The classic rock band Robert Plant always wanted to imitate: “That Chicago tightness”
Being one of the single greatest frontmen to walk the face of the Earth wasn’t a burden that Robert Plant was ever comfortable carrying.
He wanted the chance to make music that was a bit more obscure than what the rest of the world was listening to, but he didn’t plan for all of the baggage that came with being in a group that became as big as Led Zeppelin. There was a lot more room for him to explore new things whenever he worked with the band, but there were a few moments where he did have second thoughts about even joining.
And before anyone starts saying that him rejecting Zeppelin would have been the worst idea in the world, you have to remember where he was at the time. The Band of Joy wasn’t a household name by any means, and while Jimmy Page would have wanted someone who was slightly more obscure than your average rock and roll singer, the idea of continuing on as a project called The New Yardbirds was already a little bit flimsy when the guitarist first began working on his classics.
But when you look at the kinds of tunes that they were creating, it’s not like Plant had much room to grow, either. A lot of that first album was about him finding his way as a vocalist and getting back in touch with the blues singers that he had loved as a kid, and while he could certainly stretch if he wanted to, nothing was going to happen if it didn’t have Page’s approval over anything else.
The band was Page’s baby in a sense, but when looking at the other blues bands around that time, not all of them were about one person taking charge. There were still bands like John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers that were definitely centred around one person throughout the entire band, but for a band that named themselves after members like Fleetwood Mac, the early incarnation of the group with Peter Green was a lot more chill.
No one seemed to have a gigantic ego about themselves, and their mentality was always about jamming until they found those special moments whenever they performed. It was never about making music that could clobber someone over the head whenever they played, and for a brief moment in time, Plant figured that it would be interesting to see where his life would take him in a band like that.
Green certainly had everything covered, but Plant felt his musical life could have gone either way when first weighing his options back in the day, saying, “I never really knew where I wanted to end up; for a long time I thought I just wanted to do country blues, maybe only two people, or a very straight blues band, and the first time I heard Fleetwood Mac they were the very straight blues band that I wanted to be – that sort of Chicago tightness.”
If you look at where Plant went after he left Zeppelin, though, it’s not all that dissimilar to what ‘The Mac’ ended up going after later in their career. Stevie Nicks had a far more spectral influence in most of her songs, but there were also many moments where she could have provided the perfect counterpoint to Plant had she been cast as the musical siren in ‘The Battle of Evermore’.
There was definitely room for Plant to grow in both bands, but each group seemed to work things out for the best when they were on top of the world. They both had to go through their own fair share of setbacks to get to where they were, but there was a lot more potential Plant had as a frontman of a group rather than just one member of a collective of musicians like Fleetwood Mac became.
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