The guitarist Eddie Vedder thought could compete with Jimmy Page: “He was right up there”
It doesn’t matter what kind of rock music you’re listening to; the influence of guitarists like Jimmy Page is there to be heard.
I don’t necessarily think that there’s an obligation for new bands to know everything about the pioneers of certain genres. More and more young people struggle to name songs by the likes of Led Zeppelin, but they continue to make decent rock music despite this blind spot. Do I think they’re missing out? Yes, of course. But I don’t think it necessarily means they’re incapable of making good music as a result.
The truth is, when you have a guitarist as influential as the likes of Jimmy Page, his style and his approach to the guitar are present in anyone who picks up a six-string, whether they know it or not. Light and Shade. That was his approach, and it’s something we see celebrated a great deal in modern music, as bands are more than ever willing to blend genres in order to achieve a range of feelings within their music.
“I had a lot of ideas from my days with The Yardbirds. The Yardbirds allowed me to improvise a lot in live performance, and I started building a textbook of ideas that I eventually used in Zeppelin,” explained Page when discussing his idea for Led Zeppelin.
“I wanted Zeppelin to be a marriage of blues, hard rock and acoustic music topped with heavy choruses – a combination that had never been done before,” he explained, “Lots of light and shade in the music.”
Blending genres might sound like common practice by today’s standards, but at the time, Page was really breaking new ground, and a lot of musicians from various genres, particularly in the worlds of rock and prog, found this new approach deeply inspiring and kept it with them when they began making their own music. Ian Anderson, for instance, said that Led Zeppelin showed Jethro Tull the way forward.
“I think what they showed to all their peer group as musicians was that there was, first of all, a very powerful and dramatic way to perform simple, direct rock music and also to introduce elements of more eclectic music,” said Anderson. “Because Zeppelin, near the beginning, there were a lot of elements of folk music, and Asian music, and African music that crept into their stuff.”
Of course, while the influence of Page is widely recognised, there are plenty of other guitarists who were just as influential to bands that don’t get this kind of credit. One of them is Peter Frampton, someone who has played lead guitar in a plethora of bands (including the likes of Humble Pie and The Herd), but who equally had a great deal of success as a solo artist, and Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam were particular fans, so much so that a lot of members of the band worked with Frampton, and they performed live with him on occasion.
When welcoming him on stage at one of their gigs, they addressed his underrated status and made the bold claim that he could easily rival Jimmy Page. “This gentleman was someone we looked up to before the Ramones,” said Vedder, “Some of our first guitar heroes, [like] Jimmy Page and Pete Townshend, he was right up there.”
More than anything, Frampton showed Pearl Jam just how effective a good live performance could be. There’s a real power behind rock music, and when channelled properly, even on something as homemade as a bootleg, it can be unignorable.
“It was one of reasons why we loved live records, and later we decided to release bootlegs because of his influence,” Vedder concluded. “He’s such an incredible human being on top of it.”
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