The singer Jimmy Page and Robert Plant called the most powerful: “So overpowering”
When Led Zeppelin were first taking shape, there was always a great internal tension between Jimmy Page and Robert Plant.
They weren’t necessarily at odds in any way, but the way that Plant’s soaring voice matched with Page’s guitar was a match made in heaven when they first started laying down their classic tracks like ‘Dazed and Confused’, especially live when they started feeding off each other. No one had seen anything like it, but in their eyes, it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary if they bothered to look back to the classics.
The biggest names in blues had always been known for feeding off of every member of the group whenever they played, and even though Zeppelin went in a million different directions, there was always room for them to kick back and make the best blues music that they possibly could every single time they worked on one of their records. ‘Kashmir’ was a step forward, but there were always songs like ‘In My Time of Dying’ to keep their music low to the ground every single time they performed.
But when looking at their musical upbringings, Page and Plant didn’t want to spend their entire lives living out of one genre. Plant had practically gone past rock and roll when working with the Band of Joy, and even though Page had made some of the best blues rock in The Yardbirds, his time as a session guitarist was proof that he could shoehorn a decent guitar part into practically any song that he wanted whenever he started working with the rest of the musicians.
If you look back on the greatest blues acts that came before them, though, it all came from the swaggering attitude that they had whenever they played. No one doubted Robert Johnson’s recordings whenever he heard him talking about a devil being on his trail, and when it came to the best singers in the genre, Howlin’ Wolf was enough to send a chill up people’s spines. His voice sounded like the most hellish blues singer anyone had ever heard, and that was more than enough for Plant when he first discovered the genre.
Compared to every other vocalist, Plant felt that Wolf was in one his own league, saying, “His personality and presence was so overpowering that he’s frighten you. He was the last echo of deep blues. It was all on one chord. That more or less started the career of people like Clapton and Zeppelin, songs like ‘How Many More Times’.” And while Page was more interested in the guitar work on those albums, it wasn’t like he couldn’t hear what Plant was talking about when he heard him for the first time.
Even if one of the frontman’s best albums has nothing but a guitar and a rocking chair on the cover, Page was definitely going to take a page out of Howlin’ Wolf’s playbook when listening to him sing, saying, “Well, it’s the atmosphere and it’s the attitude that’s created. It’s like Howlin’ Wolf: When you hear Wolf, he’s not messing about. It’s like, ‘I’m coming at you – and I’m gonna get you!’ And that’s why I love him.” And while the band didn’t need to cover him outright, it’s not like most people actually could do him justice.
Some of the best blues vocalists of all time don’t dare to try and touch what ‘The Wolf’ did, and when you hear him getting a bit more nasty on songs like ‘Smokestack Lightning’, there was no sense of competing with what he had done. He was a one-off in blues, but he did remind everyone about the importance of being themselves whenever they tried talking about their inner pain.
No one could try and build their living off of copying what everyone else did, but when they take off all of their musical masks and start being themselves, that’s when people start paying attention. And while Page and Plant were more than ready to let their freak flag fly most of the time, they were going to make sure that everything they did was done in service of doing right by their heroes.
