The musicians Jimmy Page didn’t want to be associated with: “I made it very clear”
Not every musician is meant to work together with everybody. Despite people like David Bowie being able to transform themselves into any kind of performer they wanted to, no one was coming to someone like Lemmy and expecting them to write the next major hit for Celine Dion or anything. However, even for as much ground as Jimmy Page covered throughout his career, he knew that there were some artists that he would rather stay away from.
Before Page was even out of The Yardbirds, though, he had a set idea of what he wanted out of his music. Part of the appeal of forming Led Zeppelin was that there were no set rules for where he could go, and while a lot of it came back to traditional blues, no one was going to make the kind of blistering hard rock that came out of tunes like ‘Black Dog’ or match the majesty of ‘Kashmir’.
That kind of versatility only comes from someone who has been around the block in terms of session scenes. Even though Page had found his niche in Zeppelin, one of his greatest strengths was being able to shoehorn his guitar into any situation, and if someone could work with both Shirley Bassey and Donovan and still make it work, there was hardly anything that he couldn’t cover.
But by the time that Zeppelin was storming up the charts, the pop charts were also getting far more wholesome. While the bad boy reputation of their backstage antics have become the stuff of legend, the rest of America was busy watching Sonny and Cher play tunes like ‘I Got You Babe,’ which may as well have been the inverse of what tunes like ‘Whole Lotta Love’ were supposed to be.
That didn’t mean there wasn’t some overlap, though. Regardless of how many classics Zeppelin was spitting out, they were still tied to Atlantic Records, which meant they were getting the same kind of press coverage that Sonny and Cher were getting, albeit in very different markets. Even if they shared the same parent company, Page made it explicitly clear that he didn’t want anything to do with the pop couple when he started out.
What he made needed to be focused on music, and seeing his face next to their variety show was the last thing on his mind, saying, “[Atlantic] were aware of my work with the Yardbirds because they were pretty hip people, so they were very interested. And I made it very clear to them that I wanted to be on Atlantic rather than their rock label, Atco, which had bands like Sonny and Cher and Cream. I didn’t want to be lumped in with those people. I wanted to be associated with something more classic.”
Then again, Cher has turned herself into a different version of a classic artist over the years. While ‘Stairway to Heaven’ will be known amongst rock fans and a curse upon Guitar Centers until the end of time, there are still bound to be millions of people willing to belt out every line of ‘If I Could Turn Back Time’ or ‘Believe’ once they’ve had enough drinks in them.
They both stood the test of time, but Page was more concerned with legacy. Cher had gone through many different periods and had become virtually indestructible chart-wise, but Zeppelin would always be known as the bad boys who didn’t go along with the program and did everything they could to push themselves and rock and roll forward.
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