(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
For any aspiring musician, the artists on their bedroom walls are more than people on a stage. These artists turned their world around and made them want to write songs of their own, and no matter how many times they try to distance themselves from their inspirations, everyone will have those few moments where their record collections end up seeping themselves into their music. Although most of the British music scene had the blues as part of their musical vocabulary, Robert Plant felt that some artists were baked into the fabric of his being.
When looking at where Plant started off in the Band of Joy, you wouldn’t necessarily see the artist known as ‘The Golden God’ coming. ‘Percy’ certainly had an impressive shout on him when working with his first band, but once he started to truly study the blues greats when working with Led Zeppelin, he traded in his softer croon for the kind of Janis Joplin howl that everyone wanted to emulate.
But if most people simply saw Plant’s vocal approach and tried to copy what he was doing, they had a fundamental misunderstanding of why he was singing that way in the first place. The greatest blues musicians were focused on making the kind of songs that hit someone in their soul, and that came from taking all of the troubles they’ve gone through in life and channelling it through their music rather than trying to out high-note the person next to them.
Plant wasn’t even the first person to come up with this idea in the British rock scene. Jack Bruce had his more operatic voice when working in Cream, and Roger Daltrey had an impressive shout on him, but frontmen like Paul Rodgers and Terry Reid were cut from the same cloth as Plant, usually looking to push their vocals to the limits so they could do their songs justice once the red light came on in the studio.
The blues was certainly a great starting point, but anyone who was working in the blues scene always relied on the early stages of rock and roll. There wasn’t a soul playing those clubs back in 1964 that didn’t hold Elvis Presley in high regard or listen to Buddy Holly, but Plant still felt more in tune listening to the rockers that had a bit more of a blues edge than the others.
Little Richard may have been a primary inspiration for songs like ‘Rock and Roll’, but Plant felt that Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry’s material went beyond merely inspiration, saying, “I remember when Bo Diddley passed. It came on the radio, and it was like the whole bus just slumped. I mean, Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry — they’re part of your DNA, you know? As British kids, we spent our adolescence just furiously ruining their songs.”
By the time Zeppelin became larger than life, though, they had started to move on from the traditional sounds of Diddley and Berry. ‘Candy Store Rock’ was an homage to Diddley’s signature groove, and ‘Hot Dog’ was a weird blending of Berry’s songwriting and Elvis Presley’s moves, but given that neither song has gone down in history in the same way that ‘Kashmir’ has, it’s safe to say that they weren’t banking on being a nostalgia act.
They love the bluesy feel of rock and roll, but even on their first album, Plant wanted to do something more visceral than what he heard on the radio. After all, Diddley and Berry were slowly turning into classic rock, and if he wanted to wow crowds like his idols did, he had to make sure he pushed himself that much further.
Related Topics
