The genre Jimmy Page dismissed as “absolute crap”
Led Zeppelin were always happy experimenting with different sounds and injecting a variety of genres into their heavy rock style.
It was this creative approach to music that cemented them as some of the industry’s very best. They were coming up during a time when rock music was the most popular style in the world, and it would have been easy for them to excel with a route one version of the sound, but they opted to try something different.
Ian Anderson credited the band with making a version of prog-rock before prog rock was officially a thing. This is because while their style was pretty undeniably rock music, Led Zeppelin were also hell-bent on trying to use sounds from other cultures and genres in a bid to expand it beyond its set parameters. It was pretty experimental, and for a while looked like it might not work, but eventually, people realised just how powerful this music could be.
Jimmy Page was at the forefront of this experimental sound, and so it shouldn’t surprise people that he was always listening out for artists who were doing something similar. He found this in Syd Barrett and the work that he was doing with Pink Floyd in the early days. When they were making music towards the back end of the ‘60s, they were essentially pioneering the psychedelic rock sound before it was properly a thing. Page was a big fan of what they were doing, but he also dismissed a number of their psychedelic counterparts, describing some of them as “absolute crap”.
“I definitely listened to them and in the day, I saw some of the footage that we’ve all seen now,” said Page in an interview with Classic Rock. “Syd Barrett was absolutely unbelievable in terms of what he was doing. He took a step sideways and channelled all this amazing stuff. Their version of psychedelia was very, very cool. But there was stuff that was labelled psychedelia — and not wishing to name names — that was absolutely crap. But what they [Floyd] were doing was seriously experimental and it meant a lot.”
It’s interesting that Page makes reference to the “absolute crap” that was a lot of early psychedelic music. He is clearly referring to many of the other bands that were making as much at the time, but there were many music lovers who considered early Pink Floyd exactly that. They look at what the band went on to do, and what they did at first, and decide that their original work was a bit too directionless. And this isn’t just fans and critics saying as much, but band member Roger Waters agreed, commenting that Piper at the Gates of Dawn was one of his least favourite records that he did with the band.
“I don’t want to go back to those times at all,” he said while discussing the record. “There wasn’t anything ‘grand’ about it’. We were laughable. We were useless. We couldn’t play at all, so we had to do something stupid and ‘experimental’.”
Even Jimi Hendrix said that he couldn’t stand the sound of psychedelic music because of the fact a lot of the bands making it leaned too heavily on the experimental side of things, to the extent that their music didn’t really sound like anything. “I’ve heard they have beautiful lights,” said the guitarist, “But they don’t sound like nothing.”
When a band makes something brand new and experimental, it will always have a polarising effect, and no reaction could be classed as incorrect. While Jimmy Page respected the experimental vision of the band, the same couldn’t be said for some of his musical counterparts. History sees the band go down as innovators and long before their time, but when the music was initially made, opinion was very much split.
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