“It’s really good music”: The artists Jimmy Page said were in a league of their own
Music is never meant to be a competition. Although some people still see their instruments as a sport some of the time, the beauty of music has been about quoting what’s in someone’s heart rather than taking the time to see whether they can play something faster than the person next to them. Jimmy Page may have prioritised the song before anything else whenever he played, but even he had to admit that he was dealing with true geniuses of their instruments in this band.
Looking through most of Page’s career, though, he never wanted to surround himself with players that were merely good. There had to be some sort of ex-factor that turned them from good to great in Led Zeppelin, and even if it was difficult trying to put everyone together in those early days, hearing John Bonham dragging behind the beat while Page pushes the bat forward is still one of the most satisfying pushes and pulls in rock and roll history.
And along the way, Page managed to turn himself into one of the few virtuosos on the guitar. Despite them getting lumped into the hard rock category, hearing what he did on albums like Houses of the Holy helped push rock and roll forward, especially when inventing new tunings on ‘The Rain Song’ or being unafraid to work in off-kilter time signatures like on ‘The Ocean’.
But rock and roll already had an entire genre for that kind of music, and acts like Yes and Genesis made Zeppelin look like schoolchildren by comparison. Every band may have had great tunes in their discography, but hearing Steve Howe’s playing compared to Page’s was like watching a classical musician write a symphony on guitar half the time. Once Zeppelin closed up shop after Bonham’s death, Page started to realise that he could learn a thing or two from those bands.
Forming the supergroup XYZ, Page got an education working alongside Alan White on drums and Chris Squire on bass guitar. Despite John Paul Jones being a monster on the four-string, Squire was the one who turned the instrument into a leading musical force, and seeing him work alongside Page would have been the equivalent of two lead guitarists, only one of them was missing two strings.
Even though they only scraped together a few demos before Page formed The Firm, he said that he had never played with a band that tight, saying, “What I don’t know is what bits and pieces they brought to the party that may have ended up on Yes records. One that we did there as an instrumental eventually came out as ‘Fortune Hunter’ with the Firm. But those guys were just in a league of their own. So it’s really good music. I haven’t actually returned to it yet. I will because I know how darn good it is.”
While both Squire and White are no longer with us, the idea of having those demos out would be an interesting look at what another version of Zeppelin could have been. Since Zeppelin was always Page’s baby, seeing him take cues from jazz and classical music instead of blues and Eastern influences would be a much more interesting take on his usual furious style.
Although time may have worked out exactly how it was supposed to, the beginnings of XYZ really deserve to see the light of day. While the band never got to tour, hearing them gelling together for the first time is like unearthing a piece of rock history that has yet to be discovered.
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