“You start to look like a jerk”: The solo that made Robert Plant resent Jimmy Page
No band is safe from being a little too satisfied with themselves when they’re on top. There might be a lot of fans who feel the same way about you being one of the biggest names in music, but there are only so many times that you can play blistering solos before someone starts to ask what the point of it all is. Even though Jimmy Page was the one guitarist who could get away with solos that were too long in the 1970s, Robert Plant took exception to his solos when they got on the road for albums like Physical Graffiti.
But any group will already have to do more than just a typical guitar solo to wow a crowd. Eddie Van Halen had his signature tapping licks, and even when Eric Clapton was ripping one massive solo after the next, he knew enough to craft it almost like a conversation, with a beginning, middle, and end to leave the listener feeling as if they’ve actually gone on a journey through sound.
And it’s not like Zeppelin didn’t know how to craft those kinds of songs, either. On this album, ‘Kashmir’ is the epitome of what that kind of journey should feel like when performing onstage, especially when the drums come storming in at the top of the tune and the guitar breaks in the middle, which sounds like the entire world started to cave in on itself.
When it came time for Page’s moment in the sun, though, he would never go the usual route. He had already honed his skills playing traditional lead guitar in The Yardbirds, but the minute that he started working with Zeppelin, nothing was off the table for him, whether that was using the theremin on a few occasions or hamming it up a bit to make sure that everyone knew that he was one of the finest guitarists in the world.
It’s one thing to be able to play that, but that doesn’t mean that every band member has to enjoy it. Sure, it might have its place in the middle of a gig to break up the monotony, but when it started showing up in the middle of some of the songs, ‘Percy’ got a little bit angry at having to stand there waiting for Page to finish whatever he was doing.
When reminiscing on that tour, Plant had to wait and said that was growing resentful of Page around that time, with assistant Benji Lafevre saying, “One night Jimmy was doing his half-hour egotistical bullshit–which is what it and Bonzo’s drum solo became– and Robert said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Jimmy Page’, and just stood there onstage.”
Although Plant was not as harsh, he did admit it had become far too overblown, saying, “Whatever was going on, to me, it did go on a little bit. It’s not that it wasn’t good. It’s just that I had to start thinking about things to do because, after a while, you can start to look like a little bit of a jerk, wobbling your head around like some sort of Indian tradesman.”
But that may have just been the first sign that things were starting to go off the rails. If you look at how things were shaping up during the making of Presence, Plant’s car accident, combined with Bonzo and Page getting more and more hammered, led to them slowly slipping when it came to that pure collaborative spirit. Everything was shaping up pretty well then, but when someone’s on that euphoric high, it will never feel that good coming back down.
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