The Led Zeppelin song Jimmy Page said “came out the ether”
Some songs are hard work—laboured over for weeks, months, or even years as artists chip away, trying to get them just right. There are countless stories of musicians wrestling with a track, refining it endlessly. But in this instance, Jimmy Page didn’t need to work at all.
Page isn’t afraid of the effort, though. At first starting out as a session musician, his patience and technicality built him a good reputation. He was known as a hard worker and a good worker, playing his part over and over until the song was perfect, no matter how uninspiring that song might have been to him.
It meant that when Led Zeppelin began and Page fully immersed himself in the world of rock and roll—this time with complete creative control—there was still a deep level of skill at play above all else. The band’s experimentation was rooted in that expertise. Page’s heightened understanding of his instrument, its capabilities, and how to push it even further in the studio made their sound not just inspiring but, in many cases, almost logical—bordering on scientific.
To some, that would be stifling. There is a big debate in art over whether an artist should work or simply wait for the muses to appear. “This whole thing of do you practise at home and all that,” Page said, summing up that dilemma in music and the question of whether effort and inspiration striking can go hand in hand.
But as a musician, Page experiences both sides of that spectrum all at once. “Well, I play at home, and before I knew where I was, things would be coming out, and that’s those little sections or riffs or whatever,” he said, as his routine of practising so often lends itself to inspiration. To him, it’s all a muscle that the more you exercise, the better you’ll get, as each and every Led Zeppelin song was born from the time and effort he put in, either to the immediate song or to the years of his career.
“At that stage, it’s selection and rejection. It’s whether you continue with something or you go, ‘No that’s too much like something else,’ and then you move into something else. If you’ve got an idea and you think that’s quite interesting, then I’d work and build on it at home,” he explained of the process and how he’d work on a song again and again, whittling it down to its final form.
However, in one instance, all that seemed to fall away. “’Rock and Roll’ was something that came purely out of the ether,” he said as the song simply appeared to him, fully formed. “We were working on something else and John Bonham happened to play—just as you do sometimes, because we were recording—this intro from ‘Keep A-Knockin’’ from Little Richard and I went, ‘Oh, that’s it!’—I did this chord and half a riff that was in my head – ‘Let’s do this’”, he recalled as the idea for the song hit all at once, adding, “It was really quick to do and we could write like that.”
Falling into his lap like a mysterious token of creativity, who knows where inspiration like that ever comes from if not the “ether” Page tapped into that day.
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