The one Led Zeppelin cover that kills Robert Plant every time: “It’s just a magnificent performance”
One of the strangest parts of becoming a famous musician must be hearing other people start covering your songs. Once you’ve made it to the big stage, you also end up in the audience, watching others play your work. Robert Plant, for one, has needed to sit through more than a few Led Zeppelin covers.
It’s a weird phenomenon, and some artists absolutely hate it. The Who once called Limp Bizkit’s cover of ‘Behind Blue Eyes’ “embarrassing”, while Billy Joel made Helen Reddy explicitly promise that she’d never cover his music again after her take on ‘You’re My Home’.
Thom Yorke, meanwhile, took things a step further. Despite Peter Gabriel’s legendary status, Yorke reportedly cut off communication after the former Genesis frontman covered Radiohead’s ‘Street Spirit’. It seems Yorke disliked the version so much that he felt there was nothing to gain from speaking with the veteran artist.
But on the flipside, other artists don’t just like covers of their songs, but see it as an honour. Leonard Cohen was always utterly overjoyed by it, as he once said beautifully, “I’ve never gotten over the pleasure of somebody covering one of my songs”. Cohen had no favourites, though, as he added, “Somehow my critical faculties go into a state of suspended animation when I hear someone’s covered one of my tunes. I’m not there to judge it, just to say thank you.”
For Robert Plant, though, it was an odd and difficult thing – especially after 1980.
Zeppelin were a rare band that quit at their prime. After the death of their drummer, John Bonham, in late 1980, they made the rare decision to completely call it off and stick to it. While plenty of their peers would simply, and somewhat callously, replace a lost member and keep on keeping on, they refused. “We wish it to be known that the loss of our dear friend, and the deep sense of undivided harmony felt by ourselves and our manager, have led us to decide that we could not continue as we were,” they told the press, and that was that.
So in 2012, even decades on, when Plant was sitting watching Heart cover ‘Stairway To Heaven’ from the audience, it was a profound yet grief-stricken moment, even as he loved the performance.
Even before Bonham’s death, ‘Stairway To Heaven’ felt like a tender track for the world to be taking as its own. “’Stairway To Heaven’ has its own life. Later I often felt estranged,” Plant told Vulture, stating, “It began intimate and vulnerable and sincere, and then the years carried on. It was no longer ours and neither should it be.”
But something about Heart’s take on the track really hit him hard. “That night I was watching a reenactment — clever, well intentioned and respectful,” he said, as he suddenly felt reconnected with the track in various complex ways, calling it “a beautiful feather, balloon, or bubble”, as if he was seeing his talent, his old bandmates, their music and all the years their spent together float by him again.
It’s tough because it’s something he never expected to be doing, especially with one of those friends missing. “It was just something that I’d never, ever thought I would look at from this gallery. I didn’t ever see myself as smarting around seeing an artist’s impression of it,” he said as he’d really never once considered in his youth that he might wind up somewhere like this, with the Kennedy Centre honouring him. Then, especially after Bonham’s death, it was impossible for Plant to ever hear these songs without reflecting on the years and the fact that things had changed.
“I’m now a voyeur. I’m not responsible for it anymore. I’m not in guitar shops being told not to do it. I’m not going down the aisle at a wedding playing it with a flute. I love the song,” he added, claiming that Heart’s cover somehow found a way to make it feel beautiful and fresh and somehow not his, even though that feeling was sometimes hard to handle. It let him connect with the song, and in the video captured of the performance, the emotion ripping across his face, and the faces of Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, show vividly how special it was as they all have tears in their eyes.
“It came upon me and stripped away all the years of being a part of all that. It just rubbed it right back to the bone. Because maybe it was all over for us a long time before it was all over. It was definitely all over without John,” he said, accepting that by now, Led Zeppelin songs aren’t really theirs. Instead, they’re the world’s, and as he sat watching Heart, with John Bonham’s son on drums playing with them, it all hit him at once. “It’s just a magnificent performance to watch, and it kills me every time. It kills me in two or three different ways. It’s just like, Oh my God.”
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