Watch Robert Plant’s spine-tingling performance of Elvis Presley’s ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’
Robert Plant and Elvis Presley represent two of the most rafter rattling performers in music history. With all the grace of a roaring tiger, they are both the sort of singers that could summon storm clouds on a whim and seduce a screaming audience in the process. Thus, the melodious ways of the gathering ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’ is a tune primed for their pipes.
Plant was even stirred up by Presley in the first place and their paths would later cross. As Plant once told David Letterman: “I heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ [1956]. It was the sound of Elvis’ voice and the echo, a kind of exotic calling. When I was in the bathtub one night – it didn’t take long [both men and the audience laugh] – I pulled the plug out and sat there ’til all the water went away.”
Comically continuing: “I sang into the overflow and I got this amazing sound. I went, ‘Wait a minute, that’s me.’ The sound kind of came up just under my legs. That’s how I invented echo, so forget about Les Paul – he was not important at all [laughs].” You could almost say the rest is history for Plant at this point as the magic of music began to weave his legacy. However, happenstance had another role for Presley to play in Plant’s life.
As Plant adds: “Elvis played the Forum in L.A. [one afternoon and one evening show on May 11, 1974], and I’d seen him a couple of times before that. I was so in awe of him as a singer, and I loved the way he could send himself up. Singers generally are all one trick ponies. Sometimes they can’t see the humour in it but he did. Jimmy Page and I met him after the evening show.”
As it happens, the pair would hit it off like a house on fire and ‘The King’ finally asked Plant what his favourite songs were, “I said, ‘Well, I like loads of ’em’,” Plant recalled, “’But I do like this song called ‘Love Me’.” He then proceeded to sing the first line back to Elvis himself. They shrugged off the potentially awkward moment and got talking once again.
Then, Plant concludes: “We talked awhile, said goodbye, shook hands and said we’d all meet again. As we went out in the corridor heading toward the elevator, suddenly Elvis swings around the door and yells, ‘Hey Robert!’ He started singing, ‘Treat me like a fool, treat me mean and cruel, but love me,’ and I started singing to him, and we were all crying.”
It’s an emotional story that seems to linger somewhere in the welter of the performance below. With his usual tempered bravura, Plant stirs with spine-tingling soul as he honours his hero and singing soulmate. It’s a stirring performance that floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee.
