The punk Led Zeppelin single Robert Plant and Jimmy Page disagreed on: “We were so pissed off”
Towards the end of the 1970’s, the punk movement came into full force, and it shook the entire musical world.
Don’t be mistaken, there were certainly plenty of precursors to punk music out there. Artists like Jim Morrison, Alice Cooper and Iggy Pop all embodied that punk aesthetic before John Lydon and the Sex Pistols were on the scene. However, what we saw with punk bands wasn’t just a load of angsty teens penning songs about how much they hate the government, we also saw a complete reset in music.
At the time, bands like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin were all the rage, and while a lot of music lovers adored their complex approach to sound, many of the people who would end up making punk music felt as though they were completely out of touch. That’s why so much punk music is made up predominantly of three chords and some angry lyrics. It’s simple, sure, but that’s the point.
Suffice it to say that while a lot of people were drawn to the simplicity and the rage of punk music, the bands that it was made in protest of couldn’t stand it. They felt that it was one-dimensional and boring, and struggled to see what so many people were drawn to.
John Lydon famously wore a Pink Floyd T-shirt on which he scribbled “I hate” at the top. He’d wear this to a lot of gigs, and for Roger Waters from Pink Floyd, the feeling was entirely mutual. He felt as though the punk movement was no longer a mere moment in time, as opposed to any kind of representation of good music.
“I’ve never been very interested in modern music. I might find some of it enjoyable, but it’s never really been interesting. I never really heard The Clash, and certainly not the Sex Pistols,” Waters said.
“As I still am now, I was listening to Neil Young when all that happened. It passed me by.”
Roger Waters
Led Zeppelin had a similar mindset, they weren’t fans of the punk movement, but they took their disdain for the genre to a whole other level. Rather than just simply not liking the genre, they decided not only to go on a rant about how much they hated it, but also opted to write their own punk song, which they deemed superior to anything that famous punk outfits were doing.
They wrote ‘Wearing and Tearing’ with the intention of releasing it as a single ahead of their Coda compilation. It’s certainly an interesting idea, but one that split the band down the middle. Robert Plant loved it because he felt as though it was just punk music, but better. Meanwhile, Jimmy Page couldn’t get over the laziness of it, and so their track remains one of the more controversial Led Zeppelin numbers.
“I love ‘Wearing and Tearing’, which Page and I wrote together,” said Plant. “We were so pissed off with the whole punk thing, saying, ‘What do those rich bastards know?’”
Concluding, “First of all, we knew that we didn’t have that much dough. Secondly, we knew more about psychobilly than they did.”
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