The 1969 concert that saw Led Zeppelin become too big to fail: “Christ, we’ve got something”
Becoming one of the biggest rock bands of all time wasn’t something Robert Plant concerned himself with in Led Zeppelin.
He only thought that he was joining the best band that he could at the time, but by the time they had reached albums like Physical Graffiti, there’s a good chance that The Beatles were the only band that was out of their reach at the time. And while a lot of that comes down to the genius of Jimmy Page every time they made a record, Plant felt that there was a lot more going on when the four of them locked in together whenever they played.
But the reason why Zeppelin works so well is that every member of the group had their own distinct feel. There was always an uncanniness to the fact that Page played slightly ahead of the beat and John Bonham was right behind the beat, but getting that slight push and pull out of their records was a lot more interesting than someone playing everything perfectly whenever they came onstage.
Their songs sounded like a freight train whenever they played live, and Plant was the ‘Golden God’ soaring above everything. He wasn’t afraid to make some more daring vocal leaps than everyone else, but even if he wasn’t all that proud of some of the more outlandish vocals that he laid down with Zeppelin, Plant realised pretty quickly that the band’s reputation was bigger than anything that he could have imagined.
No one thought a band originally named ‘The New Yardbirds’ had a shot at competing with the original blues outfit, but Zeppelin were clearly on another level. Before the term supergroup was coined, every single member of the band was one of the greatest in their field on their instruments, and it wasn’t until Plant played the Fillmore with the band that he began to understand the gravity of the situation.
They were among the biggest names in rock and roll before the 1970s had even started, and those shows in the US were the moment where Zeppelin created a monster in Plant’s mind, saying, “I remember when we played the Fillmore West in San Francisco, Bonzo and I looked at each other during the set and thought ‘Christ, we’ve got something’. That was the first time we realised that Led Zeppelin might mean something; there was so much intimacy with the audience, and if you could crack San Francisco at the, height of the Airplane, Grateful Dead period then it meant something.”
It’s also important to recognise what Plant was trying to do at the time. Zeppelin were one of the greatest hard rock bands out at the time, but there was a slight bit of hippie idealism in the way that Plant sang. His ad-libs at some of their later shows are still more about the kind of musical utopia that the hippies preached about, and he was more than happy to move in that direction when he went solo as well.
But the building blocks of something else were already forming. ‘Whole Lotta Love’ was already warming the public up for what the 1970s were going to sound like, and almost every single guitarist had to admit that Page was becoming one of the biggest names in music. It was only a matter of time before everything took off again, but the fact that they came to such an abrupt end is what made Plant want to hang everything up after Bonzo passed away.
There was no sense in them carrying on without one of their main members, and even if they found someone who could hit just as hard, it was also a matter of respect. They had all built an empire together, and even if the rest of the band could play together and churn out some hits, there’s no reason to keep a musical body alive once the heart has been taken out.
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