“Those high falsetto screams”: Robert Plant’s most astonishing vocal moment with Led Zeppelin
Every single rock and roll frontman is always going to be chasing the high that they had when seeing Robert Plant for the first time.
Plant didn’t invent the idea of having a star frontman at the front of the stage, but by the time that Led Zeppelin became one of the biggest bands in the world, there wasn’t a soul on Earth that wasn’t taking cues from what he was doing every single time he came onstage. He earned every single bit of that ‘Golden God’ nickname, but only he knew when he had pushed himself as far as he could possibly go when working on some of their best tunes.
Because, compared to John Bonham’s muscle behind the kit or Jimmy Page’s endless supply of riffs, the pressure is normally on the singer more than anyone else. Aside from having to make sure that you don’t have a cold every single time you play a show, the fact that he has to maintain a high level of singing throughout his entire life is probably the reason why Plant refused to give a Zeppelin reunion the time of day.
And it’s not like anyone’s asking him to be ‘Percy’ all over again. Most of us are happy to have one version of his voice documented forever on records like Physical Graffiti, but he wasn’t going to try and strain his voice trying to reach up into the rafters for ‘In My Time of Dying’ every single time he played. He wanted to explore other areas, but it’s not like Zeppelin was a one-trick pony by any means.
Every one of their records was all about expanding their musical horizons, and even if the blues was a core part of their sound, it was nothing compared to the strange detours they would go on. There was no reference point for a song like ‘Kashmir’ or ‘Stairway to Heaven’, but compared to all of their previous records, Houses of the Holy was the first time everything started to sound a bit more eclectic.
Not everything worked perfectly, but whereas emulating James Brown might have been fun on tracks like ‘The Crunge’, the moments on the record that do work shine brighter than anything else in their catalogue. ‘No Quarter’ is one of the most ominous tunes that they’ve ever made, and ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’ is a prime example of them blending acoustic and electric instruments, but there’s no real way to describe the kind of magic that they managed to capture on ‘The Rain Song’.
They had been working on ballads before, but even with Page’s strange tuning for the song, Plant felt that his work on the track was some of the finest he ever sang with Zeppelin, saying, “‘The Rain Song’ was just sort of a little infatuation I had. The next morning I’d scribble it out. If I had done it the day after, it would have been no good. I’d say that on ‘Rain Song’ I sounded best. I’d reached a point where I knew that to get good I couldn’t repeat myself. The high falsetto screams had become quite a kind of calling card.”
But aside from the writing of the song, Plant’s vocal performance is also something that could never be replicated again. A lot of the song already had a moody feel to it, but Plant’s vocals are practically feeding off of what the rest of the band is doing, building to one of the most unsettling riffs that Page ever made towards the end of the song, which sounds like it could have been a dark interlude on a Black Sabbath record.
Although many people may have been looking to hear ‘Percy’ in rare form throughout most of this record, ‘The Rain Song’ is a prime example of giving people the kind of music they didn’t know they wanted. This tune was light years away from ‘Whole Lotta Love’, but you couldn’t deny that it had a bit of magic across those few minutes.
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