The little-known song that changed the 1960s for Jimmy Page: “That’s wild! That’s serious!”
Jimmy Page always wanted to be at the forefront of rock music. He may have started out playing the same kind of skiffle music that almost every rock and roller did in the early 1960s, but the minute that he started working on sessions, he was more interested in seeing where he could take music beyond just the catchy single.
Led Zeppelin was certainly the breeding ground for his own sonic experiments, but he thought that one of the game-changers in modern music came from the band The Pretty Things.
Compared to every other psychedelic-adjacent rock outfit from the time, The Pretty Things were still a bit of an oddity. Their sound does lend itself well to being played amid the Jefferson Airplanes of the world, but they were more interested in making songs that could blow out your eardrums than just jamming.
Even when The Beatles were still pioneering the idea of the concept album, The Pretty Things were ahead of the curve with their album, S.F. Sorrow. Almost picking up where Paul McCartney left off, this was an album that actually told the story of one man from back to front, a full year before Pete Townshend got the idea to dream bigger with Tommy.
Part of what made The Pretty Things so influential was their refusal to smooth out the rough edges of their sound at a time when many British bands were leaning toward increasingly polished psychedelia.
Even at their most experimental, there remained something abrasive and unruly about their music, a quality that separated them from many of their more commercially successful contemporaries. That rawness helped bridge the gap between rhythm and blues, psychedelia and the proto-punk aggression that would emerge at the end of the decade.
Page’s admiration for the group also highlights how closely connected the British rock scene remained beneath the surface during the 1960s and 1970s. While Led Zeppelin eventually became global superstars, Page continued paying attention to artists operating outside the mainstream spotlight, particularly musicians pushing rock into stranger and heavier territory.
His support for The Pretty Things through Swan Song reflected a genuine appreciation for innovation rather than simple commercial instinct, especially given how far ahead of their time many of the band’s ideas ultimately proved to be.
Page was still more interested in individual songs, but even he could admit that The Pretty Things were something special. When talking about his roots with Uncut, Page explained that their song ‘Rosalyn’ was wildly innovative for its time, saying, “The Pretty Things were a band that were really changing their music and had done because they probably did one of the best singles way back in the day with ‘Rosalyn’, that’s wild! That’s serious”.
Compared to the other pop rock songs of the era, ‘Rosalyn’ is still one of the weirder entries in the genre. It still had a bluesy foundation, but the snarl behind the song is much closer to what bands like MC5 would be doing a few years later, almost taking the building blocks of rock and roll and starting over with a lot more attitude.
Page wasn’t the only one who knew the song’s power. Years after its release, fellow innovator David Bowie covered the song on the album Pin Ups. Despite Bowie not actually wanting to make a covers record, you can still hear his enthusiasm when playing the track, almost fitting his Ziggy Stardust persona a little too well.
Despite never getting the same accolades as their psychedelic peers, The Pretty Things got a new lease on life thanks to Page. After being one of the inaugural signings to Zeppelin’s Swan Song label, their music happened to fall in line with what Zeppelin was interested in, especially since they were undergoing their own changes on Physical Graffiti.
While garage rock has never exactly lent itself to the radio-rock format, The Pretty Things still deserve a spot behind acts like MC5 and The Stooges for bringing R&B back down to Earth. Zeppelin was still seeing how far a rock band could go as a cultural force, but Page’s interest in the struggling bands proved that he still had his ear close to the ground for the true innovators.
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