The producer Jimmy Page banned from working with Led Zeppelin: “Haven’t got a hope in hell”
Any producer, even one who has to work with Jimmy Page, is supposed to have a band’s best interests at heart when making any of their records.
As much as some producers have their fingerprints all over a project in some respects, it’s the musicians’ album at the end of the day, so it’s their job to take them from sounding like a scrappy bar band to a group that could go toe-to-toe with musical giants.
That balance between guidance and control is where the role of a producer becomes delicate. Push too hard, and you risk diluting the artist’s vision; stay too hands-off, and the record may never reach its full potential. The best producers understand when to step in and when to disappear, shaping the sound without overshadowing the personalities at the centre of it.
For someone like Jimmy Page, that line was even more important. He wasn’t just the band’s guitarist, he was the architect behind their sonic identity, meaning any external influence had to complement rather than compete with his ideas. It’s why he approached collaborations cautiously, ensuring that whoever was involved in the process understood that Led Zeppelin’s sound was ultimately being driven from within the band itself.
While Jimmy Page normally had a clear vision of what he wanted Led Zeppelin to sound like, he vowed never to see this person’s name on one of their album sleeves.
Because, really, Page should get credit as the producer behind most of the group’s best albums. Even if he wasn’t responsible for every mixing and mastering session that they ever made, his discipline as a studio musician gave him a good idea for how to get the sounds he heard in his head, whether that was feeding his guitar through a Leslie speaker or using different tunings no one had heard of.
And listening to Page talk about his work with engineer Eddie Kramer, the session may as well have been like watching kids in a candy shop. Since Kramer had already worked with fellow production genius Jimi Hendrix, a lot of the material on Zeppelin records sounds like it’s being played from a completely different universe.
Even the happy accidents that they made together managed to fit pretty well alongside their bluesy material. Despite it being a complete accident when they discovered it, hearing that slapback echo on Robert Plant’s voice on ‘Whole Lotta Love’ is what makes the tune one of the enduring classics of rock and roll history.
If things had gone slightly differently, though, Glyn Johns would have been the right person for the job for Zeppelin. It’s not like he was a horrid choice by any means. His resume speaks for itself when working with acts like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Who, but Page knew he wasn’t the right guy for the job the minute he walked in.
Compared to the collaborative spirit of everyone else, Page thought that Johns wanted to cash in on Zeppelin while they were still green, saying, “Glyn Johns was the engineer on the first album, and as I mentioned earlier, he had a bit of an attitude problem. I’ll tell you what he did. He tried to hustle in on a producer’s credit. I said, ‘I’ll tell you, you haven’t got a hope in hell’. And then we went to Eddie Kramer for the second album.”
While there was definitely tension between Page and Johns, the producer wasn’t exactly hurting, either. By the time he had his fill of powerful music, Johns eventually worked the same magic for the first two and a half Eagles albums, while his brother, Andy, stayed with Zeppelin and helped lay down impressive soundscapes later with Van Halen.
But, really, was there any point in having a consistent producer behind Zeppelin? Some bands like The Beatles or Radiohead need a George Martin or Nigel Godrich to balance everything, but in Zeppelin’s case, the magic was all in Page’s head, and it was only a matter of time before it got translated out his fingers.
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