“Light and shade”: Did Jimmy Page need to be a session musician to be successful?
One night in Sheffield, when the name Jimmy Page was dancing on the tips of tongues rather than cemented in rock history, the man himself was about to play a gig and collapsed. While on his first-ever tour with a band called Neil Christian and the Crusaders, Page was subjected to a life of late nights, partying and stress, which all proved too much for him. As a result, he hit the pavement and cut his tour short.
Page might have been frustrated at this, but it was actually one of the best things that could happen. By stopping plans to go back out on tour, he decided to turn his attention towards becoming a session musician. This meant that he was working with a range of different artists, playing various styles of music, and developing a broad taste.
Why did Led Zeppelin become as popular as they did? There are a number of different reasons. One of the main is that when you have a band filled with the minds of Jimmy Page, John Bonham, John Paul Jones, and Robert Plant, it’s likely you’re going to make some exceptionally good music. However, it’s not as simple as that.
Granted, the members of Led Zeppelin are all musical geniuses in their own right, but their talent needed to be channelled in the right way to make a sound that resonated with people so much. This came from Page, who had a clear idea as to what kind of sound he wanted to make with the band, a lot of which stemmed from his work as a session musician.
By working with such a range of artists, Page had been subjected to the broad nature of guitar music. Whether he was playing rock, the blues, R&B or slow acoustic ballads, he was homing in on his skills and working out what parts of these genres he enjoyed the most. Subsequently, when it came to merging the genres like Led Zeppelin did, he knew what bits would likely work and what wouldn’t. The overall tone Led Zeppelin ended up establishing was referred to as “light and shade”.
Before the band jammed together for the first time, Page knew what he wanted them to sound like. He took the work he had done as a session guitarist and brought it to The Yardbirds, which only gave him more clarity on what would likely work and what might be met with hesitation.
“I had a lot of ideas from my days with The Yardbirds,” said Page, “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.”
Page continued, discussing what kind of feel he wanted to achieve with the band, “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. Lots of light and shade in the music.”
When Page took that sound to his first band practice with Led Zeppelin, it came together beautifully because of how powerful each member was. However, without that initial blueprint drawn up from years of being a session musician, Page likely wouldn’t have known to put this style of music to the band.
It was evident it would work, as from the first song they played together, the band could tell they were knocking on the door of something groundbreaking. Plant said he believed he was part of a moment and was worried about letting it pass. “I could feel that something was happening to myself and to everyone else in the room,” he said, “It felt like we’d found something that we had to be very careful with because we might lose it”.
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