Robert Plant names John Paul Jones’ best moment: “He was a great technician”
It would have been difficult for anyone in the 1970s to ask Led Zeppelin to do more than they were already doing. The whole point behind their records was watching some of the best in their craft make the finest rock music known to man. Even if it wasn’t always to your taste, it was hard to argue with someone who thought that everything the genre had to offer could be found in songs like ‘Kashmir’ and ‘Rock and Roll’. While Robert Plant and Jimmy Page were the ones in the spotlight half the time, there was always a secret weapon they had in the background in John Paul Jones.
The band itself might have been Page’s baby, but the reason why they were able to touch on so many different styles was partly due to what Jones had done with his bass and keyboard work. A lot of Zeppelin’s shining moments may have been about following the riff, but on tracks like ‘The Lemon Song’, Jonesy is playing hard rock and roll the same way someone like James Jamerson would have during the days of Motown, even flying off the handle and doing more intricate stuff than Page in some sections.
And when it came to his keyboard playing, Jones made textures that no one else was able to touch. While the band themselves had become a bit disillusioned with the prominence of synthesisers on In Through the Out Door, there’s no way that a song like ‘All My Love’ could have worked without those cascading keyboard lines in the bridge section.
In between their reputation as a hard rock act and an eclectic musical monster, Houses of the Holy falls between the cracks a lot of the time. It would have been hard for any album to stand beside Led Zeppelin IV and Physical Graffiti in the timeline, but the record is actually home to some of the band’s finest moments, whether that’s the pure beauty of ‘The Rain Song’ or the folksy balladry on ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’.
Even when they were trying to make music from the ground up, ‘The Song Remains the Same’ is still a case of them working at the peak of their powers. Despite Plant’s insistence that he adds words over their intended instrumental, putting together the perfect balance of Page’s guitar locking in with John Bonham’s drums.
For Plant, though, the thing that really made the whole song come together was Jonesy’s bassline, saying, “‘Song Remains The Same’ was nice—I think John excelled himself. He was a great technician from a school of studied bass. It wasn’t a John Entwistle type of thing, and I’m sure it still isn’t. I like the more long meandering things because he tended to diversify quite a bit.”
Any bassist is only as good as the drummer they’re working off of, though, and hearing Bonzo bringing a swinging swagger to the track is part of what made them work. Since Jones played everything right up the middle with Bonham trailing behind, that push-and-pull dynamic is what brought all of Zeppelin’s songs the kind of natural groove that no amount of click tracks could have made up for.
But despite every member of Zeppelin adding their signature touch to things, Jones has always provided the magic that people didn’t even know they needed to hear on all of their tracks. He might not have been one to grandstand or even make the most complicated part, but having the ability to support every song that he ever played on is a lost art for any aspiring musician.
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