“All I need to know”: the artist Jimmy Page said changed everything for rock
There seemed to be some sort of magic hidden inside Jimmy Page when he burst onto the scene with Led Zeppelin. The Yardbirds had given him a firm starting point in the public eye, but after years of being a session player, he felt completely unchained when he first started putting together riffs with Robert Plant. While Page turned rock and roll on its head more than a few times, he also acknowledged the efforts of other artists who were just as influential.
Compared to other guitarists of his time, though, Page was never set on one specific genre. Much of the other six-stringers of his time were focused on making flashy blues licks, but Page was more concerned with seeing where the instrument was going to take him rather than having to worry about a signature blues lick.
Even on Zeppelin records, Page was known to change two or three times within the context of an album. Houses of the Holy may get credit as one of Zeppelin’s most experimental works, but nowhere else could anyone find a band going from reggae music to the James Brown stomp of ‘The Crunge’ to making something ethereal and beautiful like the strange tuning on ‘The Rain Song’.
Then again, Zeppelin still considered themselves rock and roll, and half of their greatest tunes came from playing tribute to those that came before. There were the odd Little Richard tributes like on ‘Rock and Roll’ and Beatlesque touches on their ballads like ‘Thank You’, but for Page, all roads led back to him seeing Elvis Presley and being absolutely gobsmacked by what he saw.
Outside of the fact that he was still singing in that bluesy tone, Presley became the perfect eye candy for every girl who swooned over singers. Even outside of his enormous female fanbase, Presley was the stuff of dreams for kids of Page’s generation, only dreaming that they could get that kind of reaction if they had a guitar slung across their back and a couple of chords in their heads.
Even after years of experimenting with different soundscapes, Page still felt that nothing could match what Presley did for him, saying, “What’s important about Elvis was that he changed absolutely everything for youth and that he came in right under the radar. But that’s all I need to know about his life. I guess I’m interested in how those recordings were done with Sam Phillips, and about Phillips’s vision of having this white guy sing black music. But the music is what turned me on.”
It’s not like Page doesn’t have a point about the songs, either. Even though Presley has become more about the spectacle of his life in the history books, the music is what was paramount for every kid listening, whether it was him trying on his best heartache voice on ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ or having that signature vibrato that sent shivers down the spine on ‘Mystery Train’.
Although Zeppelin’s attempt at a Presley tune left a lot to be desired on ‘Hot Dog’, they never needed to pay tribute to him in any capacity. Because if you look at any band that has come out of the rock genre in the past half-century, half of them still owe their career to seeing Presley on television.
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