The one singer Robert Plant called “the first” original voice: “head cat”
One of the biggest strengths an artist can have is originality.
Any band can try to ape from their record collections and sound fabulous, but it takes a special artist to make something leap out of the speakers in just the right way. And while Robert Plant was a master at that with Led Zeppelin, he was far from the first to think of combining rock and heavy blues.
Granted, there are also pieces of the band’s catalogue that aren’t as original in a court of law, either. Outside of the many songs that they had to give other people credit for over the years, though, a lot of what they were doing was reintroducing songs to the next generation. Most people didn’t know any Robert Johnson songs or the first thing about a track like ‘Killing Floor’, but it was a little better for them to listen to ‘The Lemon Song’ and use that as a musical skeleton key into the world of blues.
They weren’t starting off that bad with someone like ‘Percy’ at the front. He had spent time studying all of the greatest names in blues music, and whether it was channelling Sleepy John Estes or trying his best Janis Joplin impression, Plant perfectly balanced being absolutely ferocious whenever he took the stage and managing to be tender as well when the time called for it.
Blues was always the first reference point, but Zeppelin was considered the best rock and roll band for a reason. Page’s blues vocabulary was honed in The Yardbirds, but the riffs that he spat out were much more in line with rock, from twisting the blues into magic on ‘Whole Lotta Love’ or turning strange note clusters into works of art, like in the breakdown section of ‘Ramble On’ or ‘Bring It On Home’.
If Plant got his vocal training from blues, then Elvis Presley was the next best thing for him to try on. Presley had been a student of the blues as well, but listening to all of his early rock and roll records, you can hear the walls being broken down between two different musical styles. Suddenly, kids could latch onto other styles of music, and Plant had never seen anything like it before.
There were many great rock voices, but Plant remembered Presley as one of the first times he heard something original, saying, “[Presley] was the first sort of hors d’oeuvre. He was totally unique. He took a lot of elements of Johnny Ray, but he combined it with the approach that he heard when he was a kid in Memphis. The main thing with Presley was that he was the original head cat.”
That’s not to say that Presley was never a problem at the time, either. Even outside of the strange dance moves that had middle America in a stir, there were always going to be people wondering if he was co-opting Black music for the wrong reasons. There were definitely some shady tactics being used once in a while, but you could tell that Presley’s style always came from love rather than business.
While Plant’s imitation of Presley may not have been spot on when Zeppelin tackled a song like ‘Hot Dog’, you could tell it was still done out of reverence. No one in the band would have been filling those stages in Madison Square Garden were it not for people like Presley coming first, and when he broke down those barriers, that left it open for every rock singer to try their hand at letting themselves loose onstage and seeing whatever came out of their mouth.
