There are some drawbacks to major success. You lose a sense of privacy, the pressure is piled on and mostly, everything you do suddenly becomes a breeding ground for comparison and competition.
Back in the 1960s and ’70s, Led Zeppelin knew that well.
When Led Zeppelin unleashed their self-titled debut in 1969, they came in hot as late stage dominators. The era of rock and roll was almost over. Everyone thought the cast of idols was already set in stone, but then here he came: Robert Plant.
By that point, a god-tier of rock and roll’s top frontmen was already being formed. Mick Jagger was the king of it, but there were other names up there, too, like Jimi Hendrix or Jim Morrison. All of them had their differences, but all of them also had the same type of appeal. It was that sex, drugs and rock and roll charm of erotic danger and complete sexuality with their limbs flailing. All of them had an obvious and intense presence that whipped their crowds into a frenzy.
Then suddenly, there was another name joining the ranks. When Plant first emerged with that voice and that mop of long, curly hair draping around a typically pretty face, the 1960s got a last-minute contender for its most desired singer. But as quickly as that happened, the finger-pointing came in, too.
Even though Led Zeppelin’s music was very different to The Doors, a loud choir of voices sparked up, essentially accusing Plant of trying to be Jim Morrison, as if swagger can ever be stolen. They claimed that each night, Plant was getting up on stage and merely moving his body like Morrison, trying to emulate his aura and trying to copy from the blueprint of his success.
To Jimmy Page, it was bullshit.
“How could he have done? They’re completely different,” Page said. To him, it was nothing but a limiting, and perhaps even degrading, view of his singer that reduced him to nothing more than a pretty face. “If you want to relate Robert to a sexual image, and a lot of people are doing that, he’s all those things one would associate with it. He’s good looking (I’m not saying Jim isn’t), he’s got the virile image, he moves very well on stage and he looks right and he sings well — his whole thing is total sexual aggression,” Page said.
But to him, and to Led Zeppelin fans, it was more than that. Plant was obviously a good-looking leader, but with a voice like that, he could’ve been the ugliest man in the world and still had people fall at his feet or stand hypnotised by his vocal power.
According to Page, Morrison could never ever come close to that. “As far as I could see, the Morrison thing is just an embarrassment towards the audience,” he said to NME in 1970, rejecting any suggesting that his own singer was anything like The Doors’ one he disliked.
He joined an army of others who felt the same as Morrison is surely in the running to be one of music’s most broadly disliked figures when it comes to his own peers, so it’s no wonder that Page wanted to quickly shut down any association.
