“Just phenomenal”: the song that stopped Jimmy Page in his tracks
The entire world of rock and roll seemed to shift on a dime the minute that Led Zeppelin started to become the biggest band in the world. Jimmy Page may have been the ringleader of the group, guiding them into whatever crazy venture they were up to next, but the minute that John Bonham and Robert Plant entered the equation, this supposed supergroup turned into the kind of musical gods that seem to only come once every generation. Granted, Page was always a student of rock and roll, and his approach was no different from what his heroes had been doing earlier.
Before Page had even become one of the biggest guitarists in the world, he was already woodshedding his craft on the session music scene. He had a lot of time to practice and a lot of time to listen, and given his work with any band that walked into the studio, he already had a massive knowledge of what the guitar could do under his belt before he even was asked to join The Yardbirds.
But as much as Page wanted to leave his old band to try something new with Zeppelin, the love affair with the blues never really went away. Zeppelin’s entire debut album felt like the same kind of blues The Yardbirds had been doing only ten times heavier, and when they followed it up, tunes like ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and ‘The Lemon Song’ offered a slightly more chaotic version of what the blues could be than a simply I-IV-V progression that keep looping for as long as they wanted.
For anyone at Page’s age, though, the main starting point was rockabilly and skiffle music. No one was going out of their way to buy imports of Muddy Waters records right out of the gate, so when they heard people like Lonnie Donegan on the radio, getting that kind of guitar work under their fingers was much easier. Even for a genre that was simplistic, Johnny Burnette was a breath of fresh air for anyone playing guitar.
“The musical glue of that record is just absolutely phenomenal, and the guitar playing was so abstract to anything else that I’d ever heard.”
Jimmy Page
His licks were no different than what a lot of guitarists were doing at the time, but the path for him to pull them off was a lot more eccentric. Compared to everyone else strumming chords, Burnette was a bona fide guitar hero, and for a young Page, he knew that he could learn a lot from watching him play.
When discussing his upbringing, Page said that Burnette’s approach was one of the few times that he was left speechless in the beginning, saying, “You were fueled to do the best you could, and it’s quite right. I mean, one of the records that stopped you in your tracks was [1956’s] Johnny Burnette and the Rock n’ Roll Trio. The musical glue of that record is just absolutely phenomenal, and the guitar playing was so abstract to anything else that I’d ever heard.”
And that kind of playing was pivotal to how Page approached his instrument later. He knew that the limits had only slightly been tested with the electric guitar, and listening to the way that he dragged a bow across the strings or worked in exotic tunings into his arsenal, Page was willing to take what Burnette did one step further, even if what he was playing ended up going back to the same old blues turnaround.
But isn’t that the core of all great guitar playing? Anyone can spend their time practising to become a technically proficient musician, but the real mark of any great artist is having the fearlessness to create something that’s intentionally against the grain to pave the way for something no one had heard before.
