The songs that embarrassed Jimmy Page: “It was absolutely wrong”
Jimmy Page was never one to be told what to do in any of his bands. Even though Led Zeppelin seemed to present themselves like a democracy most of the time, everyone knew that the final word came down to Page whenever it came time to make a group decision. Before he had ‘Dazed and Confused’ under his fingers, though, Page knew that he was in trouble when he was being forced to play along to singles with The Yardbirds.
When Page got started with the blues outfit, the whole point seemed to be about moving on from the session musician. While the role of any good session player results in a fairly decent payday, it doesn’t leave much room to experiment, and Page knew that if he wanted to do his own thing, he would need to have a democratic group to work with.
Looking at it objectively, The Yardbirds couldn’t have been a better breeding ground. The entire band was made up of blues legends, and while Eric Clapton had fallen by the wayside in recent years, having someone like Jeff Beck certainly wasn’t going to hurt their chances when thinking outside the box.
Away from the handful of psychedelic tracks like ‘Heart Full of Soul’ or ‘Shapes of Things’, though, Page ended up getting lost in the shuffle with management. Playing guitar like no one else was all well and good, but as far as the record executives in three-piece suits were concerned, that wasn’t what paid the bills.
What got everyone moving was having hit singles out, and thanks to ‘For Your Love’, everyone had the model of what a pop version of the group sounded. Except The Yardbirds already had their own sound thanks to tracks like ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’, so hearing them intentionally try to be a bluesy version of The Beach Boys was never going to go over well.
Since this was towards the end of Page’s time with the band, he remembered feeling embarrassed that his name was on The Yardbirds’ pop songs, telling Guitar Player, “Bit by bit, we started to record tracks which we should never have done. The Yardbirds had done all of this magical stuff, and then to do things like ‘Ten Little Indians,’ it was just absolutely wrong. I’m just really annoyed that they’re even out there.”
It’s not like Led Zeppelin were averse to doing cover songs in the beginning, but what Page created with Robert Plant had a totally different approach. They still had that blues rock flowing through their veins, but hearing them working off each other on ‘Good Times Bad Times’ and ‘Communication Breakdown’ are the first sounds of punk and hard rock waiting to become massive.
Although Page wasn’t that comfortable with the metal tag, either, Led Zeppelin were at least a better fit for what he wanted to do than The Yardbirds. The period of the blues acolyte had come and gone, and it was now time for him to start opening doors that most guitarists thought could never be touched.
