Robert Plant knew that the power of music was never about playing everything perfectly.
It was about capturing a feeling in between the notes as you were playing, and throughout Led Zeppelin’s career, every one of his vocal performances felt like him telling the most intimate stories over Jimmy Page’s riffs. But whereas most people were concerned with whether Zeppelin were corrupting the youth with tales of Satan, Plant knew the best way to play music was trying to make the world a better place.
After all, Plant started life as a hippy half the time when working in The Band of Joy, so he knew a thing or two about what peace and love was always supposed to be. The counterculture was still among the best movements for anyone that played rock and roll, but even when things started shifting towards the blues, Plant always held onto those beliefs whenever he sang their ballads.
Even though Plant might be a little embarrassed by it today, the phrase ‘does anybody remember laughter’ from The Song Remains the Same is a beautiful moment in the middle of ‘Stairway to Heaven’. He may have been trying a little bit too hard to come off like some wise guru, but he always loved the idea of people coming together through music rather than having to worry about death and destruction.
That was for the Black Sabbaths of the world, and even looking at Plant’s solo years, he was always interested in getting back to that optimistic side of music. Not everything was going to come together perfectly, but for every mock attempt that he made to sound like bands like Talking Heads, there’s something about him playing off of Allison Krauss on Raising Sand that feels a lot more at home with his voice.
He always kept things fairly rootsy, but listening to The Incredible String Band, there was a lot more going on. No one in the band was trying to create grand symphonies by any stretch, but their eclectic mix of psychedelia and folk rock gave them the same kind of smooth edge that The Grateful Dead had when they first started.
Acts like Zeppelin would get ridiculed for sounding dangerous by some parents, but Plant felt that these guys were helping to make the world a little less dour, saying, “I saw the String Band as real dream weavers, and layered into all of this is a sense of peace, soliloquies of pure charm, riddlings, and joy. In some ways I think musicians have a great responsibility to promote all those things. It should be some sort of code for us. There’s the world around us that’s not really like that.”
But Plant might be selling himself short by saying that. There are plenty of mellow moments throughout The Incredible String Band’s repertoire that help everyone see the sunny side of life, but even if a song like ‘Tangerine’ isn’t the most cheerful song in the world or anything, it’s easy for someone to find a sense of closure or peace when listening through to Plant’s fantastic melody.
And considering Plant has spent the rest of his days trying his best to get back to that, he seems to have taken the band to heart in more ways than one. He’s not out to imitate anybody, but every so often a band comes along that seems to be everything that someone strives to be as a musician.
