The band that Jimmy Page couldn’t stand being compared to: “It really pissed me off”
Led Zeppelin has been responsible for turning people on to rock and roll more than any other band on Earth.
The Beatles may have been fun for their time, and The Rolling Stones definitely brought an element of danger into the mix, but the minute that someone hears a track like ‘Whole Lotta Love’ or ‘Dazed and Confused’ for the first time, it feels like something alters in their brain that makes a loud guitar sound like the coolest thing on the planet.
Jimmy Page had carefully constructed that kind of rock band format, but he was pissed off when his playing was compared to Jeff Beck’s.
Then again, any other guitarist who hears their name in the same conversation as Beck would probably be proud of themselves. Beck had a unique way of making the guitar speak whenever he played, and his versatility across every one of his albums showed that he was always curious to see what kind of strange noises could come out of this little stringed instrument.
Once Page had struck out on his own apart from The Yardbirds, part of his MO was to make something far heavier than anything he or Beck had done in their old outfit. There were still foundational blues elements in their styles, but it’s hard to call something like ‘Friends’ or ‘Stairway to Heaven’ blues unless you squint your ears as hard as you can.
Part of Page’s frustration likely came from how determined he was to establish Led Zeppelin as something entirely separate from the British blues boom that had dominated the mid-1960s. While Beck remained deeply interested in improvisation and instrumental exploration, Page was focused on building a complete sonic world around Zeppelin, combining folk, psychedelia, hard rock and mysticism into a sound that felt cinematic in scale.
Comparisons to the Jeff Beck Group, therefore, risked reducing Zeppelin to just another offshoot of The Yardbirds rather than the revolutionary force Page believed they were becoming.
At the same time, the similarities between Beck and Page reveal just how fertile that generation of British guitarists really was. Alongside Eric Clapton, they transformed the electric guitar into the defining instrument of rock music by approaching it in radically different ways.
Beck pursued unpredictability and nuance, while Page prioritised atmosphere and riff-driven power, but both expanded the emotional possibilities of the instrument far beyond traditional blues conventions.
When Zeppelin first emerged, Page wasn’t happy being compared to his former bandmate, saying, “It really pissed me off when people compared our first album to the Jeff Beck Group and said it was very close conceptually. It was nonsense, utter nonsense. The only similarity was that we’d both come out of The Yardbirds, and we both had acquired certain riffs individually from The Yardbirds.”
Granted, every musician who leaves one band for another is going to need to work out the bugs, and Page seemed to be chipping away at his old sound on the first Zeppelin record. There were a lot more explosive moments to go around, but when you listen to a piece like ‘You Shook Me’, it’s easy to tell where he got his ideas from, especially since Beck covered the exact same song on his album.
If you peel back what both players are doing, it’s like night and day. Whereas Beck was a bright ray of musical light that lit up the stage, Page was his dark counterpart, making the kind of riffs that seemed to be pulled from the depths of Hell while also being able to make sweet, gentle acoustic tunes with Robert Plant crooning above him.
As each guitarist got into their own individual style, though, they both had the motivation to take their music to places no one had seen. Physical Graffiti saw Page bringing in every genre under the sun to suit his needs, while Beck’s later career continued from what he started with albums like Blow By Blow, taking the foundation of rock and putting a jazzy twist on everything. Both legends had blues as a decent start, but after spending some quality time with the instrument, they found ways to squeeze emotion out of them.
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