The rock singer who taught Robert Plant how to be a star: “Some kind of new animal”
Anyone is normally going to want to copy from those that came before them. It’s impossible to be original all the time, and even when making classics, it’s easy for someone to dig into their old record collections and see what they haven’t touched on over those endless hours of listening as a kid.
However, for Robert Plant, there was a difference between taking subtle inspiration and wanting to be a carbon copy of some of his favourite artists.
For Plant, influence was only valuable if it eventually evolved into something personal. Led Zeppelin may have begun by heavily leaning on blues traditions, but their real breakthrough came when they stopped trying to faithfully recreate the past and instead exaggerated it into something louder, stranger and far more theatrical.
And when looking at the beginnings of Led Zeppelin, it’s hard not to see Plant wearing his influences on his sleeve a lot of the time. There would be a few moments where his voice would leap out of the mix like nothing anyone had ever heard, but there were also the few moments where he would sound like a blues belter like Howlin’ Wolf, only with the high precision and power that you would hear from Janis Joplin.
There were many belters from around this time, but Plant seemed to have them all beat in terms of where he could take his voice. While certain moments weren’t worth trying to recreate, like the massive exercise of ‘In My Time of Dying’, there are also a handful of moments that managed to get better whenever he played them live, like when he did a back-and-forth with Jimmy Page, matching his guitar licks or sounding completely unhinged when he kicked off ‘Black Dog’ whenever they performed.
Those performances also highlighted how much Plant treated his voice like a physical instrument rather than simply a vehicle for lyrics. He pushed it to extremes night after night, turning Zeppelin concerts into displays of stamina, charisma and sheer reckless abandon.
But if you want to see the moment the band went too over-the-top, look no further than their performance on The Song Remains the Same. The footage itself is great, and you’d be hard-pressed to find another band in their prime, but looking at the little vignettes that happen in between, it was clear that they were taking things too far in some respects, especially given the fact that they filmed fantasy sequences.
By that point, Led Zeppelin had started embracing their own mythology almost as enthusiastically as their fans had. The fantasy imagery and larger-than-life presentation reflected a band fully aware they had transcended ordinary rock stardom and become something closer to folklore.
For Plant, though, this was no different than what he tried to do when idolising his favourite acts as a kid. It might have been more exaggerated seeing him look like a Viking from another century, but when it came to his vocal chops, he was always going back to people like Steve Marriott whenever he developed his rockstar moves.
Although Marriott turned down the chance to join Zeppelin in the late 1960s, Plant never stopped seeing him as his model for singing, saying, “I pouted because I wanted to be like, ‘Come on!’ I wanted to be Steve Marriott, for fuck’s sake. But in that environment, I was way past all that. I was part of some kind of new animal that included everything you see in that film. And I can’t get embarrassed by it.”
There is some of that naivete that Plant talks about in the movie, but looking at the way he plays, he had gone past Marriott in a few respects. The Traffic frontman still had the vocal chops he did back in the day, but listening to Plant belt, he had developed that ‘Golden God’ persona by the time they had descended on Madison Square Garden, and there wasn’t a soul in that room that wasn’t transfixed by every move he made.
Then again, isn’t that the point of why people make music in the first place? Everyone spends their time emulating their heroes the same way Plant idolised Marriott, but the key is to keep pretending to be a rock and roll star until that rockstar manifests themselves whenever you come onstage.
