You can immediately tell from the delivery of Robert Plant‘s vocals in all of his musical endeavours that he’s always been a fan of the most raucous stuff imaginable.
Whether you’re listening to the earlier works of Led Zeppelin, or even his folkier works from later in life when he worked primarily as a solo artist, you can always hear elements of the same vocal inspirations, and Plant tends not to give anything but his absolute all.
There’s a raspy tone to his voice that comes across, even when he’s attempting to be more subdued, and it makes you think that he’s trying to restrain himself from unleashing something wilder at times. There are moments when he manages to cushion the largest yelps with something sweeter, but at the root of everything, Plant is all about projecting his voice as far as possible, and there was nothing that could get in his way of doing that.
Like many of the progenitors of hard rock music, he was influenced by the bluesmen of decades before, and by the rock ‘n’ roll stars who arrived shortly after, and will often cite the likes of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, two of the wildest vocalists, as being the primary influence for his own style. You can hear more than just an element of both of these in Plant’s style from the earliest days of his time with Led Zeppelin, and while his tastes may have expanded later on, these two were ever-present inspirations to him.
However, there’s one rock ‘n’ roll song that Plant acknowledges is perhaps beyond anything else he’d ever heard in terms of its crazed delivery, with blood-curdling screams and frenzied guitar playing being two of the main elements of the song. Much to his disappointment, very few others were aware of its brilliance, and it remains a relatively obscure track from the early 1960s, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be stunned by it.
When invited onto Johnnie Walker’s BBC Radio 1 show for an interview in 1993, while promoting his Fate of Nations record, he selected a particularly riotous track to play for the beloved disc jockey, which left Walker speechless, and he had to rely on Plant to further explain the context behind the song.
“That’s Ralph Nielsen and the Chancellors,” Plant chimed in, following the track, which was aptly titled ‘Scream’. “It’s proclaimed to be ‘the wildest rock ‘n’ roll song ever’. My daughter, Carmen, she turned me onto that because she used to go to all the psychobilly and rockabilly things around Camden and Kentish Town, and there’s some fantastic records that are just being missed by everybody. People just don’t know about them unless there’s some bootleg albums in Camden.”
It is pretty out there for a song released in 1962, and while Ralph Nielsen and the Chancellors never really experienced any fame, the song has since become infamous in certain circles for how wild it is. It’s perfectly understandable why people were so afraid of rock ‘n’ roll corrupting the youth when songs like this existed, and had you played this to your grandmother when it came out, I’m sure it would have given her a heart attack.