(Source: Far Out / Andrew Smith)
When you listen to Led Zeppelin, you hear four masters at work. Some of the best minds in music coming together and fusing their complex understanding of melody and rhythm to create a blend of acoustic music, rock and blues the likes of which the world had never seen. They were absolute trendsetters and Jimmy Page was right in the middle of it.
Jimmy Page grew up in a place where there were many different styles of guitar. He started playing on an old acoustic guitar, swapping the strings around so he could bend them and play blues. He honed his skills while at school, and after life in a touring band didn’t work out the first time, he decided to become a session musician.
While working as a session guitarist, Page played for various artists who explored different genres of music. This constant exposure to different sounds helped him develop the idea for Led Zeppelin, a band that could explore multiple genres of music and still create something cohesive. He had time to try out these ideas with The Yardbirds and knew there was potential.
“I had a lot of ideas from my time with the Yardbirds. The Yardbirds allowed me to improvise a lot in live performances and I started to create a textbook of ideas that I eventually used in Zeppelin,” said Page, speaking about how he came up with the band’s iconic sound. “I wanted Zeppelin to be a marriage of blues, hard rock and acoustic music, topped off with hard choruses – a combination that had never been done before. Lots of light and shade in the music.”
Although it is a huge challenge for any musician to mix so much at once, Zeppelin’s star team was up to the challenge, and from the first moment they played together it was clear they were on to something special. Robert Plant remembers their first jam session: “It sounded good – very exciting and challenging because I could feel something happening to me and everyone else in the room. It felt like we had found something that we had to be very careful with because otherwise we might lose it.”
One Led Zeppelin song that really showcases the band’s musical ability is their song “Black Dog.” The time signatures are random and the mix of instruments is so experimental and chaotic that many people believed John Paul Jones originally wrote it as a song that no other band could cover.
“I actually wrote it on the train while rehearsing at Jimmy’s house,” Jones said, dispelling the rumors. “My dad was a musician and he showed me how to write notes on anything. And so I wrote the riff to ‘Black Dog’ on the back of a train ticket, which I unfortunately don’t have.”
One sound to pay particular attention to on this track is Jimmy’s guitar, not just the notes he plays but the sound of the instrument. Even though he was such an experimental guitarist, this was one of his signature tones that was difficult to handle and felt like it could explode at any moment.
You hear this in full force right at the beginning of the song, as the first feedback and sound comes from Page turning up the volume on his guitar, preparing his six-string for more Led Zeppelin magic. This was a common sound that the band didn’t often leave in on recordings. On “Black Dog,” it was probably left in to prepare the listener for the chaos that was to follow. The sound you hear, which ushers in the guitarist’s favorite tone, is aptly called “Waking up the army of guitars.”
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