Has anyone ever told Jimmy Page that he can simply make friends, rather than always having to make a band?
Throughout the 1960s, Jimmy Page was on a singular mission, moving through different chapters all in order to get there. He simply wanted to start a band, a great band, and a band in his image.
Sure, he had major success in the Yardbirds; however, there was a reason why he eventually dissolved that unit and refused to carry on its name, instead forming Led Zeppelin as something new. He wanted to build a legacy from the bottom, and almost from the first second Plant and Page met, they did exactly that.
Robert Plant was arguably the missing piece in it all. Page had the vision and the guitar skills, but what is a band without a voice? And, when it comes to voices, there is really no beating or bettering Plant’s. It was a golden combination of winners.
They weren’t the only ones, though, and the eventual split of the band honours exactly that. When their drummer, John Bonham, died in September 1980 at only 32, the group make the decision to stop – there and then. They decided there was no continuing without their foundational beat maker, reminding the world that it’s the package that makes a band; you can’t just replace somebody and move on.
So, as the 1980s began, Page was sad, obviously. He was grieving his friend and suddenly found himself out on his own. By Christmas, only a few months after Bonham’s death, he seemed to be looking for something again, but it’s hard to tell if what we wanted was a new band, a new thing to keep his mind occupied, or simply a new reason to be around people.
At a Christmas party, he met Chris Squire and Alan White of Yes. Clearly, the end of 1980 had been big for band breakups as their group had just called it quits too. As they started jamming at the party, as musicians tend to end up doing, Page floated the idea – ‘we should start a band’.
The result was the incredibly short lived XYZ; Page’s first post-Zeppelin project and his dreamed-up supergroup that never really came together.
It never really worked because a key part of Page’s plan turned it down. After attending one of their first rehearsals and thinking maybe he would get involved, Plant quickly turned down the invite to join his old bandmate’s new project.
According to the band, Plant thought the music was too out there. “Robert (Plant) thought (the music) was too complicated,” Alan White said, “He came and listened to it, and I think he thought it was too complicated, or else there could have been the kind of a Yes Zeppelin band at that time.” He thought that if a band with this kind of epic sonic could exist, it already would as White added, “I think that kind of either frightened a lot of people off at that time or it was a too-good-to-be-true kind of thing.”
However, and if I may psychoanalyse these old rockstars a moment, there is likely an element here where Plant simply thought it was too soon to be back in a room with Page, without the rest of the band. “It’s the first thing that I did after we lost John Bonham,” Page said as there is no separating that grief from this early project.
There is likely a side of the story here where for Plant, the idea of being back in a band with Page but without involving John Paul Jones, and without John Bonham being able to be involved, all seemed too soon.
