News The Buffalo Springfield song that changed Robert Plant’s life
As evident from his work with Led Zeppelin, Robert Plant‘s first musical love was rock ‘n’ roll. During his teenage years, it was an all-encompassing addiction stimulated by icons such as Elvis Presley and Howlin’ Wolf. Yet naturally, his preferences developed as he gained a taste for folk-influenced rock, which has stayed with him ever since.
Since Plant has become an elder statesman in the industry in recent decades, the former Led Zeppelin frontman has leaned back into his love of folk. However, it’s been part of his make-up since the 1960s and has successfully squeezed into recordings throughout his career.
Before forming Led Zeppelin, Plant was in Band of Joy, who didn’t hide the influence of Buffalo Springfield in their work. They even covered ‘For What It’s Worth‘. However, when the opportunity arose to start a new band with Jimmy Page, Plant dropped everything to take flight on the adventure which became Led Zeppelin.
Nevertheless, he returned to the Band of Joy moniker for an eponymous album in 2010, although none of the other original members were involved in the project. Additionally, he used the name of the band, the Band of Joy, for the record, and he wanted to tap back into the same sonic mind-frame that inspired him previously.
During an interview with Melody Maker in 1970, Plant revealed that his love of Californian country-tinged rock had been born out of growing tired of The Beatles. Therefore, he felt compelled to search for something new to whet his musical palette.
However, although Buffalo Springfield went on to play a significant part in the soundtrack of his life, it took Plant a portion of time before he truly understood the brilliance of ‘Flying on the Ground is Wrong’, the first song he heard by the group.
The singer recalled to Melody Maker in the same interview: “I remember the first time I heard Buffalo Springfield’s ‘Flying on the Ground is Wrong’. I thought: ‘That sounds like nothing at all,’ and then I heard it again and thought: ‘There’s something more to this.’ The lyrics at the time weren’t astounding, but there was something there. Then I got the album, and it was great because it was the kind of music you could hare around to or you could sit down and dig it, and I thought, ‘This is what an audience wants – this is what I want to listen to.’”
The song from the supergroup’s debut album sparked a new part of his artistry into gear, and he grew an eternal sense of fondness for Buffalo Springfield. However, by his own admission, due to his age and limited life experience, with the benefit of hindsight, Plant believes his lyrics didn’t quite match the levels set by his heroes.
He admitted to Vulture in 2022: “I was wedged in the tail end of Dion and the Belmonts — Dion DiMucci is a spectacular singer. I also loved the lyrics and the shuffle of what was going on with early Buffalo Springfield. The thought process was far more coherent and challenging coming out of America at the time. So I suppose I was kind of stuck in this antiquarian approach of sticking a lyric to a riff. Was it cute? Yeah, it was cute. But did it make any sense?”
Nevertheless, the wide smörgåsbord of influences that Plant soaked up gave him a unique approach that mixed everything from Muddy Waters to Buffalo Springfield to J.R.R. Tolkien. While this eclectic variety shouldn’t have worked on paper, with the force of Led Zeppelin behind him, Plant was well-positioned to reach greatness.
