theirs stunk, but the band was never dismissed here as heavy metal (and by definition useless), perhaps because of the traditional Stooges-bred CREEM writer's benevolent attitude towards loud noise.

And it's fitting that Plant should make his re-emergence as a solo in 1982, as a strong party line seems to be emerging in this year of "new wave" breakthroughs such as the Human League and the Go-Go's (if you can believe they have anything in common). I witnessed the audience at a local Detroit cable show chanting insults about radio gods Journey, Foreigner...and Led Zeppelin. It's tiresome, this knee jerk noo wave reactionary philosophy. High schools are divided into long-hairs and short-hairs, and the shorthaired kid who snaps up Soft Cell wouldn't be caught dead with a record featuring a musician with hair beyond his earlobe. Scratch, then, the early Kinks records, those shaggy Yardbirds, Love, the Doors, the MC5. My close-cropped youngest brother has found he likes Creedence Clearwater Revival, so I'm looking to gift him with the CCR album featuring the grottiest, hairiest picture of Fogerty resplendent in flannel so as to shock his post-modernist senses. Me, I prepped for this interview not merely by playing LZ albums, but also listening to the Troggs and willing myself into an anti-Anti-Nowher^ League sort of mood.