The song Jimmy Page called one of his creative peaks: “The crest of a wave”
Rock and roll has never been about perfection. Anyone can try to craft the most technically flawless song in the rock canon, but even if it’s polished to a blinding sheen, what’s the point if there’s no groove behind it? Sometimes, the mistakes are the entire appeal of a song—and Jimmy Page knew that some of the best players on Earth were always a bit rough around the edges.
Because listening back to Led Zeppelin’s catalogue, it’s not like Page knocked it out of the park with the most technical lead lines of all time. As much as a song like ‘Heartbreaker’ has gone down in history as one of his classic guitar solos, there are many times when it comes off a bit sloppy, almost as if he’s hanging on by a thread and barely keeping the tempo of the track before John Bonham comes roaring back in on the final verse.
But that was never a hindrance to Zeppelin’s success. The entire band had a communal sense of rhythm, and no matter how much Page played ahead of the beat some of the time, Bonzo was always there dragging the beat back, which gave their music a distinct push and pull throughout every single tune. Then again, Page was about more than one band throughout his career.
No one gets the role as a session guitarist by being merely good, and considering how many people he had worked with, Page knew how to be a bit of a maverick in the studio, often flying blind with a song and getting the most out of sitting in with his fellow musicians. Even for someone who had built up a mammoth career in Zeppelin, though, being asked to guest on a Rolling Stones record was bound to be a bit intimidating.
While Page had already been working on some of the best Zeppelin records, his performance on the song ‘Scarlet’ from Goats Head Soup is one of the stranger detours that he made during this time. Everything was fairly in-house by the time that he began working with Zeppelin, but looking back on his work on the track, Page remembered those sessions as a classic example of him working at his peak.
“You can hear from listening to ‘Scarlet’ that I’m really on the crest of a wave”.
jimmy page
Since this fits somewhere in between the release of Houses of the Holy and the beginning of Physical Graffiti, Page saw this as the moment where he started to come into his own, saying, “You can hear from listening to ‘Scarlet’ that I’m really on the crest of a wave with Zeppelin, with all the playing, so it would’ve been nice to maybe have done more together with Keith around that time, before we moved on to other pastures.”
Even if he didn’t get the chance to jam with Richards as much, he did get the next best thing when working with their shared musicians. Outside of asking Stones collaborator Nicky Hopkins to join Zeppelin in their early days, ‘Boogie With Stu’ featured Ian Stewart on the keyboards, who practically was the sixth member of The Stones throughout their early days.
Though Page and Richards were on two separate creative planes by the time the 1970s kicked into gear, they were always cut from the same cloth. Both of them had the blues to learn from, and when they started making their own rock and roll hits, the world was left with a guide to what the harder side of the genre could sound like.
