Robert Plant — “In The Mood”

Entered Top 40:  December 24, 1983  
5 weeks    
Peaked at: 39   

Sometimes I feel like the only cishet white GenX male who grew up in the 1980s and did not have a substantial Led Zeppelin phase. There were some songs I didn’t mind hearing on the radio or whatever, but the biggest middle/high-school assholes seemed to be most in the tank for Zeppelin, so I was content to stay clear of that whole scene. Not until college did I find a “classic rock” cohort that wasn’t the worst that fandom had to offer.

So it might be contrary, but unsurprising, that I’ve always been a bit taken with the somewhat anti-Zeppelin singles from Robert Plant’s second post-Zeppelin solo LP, The Principle of Moments. My favorite, the dreamy, minimalist “Big Log” (#20) seemed calculated to throw off the park-bench hoodlums with its drum machine and synth bed. “In the Mood” always sounded to me like the more commercial single, but it stalled out at #39. ”In the Mood” had the familiar Third Single problems though it technically was not one; Plant refused to release Atlantic’s choice of a single, “Other Arms,” as one, but FM radio grabbed onto it, making it a #1 on Billboard’s Top Tracks (now called Mainstream Rock) chart.

In 1984 Robert Plant would continue to perplex Led Zeppelin diehards. He formed The Honeydrippers, a supergroup including Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Nile Rodgers and Paul Shaffer(!) to record…an EP of ’50s covers. Their version of Phil Phillips’s 1959 “Sea of Love” went to #3; while of course Plant & Led Zeppelin were never much about singles, that song is Plant’s highest-charting work. We’ll see Plant again later in the ’80s.