The one song Jimmy Page was terrified to hear: “I thought they’d be the same”
There’s a certain confidence that any guitarist would have needed to take the chances that Jimmy Page did.
No real roadmap was going to tell him where to go after he left The Yardbirds, but thanks to the right people behind him and a gift for writing the most incredible riffs of all time, he had that natural sixth sense that drove him to make the greatest guitar compositions of all time. But before Led Zeppelin even got off the ground, it didn’t take much for Page to be intimidated, either.
You have to remember that Page had enormous shoes to fill before he even joined The Yardbirds. While he had a unique voice on the instrument when he came out with the psychedelic-coloured Fender Telecaster, the idea of anyone having the kind of guitar chutzpah to compete with Eric Clapton was in for a massive uphill battle. But it’s not like Page didn’t have a fair bit of training as well.
Being thrown into the session scene at a young age was never going to be easy on even the most professional guitarists, but Page took to it like a fish in water half the time. His guitars had been heard on countless hits before anyone knew his name, and even if joining the blues titans seemed daunting, it was going to be a lot better to manage knowing that Jeff Beck was on the other side of the stage.
Both of them had the potential to make a guitar symphony together, but it was clear that the label had other plans. They envisioned the group as a pop band, but when listening to the cheap songs they were being forced to play, Page and Beck both realised that there needed to be a better outlet than the bogstandard poppy blues rock tunes. But Page didn’t count on having the exact same idea as Beck, either.
It would have been easy for them to chart out their own path together, but after splitting into their own bands, Page was terrified when he found out that Truth had the same style as the first Led Zeppelin record. Rod Stewart and Robert Plant may have been completely different frontmen, but when looking at the track listing, Page was sweating a little bit knowing that they both recorded a version of the blues classic ‘You Shook Me’.
They each had similar sounds, but Page knew that was way too close for comfort, saying, “You’ve got to understand that Beck and I came from the same sort of roots. If you’ve got things you enjoy, then you want to do them – to the horrifying point where we’d done our first LP with ‘You Shook Me’, and then I heard he’d done ‘You Shook Me’. I was terrified because I thought they’d be the same.”
If you had to put both songs into a music grudge match, though, Beck does edge out Zeppelin’s version just a little bit. That’s borderline heresy in rock circles, but given how the rest of Led Zeppelin is full of classics like ‘Dazed and Confused’ and ‘How Many More Times’, hearing Beck and Stewart cut loose feels more like walking into a sweaty club and watching them jam for the hell of it half the time.
It could definitely benefit from having the power of a John Bonham and John Paul Jones’s ear for arranging, but Beck had one foot trailing back into the blues on his version. The Yardbirds had been trying to sell the blues to a pop audience by the end of their run, but if Page was going into more extravagant territory, Beck was trying to create a blues jam with rock and roll swagger.
