Jimmy Page’s first time on the road didn’t go well. He was playing guitar for Neil Christian and the Crusaders, but his health deteriorated while on the road, to the point that he collapsed in Sheffield and had to leave the tour early. After that, he started focusing on being a session musician, a job that became a double-edged sword.
Page made a great career as a session musician, earning good money, meeting the right people, and getting experience working in a range of different genres and styles of music. Of course, this meant that when it came to having his own sound, Page was so well-versed in so many different guitar techniques that it was difficult for him to pinpoint a style of music that he wanted to take forward as an individual artist.
The best move that Page made at this point was stepping away from being a session musician and instead opting to join The Yardbirds. During the Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck periods of the band, they had asked Page to join multiple times, but he never thought that the timing was right, so he refused. However, he finally joined the band in 1966 and played with them for two years.
This period with The Yardbirds was incredibly important as it allowed him to take what he had learnt as a session musician and apply it to playing in a band. It meant that by culminating all the different styles he had dabbled in, he landed on a sound that was fundamentally his own, which he carried over to Led Zeppelin.
“I had a lot of ideas from my days with The Yardbirds. The Yardbirds allowed me to improvise a lot in live performance, and I started building a textbook of ideas that I eventually used in Zeppelin,” he said, “In addition to those ideas, I wanted to add acoustic textures.”
One of the things that set Led Zeppelin apart was how unique their songs were. They intertwined many different elements of music to create something that was undeniably rock but a version of rock that people weren’t used to. Page said this was the whole point, and he was never interested in Zeppelin being a one-dimensional band.
“I wanted Zeppelin to be a marriage of blues, hard rock and acoustic music topped with heavy choruses – a combination that had never been done before,” he said, “Lots of light and shade in the music”. A prime example of that is ‘Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You’.
‘Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You’ does surmise the sound of Led Zeppelin very well. It starts slow, almost like a serenade, and then erupts into chaos. This is a culmination of all aspects of Page’s early career, which were necessary for the band to develop the unique sound that made them famous.
