The classic Led Zeppelin song that only credits Jimmy Page: “To me, Led Zeppelin is Jimmy Page”
Keith Richards once controversially proclaimed, “To me, Led Zeppelin is Jimmy Page if you wanna cut the story short.” While that doesn’t give much credit to the vocal highwire acts of Robert Plant, the thunder of John Bonham’s signature drums, or John Paul Jones’ intricate arrangements, perhaps structurally, it does hold a grain of truth. His guitar was the world of Led Zep, and his bandmates were characters within it.
There is something ethereal about Page’s dark and mystic playing that brought a unique identity to the band. The likes of Eddie Van Halen might have called his style a little sloppy in retrospect, but the counter-argument is that it contained untold depth and a filagreed nuance that outstripped any traditional ideals of refinement. Page’s playing is a world unto its own—channelling the troubling swirl of the zeitgeist.
No track showcases this quite like ‘Black Mountain Side’, the instrumental effort where Page is the only credited band member for the song. It might be just an acoustic performance backed by Viram Jasani on tabla, but it sure says a lot about the world in myriad ways—not least the fact that the band sit it out in favour of an otherworldly backing by a Kenyan-born Indian composer.
It has long been established that society seeps into art long before art is wrung back out as an era’s ‘culture’. Even Aristotle said so when he laid down his mantra: “The purpose of art is to represent the meaning of things. This represents true reality, not external aspects.” Little did he know that his statement would beget a bunch of scallies from Birmingham who would change the world with heavy metal music—Page’s guitar serving as a conduit of capitalist realism.
You see, the flower power of Laurel Canyon’s counterculture had no place amid the heavy industry and wartime rubble of Birmingham, where a daisy change would be covered in soot a few minutes before it could be placed in anyone’s hair. Disillusioned by this scene, Page and his peers over in neighbouring bands like Black Sabbath thought about capturing the true reality of their own existence. That isn’t all that easy; how do you capture the rough and tumble of the post-war midlands? The closest thing was possibly the blues. So, Page learnt how to play them with such perfection that he could mutate the age-old artform into something he could call his own. Brummie blues, if you will.
In searching the past, looking for answers about an increasingly uncertain future, Page found an old Irish folk song called ‘Down by Blackwaterside’ that he set about twisting with his own exotic-inspired arrangement. Along with the help of Bert Jansch, Page arrived at a strange D-A-D-G-A-D interpretation. He then sent the song packing to foreign lands, in some ways a signifier of counterculture’s dreams about ‘the other’, an unknown alternative to tradition.
But, with the future so uncertain, it is noteworthy that Page delved into the past to try and project something new. What did a fresh future look like in the late 1960s, with counterculture waning and brutalist factories still rising in his homelands? Perhaps all beauty lingered in the past, and the only sense of progress was reinvention rather than ‘invention’—the framework of the world was fixed, and you were forced to rustle up something new by cooking age-old ingredients in a new, earnest way. This is why Page’s guitar sounds so thoroughly Promethean yet so tied to tradition.
“I wasn’t totally original on that,” he even admitted to Guitar Player in 1977. “It had been done in the folk clubs a lot; Annie Briggs was the first one that I heard do that riff. I was playing it as well, and then there was Bert Jansch’s version. He’s the one who crystallized all the acoustic playing, as far as I’m concerned. Those first few albums of his were absolutely brilliant.” He learnt from the brilliance and somehow augmented it with a poetic relevance that mirrored the strange acceptance of the times that the revolution of counterculture would, inevitably, result in more of the same, just different variations.
This approach typifies Led Zeppelin and how Page, as their talisman, mystically delved into the past and mingled it with a swirling, previously unheard present. Songs don’t come much more traditional and dogeared than ‘Black Mountain Side’, but as the reinvented name alone suggests, it was also somehow different to everything that had come before.
Not bad for a little experimental solo effort backed by a man he barely knew on an instrument he had only just learnt about.
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