“Had to release singles”: the band Jimmy Page said destroyed his soul
The biggest hurdle any artist has to overcome is being uninspired. The music industry is still a business, and if any musician is in the wrong place at the wrong time, making a song from scratch can feel like pulling teeth at the best of times. Although Jimmy Page did find a sense of purpose when he started calling the shots in Led Zeppelin, there were times in his career when he experienced serious moments of crisis.
Granted, one of Page’s biggest strengths was when working as a session guitarist. The beauty of having to switch between genres is that no one ever gets bored, and even if Page still had that bluesy foundation grounding him throughout some of the best Led Zeppelin albums, he still found ways to twist things around and make something that no one could have thought of at the time.
That’s not what the fans wanted before the band debuted, though. As much as the psychedelic movement was going strong, some of the biggest names in rock were still riding the coattails of the blues tradition, whether that was Keith Richards channelling his inner Muddy Waters or Eric Clapton starting to warp minds when he blended blues with jazz and fusion when working with Cream.
And if ‘Slowhand’ had a hard time dealing with The Yardbirds in the late 1960s, it had become grating by the time that Page got to the end of the decade. He was still earning decent money and could still solo whenever the time called for it but looking back on the songs, none of them was nearly the kind of innovations that Page had thought of when he heard more adventurous artists like Jimi Hendrix.
If anything, The Yardbirds seemed to be caught in the same problem that The Rolling Stones had when copying The Beatles. No one was going to match the Fab Four, so hearing them feebly try their hand at making a token psychedelic or having the odd tune that could compete with ‘Day Tripper’ was never going to work.
So by the time Page decided to leave The Yardbirds to start his own outfit, he said that it had to be done out of necessity, saying, “In The Yardbirds, we had to release singles, which was a total soul-destroyer for the band. But some of the singles had brass instruments on them, so I was trying to make the brass sound like something interesting. So, I would put echo on the brass and then play the tape backwards so that the echo would precede the signal. And I could tell that was a really good idea, so I used that technique across a lot of Led Zeppelin.”
Since he had more time to play around with in Zeppelin, Page would turn the album into his medium of choice. Even though the band refused to release singles, it hardly mattered when the songs were great from cover to cover, whether that was listening to the size and scope of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ or the strange detours that would come up on their experimental albums like Houses of the Holy.
Even though Page was forever indebted to The Yardbirds for helping him find himself as a player, he would have never been able to continue on with them had they kept going. His dreams were far bigger than the singles market, and on the first listen of Led Zeppelin I, you can hear that Page had been fully unchained.
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