Robert Plant on the genre he considered American punk rock
Few genres have managed to shape the world of music quite like punk rock did in its prime. The whole style of music was about being fed up with what the old school of rock and roll was supposed to be and paving the way for something new from the ground up. While rock and roll had gone through many different shapes by the time Led Zeppelin had come along, Robert Plant felt that he wasn’t seeing true punk spirit again until years after the genre’s prime had faded.
Granted, Zeppelin could have considered both the first punks and the reason why punk was necessary in the first place. Because listening to their first handful of records, there is that signature aggression that could be found in early punk music. The Who’s ‘My Generation’ and The Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’ might be considered some of the first punk songs, but ‘Communication Breakdown’ certainly deserves to be in that company as well.
Looking at where the band was by the end of the 1970s, though, they were every reason someone like John Lydon was fed up with the direction music had taken. Jimmy Page may have lived the life of a rockstar every time he stepped onstage, but there was no way to connect with someone when they were blaring their music miles high in the air on their private jets in between shows.
So when someone managed to bring rock and roll back to the clubs, there was a new vocabulary at work. Sex Pistols, The Damned, and The Clash may not have been the best musicians in the world, but as soon as they began gaining traction, every rock fan was doing away with the likes of Zeppelin and started putting safety pins through their cheeks, wearing Doc Marten boots, and adopting the mohawk to blend in with the new flavour of the day.
And while America had their own sense of punk rock, nothing hit a collective nerve as much as Nirvana did when grunge came in. Even though they had all been huge fans of punk rock in their early years, Kurt Cobain’s knack for songwriting is what made them one of the biggest acts in the world, making songs with a punk rock attitude but with a melody strong enough to sing along to.
For Plant, though, this seemed to be the only time Americans managed to find their feet in the punk conversation, saying, “You know what happened? Punk said, ‘We are fed up with Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin,’ and said, ‘Let’s have music from the street. ‘What happened in America in 1991 is that you finally got your own Punk.”
Then again, Plant might have a few of his wires crossed here. Sure, bands like The Clash and Sex Pistols were massive in their time, but saying that grunge was the first American punk rock is a bit strange considering how important CBGBs was in the 1970s, how influential Ramones were in that period, and what the underground scene had been doing throughout the 1980s with Fugazi and Bad Religion.
So, while it’s fair to say that grunge was the first time that a genre had the same cultural impact as punk did in England around that same time, there was a lot more that could be done in America than the age of flannel. Kurt Cobain may have been the first to bring it to the bread basket of the US, but he was only standing on the foundations that had been set by punk acts that came before.
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