“No other way”: The Led Zeppelin song Jimmy Page could never replicate live
As the sole guitarist in Led Zeppelin, a lot of responsibility was placed on the shoulders of Jimmy Page to fill the extra spaces that a second guitarist would often be tasked with filling on their records. As a virtuosic player of the instrument, he would often go to extravagant lengths to ensure that the band’s records felt as monstrous as they deserved to be, but the real challenge was often replicating the band’s studio sound in a live capacity.
Page may have been a master of the six-string, but also found himself using a 12-string on plenty of occasions to add a different tone to songs where necessary. Not only this, but he would also make use of a twin-necked guitar at times so he could easily switch between two different sounds or tunings midway through a song. It may have been an inconvenience for most guitarists to have to deal with, but Page managed to overcome this with an immense degree of panache.
However, as mentioned, the real task was making sure that Led Zeppelin’s live shows had the same behemoth sound to them, and this meant that he would have to find suitable workarounds in order to avoid the process becoming nightmarish for him. For some bands, they’d concede that their lineup wasn’t bolstered enough to be able to pull it off, and would recruit extra musicians for their tours, but Page was always left to take care of it all by himself.
For the most part, his expertise carried him through their epic live shows, and he was able to successfully recreate the exact tones that he’d produced on the record. That being said, there were plenty of songs where his mastery was tested to its absolute limit, and he’d have to come up with ingenious methods in order to even come close to replicating his studio parts with the same finesse.
While Page had a number of guitars that he could switch between during the course of a live show, there were times when the depth of his arsenal wasn’t enough to carry him. For the band’s opus, ‘Stairway to Heaven’, there were a number of features that Page was tasked with recreating that he’d have to circumvent in a gig, and the way the studio recording pans from the left to right channel with two different 12-string guitars was one of them.
When asked by Total Guitar during an interview in 2020 how he came to decide what the best way of playing the song live was, he revealed that the selection process was a real headscratcher, but that there was only ever one suitable outcome. “It was just obvious that the only way to do this, with the sort of fragile guitar of the opening style and the more racy sort of pickups for the solo – the doubleneck is the only way I’m going to do it,” Page claimed.
He would acknowledge that when composing the song, this predicament hadn’t even crossed his mind. “When I recorded the song I wasn’t thinking about how I was going to do it live,” he laughed. “So in actual fact, the song demanded the guitar. There was no other way to do it. When you think about it, it was the only way to actually replicate that song, apart from jumping from one guitar to another on stage!” While it would have been the ultimate rockstar move to drop one guitar and immediately switch to another halfway through the song, the use of his iconic Gibson EDS-1275 is something he became famed for.
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