“All that rubbish”: the band Robert Plant thought had no substance
Every band that sticks around for a while is there because they have something to say. There will always be plenty of superficial acts that occasionally put out a few decent tunes, but for anyone into it for the long haul, it’s about trying to find some point behind making music that goes beyond being a sideshow act. Robert Plant had already radically changed how most people thought about rock and roll with Led Zeppelin, but before people got on that bluesy train, he felt that a few other English groups were a far cry from what rock was supposed to be.
Then again, it’s hard to really pinpoint what rock was supposed to be in any given decade. The whole point of the genre was that there weren’t too many parameters around what you could do, and for every artist that stuck to bluesy principles like Little Richard, people like Buddy Holly and Carl Perkins would often incorporate pop and country styles into their music to differentiate themselves from the rest.
While Plant could certainly appreciate that kind of music, he was nowhere near that style when he started playing his own gigs. He was more interested in guttural blues singers like Sleepy John Estes, and when you look at the music scene that was dominating the charts before The Beatles, it was a ghost town for anything resembling good music for a few years.
After becoming the biggest names in music, the giants started to fade away. Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran had died, Elvis Presley had joined the army, and Little Richard was becoming a preacher, so all that people had left was the most scrubbed-clean versions of rock and roll. So, if you wanted to hear an Elvis Presley tune, you would have to sit through Pat Boone delivering the musical equivalent of a butter sandwich on white bread.
Although The Beatles helped eradicate much of that, that did leave bands like Gerry and the Pacemakers looking like complete squares. Despite having a few decent songs in their arsenal, like ‘Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying’, all Percy saw were musicians trying their best to score their 15 minutes of fame with as little effort as possible.
Compared to the bluesy acts that America was spitting out, Plant remembered being slightly embarrassed by bands like The Pacemakers, telling Entertainment Weekly, “America is a multiracial society, and all of these various racial and cultural implants had a fantastic effect on music. I can’t find anything in English music that actually touches anything half as seductive or relevant. I was always amazed that Herman’s Hermits and Gerry and the Pacemakers, all that rubbish of the so-called British Invasion in the ’60s, had such an effect on people.”
When Led Zeppelin first crash-landed on the scene, no one really had the time for that brand of musician ever again. People could certainly listen to ‘Ferry Across the Mersey’ if they wanted to, but what’s the point when ‘Good Times Bad Times’ is much louder and kicks that song’s ass up and down the block?
So, in essence, Zeppelin was a British band taking all of the trademark sounds of American music and making it even heavier for the next generation. Then again, Plant may not have thought that he started some bold new art form or anything. He just knew that whatever he was doing would have a lot more substance to it than what The Pacemakers had going for them.
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