Robert Plant on the closest he ever came to singing blues: “A very, very tough time”
No member of Led Zeppelin was a stranger to the blues. The entire mentality of Jimmy Page before he even put together his first chords was making the most of being in The Yardbirds, so it’s not like he was going to be thrown for a loop when a song by Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters was thrown his direction. Robert Plant still felt that the band was more than the same 12 bars, but there were moments when they matured into the seasoned bluesmen that they loved as kids.
Because listening back to Zeppelin’s early records, they aren’t necessarily in the same ballpark as the BB Kings of the world. Oh, they still have the same foundation and might even be playing the same exact melodies in some places, but listening to them interpret tracks like ‘In My Time of Dying’ and ‘The Lemon Song’ was their way of bridging the gap between old-school blues and hard rock.
In fact, they seem to exist in the same sonic space that The Who had been working with during their Live At Leeds. It was clear that both of them had a healthy understanding of what the blues was supposed to be, but the only way they could have an outlet for that kind of music was through more angsty songs.
That’s not to say they couldn’t eventually make it to that grizzled era of blues rock. The Rolling Stones had spent years playing the same flavour of nasty rock and roll, but by the time they reached projects like Exile On Main St, they had transformed into those trademark bluesmen, all while people like Eric Clapton started throwing together their own versions of blues standards.
While Zeppelin had shed their skin as a blues covers act by the end of Physical Graffiti, they had definitely done some living in between their double album and Presence. Outside of the band going through the kind of X-rated extracurriculars not meant for human eyes, Plant surviving a car crash led to the album being a touch more gloomy, albeit with a few epics to go around like ‘Achilles’ Last Stand’.
Even though they were miles away from their beginnings, he knew they had developed the grit that all of their heroes possessed by that point, saying, “The whole momentum was directed by my accident. But that didn’t stop us from working on Presence and then going to Germany to record it. It was a very, very tough time. That was probably the nearest I’d ever get to being a blues singer — not by my voice, but by how I was feeling; not being a guy in the corner like Blind Lemon Jefferson, but just being really fucked off.”
It’s easy to understand it in execution rather than in the raw tone of his voice. Aside from the fact that his voice gets criminally buried in the mix on a few occasions, a song like ‘Nobody’s Fault But Mine’ is a good example of Plant going for it the same way blues singers might have before him, as if to leave every spec of emotion he could on the final take before going back into his wheelchair.
Zeppelin had started with the blues, but Presence marked a different kind of milestone for the group. At this point, anyone could have been a Zeppelin copycat, but this was their opportunity to turn their bluesy jams into concrete slabs of hard rock.
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