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The classic alternative band that gave Robert Plant a “shock”

Wed 11 October 2023 18:00, UK

By the latter half of the 1980s, Robert Plant had settled into his role as an elder statesman of rock music. After a full decade of debauchery and destruction with Led Zeppelin, Plant scored some new wave-friendly hit singles as a solo artist in the decade after the band’s demise. But mostly, Plant was intent on celebrating his influences, recording a series of old-school rock and roll jams with his band, The Honeydrippers.

Of course, Plant couldn’t escape the shadow of Led Zeppelin. It’s not that he tried all that hard to get away, apart from swearing off ‘Stairway to Heaven’. One of Plant’s biggest solo hits, 1988’s ‘Tall Cool One’, featured samples and references from across the Zeppelin catalogue. Jimmy Page even contributed some additional guitar parts. Throughout the 1980s and beyond, Plant became a key keeper of the Zeppelin legacy, often finding elements of the band’s music in other acts.

One of the strangest bands that Plant saw some of Zeppelin in was Let’s Active, the Athens-based alternative rock pioneers. Along with fellow Georgia bands like Pylon and R.E.M., Let’s Active spearheaded the college rock movement with their mix of rock and jangle pop. Plant was a fan of the group, as he explained to writer Tony Bacon in 1988, and even heard some influence from a classic Zeppelin track in one of the band’s songs.

“I remember the shock I had with one of my favourite bands, Let’s Active, with Mitch Easter,” Plant explained. “There’s a track on Big Plans For Everybody with slide guitar, and it’s exactly the same as ‘In My Time of Dying’ (laughs). I couldn’t believe it! I went what! Not another one. I thought it was only that Rick Rubin who did these things.”

Plant is likely referring to ‘Won’t Go Wrong’, the album track featuring slide guitar eerily reminiscent of ‘In My Time of Dying’. If you’re looking to hear it for yourself, that’s a bit of a tricky proposition since the song and its parent album aren’t streaming or available on YouTube. Plant also seemingly references Rick Rubin’s notorious use of ‘When The Levee Breaks’ on the Beastie Boys track ‘Rhymin’ & Stealin’. But it was Let’s Active that gave Plant the biggest Zeppelin vibes.

“So when I listen to Mitch Easter’s work, I hear a bit of Zeppelin,” Plant added in a discussion with Rolling Stone that year. “I heard a steel-guitar bit on the Let’s Active album Big Plans for Everybody that sounds just like ‘In My Time of Dying.’ I was flattered, even though I didn’t play the guitar part. That’s looking backwards. But it’s looking backwards with such gentility and taste.”

Check out ‘In My Time of Dying’ down below.