The song Robert Plant wrote for his son is “All My Love,” the gentle, keyboard-led ballad on Led Zeppelin’s 1979 album In Through the Out Door. Countless listeners have heard it on classic rock radio and assumed it was written for a woman. It was written for a little boy named Karac, who died at five years old while his father was on tour in America. And for a while after that loss, Robert Plant was ready to leave rock and roll behind for good.
Two Phone Calls in New Orleans
In the summer of 1977, Led Zeppelin were near the end of a huge North American tour. Earlier that spring they had drawn more than 76,000 people to a single show at the Pontiac Silverdome. On July 23 and 24 they played two dates in Oakland, California, then scattered and made their own way to the next stop, a planned show in New Orleans.
Shortly after Plant arrived, his wife, Maureen, called from England. Tour manager Richard Cole later described how it unfolded: the first call said the boy was sick. By the second call, Karac was gone. He had been struck by a sudden stomach infection, and it moved fast. The date was July 26, 1977.
The rest of the tour was canceled immediately. Plant flew home to the family farm near Kidderminster, in the English Midlands. His own father told the Associated Press that Karac was the apple of Robert’s eye, and that the two of them idolized each other.
Nobody knew it then, but the Oakland shows were the last concerts Led Zeppelin would ever play in the United States.
“I Didn’t Want to Be in Led Zeppelin”
Plant has never dressed up what he felt in the months that followed. He told Rolling Stone:
“I lost my boy. I didn’t want to be in Led Zeppelin. I wanted to be with my family.”
He also said the press made a terrible time worse. Speaking to writer Barney Hoskyns, he explained that as the family regrouped, he applied for a job at a Rudolf Steiner teacher-training college in Sussex. He simply wanted to get out of it all and forget.
It was not a passing thought. The Plant family had long admired Steiner, or Waldorf, education in the West Midlands. In a 2011 interview with GQ, Plant said there seemed to be something more honest and wholesome in digging in and putting the ego away. Entertainers, he admitted, are often insecure people underneath, and he felt he should be rid of the need for applause. He added that sometimes he still felt that way.
The Friend Who Showed Up
One bandmate understood what he needed. John Bonham, Zeppelin’s drummer, was a Midlands man like Plant, and the two families lived close together, far from the London music scene. In a 2018 interview with Dan Rather, Plant said Bonham and his wife, Pat, were “magnificent” with the family and helped them through it.
In 2013, Plant put it even more plainly. In the darkest time of his life, he said, it was Bonzo who came to him. He felt the other members, raised in the south of England, simply did not have the same way of reaching across that painful distance to console a grieving friend. Zeppelin biographer Mick Wall has gone further, claiming that Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and manager Peter Grant did not attend Karac’s funeral, and that it changed Plant’s relationship with the band for good.
Plant did not take the teaching job. In time he returned to the studio, though the music meant something different to him now. As he said years later, the swaggering lyrics of the old days did not carry much weight after he lost his boy.
The Song That Sounds Like a Love Song
When Led Zeppelin went to Polar Studios in Stockholm to record In Through the Out Door, Plant wrote “All My Love” with bassist and keyboard player John Paul Jones. It is one of only two Led Zeppelin songs in which Jimmy Page had no songwriting credit. Jones built it around a synthesizer, and the softer sound reportedly made Page and Bonham uneasy at first. Page later admitted to second thoughts about it.
For Plant, the meaning was simple. Asked about the song by Dan Rather, he said:
“I think it was just paying tribute to the joy that he gave us as a family and, in a crazy way, still does occasionally.”
By the time the album came out in 1979, Robert and Maureen had welcomed another son, Logan, born that January. Plant has said that over the years the memories of his two boys have blurred together. When he tries to describe Karac, he reaches for the outdoors. He called him a little nature boy. A mountain man.
He Still Turns Up in the Songs
“All My Love” was not the last time Karac found his way into his father’s music. Plant’s 1993 solo song “I Believe,” from the album Fate of Nations, was also written about him. Every now and then, Plant told Dan Rather, his son turns up in a song for no other reason than that he misses him a lot.
Now 78, Robert Plant still tours, these days with his folk band Saving Grace. In an interview with The Times this month, he looked back once more on 1977 and said he didn’t need the group after losing his boy. Nearly half a century later, the loss still shapes how he talks about Led Zeppelin.
The next time “All My Love” comes on the radio, it may sound a little different. Do you remember where you were the first time you heard it?