Jimmy Page’s idea for Led Zeppelin was always pretty clear in his mind, it would be made up of what he called “light and shade”.
What he meant by those contrasting descriptors was that he wanted the music he created to be made up of a range of different genres which previously hadn’t been put together. This meant blending folk with acoustic music, blues, rock ‘n’ roll, and hard rock, throwing them under the same umbrella and finding a way to make them all work together.
“I wanted Zeppelin to be a marriage of blues, hard rock and acoustic music topped with heavy choruses – a combination that had never been done before,” said Page, “Lots of light and shade in the music.”
The idea was pretty solid, but the issue was finding the right people to make it with him. The first member to join was John Paul Jones, a fellow big-city musician. He looked in the same area for the remaining members, but in order to find a singer and a drummer, Page had to travel further afield. The majority of singers he knew in London were already working on something that they were committed to, so a friend’s recommendation sent him to Birmingham, where he met Robert Plant and John Paul Jones.
Page had his reservations when he first met Robert Plant, as he wasn’t sure how well he would be able to carry himself as a frontman; however, his voice was undeniable, so Plant got the job, and the rest is history. “It was obvious he could sing and had a lot of enthusiasm,” he said, “But I wasn’t sure about his potential as a frontman.”
The band members’ differing backgrounds were never a predominant problem within Led Zeppelin, but there were moments when altered upbringings meant that they had different approaches to sensitive topics. This is clearest on the song ‘Royal Orleans’, which was a track written by Robert Plant about drag queens they met in the city of New Orleans.
“Oh, that was Robert in his usual homophobic manner,” said John Paul Jones when talking about the song. The story behind the track was covered in the Stephen Davis book Hammer of the Gods, but John Paul Jones took issue with it as he felt as though the author got a lot of the details wrong.
“It got all the stories the wrong way around,” he said, “I mean, some of the stories were actually hilarious, but the way the book reads is ‘What a bunch of miserable bastards we are!’”
Jones hated the way that Plant spoke about the drag queens they spent time with, and he attributed this change in perspective to their different upbringings. Presence was an album that really reflected a growing divide in the band, both in terms of creativity but also personal mindsets, and this song reflects that very well. If it were up to Jones, ‘Royal Orleans’ is a song that simply wouldn’t exist.
“They weren’t like big city boys. They don’t like all that sort of thing,” said Jones, “[Robert] was a bit homophobic in those days. I think it’s just ’cause they had a sheltered upbringing as lads.”
