Nancy Wilson revealed to Premier Guitar that she left a Led Zeppelin show because of Robert Plant’s sexy look.
“There was Led Zeppelin and Jimmy [Page] had his violin bow going and he was doing his echo plex magic playing, pretending that he’s summoning the music out of the air with his echo plex on repeat, which were physical tapes at the time,” the rocker recalled about hearing Led Zeppelin live for the first time.
Wilson continued, “And so we were like, ‘Oh my God.’ The singer, he’s so suggestive. He’s got his shirts wide open, he’s got his bear chest and his jeans were really low riders and he was moving in this way that was so super suggestive and we were kind of shocked. We’re like, ‘Oh, my God.'”
“We were in a little folk band at the time. So, we were from the suburbs. So we were kind of square, square little hippie chicks to be unenlightened, let’s just say. And so, they were like, ‘Oh, they’re so loud. They’re just being so suggestive and loud,'” she further remembered.
Nancy added, “Then, he sang about like ‘Squeeze My Lemon’ and we’re like, ‘Oh, we must leave, we must leave the premises’ because we were just shocked. So, we actually walked out on at the Green Lake Aqua Theater.”
Wilson has always admired Plant’s rock style and wanted to bring that to her own music. In a Guitar World interview last year, she said she was inspired by strong women like Janis Joplin, Aretha Franklin, and Judy Garland. Despite being told women shouldn’t play rock, she and her sister disagreed. She said, “So we were very loud. I guess we just didn’t care.”
“We wanted to channel the androgyny of rock ‘n’ roll. Guys like Robert Plant looked like really hot chicks, and we felt like we could be hot chicks or hot dudes on a big rock stage like that. Androgyny and a sense of humor were our basic survival tools, because there was no place for us at the time,” Nancy noted.
On December 2, 2012, Led Zeppelin received the Kennedy Center Honors from President Barack Obama, as Ann Wilson previously recalled. The show featured a performance of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ by Ann and Nancy Wilson, with Jason Bonham on drums.
