The musician Jack White said never needed to work again: “So underrated”
Everything that Jack White did at the start of the White Stripes was an exercise in minimalism.
He could have easily been a kickass guitarist in any other band, but when working with Meg White, they created the kind of ramshackle sound that felt like the days when rock and roll was first being discovered. A lot of it came down to the bare essentials of the genre, but what White was interested in went far beyond having a fistful of riffs in his hand and a couple of effects boxes on the floor.
Before he had even started The Stripes, he was already a student of the greatest blues guitarists in the world. The rest of the world was still knee-deep in the grunge world or had moved on to nu-metal and pop-punk, but having someone repping the sounds of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters on White’s first few records was like listening to relics from a bygone era.
No one really knew what to make of it at the time, but White wasn’t simply a blue purist forcing his way to the big time. Every single rock band that came before had led him to form The White Stripes, but no one else seemed to leave the kind of mark on him that Led Zeppelin did. Because while he was the blues troubadour of the 2000s, Jimmy Page was doing the same thing in the late 1960s and putting his own twist on it.
Regardless of how many times Zeppelin evolved over the years, there were always going to be pieces of the blues still finding their way into their sound, whether that was working on their epics like ‘When the Levee Breaks’ or building up their later material like ‘Achilles Last Stand’. But if Page helped set White’s mind on fire, John Paul Jones was the one that ended up taking things to the next level.
For all of the great licks that Page had and the massive shout Robert Plant possessed, White felt that Jonesy had his legacy secure before the band was even finished, saying, “He’s so important to Led Zeppelin and so underrated. Just the opening bassline to ‘Dazed and Confused’ alone ensured that he should never have to work again.” But what Jones did was always out of fun rather than necessity.
Whether he was working with Led Zeppelin or doing arrangements for other acts, Jones was the one always testing the waters for what could be done in the pop format. Sometimes that would mean bringing in massive string sections, and other times he would be making the most aggressive bassline that anyone had ever heard without anyone really noticing it behind Page’s solos.
And while it’s a bit predictable the same guy that wrote the line in ‘Seven Nation Army’ called out ‘Dazed and Confused’, it’s riffs like ‘Black Dog’ that always kept people on their toes. The song has so much swagger from the moment it starts, but it’s actually one of the most deceptively difficult songs for anyone to count right, to the point where every member of the band struggled with finding their feet when they first started working on it.
But that mix of complexity and taste is what made Jones one of the resident geniuses of hard rock half the time. He may not have been the most outspoken member of the band by any means, but if anyone bothered to look to the other side of the stage, there was a 90% chance that they were going to see something crazy happening on the four-string.
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