Robbie Blunt

Robbie Blunt played guitar on Robert Plant’s first three solo albums. That clean guitar running through “Big Log” is his. He helped write the song too, along with Plant and keyboard player Jezz Woodroffe. It was not a finished track that needed somebody to come in and add a solo. Blunt was in the middle of making the thing.

He had already been working for more than a decade by then. His name was known to other players and to people who followed British blues and rock. It just never became a household name, which is a different thing.

Before Plant called

Blunt came up around the Midlands and played with Bronco while he was still in his teens. Bronco mixed blues, country and soul and toured with bands including Free and Traffic. After that came Silverhead, Broken Glass with Stan Webb, more time with Webb in Chicken Shack, and then the Steve Gibbons Band.

So Plant did not find a mystery guitar player in a pub. He called an old friend who had already made records, toured and spent years learning how to fit into different bands without flattening them into the same sound.

Robert Plant and those guitar parts

Plant and Blunt had known each other since the 1960s. After Led Zeppelin ended, they wound up playing rhythm and blues in small clubs with the Honeydrippers. Blunt got tired of doing standards every night. They started working on new songs instead.

Plant has said he was not sure he could write naturally with another guitarist after working with Jimmy Page for so long. That concern did not last. Blunt became the guitarist and one of the main writers on Pictures at Eleven, The Principle of Moments and Shaken ’n’ Stirred.

“Big Log” started with Woodroffe working up a rhythm on a Roland TR-808. Blunt liked it, found the chords and came up with the guitar theme. That part is practically another voice in the song. The little bends, the double-stops and the notes he lets hang there are all as important as the louder bits.

The same thing happens on “In the Mood.” Blunt leaves space, then puts a line exactly where the song needs one. “Like I’ve Never Been Gone” gives him more room to stretch out, and the solo is a good reminder that the restraint was a choice. He could turn it up when he wanted.

None of this sounds like somebody trying to take Jimmy Page’s job. That would have been a miserable way to spend the eighties anyway. Blunt used a Strat, kept the notes clear and helped Plant make records that belonged to the decade they were recorded in.

After the Plant records

Blunt went back to session work after Shaken ’n’ Stirred. He added guitar to Edie Brickell & New Bohemians’ Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars and played on Clannad’s Sirius. The title track on that Clannad record has him credited with the electric guitar solo.

He also turns up on the Jeff Healey Band’s See the Light. Blunt co-wrote “Nice Problem to Have” with the band and played guitar on that track and “Hideaway.” Sharing a guitar track with Jeff Healey is not exactly the quiet end of session work.

The gear we know about

There is plenty of guesswork online about the “Big Log” sound. Blunt talked about the actual guitars and amps in period interviews, so we can skip most of the guessing.

Black Stratocaster

A 1956 Fender Strat with a 1954 neck. Stock apart from brass saddles. Blunt used it on “Big Log” and “In the Mood.”

Fender Princeton

A small pre-CBS Princeton was the recording amp paired with the old Strat for the “Big Log” sound.

Red Stratocaster

A later working guitar assembled with Schecter parts and pickups, a maple neck and a Kahler tremolo.

Roland GR-707

The guitar synthesizer Blunt used during the Shaken ’n’ Stirred period, when the records started leaning harder into keyboards and processed guitar sounds.

Mesa/Boogie Mark II-B

Part of his mid-eighties amp setup. By this point the live and studio rig had moved well beyond the little Princeton used on the earlier records.

A few tracks to play

Keep digging

Jas Obrecht taped a long interview with Blunt in 1985 and has put the original audio online. Blunt talks about the Plant records, his guitars and the way he approached solos. It is the best place to go next: Robbie Blunt: The 1985 Robert Plant Interview.

There is also a proper period profile in the April 1984 issue of Musician. It is a scanned magazine, so save that one for a screen bigger than a phone.