The 1970 Led Zeppelin song Jimmy Page insisted was his alone: “An old emotional upheaval”
The path that Jimmy Page took from a young session professional to a world-famous musician led him down a circuitous path. Two of his most famous bands, Led Zeppelin and The Yardbirds, share rock and roll DNA.
With that, a number of Page’s songwriting credits are contested because they rather blatantly rip off old blues songs. Page’s direction wasn’t always clear, but once he strapped on a guitar and took to the stage, nobody could deny the power and genius that he was conveying.
Even so, Page’s legacy has always carried a degree of complexity. While his innovations as a guitarist and producer helped redefine rock music, questions surrounding authorship and musical borrowing have followed him throughout his career, particularly regarding some of Led Zeppelin’s most celebrated songs.
Page was the man that ran Led Zeppelin from the inside. He assembled the group, picking up old session pal John Paul Jones while handpicking Robert Plant and John Bonham along the way. Given his leadership, Page’s name appears in the songwriting credits for nearly all of the band’s music, barring some later-period songs where he was dealing with a debilitating heroin addiction. There was no Led Zeppelin without Page, and as the band’s creative director/producer/guitar hero, he proved it with every album.
His influence extended far beyond simply playing guitar. Page oversaw arrangements, production decisions and the band’s overall artistic direction, helping transform Led Zeppelin into one of the most distinctive and commercially successful acts in rock history.
There are only two songs in the Led Zeppelin catalogue that credit Page alone as the song’s writer. One is ‘Dazed and Confused’, which should appear as an immediate red flag. ‘Dazed and Confused’ was originally written by folk singer Jake Holmes, with Page rearranging the track and adding some of his own lyrics. Holmes later sued and received an “Inspired by” credit, along with royalties. The other song credited solely to Page is ‘Tangerine’ from Led Zeppelin III, but that also has some problems.
The case became one of several legal disputes that fuelled wider debates about Led Zeppelin’s relationship with blues and folk traditions. While the band frequently transformed their influences into something new, critics have long argued that some of those influences were not always adequately acknowledged.
‘Tangerine’ began its life as ‘Knowing That I’m Losing You’, a song recorded by The Yardbirds in the late 1960s. Page composed the song’s chord progression, but the first version of the track had lyrics written by vocalist Keith Relf. Page later claimed that he had written his own lyrics when the song transformed into ‘Tangerine’ a few years later. “I’d written it after an old emotional upheaval, and I just changed a few of the lyrics for the new version,” Page claimed in Led Zeppelin: The Official Biography.
However, Relf’s former bandmates in The Yardbirds assert that some of Relf’s lyrics from ‘Knowing That I’m Losing You’ eventually made their way into ‘Tangerine’. When Page assembled the 2017 compilation album Yardbirds ’68, he included ‘Knowing That I’m Losing You’ but wiped Relf’s vocals from the final mix, making it impossible to compare the versions and raising suspicions that Page did so on purpose to avoid giving Relf credit for ‘Tangerine’.
The controversy surrounding ‘Tangerine’ may never be fully resolved, but it highlights a recurring theme in discussions about Page’s career. His greatest achievements often emerged from reshaping existing ideas into something larger and more ambitious, yet questions over where inspiration ends and authorship begins continue to shadow parts of his remarkable catalogue.
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