Robert Plant Reflects on 40th Anniversary of John Bonham’s Death, His ‘Golden God’ Moment

Robert Plant is busy promoting his recently released new solo collection, Digging Deep: Subterranea, but during his hectic schedule, he made sure to take a moment to reflect on his close friend and Led Zeppelin bandmate John Bonham.

This year marked the 40th anniversary of Bonham's passing. When asked how he remembers the drummer on the anniversary in a new interview with Rolling Stone, Plant said, "There’s quite a lot of people who have been close to me who are no longer with us, but he’s omnipresent in my time because we went into this venture together. We’d been on two or three different trajectories prior to Zeppelin together, which had always been chaotic and always ended in tears one way or another."

He continued, " But with Zeppelin, we always came back, shared a vehicle, came back from the airport, made our way back to where we live on more or less the Welsh borders, so we were still tight, to a large degree, right up until the end. We were definitely from the same bag, the same nest. I’m still living in the area where we were both from, so he’s present and with me quite a lot."

He added, "A lot of people knew him, like they know me...So he’s still very present here, and it’s ironically with local people...So yeah, it’s 40 years, and he’s still greatly lost from us, far and gone. But I’m looking up into the cloudy sky of the nighttime here. I’m sure he’s standing outside a pub somewhere, metaphorically, cracking a joke."

Another major anniversary that recently passed was the 20th anniversary of Almost Famous whose infamous "I am a golden god" scene was supposedly inspired by Plant himself. When asked whether he actually yelled that exclamation, Plant responded with, "Whatever was said from minute to minute was just sheer comic entertainment most of the time in those early Led Zeppelin days. And I think it was in the middle of some ridiculous moment, maybe even Bonzo’s birthday party somewhere up in Beverly Hills, where somebody had made John a three-tier birthday cake."

Plant continued, "We were at some event and John was showing it round the room, and he showed it to somebody, I think it was George Harrison who karate-chopped the cake. Bonzo decided that there was something that needed to be done about that, and there was all sorts of scuttling, and it was just another one of those boyish prank-type of events going on."

Plant concluded, "And it just seemed that the only thing that was missing was somebody to actually round the whole thing up with even more nonsense. So I just opened my arms and just proclaimed that. And then I think a piece of cake sadly lodged somewhere on the end of my nose or something."

So...there was no yelling from a rooftop moment, but at least there was cake, which is always fun.