The band who made Robert Plant “embarrassed” of Led Zeppelin’s legacy
On September 7th, 1968, one of the most legendary bands in the history of music were set to take to the stage for the very first time. Everyone who had attended the Gladsaxe Teen Club in Copenhagen that evening expected to see the Yardbirds jam but instead was greeted with a sign heralding ‘The New Yardbirds’, and disappointment quickly set in. Who were these knock-off wannabes, and how did the Gladsaxe have such a cheek to pull a stunt like this? At that stage, they weren’t even called Led Zeppelin.
When The New Yardbirds emerged, he only recognised Jimmy Page. The legendary John Paul Jones, John Bonham and Robert Plant were unknown entities. Over half a century later, that four-piece is considered to be one of the greatest of all time by millions of adoring fans. They were truly revolutionary.
Even in their earliest days, Led Zeppelin helped shift the dial away from this thinking. With a blitzkrieg of drums far heavier than anything Ed Sullivan might happily share, wailing guitars, lengthened runtimes and a daring sense of expanding pop towards something more closely aligned with classical, the Birmingham band obliterated stilted old rules.
The flower power of Laurel Canyon’s counterculture had no place amid the heavy industry and wartime rubble of Birmingham, where a daisy chain would be covered in soot a few minutes before it could be placed in anyone’s hair. Disillusioned by this scene, Page and his peers over in neighbouring bands like Black Sabbath thought about capturing the true reality of their own existence.
That isn’t all that easy; how do you capture the rough and tumble of the post-war midlands? The closest thing was possibly the blues. So, Page learnt how to play them with such perfection that he could mutate the age-old artform into something he could call his own. Brummie blues, if you will. The sound was steeped in history, virtuosity and the raw rumble of rock ‘n’ roll. It was not soaked in hairspray, cheap satanism or leather pantaloons. Sadly, this would inadvertently follow in its wake. And Plant hated it.
He felt that the darkness and dramatic angle of the group had been lent on a little too heavily. So, one day during an interview beneath a fortuitously placed piece of band promotion, Plant pointed to a camp Judas Priest poster and announced: “If I’m responsible for this in any way, then I am really, really embarrassed.”
Plant later added: “Hard rock, heavy metal these days is just saying, ‘Come and buy me. I’m in league with the Devil — but only in this picture because after that I’m going to be quite nice, and one day I’m going to grow up and be the manager of a pop group.’” And Plant is alone in thinking the genre became a “jaded” pantomime of its former glory. In 2015, Jimmy Page even refused to be part of Eddie Trunk’s show That Metal Show owing to the title alone.
The band were far more interested in the likes of Howlin’ Wolf and Ludwig van Beethoven than they were in Judas Preist, Kiss or any other group who apparently followed in their wake but failed to follow the truth of their mantra.
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