Robert Plant
Robert Anthony Plant is an English singer and songwriter. He was the lead singer and lyricist of the rock band Led Zeppelin from its founding in 1968 until their break-up in 1980. Since then, he has had a successful solo career, sometimes collaborating with other artists such as Alison Krauss. Regarded by many as one of the greatest singers in rock music, he is known for his flamboyant persona, raw stage performances and his powerful, wide-ranging voice.
Plant was born and raised in the West Midlands area of England, and after leaving grammar school, he briefly trained as a chartered accountant before leaving home at 16 years old to concentrate on singing with a series of local blues bands, including Band of Joy with drummer John Bonham. In 1968, he was invited by manager Peter Grant and guitarist Jimmy Page to join the Yardbirds, which Grant and Page were attempting to keep going after it had broken up. The new version of the Yardbirds changed their name to Led Zeppelin, and from the late 1960s to the end of the 1970s, the band enjoyed considerable success.
Plant developed a compelling image as a charismatic rock and roll frontman, comparable to other '70s contemporaries such as Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones and Roger Daltrey of the Who. After Led Zeppelin dissolved in 1980, Plant continued to perform and record continuously on a variety of solo and group projects. His first two solo studio albums, Pictures at Eleven and The Principle of Moments, each reached the top ten on the US Billboard 200. With his rock and roll band the Honeydrippers he scored a top-ten hit single in 1984 with a cover version of Phil Phillips' 1959 song "Sea of Love", which featured former Led Zeppelin bandmate Jimmy Page on guitar. Plant's fourth solo studio album Now and Zen was certified 3× Platinum and is his biggest-selling solo album to date. In the 1990s, another reunion project called Page and Plant released two albums and earned a Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance in 1998 for "Most High". In 2007, Plant began a collaboration with American bluegrass artist Alison Krauss, releasing their debut studio album Raising Sand, which won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 2009 and produced the hit song "Please Read the Letter", which won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year the same year. In 2010, he revived the Band of Joy, and in 2012 formed a new band, the Sensational Space Shifters, followed by a reunion with Alison Krauss in 2021.
In 1995, Led Zeppelin were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Rolling Stone ranked Plant as one of the 100 best singers of all time ; and he was the top pick for the greatest lead singer in a 2011 readers' poll. Hit Parader named Plant the "Greatest Metal Vocalist of All Time". Plant was named one of the 50 Great Voices by NPR. In 2009, Plant was voted "the greatest voice in rock" in a poll conducted by classic rock radio station Planet Rock. Billboard ranked him number four on their list of The 50 Greatest Rock Lead Singers of All Time.
Early life and musical beginnings
Robert Anthony Plant was born on 20 August 1948, in the Black Country town of West Bromwich, Staffordshire, England, to Robert C. Plant, a qualified civil engineer who served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, and Annie Celia Plant, a Romani woman. He grew up in the Hayley Green area of Halesowen, Worcestershire. Plant gained an interest in singing and rock and roll music at an early age; in an interview with Andrew Denton on the Denton talk show in 1994, Plant stated his desire, as a ten-year-old, to be like Elvis Presley:When I was a kid I used to hide behind the curtains at home at Christmas and I used to try and be Elvis. There was a certain ambience between the curtains and the French windows, there was a certain sound there for a ten-year-old. which was all the ambience I got at ten years old... And I always wanted to be... a bit similar to that.Plant left King Edward VI Grammar School for Boys in Stourbridge in his mid-teens and developed a strong passion for the blues, mainly through his admiration for Willie Dixon, Robert Johnson and early renditions of songs in this genre.
Plant abandoned training as a chartered accountant after only two weeks to attend college in an effort to gain more GCE passes and to become part of the Midlands blues scene. "I left home at 16," he said, "and I started my real education musically, moving from group to group, furthering my knowledge of the blues and of other music which had weight and was worth listening to."
Plant's early blues influences included Johnson, Bukka White, Skip James, Sleepy John Estes, and Jerry Miller of Moby Grape. Plant had various jobs while pursuing his music career, one of which was working for the major construction company George Wimpey in Birmingham in 1967, laying tarmac on roads. He also worked at Woolworths in Halesowen town for a short period of time. He cut three obscure singles on CBS Records and sang with a variety of bands, including the Crawling King Snakes, which brought him into contact with drummer John Bonham. They both went on to play in the Band of Joy, merging blues with newer psychedelic trends.
Led Zeppelin (1968–1980)
Early years
In 1968, guitarist Jimmy Page was in search of a lead singer for his new band and met Plant after being turned down by his first choice, Terry Reid, who referred him to a show at a teacher training college in Birmingham. In front of Page, Plant sang Jefferson Airplane's 1966 song "Somebody to Love", leading Page to end his search. As recalled by Plant and Page:File:Zoso Robert Plant feather symbol.svg|thumb|left|upright|Derivative of Plant's feather sigil symbol used in the album Led Zeppelin IV
With a shared passion for music, Plant and Page immediately developed a strong relationship, and began their writing collaboration with reworkings of earlier blues songs.
Initially dubbed the "New Yardbirds" in 1968, the band soon came to be known as Led Zeppelin. The band's eponymous debut studio album hit the charts in 1969 and is widely credited as a catalyst for the heavy metal genre. Plant has commented that it is unfair for people to think of Zeppelin as heavy metal, as almost a third of their music was acoustic.
In 1975, Plant and his wife Maureen were seriously injured in a car crash in Rhodes, Greece. This significantly affected the production of Led Zeppelin's seventh studio album Presence for a few months while he recovered, and forced the band to cancel the remaining tour dates for the year.
In July 1977, his son Karac died at the age of five while Plant was on Led Zeppelin's concert tour of the United States. Plant retreated to his home in the Midlands and, for months afterward, questioned his future.
Lyrics
Plant began writing song lyrics with Led Zeppelin during the making of Led Zeppelin II in 1969. According to Jimmy Page:Plant's lyrics with Led Zeppelin were often mystical, philosophical and spiritual, alluding to events in classical and Norse mythology, such as "Immigrant Song", which refers to Valhalla and Viking conquests. However, the song "No Quarter" is often misunderstood to refer to the god Thor; the song actually refers to Mount Thor. Another example is "The Rain Song".
Plant was influenced by the English writer and philologist J. R. R. Tolkien, whose book series inspired lyrics in some early Led Zeppelin songs. Most notably, "The Battle of Evermore", "Misty Mountain Hop", "No Quarter", "Ramble On" and "Over the Hills and Far Away" contain verses referencing Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Conversely, Plant sometimes used more straightforward blues themes dealing with sex, as in "The Lemon Song", "Trampled Under Foot" about giving in to sexual temptation, and "Black Dog" narrated by a man obsessed with a woman.
Welsh mythology forms a basis of Plant's interest in mystical lyrics. He grew up close to the Welsh border and would often take summer trips to Snowdonia. Plant bought a Welsh sheep farm in 1973, and began taking Welsh lessons and looking into the mythology of the land Plant's first son, Karac, was named after the Welsh chieftain Caratacus. The song "Bron-Y-Aur Stomp" is named after the 18th-century Welsh cottage Bron-Yr-Aur, owned by a friend of his father; it later inspired the title of the instrumental song "Bron-Yr-Aur" from their sixth studio album Physical Graffiti. The songs "Misty Mountain Hop", "That's the Way", and early dabblings in what would become "Stairway to Heaven" were written in Wales and lyrically reflect Plant's mystical view of the land. Critic Steve Turner suggests that Plant's early and continued experiences in Wales served as the foundation for his broader interest in the mythologies he revisits in his lyrics.
Page's passion for diverse musical experiences influenced Plant to explore Africa, specifically Marrakesh in Morocco, where he encountered the Egyptian singer and film actress Umm Kulthum:
Both he and Jimmy Page revisited these influences during their live reunion album No Quarter: Jimmy Page and Robert Plant Unledded in 1994. During his solo career Plant tapped into these influences many times, most notably on his seventh studio album Dreamland.
Most of the lyrics of "Stairway to Heaven" from Led Zeppelin IV were written spontaneously by Plant in 1970 at Headley Grange while the track was being recorded. While never released as a single, the song has topped polls as the greatest song of all time.
Stage persona
Plant enjoyed great success with Led Zeppelin throughout the 1970s and developed a compelling image as the charismatic rock and roll front man, similar to his contemporaries the Who's lead singer Roger Daltrey, Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, and Jim Morrison of the Doors. With his mane of long blond hair and powerful, bare-chested appearance, Plant helped to create the "god of rock and roll" or "rock god" archetype. On stage, Plant was particularly active in live performances, often dancing, jumping, skipping, snapping his fingers, clapping, making emphatic gestures to emphasise a lyric or cymbal crash, throwing back his head, or placing his hands on his hips. As the 1970s progressed he, along with the other members of Led Zeppelin, became increasingly flamboyant on-stage, and wore more elaborate, colourful clothing and jewellery.According to Classic Rock magazine, "once he had a couple of US tours under his belt, "Percy" Plant swiftly developed a staggering degree of bravado and swagger that irrefutably enhanced Led Zeppelin's rapidly burgeoning appeal." In 1994, during his "Unledded" tour with Jimmy Page, Plant himself reflected tongue-in-cheek upon his Led Zeppelin showmanship:
One of the oddest awards he received was the Rock Scene magazine "Chest O Rama". Readers of the magazine had to decide who had the best chest in rock, and Plant was the winner. When they contacted him about it, he replied: "I'm really greatly honoured although it's hard for me to be eloquent on the subject of my chest."