The one rock star Robert Plant said went over everyone’s head
There was a certain change in the air that occurred when Robert Plant took to the stage with Led Zeppelin.
There had been blues rock before, but a lot of people had a hard time describing what they were seeing, which probably explains why the critics were so cruel to them when they first began. No other blues band was playing music like this, but ‘Percy’ wasn’t going to proclaim himself to be the first one that thought of making heavy music out of rock and roll.
After all, rock and roll had been around long before Zeppelin and had gone to even heavier places. The shock rock blues singers like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins were already paving the way for what Alice Cooper would be doing, and even when the British invasion started, half the reason why The Rolling Stones gained traction was because they were looked at like the bad boy version of what The Beatles represented. But when the blues took over, people started to dig a little bit deeper.
Every garage rock act that came out of the US was falling back on blues tropes and had the same 12-bar progressions, but what Plant did with his voice was unlike anything else. Janis Joplin was certainly an influence around this time, but the way that he belted felt like a disembodied spirit singing from the other side of consciousness whenever he sang on ‘How Many More Times’.
In truth, though, Plant was a mix of both sides of rock and roll at the time. He was playing in one of the biggest rock bands in the world, and yet he still saw himself as somewhat of a hippy, still indebted to what was coming out of the Haight-Ashbury scene. But before anyone got to hear Zeppelin, The Doors had been showing everyone a darker side of what Flower Power could look like with Jim Morrison at the helm.
Being either a brilliant poet or one of the most famous drunks in the world, depending on how you see him, Morrison was looking to challenge what the traditional frontman could do. Mick Jagger got the crowd moving because of his dance moves whenever he played, but from his brooding voice to the screaming slam poetry that he would do in between the band’s jamming onstage, Morrison was trying to pry open everyone’s third eye by force whenever he started singing.
And while that dream had died by the time that Zeppelin started making waves, Plant couldn’t help but be disappointed seeing Morrison go over everyone’s head, saying, “The track ‘Cancel My Subscription To The Resurrection’ was great. But now he doesn’t get into any of the things from the past, and the sexual thing has gone. He was just miles above everyone’s head. It seemed that he realized the Doors were on the way down.”
The band may have decided to retire at the right time when Morrison left for Paris, but seeing him come to a dreary end after his heart stopped one day took the wind out of everyone’s sails. The dream that Woodstock had promised had already failed to set the world on fire, but now that Morrison joined Joplin and Jimi Hendrix as one of the cautionary tales of that era, it truly felt like the changing of the guard was happening.
‘The Lizard King’ did have the chance to wow audiences with what little time he did have, but around the time that people were listening to ‘Whole Lotta Love’, songs like ‘Break on Through (To The Other Side)’ were pretty much null and void. Most people had broken through, and when they didn’t find what they were looking for, they started getting their rocks off to the next batch of legends.
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