The one “terrible” song that changed Jimmy Page forever
There was always more on the table for Jimmy Page than being a session player for the rest of his life.
The Yardbirds were a fine place for him to start his musical journey, but having full creative control in Led Zeppelin was the first time he felt safe to be himself in the studio and make as many strange new sounds that no one would have heard before. But he also wouldn’t have been able to make all of those classics without having more than a few clunkers in his back catalogue as well.
And Page usually didn’t need to be pressed too much to bring up some of the songs that he didn’t care for in Zeppelin’s catalogue. ‘Living Loving Maid’ was one of the worst songs that they had ever made, as far as he was concerned, and while he was still proud of all of their albums on the whole, he did have more than a few issues when listening to what the band made on their final project, In Through the Out Door.
Still, he was much better off working with the band than having to go back to playing session work. It was a decent-paying gig for him and John Paul Jones when they first started making music, but it can be a little stifling when you’re only making music that someone else wants to be made. There’s no way to really stretch, and that same thing applied to what was happening with The Yardbirds.
The blues band already couldn’t hang on to a guitar player when Eric Clapton first decided to leave after they started recording tracks like ‘For Your Love’, but Page and Jeff Beck at least gave them a breath of fresh air. They wanted to make new sounds that wouldn’t have been in Clapton’s style, but when listening to the way that the band was heading, Page couldn’t take the idea of working on songs that were lousy takes on British invasion pop songs.
The other bands coming out of the woodwork, like The Beatles and The Animals, had their own sound, and Page needed to have something that was a bit more eclectic than playing the same cookie-cutter rock and roll songs. But even when being presented with a tune like ‘Ten Little Indians’, Page felt that the song needed a little extra punch before he ended up stumbling on the strange echo effect that he would use in Zeppelin.
In his own words, Page was only hoping to salvage the song, but he ended up with one of his signature effects, saying, “During one session, we were recording ‘Ten Little Indians’, which was an extremely silly song that featured a truly awful brass arrangement. In fact, the whole track sounded terrible. In a desperate attempt to salvage it, I hit upon an idea. I said, ‘Look, turn the tape over and employ the echo for the brass on a spare track. Then turn it back over, and we’ll get the echo preceding the signal.’”
And you can hear it on a lot of the tunes that he was working on during those early days of Zeppelin. ‘You Shook Me’ had the exact same kind of effect on the way that Robert Plant’s vocal was mixed, and when you look at ‘Whole Lotta Love’, a lot of that middle section involved Page doing the same thing, only this time throwing in a few more bells and whistles to make it sound like some strange blues seance going on before his guitar solo comes in to tear everyone’s faces off.
So while Page would have been happy to not work on a song like ‘Ten Little Indians’ ever again, it sometimes pays to have a few more blemishes on your resume. Because you never know when one piece of trash could have one little element to it that could come in handy when working on some more songs later down the line.
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