“They really are incredible”: The band Jimmy Page called the essence of rock and roll
There are set rules when it comes to pure rock and roll. Though many people would be happy to tell you when something is or isn’t traditional rock, there are just as many authentic rock acts still willing to push the envelope and challenge what everyone traditionally thinks of as true rock and roll music. Jimmy Page is more than capable of doing whatever the hell he wants under the rock umbrella, but if you ask him, everything that rock and roll is can be found in ZZ Top.
If there’s one bit of connective tissue running throughout every layer of rock, though, it’s the blues. As far as back as the first acts to distort their electric guitars, they had all started with a traditional bluesy riff and started working with that foundation, usually woodshedding their ideas by talking about how a woman did them wrong or the dangers of being played for a fool in a relationship.
Judging by that logic, though, ZZ Top started off in a very different place than where they ended up. In fact, they actually were on a slightly parallel track with Page, with both of them starting to embrace the sound of psychedelia, with the Led Zeppelin guitarist initially bending minds on The Yardbirds’s ‘Heart Full of Soul’ and Billy Gibbons cutting his teeth in The Moving Sidewalks.
Once they figured out that all they really needed was a loud guitar amp and a boatload of attitude, that’s when the beards came out, and things started to get a whole lot more bluesy. Listening back to albums like Tres Hombres, some of their best material comes from them only using three chords, just like Muddy Waters and BB King did before them. Hell, sometimes they didn’t even need more than one chord, with ‘La Grange’ being a textbook of what you can do with just one note.
While Zeppelin continued to innovate every time they went into the studio, ZZ Top never really needed to stray that far from the blues to get to where they needed to go. Even when they were made over for MTV with the massive suits and the Hotrod cars, all of their tunes were still just based around the same blues structure, only with a bit more sheen on the hood.
Although Page was more interested in expanding his vocabulary on the guitar whenever he played, he admitted that ZZ Top was the key band that he thought of when it came to unadulterated rock and roll, saying, “I think that’s what rock ‘n’ roll is all about. They really are incredible. They have great music, really fine playing, really solid, and they have a sense of humour as well. They’re damn fine. And everyone is enjoying it, and they’re enjoying themselves.”
At the same time, some of the subtle pieces of Page’s playing have managed to take some pieces of Gibbons’s style. They’re usually pretty discreet, but every time that Page plays a note and it gets that greasy pitch harmonic sound, you’d better believe that came from either listening to Gibbons play or them pulling from the same source.
You can call it stealing if you want, but Page learned a long time ago that true geniuses always borrow from what has come before. Because if the blues masters already made their songs five times better than you ever could, why not ride their coattails just a little bit?
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