Robert Plant on the only good arena-sized rock band: “Reasonably well”
Rock and roll has seemed to take on a few different definitions for as long as it’s been a part of the cultural conversation. This was supposed to be the kind of music that played in a sweaty club and made people raise their hands in the air, but the minute that the music started selling in droves, those clubs started to get bigger and move into the biggest venues imaginable, from packed theatres to basketball stadiums. Although Robert Plant may have helped invent the idea of arena rock in Led Zeppelin, he could only count on a few people to deliver that kind of massive show every night.
Granted, Zeppelin were no slouches when it came to the greatest rock and roll shows of all time. Although the whole point of their show was to jam and leave everything onstage, they had the ability to turn every one of their performances into their version of a sweaty club gig, to the point where no one knew what to expect every single time Jimmy Page fired up a lick or John Bonham started laying into a groove.
But the main problem with arena rock comes in the first word of that definition. Despite being one of the premier gigs that most artists can only dream about reaching, the sound quality starts to suffer when the crowds get bigger, and despite the advancements in technology, it’s hard to entertain a crowd that’s in front of you if they look like a sea of people that could devour you at any given second.
Still, that didn’t stop Plant every time he got onstage. He was an entertainer before anything else, and whether he was playing the most raucous rock and roll he could or these days when he’s playing with Allison Krauss, he makes sure that he can do his best so every single person in that crowd felt like they were in the presence of greatness. But in terms of major sell-out arenas, Plant saw Dire Straits as the ones getting it right.
Despite being made up of the most normal-looking musicians in the world, Dire Straits always knew how to get the job done strictly with their music. There were a few moments where songs would blend in with each other, but what Mark Knopfler was doing with the sound of the band every time he played had more to do with his natural musicianship rather than worrying about some studio tampering.
Since the music did most of the heavy lifting, Plant felt that Dire Straits could pull off those massive gigs with ease, saying, “I can’t play places like Birmingham NEC. The only group I’ve seen come over reasonably well there was Dire Straits, and I’ve seen quite a few people, including Dylan, David Bowie and Foreigner. That size of gig is a little out of order now, in Britain at least.”
Given the fact that Birmingham NEC is one of the most open venues imaginable, though, it’s not like Plant couldn’t hold his own, either. If you look back at the handful of shows that Zeppelin played at Knebworth during their prime, they still knew what they were doing, even if they were flying blind and trying out material that most fans would have never thought they could pull off like ‘Achilles Last Stand’.
But Dire Straits playing those huge venues had a lot more to do with their approach to music. None of them needed to be an Olympian athlete on their instrument because it was always about what felt right to them, and regardless of how many times they got onstage, they could always reproduce the kind of sounds that came alive in those massive venues.
