The Led Zeppelin song that made Robert Plant feel like a “wedding singer”
If the 1960s were all about The Beatles, the 1970s was more of an open playing field, with rock ‘n’ roll splitting into ever-tighter niches. The heady era brought us stars of glam rock, heavy metal, krautrock, prog rock, and punk. Alongside solo stars like David Bowie and Elton John, Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones seemed most apt to usurp The Beatles’ throne.
Formed from the dying embers of The Yardbirds, the band that gestated the talents of Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, Led Zeppelin was among the most talented groups to emerge from the 1960s. As a former session musician and a celebrated guitarist, Jimmy Page knew a thing or two about music and, with a nose like a bloodhound, assembled a dream team.
Joined by fellow session musician, bassist John Paul Jones on one half of the band, Page found the other half in a rising West Bromwich band called Band of Joy. Not only did the band have one of the finest drummers in the land, John Bonham, but it also housed Robert Plant. One of the all-time greats of rock singing, Plant has the projection and mane of a lion and range that would make Tiger Woods blush.
When Page first visited Plant while scouting prospective vocalists, he asked him to audition. The singer decided to bow Page away with a cover of Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Somebody To Love’. “When I auditioned him and heard him sing, I immediately thought there must be something wrong with him personality-wise or that he had to be impossible to work with because I just could not understand why, after he told me he’d been singing for a few years already, he hadn’t become a big name yet,” Page once reflected. “So I had him down to my place for a little while, just to sort of check him out, and we got along great. No problems.”
Led Zeppelin prospered throughout the late 1960s and early ‘70s, rapidly becoming a rock ‘n’ roll behemoth, frolicking in the hedonistic joys available to artists of such fame. Sadly, the band began to fall apart at the seams in the middle of the decade, amid Bonham’s tour reluctance and following Plant’s death-defying motor accident.
As Plant recovered from his 1975 accident, the band cancelled a tour and set about writing and recording a follow-up to Physical Graffiti. By most accounts, Presence is regarded as a decline in form. However, the album contained several highlights, including the epic closer ‘Achilles Last Stand’. The song is a feat of compositional excellence that attests to the virtuosity and combined strength of Page, Bonham and Jones.
Plant, who contributed some of his most immersive lyrics to the song, steeped in Eastern culture and mythology, was awestruck by his three bandmates during the recording session. “With ‘Achilles Last Stand’, the music … I was so fortunate to be around so many amazingly gifted players,” he reflected on his Digging Deep podcast.
Plant revealed that he felt like a mere wedding singer in front of such instrumental talent. “If you think about Led Zeppelin as being a trio, really, with a kind of wedding singer stuck at the front, that’s how [I saw it],” he said. “I always saw the reality of what was going on. My enthusiasm was a good contribution, but in truth, those guys were amazing … The interplay and the melding of the musicality of those three guys on that track is insane, absolutely insane. It’s magnificent.”
This wasn’t the first time Plant likened himself to a wedding singer. Famously, the frontman has a special kind of loathing for the Led Zeppelin IV classic ‘Stairway to Heaven’. In a 1988 interview with the Los Angeles Times, he described it as “that bloody wedding song,” adding that he would “break out in hives if I had to sing that song in every show.”
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