The three greatest Led Zeppelin songs, according to Jimmy Page
“I consider Jimmy Page freakier than Jimi Hendrix,” Dave Grohl once wrote. The occult-inclined guitarist would certainly take that as a compliment.
“Hendrix was a genius on fire, whereas Page was a genius possessed,” the Foo Fighters frontman continued. “Zeppelin concerts and albums were like exorcisms for them. People had their asses blown out by Hendrix and Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton, but Page took it to a whole new level, and he did it in such a beautifully human and imperfect way.”
Some have mislabeled that as “sloppy”, and by some, I mean overly precise Eddie Van Halen, but Grohl saw Page’s wavering ways as the pinnacle of rock ‘n’ roll’s roots being reinvented in the best possible way. “He plays the guitar like an old bluesman on acid,” he says. And if that comes across as “imperfect”, well, then you only have to turn to Ritchie Blackmore to address why.
Blackmore once vitally explained, “If you are always playing the correct notes, there is something wrong, you’re not searching, you’re not reaching for anything.” Page was always searching to find something special, and Led Zeppelin’s music, as a whole, followed suit. They might have ripped off the blues, but they ripped it off like archaeologists finding buried treasure and turning it into shimmering jewels.
The Foo Fighters frontman finalised his appraisal of the Led Zeppelin axesmith in Rolling Stone by explaining: “Page doesn’t just use his guitar as an instrument. For him, it’s like some sort of emotional translator.” And therein lies the crux of the band’s appeal on all fronts.
You can dwell on how they took the solid foundations of the blues and built upwards with classical compositional thinking to essentially create a new genre, but all that would’ve been lost or blunted had it not been for the fact that, in the process, they rattled the stilted ways of counterculture rock with a new emotional wallop. If anything, they defibrilated an ailing genre.
As the band’s chief orchestrator, you won’t find much in their back catalogue that Page didn’t like. Although he wasn’t fond of ‘Livin’ Loving Maid (She’s Just A Woman)’, ’All of My Love’, and, indeed, the whole In Through The Out Door, describing them as “a little soft”, for the most part, he was a firm cheerleader of everything else they did.
He usually goes against Robert Plant’s admission that the band could get “overblown“ and that he was prone to “vocal hysterics“, and supports the theatrics of the group as a vital part of their arsenal. With a love for fellow emotive performers like Jeff Buckley, his view is that being a little ‘overblown’ is perhaps a compliment in a world where safe pop dominates.
Furthermore, why belie your own musical skills with platitudes when you’ve got the chops to be pioneers pushing things to their limits? As Page opined, “I am talking about a collection of musicians who are each at the top of their craft in their own right.” So, they fed off each other to bring forth an explosive force. That’s when Page thinks they’re at their best – and he felt that force first-hand.
With that in mind, it proves difficult for Page to choose his favourites from their back catalogue. But since the dust has settled, he has been able to narrow down the peak of his love to just three epic tracks. We’ve collated what he’s said in favour of this beloved trio below.
Jimmy Page’s three favourite Led Zeppelin songs:
‘Whole Lotta Love’
In order to swell the blues to a booming new height, the band honed everything they could to a dramatic nth degree. They recorded John Bonham’s drums in a room with 28ft ceilings, they got their engineer to twiddle “every knob known to man” to produce a freakout element, and Plant got operatic with his filthy lyrics, all to create a riot that eviscerated the fact they were actually just playing the blues.
It is this experimentation with sound that truly endears the track to Page. “It’s very difficult to say with Led Zeppelin,“ he said when asked about his favourites at a press conference for the remastered release of the first trio of their albums. “Because I have separate memories for each one, how they were recorded, the sentiment, what they mean is all about. But I would say a track, to actually be able to access the idea of what comes with these companion disc audio and the release would be ‘Whole Lotta Love’.”
“Because it shows it’s a mix down at the end of that night of recording and it’s really tough, it’s really good,” Page explained. ”When you hear it you see just how much work went into the final version of ‘Whole Lotta Love’. I think that’s one of my favourites.”
‘Kashmir’
Plant has often described ‘Kashmir’ as perfect Led Zep, and, in fact, all of the members have expressed a love for the song at one point or another. For Page, the source of the love comes down to how happy he is with how his riff work was so foundational it provided huge expansive scope. ”I suppose ‘Kashmir’ has to be the one. I knew that this wasn’t just something guitar-based,” he told Rolling Stone.
”In addition, all of the guitar parts would be on there. But the orchestra needed to sit there, reflecting those other parts, doing what the guitars were but with the colours of a symphony. John Paul Jones scored that. But I said, ‘John, this is what it’s got to be.‘ I knew it, and I heard it.” And soon, the bellow came to roaring fruition and remains one of their biggest hits.
The song was born from a trip Plant and Page had to Morocco and incorporates several North African-inspired sounds. The result awed the band. “The intensity of ‘Kashmir’ was such that when we had it completed, we knew there was something really hypnotic to it, we couldn’t even describe such a quality,” Page recalled. In fact, he even found it “frightening” at first – the same can be said for many listeners.
‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’
In many ways, Led Zeppelin were a supergroup, and yet, unlike every other super-entity, they were equal to the sum of their parts. For Page, he thinks that this cut displays the strengths of the band as a unit most clearly. ”That shows how the four of us worked so well together. Obviously, we rehearsed the number and count one, two, three, four, pressed the red light and that’s what you have,” he said.
Technically, it pushed them to the limit and even proved hard to record. The problem that the band faced with ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’ was turning a simple blues track into something more elevated that suited their style; they had made a rod for their own back in this regard. This sent the song spiralling towards a complexity that tested every member’s strengths. As Plant told Mojo: “The musical progression at the end of each verse – the chord choice – is not a natural place to go.”
The singer continued. “And it’s that lift up there that’s so regal and so emotional. I don’t know whether that was born from the loins of JP or JPJ, but I know that when we reached that point in the song you could get a lump in the throat from being in the middle of it.” So, it was emotionally worth it. The track also became a live staple, and it typified the band’s ethos of borrowing, quite boldly, from blues sources and then twisting the tracks with classical complexity.
