Led Zeppelin seems to be the alpha and the omega for white rock fans from their inception through today. I never got them or what all the fuss was/is about and I say this as a lead guitar player. My sticking point is Robert Plant's vocals: I just do NOT like his voice, at all. But yeah, so many bands copped their style. The band that first leaps to mind is Heart! Ann Wilson has often cited Zeppelin and Plant as everything she wanted Heart to be and no, I can't take a lot of her voice either, although I generally enjoy female vocalists a ton.
I've never been huge into Zeppelin. I dig the song
Kashmir and while I enjoyed
Stairway to Heaven initially, when it reached the point of over-saturation I lost interest. For female singers I believe Pat Benatar has also cited Plant as a major influence (even going so far as to say she wanted to be a female Robert Plant at one point).
I was on a totally different planet in high school (1974-1978). All of the non-band kids were Zeppelin, Zeppelin, Zeppelin 24/7. I was always more into funk bands like TOP, E,W&F, James Brown, Brother Ray, Aretha, Stevie Wonder, jazz/rock stuff like Chicago & B,S&T, Jethro Tull, Latin rock like Santana and Malo and fusion such as Weather Report and Miles Davis. Maybe playing in interracial bands had something to do with it, maybe not. I dunno. But even when it came to metal stuff, I liked Deep Purple with Ritchie Blackmore on lead guitar a LOT more than Page. To me, he blew Page out of the water and he and keyboardist Jon Lord had a real jazz improvisational touch to their soloing and trading solos back and forth. To me Zeppelin was always Plant screaming bare chested and Page messing with the violin bow, all theatrics. *DUCKS*
When I was in high school, about 15 years later it seemed to be all about grunge-- Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, and Nirvana being the holy trinity of that genre. Personally, I couldn't get into it and found myself listening more and more to the classic rock that I'd been exposed to by my older siblings (one of which whose record collection impressed me to no end when I visited him at age 12 and had finally re-discovered many of the bands that had been buried in my subconcious graduated in 1978 much like you-- incidentally I don't recall seeing any Zeppelin in his collection either).
The Kid Rock thing "All Summer Long" is the other big thing there because it contains samples from SHA. Yuck. Yeah, I'm WAAYYY weird, but aren't all musicians? LOL!
Not to mention samples of Warren Zevon's
Werewolves of London.
