I was amazed at this "scholarly" article, which to me seems like a long paranoid rant about how Plant based his vocal style and his manner of dress on Janis Joplin: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1111/jpms.12081/ What I take away from it is that Plant admired Janis and may have developed his hippie stage presence based on her personal style, but the fact is both of them based aspects of their vocal styles on the blues and Plant's voice is so different from Janis' that I find them hard to compare to each other. Plant's voice is often ethereal, and I find Janis Joplin's voice to be grating. imo this type of writing is what gives feminism a bad name these days. I also don't find the article to be actually scholarly as it uses circumstantial evidence to try to show Plant somehow ripped off Joplin when we all know you can't copyright singing styles. What I believe the article does illustrate is the complete lack of imagination of rock journalists of the 70s in that the best way they could describe Plant was comparing him to Janis. That's not relevant to what Plant did nor to the history of Led Zeppelin. I found the article to be reminiscent of paranoid conspiracy theory writing. The sad state of academia today!

A recent post about the Grateful Dead along with Robert Plant talking about hanging out with Janis Joplin (Charlie Rose Interview) made me think of a really great movie called "Festival Express". If you have not seen it you should check it out. Cheers http://www.festivalexpress.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festival_Express