The one album Jimmy Page thought was a little shaky: “Robert’s voice in my head”
For most of the 1970s, Jimmy Page was one of the last guitarists in the world who lacked confidence. He could already hold his own in a group with Jeff Beck in The Yardbirds, and while Led Zeppelin started off as his bluesy brainchild, the sonic ground that he broke with them up into the 1980s is still known as some of the greatest rock music ever made. That didn’t mean that Page couldn’t see a few flaws, and he managed to notice a few kinks in the armour when working on the album Outrider.
Because if there’s one thing that Page loved more than anything, it was the idea of being in a group. After Zeppelin fell apart following Bonham’s death, it was a no-brainer for Page to just join another group, eventually working together with Paul Rogers from Bad Company for The Firm before working with even more rock giants in the future.
It’s easy to say that Page has a solo career in theory. Still, when you look at his track record, a lot of his best moments tend to come when he’s leaning on someone else, whether that’s working with David Coverdale for their collaborative record, coming back together with Robert Plant for Walking into Clarksdale, or even when he was sharing the stage with The Black Crowes in the 1990s.
After Rogers retreated back into his solo career and eventually started up his version of Bad Company, though, Page finally had time to work on his own on Outrider. While the focus was still on his genius licks, the album featured a revolving door of different vocalists on the tracks, including John Miles and Chris Farlowe on most of the tracks.
Even with Plant returning for the song ‘The Only One’, it does seem like Page is starting to find himself all over again. The riffs are still there, but whereas Plant could pull a melody out of the guitarist’s finest moments, a lot of the record can feel like Page jamming at points as he tries to play something that’s uniquely him yet completely different from Zeppelin.
Looking back on that record, he did think that the recorded version of the album didn’t have the same confidence as he used to have, saying, “When I was writing material for Led Zeppelin, I knew exactly what the approach was going to be, and I was writing songs with Robert’s voice in my head. I guess that’s where Outrider might sound a bit shaky.”
Just because he was finding himself doesn’t mean that the album is a total wash or anything. Yes, Plant’s feature on the album is a bit of a security blanket, but hearing Page drop the vocals altogether on songs like ‘Liquid Mercury’ sounds like the same kid who wrote epics like ‘Kashmir’ and ‘Ten Years Gone’ growing into a seasoned guitar veteran.
While the album remains one of the only official solo releases that Page ever made, it’s still a unique listen to hear him working outside his wheelhouse. He usually had other people to help sculpt his songs into what they were, but Outrider is the closest that anyone will get to hearing what the inside of Page’s brain sounds like.
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