The singer Robert Plant said was too good to stand next to
The entire rock and roll scene was changed the minute that Robert Plant began singing for Led Zeppelin.
Not everything he sang necessarily had to be the heaviest thing in the world, but when listening to him belt over every one of Jimmy Page’s guitar riffs, most vocalists knew they needed to step up their game if they wanted to be anywhere close to what ‘The Golden God’ could do. But Plant was acutely aware of when someone could completely outmatch him from the minute he started jamming with them.
Then again, ‘The Golden God’ wasn’t something that Plant bestowed upon himself. He may have said it once when he felt on top of the world, but when listening to him in interviews, he never wanted to be considered a higher being compared to his heroes. For him, the singers who could level someone with only a few notes were people like Howlin’ Wolf and Lead Belly, and what he was doing was practically a poor imitation of that. That said, it’s not like he couldn’t go in different directions as well.
There’s no real way to define the kind of singing that he did on tunes like ‘The Rain Song’ or ‘No Quarter’, and even if he was pulling from another blues tradition on ‘In My Time of Dying’, it’s hard to think of anyone who could manage to pull off those screams in the rock and roll realm. But when John Bonham passed away, Plant knew he needed to look elsewhere if he wanted to keep going.
After all, Zeppelin was the peak as far as rock was concerned, and Plant’s next vehicle needed to have a bit more variety. Not everyone may have been asking for him to embrace his inner new wave self on Shaken ‘n’ Stirred, but when he first started working with Page again on albums like Walking Into Clarksdale, there was at least a small whiff of the version of Zeppelin that everyone remembered.
But even then, the songs were a lot more downtempo than usual. Plant could still rock with the best of them, but now that he was getting older, it was time for him to move into different realms. Those ‘Percy’ screams were going to be a thing of the past after a while, and while he had a beautiful lower register when he started making Raising Sand with Alison Krauss, he probably didn’t know what he was getting himself into when he first walked into the room to sing with her for the first time.
Krauss had come from the bluegrass tradition, but even with all of his rock and roll chops, seeing her alongside legends like T Bone Burnett was enough for Plant to run away, saying, “The door flung open, and there was Alison being really charming. And behind her, this big imposing shed, John Henry Burnett! So I went, ‘Shit! … There’s two of them!’ They said, ‘Come in! What key?’ I said, ‘I don’t know what key; I don’t know what key anything is!’I felt so exposed and vulnerable. ‘How do I get out of here, man?’ … I could feel the moisture at my brow. ‘I’ve gotta get out of this place!’”
But when listening to the songs that ended up on record, Plant does an admirable job at matching what Krauss could do with her voice. He was never going to be reaching back into his Zeppelin bag of tricks, but the fact that he could thrive in this environment was a testament to the kind of vocalist that he had turned himself into over the years. And even when he reunited with Zeppelin later, you could still see some of those new tricks rubbing off on the way that he played some of those older acoustic tunes.
So while any vocalist would be shaking when working with a legend like Plant, having Krauss next to him never ceased to be a learning experience. Anyone from his generation could have remained stagnant and kept trying to make the best with what voice they had left, but Plant always figured it would be much more exciting to try to see what else he could do after Zeppelin fell.
