The one blues musician so good they scared Jimmy Page: “I get the chills”
When Led Zeppelin first formed, Jimmy Page was already the one steering the ship forward.
He had the plan for what he wanted them to be, and by the time that Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham assumed their roles, they had everything that a superband could have ever wanted. And once they finally got the tunes that they wanted for their debut album, each song took the rootsy blues that they all started off with and catapulted it into the stratosphere once ‘Good Times Bad Times’ kicked in.
Then again, that was all by design. The blues that The Yardbirds were doing was clearly trying to be straightahead pop music, and since Page was looking to make something more innovative, hearing him go from ‘Heart Full of Soul’ to Zeppelin is almost jarring. He had been one of the best guitarists in the session scene for a while, but hearing him take the building blocks of blues and turn in songs like ‘How Many More Times’ was enough to blow anyone out of their seats.
It was new and exciting for the times, but it was all part of the musical framework that Page had listened to for years now. Plant had clearly been listening to everything from Sleepy John Estes to Janis Joplin when he reached into his higher register, but whereas most other bands start experimenting after a few albums in, Page already wasn’t afraid to take risks like using a bow on his strings or breaking out the theremin.
But even if he had a million tricks up his sleeve, Plant would forever be the ‘Golden God’ chanting for the people every time they played. Page had a lot more swagger in his delivery, but it’s impossible to find anyone on Plant’s level from the time that could have that much stage presence when belting to the rafters. If Plant could make any song his own, Page was going to make a career out of making the guitar speak in a way no one else ever could.
After all, The Stones had started making their way towards pure blues when they started working on tracks for Beggars Banquet, but Page wasn’t going back to the same wheelhouse that he had done with The Yardbirds. He had to play music that moved something in him, and whereas most people were following the pattern of every other Beatles and Stones copycat, Page was aiming for Muddy Waters half the time he played.
There were plenty of blues belters like Howlin Wolf that came before him, but Waters was the perfect package the minute he sang songs like ‘Standing Around Crying’, with Page recalling, “As much as there’s technical playing, there’s a whole atmosphere to the performance that really got me as much as anything else. That was just so eerie. Oh, my goodness. I get the chills even thinking about that one.”
And that’s really the key word that connects Zeppelin back to the blues: atmosphere. A lot of the tension behind their songs came from the energy they created as a four-piece, and when you listen to the size and scope behind a tune like ‘When the Levee Breaks’, they managed to take a traditional blues tune and make it sound like the apocalypse was coming every single time Page started playing those slide licks.
It still sounded fantastic, but Zeppelin would be the first to say that blues wasn’t created to make everyone feel happy. This was the genre to unleash all those repressed emotions, and their mission was to come anywhere close to whatever magic Waters had tapped into when he played his classics.
