Robert Plant didn\u2019t get into music to become \u2018The Golden God\u2019 that everyone claimed him to be.<\/p>\n
He simply wanted to make the best music he could, and while Led Zeppelin did give him a lot more notoriety than he had hoped for, he would have been equally as happy playing the music that he wanted in a festival rather than in stadiums all across the world. But even with Led Zeppelin\u2019s knack for musical perfection, Plant knew that a handful of artists could do no wrong in his book.<\/p>\n
When listening through Zeppelin\u2019s first records, it\u2019s a lot easier to hear where Plant was getting a lot of his influences, and not always in a good way. Given the fact that half of the track list of Led Zeppelin\u2019s first album is littered with covers, it was clear that Plant wasn\u2019t ready to embrace the kind of persona that he would soon gravitate towards, and even when he was making his own masterpieces like \u2018Whole Lotta Love\u2019, there was still the sounds of people like Willie Dixon slowly working their way into his lyrics.<\/p>\n
A lot of people may have needed to get paid off for the band to keep moving, but it was more than old blues records in \u2018Percy\u2019s catalogue. He had started off as a recovering hippy when he first got the gig jamming with Zeppelin, but when they started to get a bit more experimental on Led Zeppelin III, there was a lot more focus on the acoustic songs that he had been brought up on.<\/p>\n
There were bound to be a few more blues tunes like \u2018Since I\u2019ve Been Loving You\u2019, but tunes like \u2018Gallows Pole\u2019 and the B-side \u2018Hey Hey What Can I Do\u2019 were where his heart really was. He had followed in the footsteps of songwriters like Joni Mitchell for the longest time, and while there was a much heavier slant to what he was doing with Jimmy Page, there were even a few callbacks to The Byrds\u2019 hits.<\/p>\n
After all, the signature chime of Zeppelin\u2019s guitar sound on \u2018The Song Remains the Same\u2019 could have easily come from Roger McGuinn if it was under a different circumstance. Both bands were speaking two musical languages, but when looking at their track record for going in a more country direction, Plant was convinced that there was no way that The Byrds could ever release a bad record.<\/p>\n
There were definitely a few that didn\u2019t resonate with the fans, but the sheer musicianship on display made everything sound great to Plant, saying, \u201cThe Byrds \u2013 they can do anything and it\u2019ll be good. Those are the groups, the ones who have an atmosphere, and I\u2019d really like to think that we\u2019re one of them, in our own way. It isn\u2019t just a teenybopper-swinging-the-mic-around thing, there\u2019s something else going on.\u201d<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s not like the band didn\u2019t take a few cues from the band along the way. Sweetheart of the Rodeo may have been the next phase of what McGuinn was looking to do, but listening to Zeppelin\u2019s folksy ballads, they were doing the more bluesy interpretation of what a band like that would have done.<\/p>\n
But perhaps the biggest draw that Plant saw with The Byrds back then was seeing the other side of rock and roll. In the back of his mind, he knew he could never play this kind of music forever, so hearing McGuinn make his living doing more downtempo material is what led him to working with people like Alison Krauss later down the line.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Robert Plant didn\u2019t get into music to become \u2018The Golden God\u2019 that everyone claimed him to be. He simply wanted to make the best music … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2867,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"yoast_head":"\n