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Tue 28 July 2026 19:30, UK
It was a rare sunny day in Birmingham, and puzzled old folks in flat caps looked on at a hippie being paraded through the streets like counterculture’s inverse Christ. Pickets were held aloft, saying, “Legalise pot”, and “Robert Plant must go free”. The times were a-changin’.
The puzzled old folks might have wondered, ‘Who was this martyr?’ Well, he was, frankly, an 18-year-old nobody who wasn’t even facing a drug charge. The whole faux pot protest was a drummed-up stunt looking to launch the name of a would-be singer who had recently decided he might like to be a rock ‘n’ roll hero.
In the years that followed, Plant became a fierce fanboy of some of Britain’s finest bands. He loved Fleetwood Mac, calling them “the best blues band”, but he also adored one outfit modernising the genre in a manner that he hoped that he might one day emulate.
That group was Small Faces, and their screaming frontman, Steve Marriott, is a very obvious influence on what Plant would become once you connect the dots. This wasn’t lost on the Small Faces singer, either. Marriott had noticed Plant’s lion’s mane pronouncing around at plenty of their concerts. How could he not?
Years later, in All Too Beautiful, Marriott would lay out the dominoes, starting with the Muddy Waters song, ‘You Need Lovin’’, originally written by Willie Dixon. “It was fantastic,” Marriott said of the proto-blues rock anthem.
“I loved it, Muddy Waters recorded it but I couldn’t sing like Muddy Waters so it wasn’t that much of a nick.”
However, his passion for the track served to liberate his own style. As he explained, “I was a high range and Muddy was a low range so I had to figure out how to sing it. So I did and that was our opening number for all the years we were together. Every time we were on stage that was our opening number, unless we had a short set.”
Further reading: From The Vault
The Small Faces would perform it with a noted roar, Marriott using his sublime vocal command to an almost operatic extent, waking up even the sleepest of Monday audiences in the process. Plant was often among them, as the singer recalled, “That’s where Jimmy Page and Robert Plant heard it. Robert Plant used to follow us around. He was like a fan.”
Inspired by the singer, who he has since waxed lyrical about, and by ‘You Need Lovin’’, in particular, Page and Plant would soon craft their own Faces-adjacent take on Dixon’s tune with ‘Whole Lotta Love’. Lovingly ripped off, in the liberal manner that made Led Zeppelin a freewheeling force, the Brummie band further extended the roughness at its heart.
Marriott might have bemoaned, “He [Plant] sang it the same, phrased it the same, even the stops at the end were the same”, but it didn’t seem to bother him too much. After all, at least Plant had been a fan. He’d paid for his ticket and gone along for the Small Faces ride.
Dixon, however, wasn’t so friendly. He took them to court of the song, prompting Plant to admit, “Page’s riff was Page’s riff. It was there before anything else. I just thought, ‘well, what am I going to sing?’ That was it, a nick. Now happily paid for. At the time, there was a lot of conversation about what to do.”
“It was decided that it was so far away in time and influence that,” he concluded, “Well, you only get caught when you’re successful. That’s the game.” It’s a game that was afoot from him when he was 18 with a ‘Legalise Pot’ picket, and it was in full swing when he was taking notes from his beloved Small Faces. Eventually, it would make him a master worth nicking from, too. And we can all be thankful for that.
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