It’s hard to imagine a time when Robert Plant wasn’t a fixture of what rock and roll was meant to be.
He wasn’t the leader of Led Zeppelin by any stretch, but whenever they took to the stage, his inner ‘Percy’ showed everyone what a frontman was capable of if they had full control of their vocal cords. His voice soared above nearly everything else out at the time, but he wouldn’t have been there if not for the kind of blues musicians who helped show him the way towards rock and roll.
Because if you think about it, Zeppelin was almost more of a blues band half the time than a proper rock and roll outfit. Their biggest heroes were people like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, and considering how many songs they “borrowed” to suit their own needs half the time, it’s safe to say that they were more than a little bit comfortable playing those same blues like they started off with when they were kids. But of course, Jimmy Page had a few other plans when they initially got going.
The second Zeppelin record was already the clarion call for what hard rock would become, and even by the standards of blues belters, Plant was already going miles above everyone else. He might have said that he idolised people like Howlin’ Wolf and Sleepy John Estes, but even compared to the other technicians out at the time like Terry Reid and Steve Winwood, Plant put everyone else to shame with how uninhibited he could be. No one could have imagined singing ‘Immigrant Song’ like that, but Plant was running on pure excitement.
And, really, isn’t that what all good rock and roll is supposed to be? The genre may have been built on writing tunes that played the same old blues chord sequence over and over, but even when the band were tearing through a song like ‘Rock and Roll’, they were going to make sure that it sounded like one of the greatest jams that anyone has ever attempted. You weren’t going to see The Beatles doing that, but it was only the natural extension of what the Stone Age of rock and roll were doing.
Elvis Presley may have shown everyone what was possible when a kid from nowhere got up onstage and shook his ass, but Plant felt that rush of adrenaline when he first heard tunes like ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and the Comets. This was something different, and it was enough for him to throw away the easy listening and start finding out what he could do with a couple of blues chords.
Haley might not have been the greatest rock star in the world, but that one song was everything Plant needed in the early days, saying, “There was Bill Haley. He toured with the Comets, and looking back now, you’d probably say he was pretty tame compared to what came after. But at the time, they were setting the world on fire. I looked at them and thought, ‘That’s what I want. I want to be like that.’
The tune isn’t exactly as heavy as your standard Zeppelin outing, but you can hear where Plant started to get a few of his ideas. The foundation of the song could easily be transformed into a Zeppelin tune with the right backbeat, and even if the song doesn’t have as many vocal leaps, hearing a tune like that was about more than being one of the greatest songs in the world at the time.
What looked like a teen fad at the time was bound to take over the world, and Plant was going to do everything he could to get anywhere close to what Haley did. And while Zeppelin went far beyond anything that Haley ever did, chances are Plant would be just as happy knowing that he influenced kids to pick up a guitar the same way that Haley did for him when he was a youngster.
