News Robert Plant on the artist who could rival Elvis Presley
Any rock and roll fan looking to get in front of a microphone is going to take a few cues from Elvis Presley. Even though Chuck Berry may have introduced the world to rock and roll, seeing Presley shaking his hips across the stage lit a fire in kids who wanted something more than just a catchy tune, resonating with everyone from John Lennon to Mick Jagger. Although Robert Plant was also among the many to follow in Presley’s footsteps, he thought that Charlie Feathers could give ‘The King’ a run for his money.
Before Plant had even started with Led Zeppelin, his brand of rock and roll was far away from the kind of music that Presley was making. While there was definitely some blues influence, Plant’s first outfit, The Band of Joy, felt like they were going to go the way of many different counterculture bands from around the same time, usually making the folksy brand of rock with the occasional heavy tune here and there.
Across the country, Jimmy Page was already hard at work putting together the dream band he had heard in his head. After walking out on The Yardbirds, Page wanted to make something with more muscle than straight blues rock, convincing bassist John Paul Jones to join him before stumbling upon Plant’s operatic voice.
Although Plant had an affinity for blues rock, his first exposure to rock and roll came with the songs of rockabilly, usually hearing the greatest rock artists secondhand from America. Even though Presley could slick back his hair and twirl his hips in a way that made girls scream, Feathers could keep up with him in terms of raw rock and roll power.
Even though he may not have reached the same eights, Feathers’ main calling card came from his ferocity when playing. While he never intended to sound like one of the cleanest players in the world, it was all about the energy that he brought across onstage, usually getting into as much of a frenzy as the audiences that filled the venues.
When talking about Feathers’s influence, Plant said that he could have rivalled Presley in his prime, saying in Digging Deep, “Charlie Feathers was the Elvis that never was. He carried his blistering fury all the way through his career because he thought that was the case…[He] might have been a couple of years older than Elvis. The bottom line was he had these tracks, and they were great”.
While Presley may have loomed large over the rest of the rock world, Plant’s vocal stylings feel like they are descended from what Feathers had done. Even when playing the odd Elvis pastiche whenever Zeppelin played live, the reckless abandon in Plant’s voice comes from listening to artists that had a bit more fury in their soul than Presley, which Feathers already had down to a science.
Even though Plant was looking to channel his own fury through Zeppelin, he would eventually turn those influences into the blueprint for hard rock, becoming the template that every other frontman was supposed to study. Presley may have been the originator of the rock and roll frontman role, but with a little help from Feathers’s music, Plant introduced the world to ‘The Golden God’.
