Robert Plant’s Experience Watching Rolling Stones Was An “eye-opener”

Seeing the Rolling Stones play with Little Richard and Bo Diddley, Robert Plant commended their gig in the early days as an “eye-opener” for him.

Plant, before his break on Led Zeppelin, has always been a fan of anything related to music. Just before he met Jimmy Page and the rest of the gang, he was taken to see a show in the English West Midlands city of Wolverhampton, where the Stones played with Diddley and Richard.

Since the start of his career as a singer, he’s always been fascinated with Chicago and Mississippi and the Delta blues music, a fact that he revealed in his recent interview with BBC. “I think on the English music scene, one of the main forerunners and purveyors of this music bringing it to us as early teenage kids was the Rolling Stones,” Plant said. He also told BBC how the band’ cover of Chuck Berry’s “Come On” was the beginning of their career, inspiring blues music to its greater manifestation to North America.

As a teenager from the North of England, Plant wasn’t too cultivated on the pop culture that’s been burgeoning in London. It was until he saw the Rolling Stones play that he got the gist of what’s happening there. “They [Rolling Stones] did a theater tour with Bo Diddley and Little Richard, and it was the Rolling Stones’ first-ever package tour. It was really an eye-opener – we were all leaning towards that music, but nobody really had it down.”