“I had to do that”: Robert Plant on the band that typecast Eric Clapton
Any artist’s worst nightmare is to be put in a box and have nowhere to go. The entire concept of making music should be about having no rules, and the minute that people start sticking their noses in places they don’t belong and tell a musician how to make their music, there’s a good chance that it won’t be fun going into the studio. Robert Plant may have spent much of his post-Led Zeppelin career trying to outrun his legacy, but if he hadn’t, he knew he could end up in musical purgatory.
Then again, that strange dead zone for musicians isn’t always a bad thing. The whole concept of a band like AC/DC is to make the same song on every single album, and as much as people might feel like it gets monotonous, I’m sure they’re crying all the way to the bank whenever they sell out their massive arena shows.
But the life of a lavish rockstar was something that Plant only needed to experience once. After all, he had joined the band as the hippie of the group, and by the time they were making movies like The Song Remains the Same, it had gone from them being one of the biggest rock artists in the world to gods among men, with Plant himself being heralded as the archetype for everything a rockstar frontman was supposed to be.
Granted, Plant was far from the first one to be considered a god in rock and roll. Years before Page had the idea of forming Zeppelin, Eric Clapton was already turning into everyone’s idea of a guitar genius in The Yardbirds. Despite being a free agent throughout his career, Clapton was always best when working off other musicians, whether that was playing off of Ginger Baker, adding his guitar part to The Beatles’ ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, or co-founding Derek and the Dominoes.
Even for someone as high-profile as Clapton, though, there were bound to be a few familiar licks on every album. Clapton never once apologised for being a disciple of blues, nor did he have to, but the minute that people started hearing tunes like ‘Layla’ and every other BB King in his arsenal, they felt like he had used up all of his musical magic tricks before the 1980s even got started.
And when leaving Zeppelin behind, Plant cited Clapton directly as the reason why he couldn’t keep playing the same style for too long, saying, “I had to do that. I remember poor old Clapton, years and years before, having had this phenomenon with Cream. Every time he tried to play ‘Layla’, people would scream for ‘Crossroads’.”
But it’s not like Clapton couldn’t overcome that stigma, either. The whole point behind his famous Unplugged performance was to prove his doubters wrong, and while it was met with some people dismissing him as dad rock, he was never going to be someone who only played tracks like ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ for the rest of his life.
It’s never an easy decision to not give the fans what they want, but the mark of any great artist is to go against the audience’s wishes the right way. After all, people don’t know what they want until they’re given it, and while Plant might pull out the occasional Zeppelin tune onstage now, he and Clapton have both realised it’s more satisfying to follow their own use than fit into someone else’s definition of what they should be.
