How Jeff Buckley risked death in front of Led Zeppelin: “Oh shit!”
“My main music influences?” Jeff Buckley once said, repeating the question that had just been asked of him. “Love, anger, depression, joy… And Zeppelin.”
Buckley was up front with his admiration for Led Zeppelin, as were plenty of other fans who found themselves moved by the rock band. The four-piece, made up of Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Bonham, and John Paul Jones, is one of the most important rock bands of all time. They didn’t just make good rock music, it went much further than that, as they showed how fucking far people could push the genre.
Jimmy Page brought the original idea of the band to the table, as he wanted to create a goddamn hard rock outfit that explored different genres of music. It still kept the love of rock at the heart of everything, but it also used various time signatures, song structures and styles of music in a bid to deliver something completely different to the world of music. Their first rehearsal was in a basement in Chinatown, and it became apparent that they had stumbled across something special.
While things started slow, as soon as they started jamming to an old Yardbirds tune, it became clear to each member just how good what they had happened across was. “There was an old Yardbirds tune,” said John Paul Jones, recalling their first session, “called ‘Train Kept a Rolling’… The whole room just exploded.”
Robert Plant agreed, admitting he was hesitant to play too much once they had come across this special sound at risk of letting it slip away. “I remember the little room, all I can remember it was hot and it sounded good – very exciting and very challenging,” said Plant. “Because I could feel that something was happening to myself and to everyone else in the room. It felt like we’d found something that we had to be very careful with because we might lose it.”
This sound resonated around the world. People didn’t just see Led Zeppelin as an exciting new band stirring up shit on the scene in ways never seen before, they saw them as the Godfathers of this new style of rock music. They paved the way for musicians who wanted to step outside the sloppy realms of standard chart-topping music and instead explore how they could merge different genres in a bid to make something brand new. One of these budding musicians would wind up being Jeff Buckley, who was always very open about his love for Led Zeppelin.
Many Led Zeppelin fans were devastated when the band split up following the death of John Bonham, and those fans have been left equally devastated by the band’s reluctance to do any kind of reunion shows. Aside from the one-off concert for different charitable causes, Led Zeppelin have been left to drift off into the stuff of legend. The closest fans came to enjoying a reunion was in the ‘90s when Robert Plant and Jimmy Page started touring together as a duo, playing various Led Zeppelin songs to celebrate being included in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame.
One of these duo shows took Plant and Page to a festival in France, where Jeff Buckley finally had the chance to see them. He was playing on the same stage as Ben Harper, and asked Harper if they could run to see Zeppelin as soon as both their collective sets were done. Harper, who was also a big fan, agreed to meet Buckley after his set. However, when Harper started looking for Buckley, he couldn’t seem to find him.
Recalling, “After Jeff’s show, I go around, I’m in the pit. We’re looking for Jeff constantly, trying to watch the show, trying to look for Jeff.” With no luck finding Buckley, Harper starts enjoying the show, and in doing so, catches sight of the singer watching his favourite band with a view that anyone else would envy.
“We looked up, out of my periphery… oh shit!” Harper concluded, “There’s Jeff, all the way up, off the scaffolding. Zeppelin is at full throttle, and Jeff is there with every decibel coursing through his veins. You could call it death-defying.”
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