The Led Zeppelin album Jimmy Page called a “tour de force”
Over the many decades since Led Zeppelin first emerged, immense mythology has been built around the story of the band’s beginning. It’s claimed that they were destined for greatness due to the prestige of the individual members prior to them joining forces. However, that isn’t strictly true, and Led Zeppelin had everything to prove.
Admittedly, Jimmy Page was a known commodity thanks to his extensive session work on the London music scene before their formation, but he was far from a household name. He’d been a member of The Yardbirds and played on records with The Who and The Kinks as a session musician, but this by no means guaranteed him a ticket to the big time.
While musical circles were well aware of Page’s magnificence as a guitarist, his prowess would have counted for nothing if he didn’t gel with his new bandmates. Furthermore, Robert Plant wasn’t even Page’s first choice to be the band’s vocalist, and he was only recruited for the role after Terry Reid shunned a proposal to become Led Zeppelin’s frontman.
Plant had previously fronted Band of Joy, which featured Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham on drums, but both men had little reputation among those who held the cards in the music industry. Lastly, John Paul Jones had carved out somewhat of a name for himself as a bassist due to session work; however, his prominence was slight compared to Page.
Therefore, with their eponymous first album, released in 1969, Led Zeppelin had to race out of the gates and prove themselves on their inaugural project. Although he wasn’t the vocalist, nobody questioned Page being the group’s star attraction at this point of their tenure, and on Led Zeppelin, they rammed this point home in no uncertain terms.
As Page dominated the conversation surrounding Led Zeppelin, they ensured that he lived up to the listeners’ expectations, who demanded his breathtaking skillset on their first LP. On tracks such as ‘Communication Breakdown‘, ‘Good Times Bad Times’, and ‘Dazed and Confused’, Page proved he was the real deal and could compete with Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton.
However, while Page was immensely proud of what Led Zeppelin successfully created with their first album, he was acutely aware that they needed to evolve and that everybody in the band needed to have the chance to showcase their respective talents.
In a conversation with the Los Angeles Times in 2008, Page explained the challenges that faced Led Zeppelin with their debut album and the aims they set out to achieve. “They were not relatively unknown – they were not known at all. No one knew who they were,” Page said of his bandmates. “When the Yardbirds folded, I heard the news here in L.A. I wanted to get a band together in which everyone was phenomenal. The first album was a guitar tour de force – that is what it was supposed to be – but I didn’t want to do that at the expense of the other musicians.”
Although the limelight was on him, Page had one central ambition for Led Zeppelin: “I wanted it to be a band. It was a band.”
As a collective unit, there’s no doubt that Led Zeppelin was indeed a band of the highest calibre rather than Page’s plaything. He may have been their lead guitarist, chief songwriter, and their producer during the later years, but the group were still a democracy. It wasn’t his way or the highway, and every member’s voice held the same level of weight. Over their decade at the top of the mountain, they all eventually exhibited their marvellous musicality, but it was paramount to primarily make a spectacle of Page on their debut.
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