Heart’s Nancy Wilson walked out the first time she saw Led Zeppelin live

Heart‘s Nancy Wilson had quite a reaction to Led Zeppelin the first time she and her sister and bandmate, Ann Wilson, saw the band in concert.

While speaking to Premiere Guitar for the Jimmy Page episode of their 100 Guitarists podcast, Nancy shares that in May 1969 they went to see Fifth Dimension at the Green Lake Aqua Theater in Seattle, where Led Zeppelin was the opening act. They actually walked out because they thought frontman Robert Plant was being too racy.

“We were like, ‘Oh my God, the singer, he’s so suggestive,’” she said. “He’s got his shirt wide open, he’s got his bare 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, like, shocked.” 

She adds, “We were in a little folk band at the time, so we were from the suburbs, right. So we were kind of square, square little hippie chicks to be unenlightened, let’s just say. And so, we were like, ‘Oh, they’re so lewd. They’re just being so suggestive and lewd.'” 

But what put it over the top was Zeppelin’s performance of “The Lemon Song,” a track that appeared on their album Led Zeppelin II.

“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,” she said. “We were scandalized, and we had seen enough and we walked away.”

Their thoughts on Led Zeppelin apparently changed at some point. In fact, Ann and Nancy paid tribute to Led Zeppelin when they received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2012, performing the classic “Stairway to Heaven,” which featured Jason Bonham, son of Led Zeppelin’s late drummer John Bonham. The performance earned a standing ovation from Plant and later went viral on YouTube.