John Paul Jones on songwriting: “Led Zeppelin wasn’t song-based”
The creative process behind Led Zeppelin was both well-known and ensconced in mystery. The writing credits were plain as day: Robert Plant and Jimmy Page were the main parties responsible for songwriting, while John Paul Jones took on a more pronounced role in the process during the latter part of the band’s career. John Bonham received a few credits in the early days of Led Zeppelin, but his songwriting contributions had largely been dispensed of by the mid-1970s.
Despite this, Jones remembered Bonham being the lynchpin for the band’s songs, which often came out of jams. “I’d played with good drummers before, but I realised Bonzo was a killer drummer from the word go,” Jones told Mojo Magazine in 2007. “It was a lot of fun playing with someone so shit-hot with such great musicality; he knew what he was doing – big time. Jimmy definitely had a vision of how things should be, and we played our part but brought our own stuff to it.”
“At first we were all writing songs together. Unlike a lot of other bands, Led Zeppelin wasn’t song-based but performance-based,” Jones adds. “The Who are song-based; it almost doesn’t matter who played them, as we see now with them being only two original members. Whereas with Led Zeppelin, other people playing the songs don’t really translate that well.”
Jones also shed some light on the specifics of the Led Zeppelin writing process. “Robert was a writer on every song as the only person who wrote lyrics; nobody else would do it,” he said. “There was a period after one tour when Bonzo and I went back to our families and Jimmy and Robert went away to their cottage and wrote the songs on Led Zeppelin III, so that became a songwriting partnership. Generally whoever had a riff would bring it in, and if it worked it would make the album. And music would emerge in jams and be worked on in sections.
Despite not being as heavily credited as Page and Plant, Jones claimed that his contributions went beyond the official credits. “On songwriting credits, my input was more than it would seem, as was Bonzo’s – much more,” Jones said. “The four of us were very tight. Because Jimmy and Robert were out front, they got most of the photographs. Robert always used to say I should come out to the front, which I did for the first number.”
“But my problem was I couldn’t hear the drums. I like to be close to the drummer so I’d always move back,” Jones concluded. “You needed eye contact. The monitors back then were appalling, but even today with sophisticated monitoring I still like to be right next to the drums. I like to feel the wind from the bass drum!”
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