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(Credits: Far Out / Open Culture)
There was no one else who rewrote the book on rock and roll guitar quite like Jimmy Page.
As much as rock and roll would have gone down a similar bluesy road if he hadn’t formed Led Zeppelin, the idea of the guitar riff being an art form was something he fully mastered the minute that he hit on tracks like ‘Whole Lotta Love’. Not every song needed to have such outlandish production, but Page knew it was about more than just him when it came to musical pioneers.
When looking back on the 1960s, it feels like another classic band was sprouting up every few seconds, even if not all of them were the most accomplished musicians in the world. It’s insane to think that in the same year, you could get landmark records from everyone from The Beatles and The Beach Boys to The Velvet Underground and The Stooges without really having to look too hard.
While all those bands had their place in history, Page was still trying to break away from the spirit of The Yardbirds on those first Zeppelin projects. All of them were still eager to break new ground, but after their first record gave them a foundation, tunes like ‘Ramble On’ had started to take things in a different direction. They wanted to be purely rock and roll, and while the blues did hang around for a little bit, Page’s idols were taking the basis of the same and moving it somewhere else.
As much as Jimi Hendrix was a fan of the genre, it’s hard to call everything he played straight blues. He had that as a template to work with, but he was finding different musical colours that most people didn’t have a name for yet, like when he started working in soul and R&B on ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ or turning in the closest thing to heavy metal that anyone had heard at that point on ‘Manic Depression’.
It was all an extension of his soul, but in terms of sheer weirdness, there were also the biggest names in psychedelia tapping into the same vein. The Doors had their place in the world, but when Syd Barrett first came out with Pink Floyd, most people didn’t know what to think of how he constructed his melodies, almost like taking the fanciful side of The Beatles and marrying it with outright whimsy whenever making tunes like ‘See Emily Play’.
Page was on equal footing with both artists in his prime, but he felt that what they were doing had a lot more to do with the rock and roll that was to come, saying, “Syd Barrett’s writing with the early Pink Floyd was inspirational. Nothing sounded like Barrett before [that]. There were so many ideas and positive statements. You can really feel the genius there, and it was tragic that he fell apart. Both he and Jimi Hendrix had a futuristic vision in a sense.”
While he didn’t take a lot from Barrett’s melodic structures, Page made sure that all of Zeppelin’s records sounded different from everything else on the radio. Hendrix and Barrett never settled for making records that were ‘good enough’, and when Page was making a tune like ‘When the Levee Breaks’, for instance, he was going to make sure it sounded like the soundtrack to the apocalypse whenever he played it.
There are many musical children that came from Hendrix and Barrett, but there’s a reason why both of them are still talked about in such hallowed terms today. They are each great in their own right, but their real power came from how well they were able to put their personality into nearly everything that they played.
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