Jimmy Page on the age of modern guitar heroes: ‘Jack White won’t disappoint you’
There’s not a day that goes by that Jimmy Page hasn’t been a student of the guitar.
There are many aspects of the instrument that he has mastered both onstage and in the studio, but he was always willing to learn something new from whatever guitar hero was setting the world on fire at any given time. He was paying attention to Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s and stood in awe of what bands like Steely Dan were doing, and even when the guitar went out of pop music, he wasn’t about to stop listening.
But the institution that Page helped create did have more than a few dents in it by the time Led Zeppelin disbanded. The punk wave had all but wiped out the virtuosos, and while Eddie Van Halen helped set the entire scene on fire again with his tapping licks, there were bound to be a few guitar heroes who were turning the instrument into a gimmick. It was interesting to hear Yngwie Malmsteen play a million notes a minute for one song, but a lot of people forget that it could get boring listening to a bunch of notes hitting your eardrums at warp speed.
Which is why grunge was so necessary when it wiped out the era of the guitar hero. Kurt Cobain didn’t claim to be a guitar genius by any stretch of the imagination, but a lot of his moments on the instrument mattered as much as any Page solo to any budding guitarist. He was playing from the heart, and while it wasn’t the most technically advanced thing in the world, the rest of the world was going to take that and run with it.
Everyone from Green Day to Weezer had the same mentality when it came to playing solos, but that was also a double-edged sword for the guitar. All of them were learning the basics and not going any further, but even in a musical wasteland like that, Jack White was there to remind everyone of why rock and roll was born in the first place. Because, regardless of the power chords everyone started with, it all circled back to the blues.
And while what White was playing in The White Stripes wasn’t always that technical, you could tell that he had done his homework the same way that Page had done. He was clearly pulling from everyone from Robert Johnson to Muddy Waters whenever he played through his effects pedals or broke out the slide guitar on tunes like ‘Seven Nation Army’.
Page had already seen what White could do in the documentary It Might Get Loud, but even during his work with bands like The Dead Weather and The Racounteurs, he felt that White could do no wrong, saying, “I think Jack White is definitely a hero to a young generation of guitarists and an old generation of guitarists. There’s no doubt about that as someone who has roots. Not only that, Jack, every time that he has a new project, it’s always worth checking out because he won’t disappoint you.”
But even if White stayed consistent throughout his career, he wasn’t afraid to try something different every now and again, either. Most blues guitarists of his ilk wouldn’t have had the guts or the knowledge to hop on a record by Beyonce or A Tribe Called Quest, but when it comes to the greatest genre to come out of the past half-century of music, the blues is the common language that anyone can understand.
There are a lot more bells and whistles to White’s sound than what he might allude to, but his reverence of the past is one of the reasons why he will one day be talked about the same way that we’re talking about Page today. He was still a student of music like his idols in Led Zeppelin were, but the greatest strength any guitarist can hope to have is being able to work outside of their comfort zone and make it look flawless.
