Why Robert Plant Wasn’t Convinced He Would Last With Led Zeppelin During Their First Two Albums

Whether howling with Led Zeppelin, crooning with Alison Krauss, or leading the charge with The Sensational Space Shifters and Band of Joy, Robert Plant has always been a performer who seems to ooze confidence from every pore. His command of the stage has only grown more powerful since his days as a young up-and-comer in the late 1960s. Indeed, age and experience have seemed to broaden and intensify his musical vocabulary in fun, inspiring ways.

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But therein lies the secret of all the best performers. The trick is to look confident even if you don’t feel that way, which, amazingly, Plant was dealing with during the making of the first two eponymous Led Zeppelin albums. In a 2008 interview with Uncut, he even went so far as to call himself “demure” at this time, which is one adjective I would have never thought to use to describe the iconic rock vocalist.

Nevertheless, Plant spent those early Zeppelin years feeling much smaller than his larger-than-life persona would suggest.

Robert Plant Knew He Had to Try to Measure Up in Led Zeppelin

When Robert Plant first met Jimmy Page at one of Plant’s gigs with Obs-Tweedle, he knew he was meeting someone with exceptional talent. Plant was also acutely aware that if he were to be in a band with Page, he would have to hold his own on stage in a way that complemented Page, not clashed with him. “I was doing what I was doing, and he was doing what he was doing,” Plant told Uncut. “If I’d have been static or if I hadn’t had the appeal or the front myself, I’d have been out of there. Gone.”

But even with that impressive ability to command the stage with just a microphone in his hand, Plant wasn’t sure that his chops were good enough to keep him in the band. “As far as I was concerned, I thought that I was going to go anyway,” Plant recalled of the Led Zeppelin I era. “I didn’t feel that comfortable because there were a lot of demands on me vocally, which there were all the way through the Zeppelin thing. And I was quite nervous, and I didn’t really get into enjoying it until II.”

Plant said that one of the reasons he felt so unsteady on the mic was that vocal amplification technology was subpar at that time. Guitar amps were getting louder and louder, but the equipment necessary to make a human voice cut through all of that mechanical noise was still lagging. “In those days for vocals, I could never hear myself,” Plant said. “There were no monitors. Nothing. Nothing.”

Those early days might have been a learning curve for Plant, but it’s safe to say that he managed to figure it out just fine.

Photo by Jorgen Angel/Redferns