Call it what you will. Bands come and go and leave a legacy that often gets duplicated by another band. In all actuality, there is a very good theory that states that music is just a few different sounds coming from millions of artists and bands. They may be onto something with that notion. So many bands have started trends and then so many other bands have hopped on that trend to end up sounding like the band that started the sound in the first place. No one is really to blame for that. What sells is what sells and what sells is what makes money to continue a career moving forward.
Some bands make sense when they’re called out for stealing another band’s sound. Other bands, however, just don’t seem to line up and it sounds a bit too out there to be considered. If you ask Robert Plant who ‘borrowed’ the Led Zeppelin sound, you’d be extremely shocked to hear who he feels did so – and he even seems a bit mad about it. It seems Plant loves to call out artists.
In a recent interview transcribed by Ultimate Guitar, Robert Plant spoke on a plethora of topics ranging from the early workings of music to later on finding out who took a bite from his apple. Firstly, Plant spoke on the internals of the band.
As it was asked in the latest episode of the “Broken Record” podcast hosted by Rick Rubin: “Were there cliques within the band? Like, were there any people who hung out with other people more than other people? How did it work, the internal dynamics of the band?”
Plant responded: “It would change. I mean, the very, very first times together was obviously – Bonzo and I borrowing his mom’s car to go down to an audition. And siphoning the petrol out of somebody else’s car while they were asleep to get there, that sort of deal. And as time went on… I think really, the sharing of musicality was the kind of beacon.”
At this point, the topic changes a bit and Plant speaks on the acoustics of where the band would be playing music at.
Plant: “So John Paul, Bonzo, and I, when we were working on stuff, when we were staying in these sort of what you’d loosely call residential places, which were housed with a staircase, a sub stairwell where we could get that sound that the Beastie Boys *ahem, ahem, ahem* [laughs] borrowed. The whole deal was like, we were there. So, sometimes somebody would go to bed or somebody would go somewhere, and some two guys might be left just playing rhythm parts, just grooving, two of them.”
It’s a bit odd to hear Plant bring up the Beastie Boys when it comes to sound dynamics as what he is explaining seems to be reverb and possibly a more ‘rougher’ sound when it comes to vocal mix quality. These things do not seem to be exclusive to Led Zeppelin at all.
