Why Robert Plant is grateful he wasn’t in Genesis: “That’s something you can never get round”
Being in one of the biggest bands in the world tends to be a double-edged sword for every member of the group. Getting the opportunity to play music with friends might be a dream come true in many respects, but if there is one album, song, or performance that people see as your crowning achievement, it’s impossible for you to try to recapture every time you go back into the studio. And while Robert Plant had his moments of distancing himself from Led Zeppelin, he always knew it could have been a lot worse.
Then again, it’s not like Zeppelin has necessarily gone out of style since their breakup. They may have only been around for a little over a decade, but listening to those first four records is still a crash course for anyone mildly interested in hard rock, with even hip-hop acts taking from them when looking for their first samples. But that was only one piece of what Plant could do with his voice.
Zeppelin always prided themselves on being a hybrid of different influences, and while many people couldn’t get enough of songs like ‘Rock and Roll’ and ‘Black Dog,’ Plant has made it a habit of trying to move away from that sound throughout his solo career, whether that’s reforming The Band of Joy or going out onstage with bluegrass singer Allison Krauss during their album Raising Sand.
A lot of his influences still trace back to the greatest in blues and roots music, but he knew there was a danger of getting typecast when he saw bands like Yes and King Crimson breaking through. They also wanted to move rock in a different direction, but when everyone heard them stretching out their songs into ten-minute epics, everyone folded those bands into the prog-rock genre without thinking too hard about it.
Even for progressive music, though, Genesis was a much different beast. Their tenure with Peter Gabriel had always been extravagant, but when looking at the music they made with Phil Collins, they were far more comfortable with making pop songs like ‘That’s All,’ even managing to thrive in the MTV generation once they hopped on the synth bandwagon.
Though Plant was far away from Zeppelin by that point, he admitted that he was grateful to have never been confined to a specific the same way that Collins was, saying, “So Led Zep – the miscalculations and misinterpretations are quite vivid and very funny. But thank God I wasn’t in Genesis, or I’d be called ‘prog rock’ now. And that’s something you can never get round!”
And it’s not like Plant is necessarily wrong about not getting over being called prog-rock. The genre is by no means a pejorative term, but the minute that people expected to hear massive exercises from Collins, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford, it was hard for those same fans to suddenly accept the idea of him being a pinup star once ‘In the Air Tonight’ came out or seeing him writing the soundtrack to Tarzan.
Sure, Plant doesn’t have as many platinum records as Collins had for Invisible Touch, but it’s better for him not to have to deal with the headache of having to follow his audience. Led Zeppelin had their time and place, but he’s far more happy doing whatever the hell he wants rather than chasing after a sequel to ‘Whole Lotta Love.’
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