The musician so good they scared John Paul Jones: “Just very inspiring”
When it came to Led Zeppelin’s live show, no one could say that John Paul Jones was the most magnetic performer in the world.
He was the band’s secret weapon in many respects and came up with some of their iconic riffs, but with John Bonham looking like a madman behind the kit and Jimmy Page being a sonic wizard onstage, it’s hard to really focus on the guy playing it cool to the side of the stage on bass. He may have been as important as everyone else in the group, but even if he didn’t hog the spotlight, Jonesy had a sixth sense for when he saw a true artist out there in the wild.
Then again, it’s not like Jones really had to do more in Zeppelin other than play music. He had his hands full arranging nearly everything they did, and when you look at the few times he did hog the spotlight, it’s not like everyone was clamouring to hear him sing the female line in ‘The Battle of Evermore’ alongside Robert Plant or anything. Then again, Jones liked to surround himself with people to do the heavy lifting for him.
This probably explains why some of his best work outside of Zeppelin came from working behind the scenes in some capacity. Everyone from REM to the Butthole Surfers could benefit from the music that he made, but for Jones, nothing suited him better than hearing a tune taking shape in the studio. But when the road did come calling again, he had the perfect foil every single time he got back up.
Them Crooked Vultures already gave him a great outlet to go back to the same heavy riffs that he started out with, but it was clear that everyone else in the band was a little bit starstruck. Dave Grohl was practically living out his fantasies every time he went onstage with Jonesy, but after a while, Diamanda Galas turned up and stopped the bassist in his tracks when he first heard her play.
While not necessarily in the rock and roll vein, Galas’s approach to music wasn’t all that dissimilar from how Jones looked at his own music. She wanted to look at the big picture every time she made her tunes, and while Jones was more than happy to help her on the production side of things, he remembered a few times where he felt like his career may have been in jeopardy if she got too good.
Because compared to his keyboard playing, Jones felt Galas wiped the floor with everyone else, saying, “She’s my favorite piano player. She’s just very inspiring as an artist, she’s very passionate, very committed, and always knows what she wants to do. I have several other things to thank her for; she got me playing steel guitar again, which I hadn’t done for years. She scares us all! That’s the fun part. But she’s so committed to her music.”
Given that last sentence, though, does the idea of having fun creating brilliance not ring a few bells? Jones may have been inspired by what Galas was doing, but the idea of someone taking complete control over their music and making the best songs possible feels like the same mentality that Page had when he first put together the idea for Zeppelin with Jones back in the day.
Maybe that hunger made Jones inspired again, but it’s hard not to be around that kind of musical spirit and not share in the enthusiasm. They might be pushing themselves further than you were willing to go, but if musicians aren’t pushed, there’s a good chance they wouldn’t get to make their true classics.
