It all started in a basement in Chinatown. That’s the first time that Led Zeppelin ever got together and started playing music. The sessions started with four clueless faces staring back and forth at one another, and ended with those same four smiling, recognising they might have just stumbled upon something magical.
Jimmy Page already had a good idea as to what he wanted Led Zeppelin to sound like; however, he needed the right band members to ensure that that idea came to fruition. After years of playing as a session musician and with The Yardbirds, he had plenty of experience with different genres and wanted to merge a number of different styles in Led Zeppelin to create something equal parts chaotic and cohesive.
The idea sounds good, but you’re asking a lot for band members to be able to adapt to play all of these different genres in a fluid way. Luckily, the band he had put together for Led Zeppelin all wound up being some of the best in their field, and if there were any doubts about each player’s ability, they were left in that basement in Chinatown. After doing a Yardbirds cover, it became clear that something special was happening.
“We first played together in a small room on Gerrard Street, a basement room, which is now Chinatown,” John Paul Jones recalled when talking about that first jam session, “There was just wall-to-wall amplifiers, and a space for the door – and that was it. Literally, it was everyone looking at each other – ‘What shall we play?’ Me doing more sessions, didn’t know anything at all.”
He continued, “There was an old Yardbirds tune,” said Jones, “Called ‘Train Kept a Rollin’… The whole room just exploded.”
Led Zeppelin were lucky in the way that their band shaped out. Jimmy Page had a broad idea for the band, which involved combining lots of different sounds, mixing genres that hadn’t been mixed before in a bid to make a completely new sound. However, you also had the benefit that the band weren’t just blind followers, they were excellent musicians with their own ideas, which meant that they could take Page’s ideas and expand upon them.
Their musical know-how also meant that the band were great at coming up with stuff on the spot. If there was a show being played and Jimmy Page decided to deliver a long, killer guitar solo, or if John Bonham went off on a tangent with his drums, the whole band knew the best way to follow him. They developed a reputation as a live band for being unpredictable and exciting, and that’s what led to Jimmy Page daring to say that they were better than The Beatles.
Granted, their sounds are very different, so comparing the two is hard, but Page’s case is that if you watch the Beatles, you get the same thing every time, whereas Led Zeppelin kept their audiences guessing. That combination of musically tight songs but a freedom to improvise meant the band was in a great spot to play great live sets.
“I mean, compare our [BBC] sessions to, say, the BBC recordings of the Beatles,” said Page, “I bet you a cent to a dollar, if they have two or three versions of ‘Love Me Do’ or whatever, they’ll all be identical. That’s the difference between us and our contemporaries: Led Zeppelin were really moving the music all the time.”
