There’s a clear delineation between beauty and majesty, and over the past 50 years, nobody has been able to channel both the way Robert Plant has.
There’s nothing beautiful about the banshee wails of ‘Immigrant Song’ or the raunchy blues of ‘The Lemon Song’, but there is something undeniably majestic about them.
Similarly, majesty isn’t exactly in the equation for the rough-hewn dynamic shifts of ‘What Is and What Should Never Be’ or the understate folk of ‘That’s the Way’, but the same man was pivotal in both. In fact, Led Zeppelin were often able to mix in both majesty and beauty, but Plant always knew the difference between the two.
So when the singer they called The Golden God crowns someone as “beautiful”, it’s more of an appraisal of the delicate and intimate side of music than a majestic shriek of rock and roll glory. It’s an autumn morning with a coffee rather than a Friday night with friends at the bar. The Led Zeppelin man seemingly loves both equally.
Plant’s eclectic tastes are legendary, but there was one folk figure who had a permanent hold on Plant’s brain during his most famous writing days in the early 1970s. That would be none other than Joni Mitchell, to whom Plant often dedicated the heavily Joni-indebted ‘Going to California’ by crying out her name in concert when the group played live.
While sitting down with the BBC Radio 2 programme Tracks Of My Years, Plant listed out some of his favourite songs and artists of all time. Inevitably, Mitchell’s name made an appearance as Plant opted to focus on her Hejira cut ‘Amelia’. The song selection also came with some high praise from the former Zeppelin frontman.
“[She’s] the queen of all that beautiful music that was written around that time for the late ’60s on through,” Plant gushed about Mitchell. “Her catalogue is incredible, and her concerts were really beautiful, incredibly moving. The whole Laurel Canyon music scene up there in Sunset Boulevard was something really special.”
Jimmy Page shares a similar opinion on the Canadian star. The guitarist once explained, “That’s the music that I play at home all the time, Joni Mitchell. Court and Spark I love because I’d always hoped that she’d work with a band. But the main thing with Joni is that she’s able to look at something that’s happened to her, draw back and crystallise the whole situation, then write about it.” As Plant would caveat, she doesn’t just crystalise, she beautifies, too.
Mitchell’s acoustic folk music, especially between the albums Song to a Seagull and For the Roses, clearly had a strong effect on Led Zeppelin and their sound. Although blues and hard rock were their chosen genres, folk began to creep in steadily around Led Zeppelin III. By the time they called it a day in 1980, nearly a full third of their catalogue was acoustic songs, which contributed to the band’s disdain for being lumped into the genre of heavy metal.
Plant, a lover of folk and proudly flowery forms, even went so far to say he was embarrassed. He’d always rather keep company with the queen of beauty than bloody Kiss.
