The Black Crowes: the band that gave Jimmy Page “a thrill”
The studio technicians of the world are always somewhat cursed whenever going out on the road. People like The Beatles and The Beach Boys could have gone out on the road after making stuff like Sgt Peppers and Pet Sounds, respectively, but what would be the point when all they had to look forward to was some lacklustre version of what they laid down in the studio. Although Jimmy Page never could equal the sounds he heard in his head whenever Led Zeppelin played live, he felt one band managed to get one of their anthems exactly right.
But Led Zeppelin was always bound to be a different animal whenever they got onstage. If anything, the fact that John Bonham was confined to the studio was a detriment to them, given the fact that every night could go over well if he adhered to his traditional drum solo formula and beat the life out of his kit.
That didn’t mean that Page didn’t stop trying to match the studio versions of Zeppelin on the road. Going through his version of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ from The Song Remains the Same, he makes perfect use of both necks on his guitar, going from the delicate strum on the verses to sounding like he’s about to fly off the fretboard when he gets to the solo.
‘Stairway’ may have been a one-off, but Physical Graffiti was where things really started heating up. Now that they were the biggest band in the world, there was no question of what they couldn’t pull off, especially when it came to ‘Ten Years Gone’. While not being nearly as complicated as ‘Stairway’, the tune is more of a studio experiment taken to the nth degree, with Page putting layers of guitars into the mix to create this wall of rock.
But that doesn’t always equate to the best mixing onstage. Going through some of the band’s performances, there’s definitely something missing when the layers of guitars aren’t put into the mix, but The Black Crowes gave Page a new avenue. Since Zeppelin were a thing of the past by the 1990s, this was Page’s excuse to play some blues with some fresh blood, and the results finally gave him what he wanted to hear.
Despite his many performances with Zeppelin, Page felt The Black Crowes took everything he had on record and made it better, saying, “Once a song got on the road, those parts would change, especially where there were numerous guitar parts on the record. We used to do ‘Ten Years Gone’, and that’s got lots of guitars. We did a pretty good version. It wasn’t until I played it with the Black Crowes [in 1999] that I heard all of those parts live. That was a thrill.”
But it shouldn’t be shocking that The Black Crowes could pull it off. They had become one of the resident kings of blues rock in the meantime, and considering they had worked that same magic when doing their own version of the blues classic ‘Hard to Handle’, playing alongside Jimmy Page on some Zeppelin tunes may as well have been their version of graduating to the big leagues.
As much as Page may have had a ball during that time, no one was going to have the exact touch that he had in his prime. The Black Crowes may have had all the parts accounted for, but the magic exists between Page’s fingers rather than something that could be honed in on for too long.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Led Zeppelin Newsletter
All the latest stories about Led Zeppelin from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.