The rock singer Ian Anderson could never sing like: “Quite jealous”
Rock and roll doesn’t always have to be a competition. Most people use music as a means of channelling their deepest emotions, but whenever someone sees someone out in the wild that can sing a little bit higher than them or play the guitar faster than they could, it’s easy for them to get a fire in the pit of their stomach and try to make something that leaves everyone else in the dust.
Ian Anderson may have made sure to keep things professional behind the scenes, but that didn’t mean he had to mask all of his feelings towards everyone he saw.
Throughout Jethro Tull’s run in the 1970s, though, Anderson was already a bit of an oddity whenever he came out onstage. The guy was a phenomenal performer in every sense of the word, but when someone thinks of the archetype for a rock and roll frontman in the vein of Mick Jagger, not many people expect someone balancing on one foot as they proceed to dominate flute licks in the middle of a rock song.
But at the time, it was far more original to see someone taking chances than having to play the same kind of blues licks over and over again. It was clear that Anderson was no Eric Clapton, and if anyone was going to make their turn over to the blues, that had to be either one of the greatest blues artist to ever walk the Earth or find a way to twist it on its head, and Jimmy Page had an ace in the hole when forming Led Zeppelin.
Tull may have been going through their own rise when Zeppelin was first starting, but compared to every other rock vocalist, what Robert Plant was doing was in a league of its own. ‘Percy’ may be slightly ashamed of what turned up on the band’s first few albums, but his way to blend the traditional bluesman singing with the tortured screams of Janis Joplin is the kind of vocal delivery that every heavy metal singer thrived on for decades at a time.
And despite Anderson going in a completely different direction, he knew that any chance of him sounding remotely close to what Plant was doing was hopeless, saying, “[I was] quite jealous [of his] greatly superior vocal skills. I wasn’t born with those attributes, and I knew I would never be in his league. They were rock gods, and we were the humble support act.”
Anderson might have been a bit jaded about not being able to sing like Plant, but it’s that every single vocalist should be taught a lesson right now: NO ONE sings like Robert Plant. As much as people like the idea of mimicking him, there’s no reason that anyone was going to match what he was doing on ‘Immigrant Song’ and ‘How Many More Times’, so seeing Jethro Tull go in a wild direction on Thick as a Brick was far more interesting than whatever else Zeppelin knockoffs were spitting out.
Then again, even some people who followed in Plant’s footsteps made the most with their tunes. Ritchie Blackmore admitted to using Zeppelin as a model when making Deep Purple sound heavier, and while prog rock icons Rush are still considered one of the most complex musicians in the world, they initially started off hashing out Zeppelin-style tunes on their debut album.
It can get more than a little bit annoying watching everyone take a few notes from what the blues-rock icons did, but people only look at Zeppelin that much because they pulled everything off so well. Anderson certainly has his place in prog-rock history for bringing something new to the table, but when looking back at the grand history of rock, Zeppelin are going to be second only to The Beatles in terms of influence over modern music.
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