The elusive story of how John Paul Jones joined Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin aren’t a band; they’re a moment in time. Everything had to go right for the world to be blessed with their music. If there were different members, if the band’s relationship to music had been different, if the timing had been off, the band wouldn’t have had the same impact that they did. They changed the way people saw rock music, but for audiences to be okay with these changes, everything had to be perfect. Lucky for them, it was.
The band knew that they were on to something from their very first band practice. Page went into the session knowing the kind of sound they were looking for. “I wanted Zeppelin to be a marriage of blues, hard rock and acoustic music topped with heavy choruses,” he said, “A combination that had never been done before. Lots of light and shade in the music.”
Page had developed a desire to make this kind of music following his stint as a session musician and during his time in The Yardbirds, which is all well and good, but he needed the right people on board to bring this vision to life. One of the most important band members of Led Zeppelin (who is also the most commonly overlooked) is John Paul Jones.
Led Zeppelin thrived on chaos. Jimmy Page was a guitar wizard, Robert Plant was a vocal acrobat, and John Bonham ripped apart the drumming rule book before writing his own. They were all exceptional musicians in their own right, but their individual sounds needed to come together in a way that was cohesive and could be enjoyed by all. They found John Paul Jones, someone who could provide a robust rhythm section amongst the chaos, holding the entire sound together.
The story of how he came to join the band remains somewhat elusive. Supposedly, it’s information that he doesn’t see as too critical, given the music they went on to make is what defined Led Zeppelin; however, it is still something fans like to know. The most likely story is that his partner told him about the opening, and he called Jimmy Page (who was well-known on the music circuit at the time), although he told varying stories to reporters, so it’s tough to pin down an accurate version of events.
After stepping away from music for some time, his partner got bored seeing him moping around the house. “’Why don’t you join a band?’ And I said, ‘There’s no bands I want to join, what are you talking about?’” Jones said when asked about how he came to be in Led Zeppelin. “She said, ‘Well, look, I think it was in Disc, Jimmy Page is forming a group… Why don’t you give him a ring?’ So I rang him.”
Jones said that in that conversation with Page, he was told no one was in the band yet, but he was meeting Robert Plant, and Robert Plant knew a drummer. It all seems a bit too easy for it to be the building block for one of the most innovative rock bands of all time, and biographer Stephen Davies, in his book Hammer of the Gods, agrees.
“If this account seems somewhat fey and tongue in cheek,” he writes, “Consider that the dry-humoured Jones told another interviewer he got the job as bassist in Led Zeppelin after he answered an ad in Melody Maker.”
We may never have the full scope of facts, but it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the band got together, saw their potential as a group, and gave the world some of the best music it has ever experienced. It also helps that Jones isn’t shy when talking about that first Led Zeppelin band practice: “The whole room just exploded.”
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