The 1976 album Robert Plant said could never happen again: “That’s gone”
“Things ain’t what they used to be” is a phrase that virtually every generation throughout history has adopted at one point or another, whether employed to hark back to the nostalgia of a simpler youth or to bemoan the advancement from stone to bronze. Even the rock and roll world, it would appear, is not immune to its sentiment.
Rock music has always been rooted in youth, going back to its earliest emergence during the 1950s and the birth of ‘the teenager’. Throughout the history of the inherently rebellious sound, teenage angst has been a continuous source of inspiration, and the vast majority of its greatest heroes had yet to reach their 25th birthdays during their heydays. Even at the time of their break-up, none of The Beatles had reached 30, and Brian Wilson was the ripe age of 23 when he created one of the greatest albums of all time in Pet Sounds. There is no mistaking it: rock and roll is a young person’s game.
Yet, rock heroes the likes of Robert Plant don’t cease to be icons of the genre once they reach a certain age. The Led Zeppelin frontman was just 19 when he joined the ranks of the hard rock harbingers, but in the decades since, he has never stopped being the archetypal rock and roll frontman.
Even though his output during those golden years was always rooted in the cutting-edge, here and now, Plant has also been known to utter the sentiment of “things ain’t what they used to be”.
The musical landscape, after all, had changed almost beyond all recognition since Plant’s heyday, and Led Zeppelin were at least partly responsible for many of those changes. They were, for instance, among the first groups to have their own private jet, or to play extensive residencies at arena-sized venues like Earls Court. Nevertheless, for Plant, it is difficult not to look back on his younger years with a rose-tinted perspective.
That sense of nostalgia isn’t confined to Plant’s own personal discography, either. Back in 2002, for his Dreamland LP, the former Zeppelin frontman recorded a cover version of the much-maligned Bob Dylan track ‘One More Cup of Coffee’, from his 1976 record Desire, which is scarcely considered among his better works. For Plant, though, that record is the perfect encapsulation of how the music industry has changed over the years.
“I don’t see [Desire] as a least-loved album because I think it’s a fantastic record,” he declared in an interview, in support of his 2002 offering. “The abandon on the record is sensational,” Plant added, suggesting that such an album could never be created in the modern age.
“One cannot do that anymore, and one cannot do so much. There’s so much now that’s gone in the fruit-free, ramshackle troubadourean motif of music,” he affirmed, in his typically flowery fashion.
Seemingly, Plant believes that in the modern musical world, where an artist as colossal as Bob Dylan is forced to adhere to great expectations, the free abandon that leads to records like Desire is much harder to come by. Then again, the fact that Plant was able to record a cover of ‘One More Cup of Coffee’ in the 21st-century, and deserved praise for it, does appear to discredit that claim somewhat.
Ultimately, as far as Robert Plant is concerned, the 1970s were a gold standard for rock expression that can never truly be recaptured.
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