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The Led Zeppelin songs that feature only Jimmy Page

Sun 28 May 2023 17:00, UK

Led Zeppelin have always proved to be greater than the sum of their parts. Even if John Paul Jones had remained a top-tier session musician and Robert Plant continued singing with The Band of Joy, they would never have seen the heights of their careers today if they hadn’t joined forces with John Bonham and Jimmy Page to deliver the most raucous rock and roll ever conceived. Although the band were always teetering on the edge of chaos together, some of their most tranquil songs came from one of their most unhinged members.

Long before Zeppelin formed, Jimmy Page was already a seasoned veteran of the session musician circuit, playing on songs by The Who and Donovan while holding down his gig as the main guitarist in The Yardbirds. Once Page had the idea to form Led Zeppelin, he began to work on songs far heavier than the blues, bringing new life to old standards like ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’ and ‘Dazed and Confused’, complete with Plant’s guttural wail.

In between the sonic avalanches on the first record, Page also contributed a peaceful acoustic ditty called ‘Black Mountainside’. A variation on an old folk melody, this is the first time Page was heard playing in an alternate guitar tuning, tuning his guitar down to an open C# tuning to get the droning sounds of the bottom strings. While the title brings to mind sounds of the occult, the trance-like atmosphere of the tune is more indicative of Page’s fascination with Eastern music, eventually incorporating their odd time signatures into Zeppelin’s classics like ‘Kashmir’.

Page rarely returned to his acoustic showcases as time passed, choosing instead to base entire songs around his unique folksy style, like ‘Going to California’ and ‘The Rain Song’. When the band were making their ultimate double album experience on Physical Graffiti, though, Page thought it would be a good idea to bust out his fingerpicking chops one more time.

Set in the same open tuning a semitone lower, ‘Bron-Y-Aur’ was a slow instrumental written in tribute to the abode the band would frequent in between legs of touring, often using the spot to woodshed new ideas like an early version of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and ‘Black Dog’. Since it was seen as a lowly cottage on a hill, the track evokes that same peaceful feeling, as if the listener is hearing Page get up at dawn and have a quick guitar strum as the sun rises over the peaceful landscape.

Then again, these soft moments were only flickers of beauty in what Page wanted to do. Outside of his noodling, Page’s attention to detail became more extravagant on the next batch of records, including working with orchestral arrangements and different studio creations like synthesisers on albums like In Through The Out Door.

Even in this solo state, Page could still match the same intensity with a Les Paul in his hand, always sounding like he was attacking his instrument as he tried to squeeze every last note he could muster out of the guitar before it gave out. The power of Led Zeppelin might be about having those four musicians playing off each other, but the spirit of Page as a musician has never been purer than it was on these spellbinding tracks.