The moment that made Jimmy Page want to quit music for good: “I hated everything”
In 1975, the middle of music’s most unrelenting musical decade, it would have been hard to imagine a world without Led Zeppelin.
They were the definitive soundtrack of grand and opulent classic rock. There was something so fundamentally skilful about their sound, yet deeply futuristic and ultimately unbeatable. Jimmy Page’s guitar playing felt like the foundations of the instrument’s future and so no matter what was thrown their way, it seemed they would endure.
But like The Beatles before them, Zeppelin were a band destined to dominate the charts of a standalone decade. If the Liverpool band were the sound of the 1960s, the London group were the sound of the 1970s.
But by 1979, and their album In Through The Out Door, it became clear that the pistons of this musical juggernaut were beginning to misfire. Their attempt at sonic diversion, with Page’s much darker playing tendencies leading the way, fell somewhat flat on its face and the band were presented with the growing reality that they didn’t have a place in music’s next chapter.
It was a sobering realisation, given how important they had been in the 1970s but perhaps more so because of Page’s presence in the scene the decade before. Prior to banding Zeppelin together, Page had been somewhat of an unsung hero in the music scene, playing for The Yardbirds and writing songs for a whole host of stars. To think he might not have a place in the future felt completely absurd.
But then, the band’s powerhouse drummer John Bonham passed away. Not only was he irreplaceable, but the entire tragedy acted as somewhat of an emotional dagger to the heart of his bandmates, who felt both musically and personally at a loss. Absurd as it may have been, were Jimmy Page to have stepped down, this would have been as good a time as any.
“There was a point after that, where I hadn’t touched a guitar for ages,” he explained, when asked whether Bonham’s death and the end of the band signalled retirement. He added, “I hated everything, you know, the tragedy that had happened.”
“But I called up my old manager one day and said ‘look, get the Les Paul out of the storage, you know it’s about time I got back on it’. He went there and the case was empty, in fact somebody, they shouldn’t have done it, they took it out and borrowed it. It eventually reappeared, but when he came back and said the guitar is missing, I said that’s it, forget it, I’m finished.”
Eventually, Jimmy Page dusted off his plectrum and got back to work. But nothing that followed ever hit the mark quite like Zeppelin and so those ten heady years in the 1970s, is where his greatest moments would all exist. But it’s the present day work, the continued appetite to create music that allows that legacy to be so important. Had he vanished into thin air in 1980, never to be seen again, then who knows how we would have looked back on his work.
