“The best of all”: the album Robert Plant said made him feel the best
There comes a point where even living legends get tired of going back to the same grab bag of tricks whenever they make a record. Paul McCartney was never interested in repeating the same formula that The Beatles did on every record, and no matter how many times evidence would prove otherwise, there’s a good chance that Bono occasionally gets tired of the sound of his own voice whenever he starts singing during any U2 show. Even they need to recharge their batteries, and Robert Plant felt that the best records are the ones that take you back to a specific feeling during their runtime.
That’s not to say that early Led Zeppelin songs don’t have that same effect on people. Although there are a lot of fans that come to the band for the unbridled energy that came out of every one of their records, it was always about trying to get the right kind of performance that captured a raw feeling rather than spending time jamming and hoping that a classic would emerge out of the blue.
At least that’s how every other rock and roll band before them had done it. The Rolling Stones were always concerned more with the quality of the take rather than if everyone was playing at the same tempo, and ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ is the perfect example that while every Beatles was worked to perfection, there’s a way to overproduce something, especially if it’s in service to a song that was annoying, to begin with.
But those fruity songs were never where Zeppelin’s strengths were. They were always blues connoisseurs, and while there were many instances where they could play traditional tunes with their own signature flair, the importance was being able to blow them up to colossal proportions. Memphis Minnie already had a superb version of ‘When the Levee Breaks’, but as soon as John Bonham lays into a groove, all sense of time and space fades away once the rest of the band comes storming in.
“This is a compilation that’s not particularly rare, it’s part of the kind of Smithsonian catalogue of American music.”
Robert Plant
At the same time, Plant could only play that kind of music because he was indebted to those old records that he learned from as a kid. Even years after the fact, he remembered going back to artists like Alan Lomax to discover where his job originated from. Lomax was always more of a studier of music than anything else, and hearing his field recordings was like hearing old documents of folk tunes from yesteryear.
Plant’s tunes may be set in stone, but he admitted that nothing else filled him with joy every morning than hearing Lomax on the album Songs of the South, saying, “It takes me into the condition that I like best of all, and that is to be the hunter, the student, the geek who tries to find song structures and lyrical structures that are coming from another place altogether. This is a compilation that’s not particularly rare, it’s part of the kind of Smithsonian catalogue of American music.”
Despite it sharing a title with the one Disney movie that the House of Mouse wants to make sure doesn’t exist, this is one of the purest forms of preserving music. As much as Zeppelin’s records were finely-tuned, the quality of the recordings here is the old-school equivalent of bootlegging in many respects, with Lomax trying to get everything down so the rest of the world could hear.
Even though it sounds nothing like the kind of music that Plant would regularly go to bat for, it’s that purity that keeps him coming back. It’s easy to lose the plot whenever any musician sits behind the glass and starts playing, so they sometimes need to go back to this kind of recording to remind themselves of the freedom that can come from playing music.
