Jimmy Page - Guitarist - Led Zeppelin - 1970s

Credit: Far Out / 2025 Paradise Pictures Ltd

The genre that made Jimmy Page quit playing sessions and form Led Zeppelin: “I couldn’t live that life”

Wed 20 May 2026 17:30, UK

When the fiery Led Zeppelin broke onto the scene, they were like a blizzard over desert sands.

With darkness and thunder in tow, they seemed to have uncannily leapt right out of the frame of Caravaggio’s painting. But if you dip into Jimmy Page’s backstory, it becomes a little clearer how something so unique could arise seemingly on a whim as the 1960s drew to a close.

Long before his frizzy hair ever ventured into the spotlight, Page was a session musician. On long days perched behind the mixing desk at Olympic Studios in London, bored stiff by more of the same from shoddy wannabes simply copying the four chords of their peers, again, Page grew weary.

This image gives you a glimpse at how Page’s creeping frustrations with the platidinal pop and a distinct lack of technicality could’ve curdled into the full force of the virtuosic Zeppelin. As he would later say of his aim, “Many people think of me as just a riff guitarist, but I think of myself in broader terms.”

Adding, “As a musician I think my greatest achievement has been to create unexpected melodies and harmonies within a rock and roll framework. And as a producer I would like to be remembered as someone who was able to sustain a band of unquestionable individual talent, and push it to the forefront during its working career.”

Much of this mindset was formulated as he milled around Olympic Studios. Those session musician days certainly served a vital purpose on the inspiration front. But they also served a purpose when it comes to practicality, too. Unlike a lot of scrappy musicians of the day, Page had actually made a hell of a lot of money as a player on a plethora of the 1960s best songs, liberating Led Zeppelin to luxuriate in vital studio time.

He was able to pay for their debut album with his own money, allowing them to break free from the pressures of their label and any commercial expectations. That was massive. Yet, he might never have reached that point had he not grown so frustrated with one pesky genre that he decided to risk it all and venture into the spotlight, initially, as a member of the Yardbirds.

“My session work was invaluable. At one point I was playing at least three sessions a day, six days a week!” he happily told CBS. “I rarely ever knew in advance what I was going to be playing, but I learned things even on my worst sessions – and believe me, I played on some horrendous things.”

But most of those horrendous things were painless enough until one genre rose to prominence when the commercial potential of music rose to the fore. As he explains, he “called it quits after I started getting calls to do Muzak. I decided I couldn’t live that life anymore; it was getting too silly. I guess it was destiny that a week after I quit doing sessions, Paul Samwell-Smith left the Yardbirds and I was able to take his place.”

That was purely timing, but the push of Muzak feels like more than mere coincidence. The tepid, ‘made for commercial backgrounds’ genre was the antithesis of what he would go on to achieve with Led Zeppelin. It was inoffensive by design, and its only purpose was to be sellable for those wanting to drown out the sound of farts in their elevators. Page was above it.

Naturally, that gave him the impetus to move on. And now, he looks back fondly. “Being a session musician was good fun in the beginning – the studio discipline was great,” Page added. “They’d just count the song off and you couldn’t make any mistakes.” But when it came to Muzak, it was hard to know what a mistake would even sound like. He needed a new challenge, and the world is still thankful for that.