Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant believes he has the “same roots” as Elvis Presley
While many other people may have reasonable claims to be hailed as the ‘King of Rock and Roll’, there’s only one person who has ever been officially dubbed as such, and Elvis Presley remains the bearer of this honourable title.
There are many who would argue that he’s not so deserving of this lofty position due to the fact that he liberally copied various elements of his performance and persona from earlier pioneers of the genre, but the amount of success that he had with his releases across the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s is hard to sniff at. This elevated status of celebrity was one of the first of its kind, and it can be argued that he started a phenomenon of musicians being treated like stars in the same way that actors in the era were.
The number of artists who went on to take inspiration from him and recognised that their origins all trace back to the same places is still high, but in the golden era of rock, towards the tail end of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, it was more noticeable than at any other point in history. So many have the genesis of rock and roll to thank for their ascent to stardom, and it’s largely down to these trailblazers like Presley who solidified its status as a cultural mainstay in the first place.
There are many self-confessed fans of his within the music industry, but none more so than Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant, who, despite having some wariness around meeting his idol, found that he was nothing but a charming individual who truly appreciated how other artists were interpreting the same influences as he had always displayed.
Upon his first encounter with Elvis, Plant noted that he appeared far more down-to-earth than he could have imagined. “First of all, he didn’t take himself at all seriously, and that was the great thing,” the hard rock legend said of Presley. “You would think that when you meet somebody who was such a deity as that, you’re gonna have to negotiate an ego and all that stuff that I’m used to in the game, but he was really interested to meet us. He knew that despite the kind of swagger of Led Zeppelin, the deal was that we were, and remain, in many respects, huge music fans.”
He would later comment in another interview how the shared musical background that the two acts had was another reason why they ended up forming such an immediate bond with one another. “We’ve all got the same roots, you know, the blues out of Memphis and Mississippi and stuff,” Plant expressed. “We didn’t do many soundchecks, but when we did, I used to like to sing [his songs] in those big arenas because they sounded even bigger.”
Plant was not just a huge fan of Presley’s, but also infatuated with anything that was remotely related to his work, keeping a collection of records from Elvis impersonators and soundalikes such as Ral Donner. However, it’s the music of Elvis in particular that always stood out to Plant, and it’s clear that the style and showmanship of the Memphis resident had a gigantic impact on him, pushing him in the direction towards becoming a phenomenal frontman in his own right.
