The songs Jimmy Page never wanted to play again: “Called it quits”
There are huge chunks of rock and roll history that were born whenever Jimmy Page picked up a guitar.
He knew that Led Zeppelin needed to be something completely different from The Yardbirds, but when looking at their career trajectory, there’s hardly anything that they did that didn’t manage to become a part of rock and roll mythology in some way. Page knew what he had on his hands, and he would have done anything for Zeppelin to succeed rather than go back to the days of him being a no-name musician.
Then again, it’s not like Page was suffering before he formed his little supergroup. Anyone who was taking over guitar duties for Eric Clapton was bound to have their work cut out for them every time they got onstage, but Page was more than up to the challenge. Having a partner like Jeff Beck probably didn’t hurt, but Page could see things going in the wrong direction ever since the band was told to make more pop-friendly songs.
That was the entire reason why Clapton quit in the first place, and it’s not like they were being given some of the greatest pop songs of all time. The Beach Boys were expanding what pop music could be, and Page was going to be dead in the ground before he made a poor man’s version of what flavours of the day were popular on the charts. He already had that phase of his career as a sideman, and he was never going to let that happen again.
Because as much as a sideman can be fun, it does have a lot more drawbacks for someone like Page. He lived to experiment on every single record he made, but when the goal is to make the record sound absolutely perfect as it was written, it’s not like there was much room for him to grow. He could play the odd guitar solo here and there, but for someone who would become known for making ‘Good Times Bad Times’ and ‘Communication Breakdown’, going down the road of easy listening was bound to be a huge step backwards.
Since you have to take every gig you can find as a session player, Page’s decision to work in muzak lasted about five nanoseconds. It’s one thing to have hits that managed to do alright on the charts every now and again, but when you are literally making music that’s designed to be ignored as someone’s using the elevator, it’s not like Page was having the time of his life in those sessions.
Zeppelin were bound to be the kind of band that bludgeoned people over the head with their music, and Page was going to make sure that he never resorted to those muzak sessions ever again, saying, “I learned things even on my worst Sessions – and believe me, I played on some horrendous things. I finally called it quits after I started getting calls to do muzak. I decided I couldn’t live that life anymore.”
Adding, “It was getting too silly. I guess it was destiny that a week after I quit doing sessions, Paul Samwell-Smith left The Yardbirds, and I was able to take his place. But being a session musician was good fun in the beginning – the studio discipline was great.”
And you can definitely hear that Page was a much different animal when he was working off of a band. Playing those blues covers helped give him a different kind of discipline on tunes like ‘Train Kept A-Rollin”, but if you listen to the way that his guitar comes screaming in on ‘Heart Full of Soul’, he was merely giving everyone a suggestion of what he could do when he had complete control of what he wanted.
All he needed was John Bonham’s thundering drums and Robert Plant’s pummeling voice to make everything sound right, and when Page tapped John Paul Jones from the session scene, everything fell into place. He had waited years for a band like this, but sometimes people have to pay their dues more than a few times over before they have the kind of band that they’ve always wanted.
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