The pivotal moment Robert Plant and Jimmy Page discovered their chemistry: “It was wonderful”
For any musician, finding a partner to play music with is the equivalent of finding a soulmate half the time. It’s hard enough trying to recreate the sounds in your head by yourself on one guitar and vocals, but once another musician connects on the same wavelength, it’s almost as if you can finish each other’s sentences half the time. Although Jimmy Page had an open-ended idea for the initial ‘New Yardbirds’ were going to be, connecting with Robert Plant was the moment he realised Led Zeppelin went beyond his old outfit.
Then again, Page was already afraid of getting stuck playing the blues for the rest of his life. There was nothing inherently wrong with his role in The Yardbirds, but the more you listen to the final tracks he played on, it becomes clear that he had started to leave that part of his sound behind for more psychedelic and heavier affairs than anything Keith Relf was willing to play.
So when he hooked up with John Paul Jones and John Bonham, things were already falling into place. Bonzo had given him a raving lunatic behind the drumkit, and since Jonesy had spent most of his time playing in various sessions, there wasn’t a single thing that could be thrown at him that he couldn’t internalise in just a few minutes.
But Plant was still a big question mark. His work in other blues outfits, as well as The Band of Joy, were great for what they were, but how was it going to balance out next to one of the greatest blues players in the scene? To test things out, though, Page went the folksy route by having Plant play Joan Baez’s ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’ when they first jammed.
As Page would later recall, there was already something different going on when Plant opened his mouth, telling Rolling Stone, “I’d already worked out what I wanted to do on the guitar. I said, I know this sounds a bit abstract, but if you can sing that sort of melody, stick to that plaintive melody line Joan Baez is singing, you’ll see how it fits.’ He does it, and he’s like, ‘Yeah, this is great.’ It was just a joining of two minds. It was wonderful. So by the time we went into the rehearsal, it really, really kicked because now you’ve got four people all firing on all cylinders.”
Despite Page’s intentions of sticking to the script, as it were, ‘Percy’ was not going to be singing the bare minimum. He was a different animal every time he performed, and as soon as the tune got translated to the studio, Page got to witness Plant unlock his inner Janis Joplin when performing the piece, turning every syllable over in his mouth.
It wasn’t anyone’s first choice for vocal performance, but when hearing him bounce off the rest of the group, Plant was jamming the same way everyone else was. Given that most of The Yardbirds’ material was meant to be straight-ahead blues, hearing them bring this much heaviness to a traditional folk song was the biggest indicator of what was to come.
From ‘Whole Lotta Love’ to ‘Kashmir’ to ‘Stairway to Heaven’, Page and Plant’s relationship was the heavier answer to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, as if they were trying to smash the concept of rock and roll to pieces with every single track they made. It wasn’t going to be easy trying to put together another massive rock band from scratch, but in the ashes of The Yardbirds, Page’s symbiotic collaborations with Plant was the kind of partner most guitarists only dream of.
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