The singer Robert Plant said had the “voice of an angel”
There’s no real way of preparing someone for when they hear Robert Plant for the first time.
There might have been countless artists since Led Zeppelin that have tried to imitate his style, but you have to remember that there was no one else in the world who could manage to reach that kind of upper register that he had whenever he started singing tunes like ‘Immigrant Song’ and ‘Black Dog’. He was the epitome of what a rock and roll frontman was supposed to be, but Plant was never meant to sing in that one genre for the rest of his days once Zeppelin called it all off in the early 1980s.
John Bonham’s death created a massive hole in their band, and Plant wasn’t about to spend the rest of his solo career trying to be a copycat of what he had already done. There was a whole new world out there for him to explore, and since Zeppelin was known for taking chances all the time, he wanted to do the same thing once he started working on records like Pictures at Eleven or Shaken ‘n’ Stirred.
Not all of those experiments worked, but you could at least see that Plant was trying to reach for something new. Even when he did acquiesce to the audience’s pleas by joining Jimmy Page for a few albums, it was always drastically different from what Zeppelin had done. He was keen to move on to whatever other genre he wanted to, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t appreciate the classics here and there, either.
Some of the finest blues that he had ever heard came from years before he had joined Zeppelin, but there was also a side of him that was always meant to be a bit of a hippy. The Band of Joy was always about following in the footsteps of what was going on in San Francisco during the Summer of Love, and even when looking at what was on the charts on his side of the pond, Plant felt that listening to bands like The Youngbloods was a great palette cleanser whenever he worked on his own records.
There was no chance that Page was ever going to write anything as bubblegum pop as ‘Get Together’, but Plant could still see the charm whenever the song came on the radio. These were people who truly believed that their music could change the world, and whenever he heard vocalist Jesse Colin Young sing, he was transfixed by everything he was saying when he first heard him in the 1960s.
That voice was a little bit more twee than most Zeppelin fans could probably stomach, but Plant felt that no one else could ever sound more heavenly when he crossed paths with Young on tour, saying, “I was so influenced by the groups that were around me then like the Youngbloods. ‘Get Together’ was one of the great anthems of the late 1960s. Jesse Colin Young’s voice is like the voice of an angel, and still is, beautiful. [But] I knew it was pointless for me to try and follow the Youngbloods’ style.”
Once Plant graduated to working with more folksy artists, though, getting into that frame of mind wasn’t all that difficult. His work with Alison Krauss helped him realign himself with a new vocal style, and even though there are people still waiting on a ‘Percy’ moment whenever he plays, hearing him restructure his voice to suit a new sound was always going to be more interesting than hearing him go back to the same musical well every time he made a new record.
There are many artists who find their niche and stick with it, but when it comes to Plant, going solo means finding new avenues like working on songs by the Youngbloods every time he makes a new record. He already has that piece of his career, and while he has now firmly closed the door on any Zeppelin music, it’s much better to hear him playing music that he feels at home with.
