“A better example of British blues”: Jimmy Page explains why nobody could match Fleetwood Mac
“Led Zeppelin… the greatest rock and roll band of all time,” said Jack Black when discussing his favourite musical outfit, “Better than The Beatles, better than The Stones. And if you don’t agree with me, that’s because you haven’t done the Zeppelin marathon. It’s when you sit your ass down and listen to all nine Zeppelin albums in a row. The jams of Led Zeppelin are second to none.”
When you begin to analyse the different aspects that made Led Zeppelin such a success, you realise that the inability to put them in one specific genre makes them unique. They were never willing to just be labelled as a band that made only one branch of rock music, and their ability to contort and overlap certain sounds led to them being considered one of the greatest bands of all time.
Each band member needed to excel within their chosen field to play such a healthy mix of genres and still make it sound cohesive. The fact that they all could is why Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, John Bonham, and Jimmy Page are all often called the greatest in their chosen area.
When they all initially made music together, even though Jimmy Page had big aspirations for the band, it all came together incredibly well. “I had a lot of ideas from my days with The Yardbirds,” said Page. “I wanted Zeppelin to be a marriage of blues, hard rock and acoustic music topped with heavy choruses – a combination that had never been done before […] Lots of light and shade in the music.”
It was important for Page to be well-versed in all of these different genres so that he could write songs for Led Zeppelin that fit into all of these categories. He developed a strong understanding of all these different styles of music during his stint in the Yardbirds and his time working as a session musician.
He listened to and played a lot of blues music and, as such, has a great understanding of that genre. While he loves the classics, one band that was making music around the same time as Zeppelin, who he thought pulled off the blues incredibly well, was Fleetwood Mac. This was the band’s first iteration before Stevie Nicks joined, and they had a much bigger focus on the blues.
“The original Fleetwood Mac with Peter Green performed the music of people like Elmore James really well,” said Page when talking about the early version of Fleetwood Mac. “Peter had such a beautiful touch on things like ‘Stop Messing Around’. Just fabulous in the vein of BB King.”
Page concluded, “I don’t think you’re going to find a better example of British blues than the original Fleetwood Mac, with Jeremy Spencer and Peter Green.”
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