The singer Robert Plant and Jimmy Page both called the greatest: “Visionary genius”
Making a band as perfect as Led Zeppelin wasn’t something that Jimmy Page and Robert Plant concocted overnight.
If anything, it was Page’s baby, and he was going to do everything he could to make sure that he made the kind of band that he always wanted the Yardbirds to be when he first joined them. And while the entire band sounded like they were making the heaviest rock and roll ever conceived, they weren’t getting there without a thorough helping of blues on their side as well.
After all, they were right in the middle of the British blues boom, and every connoisseur of music at the time always had a few covers from the Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon playbook to work off of. The same could be said of The Yardbirds when they first got started, but if you look at the Jake Holmes version of ‘Dazed and Confused’ compared to what Zeppelin did with it, there was no contest as to which one would be remembered. Page added much more atmosphere to his version, and that came from how he heard all those old bluesmen.
On record, everyone from Robert Johnson to Howlin’ Wolf felt more like modern myths than actual people, and when hearing them sing, it was like an out-of-body experience as they tried to get all the pain and sorrow from their souls. But for all the blues covers that they were fluent in, no member of Zeppelin ever forgot that they grew up on rock and roll before anything else. This was the genre Chuck Berry built, and they all worshipped at the altar of Elvis Presley.
Then again, there’s always a caveat to what ‘the King’ did for rock and roll. While there’s a lot of evidence of him taking the songs from black musicians and selling them back to white America, the fact that he opened a door for that music to walk through was what left the greatest impression on Page when he first heard him. This was a much different form of music, and Page felt that Presley was among the only ones to get it onto the charts.
Much has been made of the Elvis mythology as both a musician and a brand, but Page felt that the true genius was him as a singer, saying, “When Elvis grew up it must have been pretty bleak but the white and black picked the cotton side by side and the local indigenous music provided the soundtrack to this tough environment. So it took the visionary genius of Elvis to blend those musical sources and change the world.”
And while Plant was busy belting in a much higher register than Presley ever hoped to get, he still had to admit there was no one else in the rock and roll world who didn’t take a few cues from Presley, saying, “I was so captured by the emotive stuff. When you flipped the record over, you got some of the most amazing singing. When he was really on fire, his voice carried all the resonance of black [music] from south Tennessee.”
It may have been edging all the closer to appropriation in many instances, but if Presley was the blueprint, Zeppelin were going to take every one of their songs into heavier territory. Their take on a Presley tune like ‘Hot Dog’ might leave a lot to be desired, but the fact that they managed to turn ‘When the Levee Breaks’ into the heaviest tune in the world or create emotional exorcisms is a testament to how much they learned from those early records.
Any artist can hope to play a facsimile of what was in their record collection, but Zeppelin was about more than regurgitating the blues. They aimed to push everything that one step further, and even if some people called it the beginnings of heavy metal, each of them knew where their real muse came from.
