The most moving vocals Robert Plant ever heard: “He was driven”
Robert Plant has pretty much trademarked all brands of hard rock singing at this point.
As much as he might not like to admit to being a staple of classic rock, what he did with Led Zeppelin helped forge the path for millions of modern singers to follow behind him. While that might have been a specific time and place for him to do the most damage, he always felt that the power behind his voice didn’t matter nearly as much as the emotion that everyone brought across when they sang.
When you think about it, not every rock and roll singer needs to have the greatest voice to be considered one of the best of all time. It’s one thing to be able to do goddamn acrobatics every time you’re onstage, but by that definition, why would Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, or even Patti Smith be considered some of the greatest vocalists of all time? Simple: Because people could feel their hearts ache whenever they heard them sing.
And while Plant had a healthy respect for that kind of singing, it’s not like he was going to give up his shriek for anything. He was gifted with one of the greatest voices of his time, and while not everything that he played needed to turn everything up to ten, it was always better to have range and be able to sing everything from ‘Thank You’ to ‘Immigrant Song’ without straining his voice too much.
But before the folkies had come around, Elvis Presley was already looked at as the gold standard of what great rock and roll vocals were supposed to sound like. It wasn’t nearly as high as what Plant had done, but there’s a certain swagger in Presley’s attitude that’s nearly impossible for anyone to properly duplicate, even if they’ve been impersonating him for decades at a time.
Although many people have singled out Presley’s ballads as his finest singing, there’s something a bit more gripping about ‘Anyway You Want Me’ that always struck a nerve with Plant, saying, “When I met Elvis with Zeppelin, after one of his concerts in the early ’70s, I sized him up. He wasn’t quite as tall as me. But he had a singer’s build. He had a good chest — that resonator. And he was driven. ‘Anyway You Want Me’ is one of the most moving vocal performances I’ve ever heard.”
And you can hear that drive in the way that Presley sings many of his ballads. There’s a much more tender-hearted version of him that’s singing half the time, but when listening back to a lot of his softer songs, he still has the same level of intensity, whether that was turning a jailhouse on fire or wishing for his other half to love him tenderly.
There are even a few times where Plant found ways to shoehorn in some of Presley’s tricks into his tunes. While most people would like to forget the pastiche that the band did on the song ‘Hot Dog’, it’s better to listen to him take more subtle cues from how his idol sings when working on tracks like ‘The Rain Song’.
Not every Zeppelin song needed to be as deep as what Presley sang, but there needed to be that overarching legacy of him in the background half the time. Because while there are many opportunities for people to badly copy what Presley did, the reason why his shadow looms large comes from the commitment that he put into every word he sang. After all, whenever a song like ‘Hound Dog’, there’s a good chance that even the virtuoso vocalists would have been running scared.
