The guitarist Jimmy Page said was better than Van Halen
There are legions of guitar players who are still trying to figure out what Jimmy Page did in Led Zeppelin.
Although every member of the band helped turn Zeppelin into a powerhouse, Page was the real puppeteer behind everything, and every classic lick and production touch he brought to their sound remains one of the most iconic moments in rock and roll history. He left the blueprint for so many people to follow in his wake, but Page thought only the true professionals were able to take every single lesson he had to teach and apply it to what they were doing.
Because if you listen to Page, it was more about making one classic lick after another. He may have been blessed with some of the greatest riffs of all time landing in his lap, but he wanted to make sure that they were given the justice they deserved on record. ‘Whole Lotta Love’ was already the sound of hard rock discovering itself on the second Led Zeppelin record, but if you look at that compared to what a song like ‘Kashmir’ would sound like, he was looking to make a classical take on what the electric guitar could do.
Which is probably why he was focused on the studio wizards that kept popping up around him. Although Zeppelin did have some brilliant guitar hero moments throughout their career, you could feel the temperature shift in the guitar community when Eddie Van Halen took the stage for the first time. He was clearly indebted to people like Page, but the tapping licks that he pulled off were enough to make any other guitarist throw out their set of rules and try to copy every single lick he was playing.
It’s not like Page wasn’t thrown for a loop by Eddie’s playing, either, but that was only one flavour of virtuosity that he loved. Years before Eddie released his first record, the biggest names in progressive rock were knocking down doors for what real players could do, but when it came to the session scene, Page felt like Steve Lukather was operating on a much different plane than anyone else when he worked with Toto.
Although Lukather might be more remembered for his resume than the massive hits that he had, his tone was always what struck Page before anything else. He was someone who cared about the specifics of what his guitar sounded like on every session he played, and even when jamming among the greatest players in the industry, Page felt that Lukather was in a completely different league than any other guitar hero.
Even in a room where people like Eddie were tearing through every single lick that they could think of, Lukather remembered Page coming over and giving the greatest compliment he could have asked for, saying, “Jimmy’s standing there greeting everyone. He points at me. I think he’s pointing at Ed, of course, but it’s me, and he motions for me to come over. He said, ‘You have something that these other guys here don’t. We were studio players. That sets you above these other guys.’ That meant the world to me.”
And it’s not like Eddie would necessarily disagree with that assessment, either. Say what you will about every Van Halen album, but Eddie was far from a songwriter in the general sense of the word, and even when working on some of his later masterpieces, he had to admit that Lukather and the rest of Toto were some of the best musicians that anyone could hope to work with in the studio.
Page may have been overly impressed with Lukather, but the way he saw it, playing the best guitar parts wasn’t always about trying to fly up and down the neck at every opportunity. It was about listening for what the song needed, and whether he was laying down a guitar solo for Lionel Richie, getting the rhythm tracks for Michael Jackson, or having his own fun singing on ‘Rosanna’, Lukather was the complete package for what a true guitar hero should look like.
