The band Jimmy Page said no one could knock: “You can’t argue with what they did”
There’s no such thing as musical perfection. The best songs known to man are always the ones where you can hear someone’s individual personality through all the sonic blemishes, but Jimmy Page felt that the best pop artists were the ones who truly learned to craft their tunes into sonic masterpieces.
After all, Page was no stranger to building his songs from the ground up with Led Zeppelin. Whatever the band was going to be at the end of the 1960s, Page knew that it wasn’t going to be following the same model that The Yardbirds had been doing for years, and once he started working with Robert Plant on songs, tracks like ‘Dazed and Confused’ and ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’ went from being decent cover songs to massive exercises whenever they performed them.
Once Page started to craft his own music, though, he never sought to fit everything into a pop formula. The best music ever created never had to cater to a three-minute window, and when looking through Zeppelin’s catalogue, the best moments come when they stretch things out, whether that’s the magnificent journey of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ or the majesty of listening to ‘Kashmir’.
That’s not to say there wasn’t a place for artists who could take chances in that timeframe. It wasn’t Page’s wheelhouse by any stretch, but acts like The Beatles had taken the pop song everywhere it could possibly go when they were together. And while the Fab Four have never been replaced in the world of pop, Page could appreciate how the pop formula was shifting in the 1970s.
Admittedly, there was going to be some high-grade cheese on the charts alongside the biggest rock bands of all time, but ABBA managed to take a lot more chances than most would think. All rock purists may have been infuriated when songs like ‘Dancing Queen’ or ‘SOS’ came on the radio, but for what it’s worth, Page did give the band a thumbs-up compared to everything else on the charts.
He was probably never going to add a guitar line to one of their songs, but Page did see a few similarities between Zeppelin and ABBA in the way that they constructed their songs to perfection, saying, “You can’t argue with what they did. It’s just so good. It was so cleverly put together. And it’s the musicianship – it’s a textbook for musicians.” And it’s not like the band couldn’t change things up every now and again.
Even if we ignore the glorious key changes that their greatest songs had, ABBA’s real superpower was being able to play around with time signatures. In a world where everything needed to be in 4/4 or people would stop caring, songs like ‘Chiquitita’ and ‘SOS’ would end up throwing in a few extra bars into their musical phrases that made everyone perk up a little bit more whenever their songs came on.
It’s not like they were going to come up with strange guitar tunings like Page did or write their own mini epics, but there was still room for them to push music forward in the world of pop. Because if there’s one thing that Page and ABBA both knew, it’s that the fans should be expecting the unexpected whenever they made a record.
