With the sort of golden locks that a lion would be proud of, a voice that could stir honey into tea from a thousand paces, and pants so tight you could count how much change he had in his pocket, Robert Plant represented the ultimate frontman of the counterculture age. However, aside from the iconography and bristling bravura, he also had more musical chops than a butcher named Beethoven to back it up, too. Behind the rocking, there were lashings of depth and individuality.
There was one artist that Plant and his Led Zeppelin bandmates always had at the forefront of their minds when it came to socially conscious music. “In May 1965, I experienced the genius of Bob [Dylan] at the Albert Hall,” Led Zeppelin bandmate Jimmy Page wrote as part of an Instagram post. “He accompanied himself on acoustic guitar and cascaded images and words from such songs as ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ and ‘She Belongs To Me’ to a mesmerised audience. It was life-changing.”
Plant was four years younger than Page; however, he still had his finger to the pulse. And in 1963, he realised that there was more to music than simply a good time. “This next track was a particular and magnificent inspiration to me when I was 15 years old,” Plant said DJing. “I think my world turned around and upside down when I heard this track from The Freewheelin Bob Dylan. It’s ‘Down The Highway.’”
This more obscure cut from the record typifies the angle that Led Zeppelin would go in. Musically, the track is straightforward 12-bar blues, and it is even a tired old love song to boot, but in the process, it turns these two stale tenets on their head by remaining deeply personal, avoiding any platitudes, and taking a postmodernist approach to the writing. As Dylan himself remarks in the liner notes: “What made the real blues singers so great is that they were able to state all the problems they had; but at the same time, they were standing outside of them and could look at them. And in that way, they had them beat.”
Dylan looked at Suze Rotolo moving to Italy to study from afar, figured out where he fit into the picture and how he felt, then introspectively extolled this in a song. Given that most folk artists in this era were simply playing covers of old standards, this new styling caught many people’s attention even if it isn’t remembered as one of the record’s classics.
This twist of depth had a profound impact on Plant. Suddenly, words were about more than just keeping a melody going. “Something happened when Dylan arrived. I had to grapple with what he was talking about,” he told The Guardian. “His music referenced Woody Guthrie, Richard and Mimi Farina, Reverend Gary Davis, Dave Van Ronk and all these great American artists I knew nothing about. He was absorbing the details of America and bringing it out without any reservation at all, and ignited a social conscience that is spectacular.”
Concluding: “In these Anglo-Saxon lands we could only gawp, because we didn’t know about the conditions he was singing about. Dylan was the first one to say: hello, reality. I knew that I had to get rid of the winkle-pickers and get the sandals on quick.”
