In 1968, Robert Plant, aged 19, was fronting a new group called Hobbstweedle when he was invited to perform at a teacher training college in Birmingham. It was here that Plant first encountered his future Led Zeppelin bandmate Jimmy Page, who, as luck would have it, was recruiting a new singer for The Yardbirds.
Plant sang an energetic rendition of Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Somebody to Love’, and just like that, Page’s search was over. However, rock and roll history very nearly took a different turn. Just two years prior, a 17-year-old Plant came close to replacing Roger Daltrey as the lead singer of The Who during a rough patch for the band.
“[Plant] came to see us three nights in a row and offered himself for the job, as did Steve Gibbons when he came to see us and Roger wasn’t there,” Pete Townshend recalled in 1990. “Obviously, none of them thought I was any good [at singing]!”
By the end of the 1960s, Led Zeppelin were a towering force in hard rock, and Daltrey had a serious stylistic opponent in Plant. “When Led Zeppelin first came out, I thought they were fantastic,” Daltrey once told Classic Rock of Led Zeppelin. “They supported us on one of their first gigs in the States. I thought they were brilliant.”
“Throughout our early history, we used to do loads of gigs with Hendrix and Cream, that three-piece-band-and-a-singer formula,” Daltrey continued. “We were well-schooled in that, but Zeppelin took it to another level. There was a power there. They were like Cream but with a lot more weight. Jack Bruce of Cream was really a jazz and blues singer, but Robert knew how to rock.”
If this endorsement wasn’t enough, Daltrey chose his Led Zeppelin counterpart as his “rock god” during Johnnie Walker’s BBC Radio 2 programme in 2019. “Well, I was friends with Jimmy Page in the ’60s; I knew them from the very early years,” Daltrey said during the show. “It was Keith [Moon] who came up with the name Led Zeppelin. I became very good friends with Robert Plant, and we still are today. They supported us on one of their first US gigs in Washington or Baltimore. I know it was Maryland.”
It appears that Plant, in return, was fond of The Who through their years of touring together and both bands’ 1970s heyday. In 1978, tragedy struck The Who when their drummer Keith Moon died from an accidental drug overdose. Just two years later, a similar fate met John Bonham, Moon’s Led Zeppelin counterpart.
Led Zeppelin broke up following their beloved drummer’s death in 1980, but The Who persisted long after Moon’s passing, ending their initial run in 1983. The Who have since returned for several reunion tours and remain active to this day. It’s this Las Vegas residency-style lingering that Plant takes issue with.
“I saw the Who trundled around the stadiums of America, and I found it so dull, obvious and sad,” Plant told Rolling Stone. “The fact that they carried on without Keith Moon was always a mystery to me, but the fact that they did it again and again, augmenting it with more and more musicians … I don’t want to be a part of that aspect of entertainment. I’ve played Vegas already.”
From Plant’s fair appraisal of The Who’s late career meanderings and Daltrey’s unbound praise, the rumoured rift between the two bands appears unfounded. Perhaps The Who’s guitarist, Pete Townshend, can shine some light on the matter.
In a 1995 interview for the documentary History of Rock’N’Roll, Townshend gave a rather cutting judgement of Led Zeppelin, condemning all comparisons with The Who. “I don’t like a single thing that they have done; I hate the fact that I’m ever even slightly compared to them,” he said. “I just never ever liked them. It’s a real problem to me cause, as people, I think they are really great guys. Just never liked the band.”
Townshend’s vitriol was aimed purely at Led Zeppelin’s music as opposed to the members. Just under 25 years later, in an interview with The Toronto Sun, Townshend appeared to admit that The Who and Led Zeppelin had a similar style, but only to accuse them of copying.
“It doesn’t sound like The Who from those early heavy metal years,” Townshend said while discussing The Who’s more recent stylistic preferences. “We sort of invented heavy metal with [our first live album from 1970] Live at Leeds. We were copied by so many bands, principally by Led Zeppelin, you know, heavy drums, heavy bass, heavy lead guitar.”
Overall, any rivalry between Led Zeppelin and The Who seems to have been friendly. It certainly doesn’t take a rock historian to draw parallels between the bands, both stylistically and aesthetically. In Pete Townshend’s eyes, despite copying The Who, the “great guys” in Led Zeppelin didn’t make a single track worth listening to.
