“I wouldn’t say I played it as well”: The style Jimmy Page claimed to play before The Beatles
The rock and roll equivalent of BC and AD may as well be Before Beatles and After Beatles. While the Fab Four certainly weren’t the first to popularise the genre, they were the ones who took everything to new heights and showed every listener what was possible if you had the right idea at your disposal. Then again, The Beatles were far from the only ones looking to innovate in the 1960s, and Jimmy Page was already trying out different sounds before he found his calling in Led Zeppelin.
Granted, anyone in Page’s position was usually far more interested in making music outside of simple rock and roll. He had started in the world of skiffle like many kids of his generation, but looking at his work as a session musician, he was more than willing to work in any genre that seemed to fit his style, whether that was dipping into psychedelic territory, recording music for films, or embracing his inner folk rocker and breaking out the fingerpicking styles on acoustic.
Even when he was a core part of The Yardbirds, Page was already being looked at as a fly-by-night artist. His work on tunes like ‘Heart Full of Soul’ helped establish the band’s identity as a psychedelic blues outfit, but with the riffs that Page was stockpiling, he was never going to be the kind of person who gave them away during a session. What he needed was the right band, but that didn’t mean he stopped looking for new influences.
While Page was covering everything he could regarding Western music, he knew that Eastern textures were always going to play a hand in his music. There’s a lot more to explore than what’s in one’s backyard, and as soon as The Beatles went international, it wasn’t long before George Harrison started making waves by bringing Indian instruments into the band’s music.
‘Norwegian Wood’ is still considered one of the first Western songs to feature a sitar, and when Harrison finally embraced his calling on ‘Within You Without You’, he made a tune that could perfectly blend music from both cultures, like having the orchestra mimic what the tabla players were doing.
It was certainly a novel concept when Sgt Peppers, but according to Page, that was already yesterday’s news to him, saying, “Let’s put it this way; I had a sitar before George Harrison, I wouldn’t say I played it as well as he did, though. I think George used it well. ‘Within You and Without You’ is extremely tasteful. He spent a lot of time studying with Ravi Shankar, and it showed.”
Although a lot of Page’s Indian influence did come out in the way that he played his drone-like acoustic pieces, it took him a while to have the same fluidity that Harrison had. The former Beatle even admitted that he was never going to be the greatest sitarist in the world, but compared to the strange detours that he made on ‘The Inner Light’, a track like ‘Black Mountainside’ was never going to measure up as well.
But the fact that Page wasn’t as good at that aspect of guitar was what led to him pushing even further forward. Most people are grateful to master only one genre during their time in the spotlight, but Page knew that if he wanted to be in it for the long haul, he was going to have to explore different textures he didn’t even know existed yet.
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