When Jimmy Page heard his bandmate, Robert Plant, sing for the the first time, he worried that the legendary vocalist had a fatal flaw that he was missing. “I just could not understand why, after he told me he’d been singing for a few years already, he hadn’t become a big name yet,” the guitarist said. Together, the two joined forces with drummer John Bonham and bassist John Paul Jones to form Led Zeppelin. From 1968 until Bonham’s death in 1980, the British rockers were on top of the world. And that’s likely how these patrons felt when Plant strolled into a small New Orleans jazz club and delivered the performance of a lifetime.
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Watch Robert Plant Transform “Black Dog”
If you’ve ever visited New Orleans, you’ve felt the possibility in the air. It truly is a place where anything can happen—like Robert Plant wandering into a jazz club and surprising the crowd with one of Led Zeppelin’s most timeless hits.
Back in April 2023, when the “Kashmir” legend was in the Big Easy for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, he headed over to Preservation Hall. There, he treated the audience to a jazzed-up rendition of the 1971 hit “Black Dog.”
“Everyone in the room having fun, including Plant,” one Facebook user commented on video footage of the performance. “That’s all that matters.”
Another added, “Is it possible he just keeps getting cooler?”
[RELATED: 5 Songs That Show Off the Softer Side of Led Zeppelin]
How “Black Dog” Came to Be
Back in the early ’70s, Led Zeppelin headed to the pastoral country house Headley Grange in England to record their definitive fourth album. The record, known as Led Zeppelin IV, contains such transformatie works as the nine-minute “Stairway to Heaven” and “When the Levee Breaks.”
While there, the rockers noticed a black Labrador wandering the grounds. Disappearing in the evening, they wouldn’t see the dog again until he returned exhausted in the early morning hours. After resting all day, he would repeat his nightly ventures. Believing the dog was stealing away for nightly trysts with his “old lady,” Robert Plant came up with the concept for the song that would become “Black Dog.”
Featured image by Jeremychanphotography/Getty Images
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