Did The Who and Led Zeppelin really hate each other?

In 1968, Robert Plant, then 19, was leading a new group called Hobbstweedle when he got the chance to perform at a teacher training college in Birmingham. Plant met his future Led Zeppelin bandmate Jimmy Page here, who, coincidentally, was looking for a new singer for The Yardbirds.

Plant delivered an energetic rendition of Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Somebody to Love’, and Page’s search was over. However, rock and roll history almost took a different turn. Just two years prior, a 17-year-old Plant came close to replacing Roger Daltrey as The Who’s lead singer during a difficult period for the band.

“Plant came to see us three nights in a row and offered himself for the job, as did Steve Gibbons when he came to see us and Roger wasn’t there,” Pete Townshend said at the time. “Obviously, none of them thought I was any good at singing!”

By the end of the 1960s, Led Zeppelin were a dominant force in hard rock. At that time Daltrey faced a serious stylistic challenge in Plant. “When Led Zeppelin first came out, I thought they were fantastic,” Daltrey told Classic Rock of the band. “They backed us up on one of their first shows in the States. “I thought they were brilliant!”

“Throughout our early history, we used to do loads of gigs with Hendrix and Cream, that three-piece-band-and-a-singer formula,” Daltrey continued. “We were well-schooled in that, but Zeppelin took it to the next level.” There was power there. They were like Cream, but much heavier. Jack Bruce of Cream was primarily a jazz and blues singer, but Robert knew how to rock.

If this endorsement wasn’t enough, Daltrey chose his Led Zeppelin counterpart as his “rock god” on Johnnie Walker’s BBC Radio 2 show in 2019. “Well, I was friends with Jimmy Page in the ’60s. I knew them from the very early years,” Daltrey said during the show. ” Keith Moon came up with the name Led Zeppelin. I became very close friends with Robert Plant, and we still are today. They supported us during one of their first US gigs in Washington or Baltimore. I know it was Maryland.”

Plant appears to have been fond of The Who during their years of touring together and both bands’ 1970s heyday. Keith Moon, the drummer for The Who, died of an accidental drug overdose in 1978. Just two years later, Moon’s Led Zeppelin counterpart, John Bonham, suffered a similar fate.

Led Zeppelin disbanded in 1980 after the death of their beloved drummer, but The Who continued to perform until 1983. The Who have since returned for several reunion tours and are still active to this day. Plant takes issue with the Las Vegas residency-style lingering.

“I saw the Who trundle around stadiums in America, and I thought it was so dull, obvious, and sad,” Plant told Rolling Stone. “The fact that they carried on without Keith Moon was always a mystery to me, but the fact that they did it repeatedly, augmenting it with more and more musicians… I do not want to be a part of that type of entertainment. I’ve already played Vegas.”

According to Plant’s fair assessment of The Who’s late-career wanderings and Daltrey’s boundless praise, the rumoured schism between the two bands appears unfounded. Perhaps Pete Townshend, The Who’s guitarist, can shed some light on the situation.

In a 1995 interview for the documentary History of Rock’N’Roll, Townshend delivered a harsh critique of Led Zeppelin, dismissing any comparisons to The Who. “I don’t like a single thing that they have done. I hate the fact that I’m ever even slightly compared to them,” he went on to say. “I’ve just never liked them. It’s a real problem for me because I think they’re great guys. “I never liked the band.”

Townshend’s vitriol targeted solely at Led Zeppelin’s music, not the band’s members. Just under 25 years later, in an interview with The Toronto Sun, Townshend appeared to admit that The Who and Led Zeppelin had a similar style, but then accused them of copying.

“It doesn’t sound like The Who from those early heavy metal years”. Townshend said, discussing the band’s more recent stylistic preferences. “We sort of invented heavy metal with [our first live album from 1970], Live at Leeds. We were copied by so many bands, particularly by Led Zeppelin, with heavy drums, bass, and lead guitar.”

Overall, the rivalry between Led Zeppelin and The Who appears to have been friendly. It doesn’t take a rock historian to see similarities between the bands, both stylistically and visually. In Pete Townshend’s opinion, despite copying The Who, the “great guys” in Led Zeppelin did not create a single track worth listening to.