The one musician Jack White called more punk than Sex Pistols: “Pretty bold”
Jack White’s approach to rock and roll was always unconventional. As a child of every blues artist that came before him, he channelled this heritage into The White Stripes, a band that thrived on doing the most with minimal resources. White’s mentality of using only a few blues licks might seem like the punk version of the blues, yet he still considered one of the most important punks he ever heard to be Jimmy Page.
Granted, saying that Jimmy Page influenced any guitar player is a bit like saying water is wet at this point. There are certainly people who went against Page’s model because they didn’t like what he stood for, but his way of turning a riff inside out is why songs are based on a simple guitar riff today.
White may have been familiar with the genesis of punk all the way back to the days of The Stooges but acts like Ramones, and Sex Pistols were meant to rally against what Zeppelin was doing. Whereas most of them lived in limousines for most of their lives, this is what music still sounded like in the clubs whenever someone went out on the town.
White certainly had that same fire, but one of the key similarities between him and Page is how much they were willing to go against the grain. It’s one thing to be able to play the blues reasonably well, but Page was the one breaking down the doors years before White knew what a guitar was, whether that meant playing around with how a song was mixed or turning in solos that involved him raking the strings with a violin bow or playing behind the nut of the guitar to bend the pitch of the open strings.
For all of the rock and roll swagger he’s known for, White saw a bit of punk music in how Page approached the instrument, saying, “The genius of Jimmy that people are always missing is of the anti-establishment punk things he was doing. Things like releasing records with no information and no writing on the cover. I mean, that’s pretty bold. It’s a lot more punk than the Sex Pistols signing a contract in front of Buckingham Palace.”
Where most people followed the Sex Pistols’ model for what a punk group should be, White knew that punk rock didn’t have to be about being able to play the bare minimum on an instrument. This was about stripping the music back to fundamentals, but that also meant being open to making something more chaotic like ‘Fell In Love With a Girl’.
In fact, there are probably a few licks in ‘Ball and Biscuit’ that owe a debt to Page’s solos on tracks like ‘Dazed and Confused’ or ‘Whole Lotta Love’. Even years after he made a name for himself, not many get White’s opportunity to see how a guitar hero operates firsthand, eventually working with him on the documentary It Might Get Loud and hearing how Page came up with his classic licks.
However, where most artists looked to be idolised, Page wasn’t focusing on his status as a guitar hero at the time. He was just looking to make the wildest sounds to come out of a guitar, and even if he made his millions off it, it was that adventurous spirit that drove him as much as it did The Clash in their prime.
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