“Always played the right thing”: The one guitarist Jimmy Page called perfect
No artist can really claim to reach perfection when they walk into the studio. It’s anyone’s guess whether an audience will see something in a band’s music, to begin with, and even if they claim to hit the nail on the head, there are bound to be new kids on the block that take what they do and do it miles better. Even though Jimmy Page never took his title of guitar hero all that seriously, he thought that the closest anyone got to fine-tuning what a guitar could do went back to the days of the blues.
Because if we’re talking about Zeppelin, everything circles back to those three chords that started rock and roll. Regardless of how much they dabbled in everything from world music to hard rock to folk music in places, Page wouldn’t have existed if not for people like Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy coming before him.
Even when looking at his past relationship with The Yardbirds, he was still comfortable working in that blues format with Jeff Beck at his side. Eric Clapton had already departed to work on something more mind-expanding with Cream, but as Page stepped up with the psychedelic ‘Heart Full of Soul’, he was still playing from that same pentatonic box that every single rock guitarist starts out with.
Listening to many blues musicians, though, that one scale was really all you needed. There were people like Stevie Ray Vaughan who took the genre to new heights, but as long as you added one little note to the scale, there was a good chance that someone could play the vocabulary of everyone from Robert Johnson to BB King.
As for Howlin’ Wolf, though, he had a secret weapon in Hubert Sumlin. Although his style wasn’t far from musically complex, he needed to make something that would stand out next to that booming blues voice, and he managed to get tones out of his guitar that actually managed to hold their own next to the borderline-cartoony sounds of Wolf’s thick baritone.
While Page had sung the praises of everyone from BB King to Buddy Guy in the past, he felt that Sumlin had a certain spice that no other guitarist could really touch, telling Guitar World, “Now that I have said all of that, I am missing one important person — Hubert Sumlin. I LOVED Hubert Sumlin. And what a compliment he was to Howlin Wolf’s voice. He always played the right thing at the right time. Perfect.”
But that kind of complementary role is something that all guitarists need to learn. Looking back at the greatest guitarist/singer combinations, it’s always about having a conversation with music half the time, whether Keith Richards giving the perfect riff for Mick Jagger to lay his vocal on top of or Page and Robert Plant playing a guitar and vocal duet throughout most of ‘You Shook Me’.
That’s because rock isn’t solely about making the loudest and most aggressive music that anyone has ever heard. It was still about telling a story with sound, and in Sumlin, guitarists were getting some of their first lessons in how to play off the singer.
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