(Credits: Far Out / Heinrich Klaffs / Ollie Atkins)
Sat 18 October 2025 22:15, UK
If there was one god to the 1960s music scene, it was Elvis Presley.
It’s tough to find a band from the countercultural sphere that doesn’t have some Elvis-based story about how The King inspired them, or even let them down. But surely Robert Plant wins.
“The BBC wasn’t very kind to youth culture in those days, but every now and then on Two Way Family Favourites on a Sunday lunchtime, some servicemen would send messages back to Mom and Dad and request a song,” Plant recalled of his youth spent listening to boring music. Then everything changed; “It was ‘Hound Dog’, Elvis.”
The Led Zeppelin frontman said, “That was the kind of lock-in. It was an opiate. Something happened when I heard the sound of that record. It certainly made me put my stamp collection to one side for a bit.”
That story is a familiar one. Paul McCartney has a similar one, as does John Lennon, about the moment they first heard Elvis, and it suddenly felt like the world was in technicolour. All of them talk about the King as if his music was something they’d never heard before, or could have even dreamed up. But for young kids in Britain, it was as Presley broke through the doors of the mainstream to deliver them rock and roll where it wouldn’t typically reach.
However, eventually, The Beatles would end up feeling let down by their old hero. “The Beatles had been a real force for anti-American spirit,” Presley was rumoured to have said to President Nixon behind closed doors as he seemed to turn on the band and rock and roll.
So naturally, when the group met the singer, they all felt a little weird. “He was just surrounded by these sycophants,” Ringo Starr said of the encounter, “You know, it was just so strange, and I was just so angry because he wasn’t making any music. He wasn’t doing what he should have been doing.”
Robert Plant and his hero, Elvis Presley. (Credit: Dina Regine/White House)
But Plant’s experience wasn’t anything like that. Instead, he was golden as he seemed to get a chance to meet Elvis as both the man he was, and the hero Plant worshipped.
They met a few times in the end as The King and Led Zeppelin seemed to fall into an accidental kinship, but out of them all, Plant recalled one truly wild memory of a night he described as “most illuminating and funny”.
After another classic time with Elvis and his entire entourage, desperately trying to impress him but also desperately wanting to just know him, Plant was leaving when suddenly, he heard the voice that had changed everything back in the day.
“I was walking down the corridor,” Plant remembered, “He swung ’round the door frame, looking quite pleased with himself, and started singing that song: ‘Treat me like a fool…’” Suddenly, not only was Plant in the presence of his hero, but he was getting a private song, hearing Elvis simply singing to himself in his own house as a real pinch-me moment that surely felt like a dream.
Plant saw it as his chance, though. While most likely would have stayed silent, not daring to interrupt the King’s song, Plant joined in. “I turned around and did Elvis right back at him,” he said, recalling how he put on his best crooner voice to sing ‘Love Me’ with him. “We stood there, singing to each other,” he said, still baffled by the happening years later, knowing he’ll cherish the memory forever.
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