“I Owe It to All of Them”: Jimmy Page Explains How His Love of the Blues Fueled the Fire for One of Rock’s Biggest Bands

“The blues is scary,” Jimmy Page says. “It’s threatening. It’s saying: ‘I’m coming to get you.’”

Harder, heavier and hairier than anything before them, Led Zeppelin shook up the blues scene, established Robert Plant as a bona fide rock star and Page as an untouchable guitar god, and gave the world the ferocious rhythm section of drummer John Bonham and bassist John Paul Jones.

“The blues – I mean, it’s just undeniable,” Page says. “It was just an undeniable element of everything that was going on in Led Zeppelin. If there hadn’t been that sort of movement in Chicago, back in the ’50s, and all that sort of riffing, then you wouldn’t have got what came through in various bands later – certainly for me and how it affected me in Led Zeppelin.

“In those days, all the guitarists were learning from records. I was lucky that I had a blues collector called Dave Williams. Through him I got to hear stuff like Elmore James. You weren’t going to hear that on the radio.”

Given his legacy, Page doesn’t owe anything to anyone as a guitarist, but he waves away the notion. “I owe it to all of them,” he explains. “That’s how I learned. My breakthrough was when I understood how to do bottleneck guitar. That’s the point when open tunings first come in for me. Boom! That’s it. And that whole world opened itself up for me. I wasn’t actually trying to play note for note what anyone else had done.”

Instead, Page broke the mold. It’s impossible to overstate the impact of that first Led Zeppelin album.

“As far as the material for the first Zeppelin album goes,” Page recalls, “I definitely knew that I really wanted to do ‘I Can’t Quit You Baby.’ ‘Dazed and Confused,’ too. And that’s not blues, I know. But it is! If you have the harmonica playing that riff, you know that it’s blues all right. And also ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You.’ All of these things. I could just list them and list them.