The band Chris Cornell called “the American Led Zeppelin”
There will never be another band even close to Led Zeppelin.
As much as people like to shower them with praise for helping start a whole new generation of hard rock bands, a lot of their impact comes down to having great songs and being in the right place at the right time to share them with the world. But whereas most people try to get serious and make their own ‘Stairway to Heaven’ once they reach the top, Chris Cornell knew that the best successors to Zeppelin were the ones that bent the rules.
Keep in mind that Zeppelin were never ones to play typical hard rock for the rest of their lives. They had a great roadmap when starting off with the blues, but Led Zeppelin III sounds absolutely nothing like Houses of the Holy, nor does anything in their discography sound remotely close to Presence. They lived to switch things up, and the beginning of Soundgarden was a lot like that as well.
The entire point of the Seattle scene was to make tunes that no one had ever heard before, and when Soundgarden began, it was hard not to hear obvious parallels to Zeppelin. Cornell clearly had the voice to reach Robert Plant’s level of grandeur, but if you look at the music they were making, they almost had a prog-rock edge to them compared to what their heroes did.
A lot of tracks on Badmotorfinger and Superunknown were clearly inspired by Zeppelin, but even Jimmy Page wasn’t ready to tune his guitar as low as ‘Rusty Cage’ or make strange looping riffs with offbeat time signatures. Soundgarden were clearly going in a different direction, but that meant going back to their hometown heroes a lot of the time.
If you look at the people that came from the Northwest before grunge, Quincy Jones came from there, Jimi Hendrix had become a staple of the city before moving to England to take over the world, but in terms of badass rock stars, Heart tends to get lost in the shuffle. While the idea of a female-led rock and roll still felt like a novelty at that point, there was no questioning the chops Ann and Nancy Wilson had.
They could be equally as innovative as anyone else on the charts in the 1970s, and while the world may not have been ready for it, Cornell saw the second coming of hard rock when he heard them, saying, “I didn’t make any discernment between them or any of the rock bands that I listened to. To me, they were like an American version of Led Zeppelin.” But whereas most artists of their calibre would become lavish rock stars, the Wilson sisters never forgot where they came from, either.
Even when the grunge wave started, Heart were still a mainstay in their hometown. ‘Barracuda’ was already becoming one of the best classic rock anthems of all time, but they were willing to have some fun with the new kids in town, whether that was creating the acoustic-based side project, The Lovemongers, or Ann lending her voice to Alice in Chains’s ‘Brother’ alongside Cornell.
No, they may not have sold as many records as Zeppelin and certainly weren’t going to have their level of prestige, but when looking at their track record, anyone even vaguely interested in Zeppelin is better off listening to Heart than what Greta Van Fleet was doing in the modern age. That was practically a carbon copy of Zeppelin, and Heart were an example of where an artist could go after they had tracks like ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’ under their belt.
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