The guitarist Jimmy Page labelled “easily the best” in their field
It’s never easy to pick out a future legend out in the wild. As much as people like to preach that their favourite artist is going to one day take over the entire genre and reshape the way that everyone thinks about music as a whole, it’s a hard call to make when the same person has people who can’t care less about what they are playing. Although Jimmy Page was able to reach across the aisle and become one of the biggest guitarists of all time, he knew that he was merely acceptable compared to his contemporaries.
Because as much as Page laid the foundation for rock and roll guitar, there were bound to be people who were taking music in a few different directions. Even in his blues wheelhouse, Page was more interested in making something that pushed himself forward, but if he was trying to make something within a rock context, Jeff Beck figured it was better to quote what was in his heart whenever he strapped on his Stratocaster.
And let’s not forget about Jimi Hendrix, either. Despite only having a few shared years on the circuit with him, no one could deny that Hendrix could play circles around nearly every single guitar player who ever lived, either through having a lot more ferocity in his playing or by creating textures that no other rock and roll act had ever heard before when busting down the door with ‘Purple Haze’.
That was all well and good for rock and roll, but many guitarists who wanted to take themselves seriously would often be going back to the world of jazz. After all, Miles Davis and John Coltrane were both masters of their instruments, and who’s to say that kind of dexterity couldn’t be translated to the fretboard? Thus, fusion was born, and everyone from Pat Metheny to Larry Carlton was able to show people the outer limits of what rock and roll could do.
“He was instinctively the best, I could tell.”
jimmy page
Still, few guitarists in the world managed to hold a candle next to John McLaughlin. Outside of playing alongside Davis, the Mahavishnu Orchestra was often a smorgasbord for any guitarist looking to learn new licks, either sprinkling in different runs that took people a long time to figure out or playing the odd jazz chord that left everyone completely dumbfounded.
Although Page had his moments of grandeur working with Zeppelin, he knew that McLaughlin’s playing was too good to even hope to touch, saying, “He was instinctively the best, I could tell. I didn’t listen to a lot of jazz—or it was selective, what I listened to—but I could tell from what I knew that he was easily the best that I was gonna hear or witness in front of me. He was the best one I was going to see, that’s for sure.”
But that shouldn’t downplay Page’s contributions to rock and roll, either. If anything, the fact that he wasn’t as proficient as McLaughlin may have led him to make some naive choices that no one else would have thought of, like the strange fingerpicking style of ‘Going to California’ or the orchestral descending lick in ‘Kashmir’.
McLaughlin may have studied under some of the best, but if you look at what Page has done, he seemed to be a guitar genius in a completely different way. The world of jazz may have been slightly alien to him, but he knew what he could get out of his instrument and was willing to push himself as hard as he could until he got what he wanted to hear.
