Dave Grohl on the guitarist who took things to a “whole new level” beyond Jimi Hendrix
In order to be an innovator of music, you first have to be a scholar. Dave Grohl has always purveyed the eclectic riches of modern music and its unfurling development, prescribing the following three records as the perfect music education for anyone: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, Back in Black by AC/DC, and Saturday Night Fever by the Bee Gees. Having studied the lessons of these classics and many more, he was ready to foist the revolution of grunge onto the world with Nirvana.
This is a familiar tale: innovation often doesn’t come from technical proficiency alone but a combination of unique skill and a developmental outlook regarding how music can find its next chapter. For instance, Grohl opines that “heavy metal would not exist without Led Zeppelin, and if it did, it would suck. Led Zeppelin were more than just a band—they were the perfect combination of the most intense elements: passion and mystery and expertise. It always seemed like Led Zeppelin were searching for something.”
They found many things as they pushed on. Jimi Hendrix had, indeed, furthered what was technically possible with guitar music. His muse was a psychedelic twist to the blues. However, this was largely a marriage of two existing genres. Whereas Grohl thinks that Page looked at Hendrix’s brilliance with the blues and figured, ‘Well, what can I do with that that’s entirely new?’ Now, we are reaping the benefits of that, but for a period, it was ahead of its time.
“They were never critically acclaimed in their day,” Grohl explains in Rolling Stone, “Because they were too experimental and they were too fringe. In 1968 and ’69, there was some freaky shit going on, but Zeppelin were the freakiest. I consider Jimmy Page freakier than Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix was a genius on fire, whereas Page was a genius possessed. Zeppelin concerts and albums were like exorcisms for them.”
He continues his praise for the outlandish band by stating: “People had their asses blown out by Hendrix and Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton, but Page took it to a whole new level, and he did it in such a beautifully human and imperfect way. He plays the guitar like an old bluesman on acid. When I listen to Zeppelin bootlegs, his solos can make me laugh or they can make me tear up.”
He concludes: “Page doesn’t just use his guitar as an instrument. For him, it’s like some sort of emotional translator.” This is indicative of Page’s own guitar philosophy, as he says himself: “I’ve never mastered the guitar. Either I was playing it, or it was playing me; it depends how you look at it.”
He doesn’t mean that flippantly either, Page doesn’t look to hone his skill insomuch as he looks to expand them. “If I pick up a guitar, I don’t practice scales. I never have,” Page says. “I come up with something I haven’t done before, new approaches to chord sequences, riffs, rhythms, so it becomes composition. It’s not like the music I’m doing is just a single thread.”
This was the central core of what Led Zeppelin were all about. The world had changed since the blues first emerged. While the oppression that spawn it emotionally was still rampant, heavy industry had made the world louder, and music had to reflect this was the feeling. So, it was this that Page wanted channel rather than ‘the best blues’. As he says, “Let me explain something about guitar playing. Everyone’s got their own character, and that’s the thing that’s amazed me about guitar playing since the day I first picked it up. Everyone’s approach to what can come out of six strings is different from another person, but it’s all valid.”
This connective capacity, according to Grohl, to play with the form with total individualism is what made Page the person who took music to a “whole new level”. And I’ll be damned if it isn’t an approach pretty close to how Kurt Cobain defined the word ‘Nirvana’: “Punk is musical freedom. It’s saying, doing and playing what you want. In Webster’s terms, ‘nirvana’ means freedom from pain, suffering and the external world, and that’s pretty close to my definition of Punk Rock.”
