Robert Plant always seemed to have a fear of getting stagnant throughout his career.
Outside of the millions of detours that Led Zeppelin went down throughout their career, Plant never wanted to be known as ‘Percy’ for the rest of his life, and that led to him exploring every single pocket of mainstream music that he could. But even for his track record for brilliant rock and roll vocal performances, he was willing to leave the door open to working in more progressive rock acts every now and again.
Then again, Zeppelin did have the makings of a prog-rock act in them when they first began. Sure, Jimmy Page was working from the same blues playbook that he had been in The Yardbirds, but somewhere around Led Zeppelin IV, the band had started working out other methods to make classics. Not everything had to be a strict blues format, and their greatest later projects were when they stretched out, like on ‘Achilles Last Stand’ and ‘Kashmir’.
And it’s not like the prog world couldn’t be adventurous for vocalists, either. Plant had the ability to twist his voice in many different directions, and whether it was listening to Greg Lake at the beginning of King Crimson or Jon Anderson’s high tenor voice in Yes, there were a lot of unique approaches to vocals that no one had heard before.
But even by prog standards, Jethro Tull was a bit of a strange beast. Although Ian Anderson never quite fit within the same parameters as the other prog giants, he did have a more refined way of looking at his music that no one had ever thought of before. Hardly any band would have thought to use the flute so prominently in many of their songs, but even when they didn’t have their frontman taking flute solos, ‘Aqualung’ remained an adventure for anyone willing to sit through all six minutes of it.
While Anderson had a much more eccentric songwriting style than Jimmy Page, their beginnings as a blues outfit was bound to be appealing for Plant. He hadn’t yet answered Page’s call to be a member of Zeppelin, but since The Band of Joy was a more mellow affair, Anderson remembered Plant coming dangerously close to dethroning him as the frontman of Jethro Tull.
Despite Anderson being the leading force, he remembered blues legend Alexis Korner nearly persuading the rest of the band to take on Plant instead of him, saying, “He more or less insisted that Robert was allowed to come up and jam with us. You know, I remember at the time, ‘Wait a minute, there’s something else going on here,’ and I saw myself in the situation of being potentially replaced by Robert Plant in the early Jethro.”
This may have helped create the subtle rub between Anderson and Zeppelin once they eventually toured together, but that never lasted that long. Page was actually quite friendly with the group, even showing up to the studio when they were recording ‘Aqualung’, which became downright mortifying for Martin Barre when he eventually tried to nail down the perfect solo for the track.
Even if Anderson had nothing to worry about, there’s a lesson to be learned about artists keeping on their toes whenever a new kid shows up at one of their gigs. Because, as much as you think that your position is secure, it only takes one major slip-up for the rest of the band to start thinking about potential replacements.
