The Jimmy Page guitar solo that brings Dave Grohl “to tears”
If it wasn’t for Led Zeppelin, then Dave Grohl might never have become a musician. They arrived in his life unannounced when he had “just started discovering music“. Thereafter, they presented an alternative reality beyond Catholic schools and the picket fences of the suburbs of Virginia. “I had faith in Led Zeppelin as a spiritual entity. They showed me that human beings could channel this music somehow and that it was coming from somewhere,“ he says.
From then on, Grohl was a devout rocker. As Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys once said, ”There is always that one band that comes along when you are 14 or 15 years old that manages to hit you in just the right way and changes your whole perception on things.” For Grohl, that came a few years early, and it came via Led Zeppelin. His first hero from the group was the legendary guitarist Jimmy Page.
For Page, that figure had been Link Wray. “I would listen to anything with a guitar on as a kid, anything that was being played and all those different approaches and the echoes, but the first time I heard the ‘Rumble’, that was something that had so much profound attitude to it,” he said in the 2008 documentary It Might Get Loud.
The attitude was precisely what Page wanted to bring to proceedings because it implied individuality. When speaking to Bob Boilen for his book Your Song Changed My Life, the spiritual songsmith explained: “I wanted to have my own approach to what I did. I didn’t want to … do a carbon copy of B.B. King, but I really love the blues. The blues had so much effect on me and I just wanted to make my own contribution in my own way.”
In doing so, he found a language that connected profoundly with a young Grohl. Even still, the Foo Fighters bandleader finds emotional resonance in Page’s music. ”When I listen to Zeppelin bootlegs,” Grohl told Rolling Stone, ”His solos can make me laugh or they can make me tear up. Any live version of ‘Since I Been Loving You’ will bring you to tears and fill you with joy all at once. Page doesn’t just use his guitar as an instrument. For him, it’s like some sort of emotional translator.”
He’s not the only one who gets emotional over it either, even Robert Plant says he finds it hard to sing. ”The musical progression at the end of each verse – the chord choice – is not a natural place to go. And it’s that lift up there that’s so regal and so emotional,” he told Mojo. ”I don’t know whether that was born from the loins of JP or JPJ, but I know that when we reached that point in the song you could get a lump in the throat from being in the middle of it.”
You can check out a live bootleg cut of the classic below.
