The guitarist so good Jimmy Page simply labelled them “the one”
There can be no doubt that Jimmy Page is one of the greatest guitarists the rock world has ever known. His poise is perhaps his greatest gift as he delicately toes the line between hardcore heavy metal and the gilded brilliance of a 1960s blues master. However, it is not only his time as the swashbuckling leader of Led Zeppelin, providing licks and riffs that will reverberate through the ages, that landed him this legacy.
Tracing his career back even further, we can still see the flecks of genius that would emanate from his guitar. His time with The Yardbirds alongside Jeff Beck was a seminal moment in pop culture, laying down a set of tunes that would influence countless artists, and that’s all without even attempting to explore the many sessions he provided Shel Tamly in his younger years. His session years would be the main reason the six-string maestro would spend so much of his life revered.
The 1950s may have started that boom of creativity, but it was the 1960s that reimagined what playing the guitar could be. After the rock and roll swing of the ’50s, the guitar took on a new role in the new decade. Countless players grabbed the instrument with gusto and experimented with its sound. Naturally, a gifted session musician and utter devotee to the craft, Page was at the forefront of changing the perception of what the instrument was capable of as a session musician and working with The Yardbirds.
But who were the artists that inspired and shaped the young and impressionable mind of Jimmy Page? While his work would go on to give a generation of kids something to ban their heads and shake their hips to, who were the guitarists inspiring and delighting Page? Well, here, we intend to decipher who is the guitarist that influenced Jimmy Page most.
First, we can look back at the guitarists that Page called some of his favourites. “Out of all the guitarists to come out of the 1960s, though, Beck, Clapton, Lee, Townshend and I are still having a go,” recalled Page to Rolling Stone. “That says something. Beck, Clapton and I were sort of the Richmond/Croydon type clan, and Alvin Lee, I don’t know where he came from, Leicester or something like that. So he was never in with it a lot. And Townshend, Townshend was from Middlesex, and he used to go down to the clubs and watch the other guitarists.”
“We’ve lost the best guitarist any of us ever had, and that was Hendrix,” the ‘Stairway to Heaven’ composer confessed. “The other guitarist I started to get into died also, Clarence White. He was absolutely brilliant.” But while all those guitarists operate as some of Page’s iconic contemporaries, one couldn’t suggest that they truly influenced his style. For the true definition of influence, we need to go back a little further and decipher the musicians who took part in the early formation of Page’s playing.
The artists Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf and Willie Dixon, are the first names that come to mind when identifying Page and Led Zeppelin’s sound with the musicians that had come before them, largely because on songs like ‘You Shook Me’, ‘Whole Lotta Love’, ‘Bring It On Home’ and ‘The Lemon Song’, Page and his band almost directly ripped them off. Considering those songs are considered some of Page’s finest contributions, it is easy to pinpoint those four iconic performers as gigantic influences on Page; in fact, the entire Delta blues scene can stake a claim.
But, if we take away the songs, we take away the stylistic inferences and uncanny inspirations, and we are left with only one guitarist who has shaped the very fabric of Jimmy Page’s career and, dare we say it, his life in total, and that is the one and only Les Paul. As Page himself said in 1975: “Les Paul is the one, really. We wouldn’t be anywhere if he hadn’t invented the electric guitar.”
While the iconography of the great guitarist will often see him pictured with his stunning Gibson SG or his flimsier Ying Yang Danelectro, the truth is, no guitar connected with Page’s style better than the Les Paul. Without the musician’s unique creation, the sound of Led Zeppelin would be without the tonal weight we know and love. Speaking in 1968, while reviewing one of the creator’s records, Page opened up about how indelible his mark on the then-growing guitarist was: “Les Paul – he’s the man who started everything: multitrack recording, the electric guitar – he’s just a genius. I think he was the first to use a four-track – or was it an eight-track – recording machine. I met him once, and apparently, he started multitrack recording back in 1945. Jeff Beck and myself have always dug him.”
While most commonly remembered for crafting one of the earliest solid-body electric guitars (The Les Paul) back in 1952, Les Paul also shaped the landscape of studio recording. Working with film audio inspired him to build an eight-track recording machine with all eight heads evenly aligned.
In his own words: “My invention was to stack the heads one on top of the other, so they were all aligned in the same place, and you could use the same multiple heads for recording and playback, and everything would be in sync. It didn’t really become functional until 1957 when we finally re-designed it ourselves to get it right. I worked on it for four years, and it cost me about $36,000 total before I ever recorded the first song on it.” These techniques would allow Zeppelin’s precursors, The Beatles, to begin their album-driven concepts and light the path for Led Zeppelin to become masters of their sound, too.
When you add the development of these techniques and Paul’s creation of the solid body guitar, it is difficult to picture anybody else taking the accolade of the most influential guitarist in Jimmy Page’s life. Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson may have provided some blueprints for his dominance, Beck and Hendrix may have tightened up his performances through direct competition, and the entire blues scene delivered a sensibility from which he could riff off, but nobody changed more of Page’s life than the wondrous Les Paul.
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