“Had no sex”: Robert Plant always believed early rock music lacked vital feeling
There’s a certain swagger that most rock stars need to sway them into the big arenas. Anyone can claim to have a great voice whenever they step onstage, but unless they have that X factor that makes people swoon, there’s no reason to think they are going to take over the world. And when it comes to the greatest frontmen to ever walk the Earth, Robert Plant exuded sex appeal from the minute he sauntered onstage with Led Zeppelin.
When Plant was first starting, though, rock and roll already had its fair share of fantastic frontmen. Elvis Presley got people dancing the same way that Chuck Berry and Little Richard did before him, and when The Beatles crashlanded in America in the early 1960s, all of those girls screaming their names when they played was proof that the Fab Four were going to be around for a long time. That was all well and good for the pop sphere, but Plant was interested in something different.
He was a born hippie when working in The Band of Joy, but it always came back to him gravitating towards a healthy dose of the blues. The Rolling Stones were the ones with the highest profile as blues aficionados, but as soon as Plant’s voice was paired with the roar of Jimmy Page’s guitar, it all seemed to blend together the same way that artists like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf sounded back in the day.
Hence, the key to any great rock and roll song standing out is the mojo. The ‘sex’ in sex, drugs, and rock and roll isn’t there by accident, and a lot of that comes from being able to put some lusty tension into every song that’s played. And while that mojo might be dripping off of tunes like ‘Whole Lotta Love’, it wasn’t exactly the most important factor when Plant was listening to the biggest names in early rock and roll.
This was still the era when rockabilly was the biggest thing in the world, and while the blues singers had their niche, having someone making their own facsimile of those 12 bars made everything sound a little bit stiff when they played live. And despite Plant’s love for someone like Bill Haley, even he had to admit that the rock and roll troubadour didn’t have the kind of swagger the latter would come to embody.
It wasn’t until Plant discovered reverb for vocals that he realised there was no overt sexuality in anything Haley did, saying, “You’ve got this effect on the vocal that made everything stop. Where you had to listen to this thing. Bill Haley didn’t have it, because his vocal was dry as a bone and he had no sex. But the more you listen to rock ‘n’ roll and early rockabilly, there’s some incredible echo effects.”
And compared to someone like Elvis Presley, who would come later, it’s easy to see why Haley didn’t have nearly the presence he should have. His version of ‘Rock Around the Clock’ sounds like any mild-mannered singer doing their best to sing, but when Presley sang ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, it was like being greeted by some form of musical spirit with that booming voice coming at you from behind everything.
Plant would end up putting his voice through the wringer as well, but even without the reverb, all he needed to do was screech for people to start screaming. He had already studied under the greatest artists of his time, but there were bound to be more people following in his footsteps once the ‘Golden God’ persona took over.
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