The key man in Led Zeppelin, according to Pete Townshend
“We first played together in a small room on Gerrard Street, a basement room, which is now Chinatown,” said John Paul Jones when discussing his first rehearsal with what would become Led Zeppelin. “There was just wall-to-wall amplifiers, and a space for the door – and that was it. Literally, it was everyone looking at each other – ‘What shall we play?’… There was an old Yardbirds tune called ‘Train Kept a Rollin’… The whole room just exploded.”
Led Zeppelin is one of the few bands whose success cannot be pinned down to one specific member/moment. There were a lot of things that had to go right for Led Zeppelin to be successful. They all clicked during that first band session because, up until that moment, they had all been exposed to various kinds of music and were willing to be in a band that pushed the boundaries of rock.
Each individual member was an exceptional musician in their own right and was considered one of the best in their field. However, it wasn’t just that they could play on their own; when their talents merged, rather than creating a mess, it made a cohesive sound that was pinned together and consistent. Without each member of Led Zeppelin, the band wouldn’t have worked, but that doesn’t stop persistent debates about who the most influential figure was.
Pete Townshend was one of the driving creative forces behind The Who and, as such, can listen to a band and understand who is contributing to what aspects of the music. He has a fondness for one member of Led Zeppelin and credits him as one of the band’s key members: the often-overlooked bassist John Paul Jones.
“The person that I’ve thought a lot about since John Bonham’s death is John Paul Jones,” he said. “He’s a beautiful-looking man and a beautiful musician. He’s a fantastic experimenter in modern electronic music and other things, and he’s sort of been sitting there… I think he was much more in the front line of Led Zeppelin music on keyboard work because nobody else in the band played it.”
Townshend isn’t the only person who believes that Jones was a quintessential part of the band’s success. Geddy Lee, the famous bassist for Rush, also believes that John Paul Jones was one of the band’s most important members, not just because he was a good bassist but also because he provided a rhythm structure for an otherwise quite messy and chaotic sound.
“The thing that held the whole thing down was John Paul Jones bass playing,” he said, “So if you listen to ‘How Many More Times’, I mean, no matter how wild that song gets at times, there’s John Paul Jones holding it all down in such a fluid way.”
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