“Wiggle your ass”: The one band Robert Plant thanked God he wasn’t in
Any rock star would have killed to be in the position that Robert Plant was in when Led Zeppelin hit the big time.
Jimmy Page may have been the ringleader of the band in many respects, but when listening to what Plant could do with his voice, there was no one else who even came close to touching him in the rock and roll world. This was the blueprint for what rock stars were supposed to look like, and yet Plant was thanking his lucky stars every day that he didn’t have to suffer the same fate as the next generation.
Granted, it’s not like Plant’s transition out of Zeppelin was the easiest thing in the world. Moving on from a tragedy like losing John Bonham is one of the worst kinds of heartache for any band to recover from, but Plant knew he had to move on to get over that loss. It was no good trying to find anyone who could replace Bonzo, and while it was strange seeing Plant start to go into different directions, it was probably a good move for him to start making tunes that weren’t connected with Zeppelin in any way.
There were more than a few times where he completely coughed it up, but for every time he tried and failed to blend in during the era of Talking Heads, he was still happy to be doing something different every single time. The weight of ‘The Golden God’ isn’t something that anyone needed to carry for too long, but Plant felt that he had inadvertently created a monster when looking at where rock and roll had gone since then.
Because if you look at the next decade of hard rock, almost every single band to come out of Los Angeles was like a carbon copy of what Plant had been doing for years. Imitation might be considered the sincerest form of flattery, but when looking at everyone from Poison to Warrant, the self-serious rock and roll singer was becoming more and more of a cliche by the minute. And nowhere did Plant see it more than when he watched Jon Bon Jovi play up his looks every time he played.
At the same time, Bon Jovi was never a bad band by any stretch. They weren’t exactly the most timeless group in the world, but their ability to weather the storm of grunge pretty well is a testament to the kinds of songwriters they always were back in the day. They were the real deal, and yet Plant knew that everyone would forever be comparing the New Jersey legend with what people like him had started.
He at least had the chance to make a difference, but he could never imagine being in a band like that and seeing the cogs in the musical machine at work, saying, “These guys, the Bon Jovis and company, when they weren’t selling anything, they saw the mechanism working. They saw they had to follow the now strongly dictated lines of the commercial process, to come up with the choruses and wiggle your ass at the right moment. Fortunately, I had success before a lot of these new rules, so I can say, ‘Fuck it.’”
Which is one of the few things that people forget about when hair metal died an ugly death after grunge came in. Not everyone was looking to live up to the same corporate misogynistic version of rock and roll that Kurt Cobain despised, and when everything went under, a lot of musicians with some great potential ended up falling by the wayside years before they were able to capitalise on anything.
To his credit, Jon Bon Jovi has managed to carve out another place for himself as his own younger version of Bruce Springsteen, but those kinds of transitions weren’t what Plant was in the business for. He wanted to be the kind of travelling musician he had read about, and being able to take risks and not know where it was going to go was half the fun of playing with his friends.
