The frontman whose integrity Robert Plant found questionable: “I could understand”
Any artist can only hope to garner the respect of their peers when they start making music. While there’s a good chance that some people coax by on their good looks or try their best with only a few chords at their disposal, the best musicians can take even the simplest music and make it seem like one of the most awe-inspiring performances in the world. Robert Plant has already been through the ins and outs of rock and roll for decades, but he knew enough to realise when someone was ripping him off as well.
Then again, Plant would probably be getting royalty checks every day from every wannabe frontman who tried to emulate him. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones may have been the ones to break down the doors for rock and roll, but Plant was the ideal role model for anyone trying to work a crowd, whether that was the booming voice that every hard rock band stole or his subtle mannerisms onstage.
But by the 1980s, even Plant didn’t want anything to do with his ‘Percy’ persona again. All of that excessive spirit seemed to die along with John Bonham at the start of the 1980s, and when looking at his first solo projects, it was clear that Plant needed to start anew if he wanted to have any kind of traction in his solo career.
And looking at everything from Now and Zen to Raising Sand with Allison Krauss, Plant has shown the world how rock and rollers can grow up, even managing to find some magic that he didn’t realise was there. But the lack of any Led Zeppelin in the world meant that more than a few people needed to fill the void, and that meant David Coverdale storming onto the charts with Whitesnake.
Granted, it’s not like Coverdale wasn’t original in many respects. He had a lot of the same influences that Plant had when he was working with Deep Purple, but considering how close the riff to ‘Still of the Night’ sounded to ‘Immigrant Song’, he wasn’t exactly shy about the people that he was cribbing from. Plant could take that kind of move in stride, but when Coverdale hooked up with Jimmy Page, that’s when he started asking questions.
For the ‘Golden God’, this was nothing but a cheap imitation of what he used to do in his early years, saying, “I find him a good man, but I feel that his integrity is now questionable. If Whitesnake was a real young band who had just seen The Song Remains the Same and decided, ‘OK, this is it, let’s imitate them,’ I could understand it.” And looking at how Coverdale carried himself, it’s easy to understand why Plant would be upset.
The whole point of his performance style was to make something that sounded a bit more ethereal, and compared to that, Coverdale may as well have been using his look as a Halloween costume half the time. That didn’t mean he couldn’t still bring the heat when he wanted, with Plant even getting flustered when he tried to play through some of their tunes when he hooked up with Page again in the 1990s.
So when Plant questions bands on their integrity, it’s not so much about the quality of the music they play. It’s about how they get their foot in the door, and if all you have to offer is an image that’s riding the coattails of someone else, maybe it’s time to go back to the drawing board and think of something more original.
