Taking a leaf out of Zeppelin”: Jimmy Page on the album Robert Plant modelled his career on
Every artist is going to want to find some way to evolve their sound as time goes on. They might not be as adventurous as bands like The Beatles in the studio, but it’s better to go into recording an album with a certain challenge for yourself rather than putting out a couple of catchy tunes. While Led Zeppelin never shied away from making something different on every one of their releases, Jimmy Page thought that the seeds of Robert Plant’s solo career were sown the minute they began working on this album.
Then again, every member of Zeppelin made them what they were. No one was replaceable in the group, and even when they tried for one-off reunions, it was never going to sound the same without John Bonham or leaving John Paul Jones conspicuously absent when Plant and Page got together for joint tours together in the 1990s.
That’s because what they created together was far too sacred to go on for too long. There are pieces of their debut record that sound closer to what Page was doing in The Yardbirds, but once they unleashed Led Zeppelin II upon the world, the temperature of the rock and roll scene felt decidedly different. Most people had heard riff-based rock and roll, but the genesis of what’s known as hard rock seemed birthed the minute ‘Whole Lotta Love’ started.
But if Zeppelin spent their entire careers making only blues-rock scorchers and the odd bit of Tolkien worship like ‘Ramble On’, we wouldn’t be talking about them in such hallowed terms. They were meant to stretch themselves, and as much as people didn’t care for it as much back in the day, Led Zeppelin III is a vital piece of the band’s career for what it did for their future endeavours.
While everyone may have felt jilted hearing ‘Immigrant Song’ as the first track and then getting nothing but acoustic tunes, this was a more pure version of what the band could do. You have to remember that Page and Plant were avid fans of people like Joni Mitchell, and listening to them make something a bit more downtempo like ‘Tangerine’ and still make acoustics sound heavy on ‘Friends’ was the main reason why they could take more chances on later albums like Houses of the Holy.
Judging by what Plant has done as of late with people like Allison Krauss, though, Page felt that the singer was testing the waters of what he could do on this record, saying, “I’m not saying that he’s just taking a leaf out of the Zeppelin book. But it’s apparent that the third album, where you have this emphasis on the acoustic, was more attractive to him as time went on, rather than the more hardcore elements of Zeppelin.”
Given those kinds of disagreements, it’s no shocker why Page went in a different direction. Despite having a love of acoustic material, hearing him pick up his electric for The Firm or working with The Black Crowes in later years gave him a much better outlet than having to worry about Plant getting more and more sentimental whenever he broke out the downtempo Zeppelin material.
But if Plant’s recent shows are anything to go on, he hasn’t lost his love for those old songs. He may rely on tunes like ‘The Battle of Evermore’ and ‘Gallows Pole’ far more often, but the best way of judging a song is to see how well it holds up if it’s played in its most natural state.
