Over a 56-year recording career, Paul Rodgers has collected guitar players like a connoisseur collecting fine wines. They’re pulled in by the soulful power of his voice, and he embraces what the combination, and combustion, of that with their playing can do to a song.

Consider the company English-born Rodgers — a solid rhythm guitarist himself, as well as a pianist — has kept, starting with the late Paul Kossoff in Free between 1969 and 1973, the band that put both men on the rock and roll map.

After that he joined forces with Mott the Hoople’s Mick Ralphs in the recently minted Rock and Roll Hall of Fame group Bad Company, for six albums defined by brawny, muscular but still sophisticated hard rock that had few peers for success during the ’70s. (The new Can't Get Enough: A Tribute to Bad Company demonstrates the group's continuing influence, with Rodgers and drummer Simon Kirke joining on tracks like "Shooting Star" and "Feel Like Makin' Love" with Halestorm, Blackberry Smoke and Def Leppard's Joe Elliott and Phil Collen.)

Then for his next trick? No less than Jimmy Page in the short-lived band the Firm, delivering a pair of powerhouse albums and Billboard Mainstream Rock chart toppers such as “Radioactive” and “All the King’s Horses.”

Rodgers went on to join forces with drummer Kenney Jones in the Law, then spent five years alongside Brian May in Queen + Paul Rodgers, another supergroup collaboration that brought May and drummer Roger Taylor back on the road and also yielded two live albums and 2008’s The Cosmos Rocks, the first Queen-related studio album since 1995’s Made In Heaven.

Rodgers maintained his impressive six-string relationships outside of his band affiliations, too, and through his seven solo albums — Jeff Beck, Joe Bonamassa, Steve Cropper and Slash among them.

“I don't really know the secret of how guitarists create their own unique sounds,” he tells us, “but I know a good guitar sound when I hear it.”

Here he shares some reflections about some of the best he’s worked with.

Paul Kossoff (Free)

“Koss was my friend and guitar player extraordinaire from before the formation of the band Free. We had met at a jam session. He came up onstage at a blues club in London, the Fickle Pickle, and blew me away with his powerful sound and his fluid electric guitar work. We played like we had been playing together for a long time, There was an instant rapport between us.

“His Gibson Les Paul was, as we used to say, ‘the bees’ knees.’ At the time, Eric Clapton was doing the Les Paul–Marshall stack thing and was playing at the Marquee just across town on Wardour Street in the West End.

The London music scene was referred to as experiencing a blues boom. The blues was the music we all listened to, the likes of B.B. King, Albert King, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters.

“Paul was one of those instantly recognizable players. You could identify him from just a few notes or chords, as in the opening chords of ‘All Right Now.’ Such a full spectrum of sound — all the high tones and all the low, with just a hint of crunch. I think the uniqueness is in the fingers, but you have to have the right gear too, and Koss had one hell of a great sound, even to this day. He was my soulmate guitarist, and we were in sync musically. Sad we lost him when he was just 25. Such a tragedy.”

Mick Ralphs (Bad Company)

“We were ‘label buddies.’ Both our groups, Free and Mott the Hoople, signed to Chris Blackwell's Island Records. I would see Mick in the office on Bodine St., Notting Hill Gate. Then Mott the Hoople and my next band, Peace, toured the U.K. together. I got to know Mick and liked him as a person — always friendly and so funny.

“We started writing songs together, and songs being the lifeblood of any band, the songwriting turned into a band, Bad Company. He had ‘Can’t Get Enough;’ Mott's Ian Hunter did not feel it suited the band's style, so when Mick played it for me I told Mick that the song was a hit and that I would love to sing it — and we were off to the races on our first album.

“Mick was often, described as a nuts-and-bolts guitar player, but to me he was always so much more than that. Being both a brilliant songwriter and guitarist. One of the great things about his sound was that he was multi-dimensional.

“Take ‘Rock Steady’ or ‘Burning Sky’ or ‘Silver, Blue and Gold,’ and of course the unstoppable ‘Can’t Get Enough’ or ‘Movin’ On.’ If you picture each song or track and focus on the guitar, not just the part he chose to play but the actual sound, each song is a a one-off — never been done before or since. Although there have been lots of copycat attempts — which is the highest praise, I’m told.

“In each song his sound perfectly matched and enhanced the mood and atmosphere of the lyrics — dark, moody and mysterious ‘Electricland’ or the blatantly rock and roll ‘Preacher.’ To me he was, and will forever and always be extremely inspirational. I believe that Mick made Bad Company what it is with his unique and varied guitar sounds.

“I can’t say how he got the variety of sounds he did. They broke the mold when they made him. I’m so happy we learned about our Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction while he was still alive. He was very happy when he heard the news.”

Jimmy Page (The Firm)

“We kind of fell together after I had built a studio in my London home, with the help of a designer, Steve Hoyland, and made a solo album Cut Loose — coincidently the same name as the smash hit American movie at that time.

“But Jimmy and I got together in that studio and began to create music. It was a very mind-expanding, creative and exhilarating time for me. Jimmy would bring along music for me to write lyrics to; the first serious song was ‘Midnight Moonlight Lady,’ and his guitar layering on that is superb — a beautiful, introspective sensitive and deeply personal piece of music.

“I would bring songs along that I had written, like ‘Radioactive’ and ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed,’ and it was pure magic watching him add his signature touches. We weren’t together long — as agreed, two years — but we left our mark on the tapestry of the story that is rock and roll.”

Brian May (Queen)

“I always admired Queen from afar. They had such a good sound. Every word from Freddie and every note from the band was crystal clear.

“When I heard ‘I Want to Break Free,’ the guitar solo was mouth-watering — so good. When we played that song together live, I would always turn around from the end of our 30-foot thrust in the center of huge arenas and watch and listen. Every time it just blew me away.

“‘The Show Must Go On’ is another great song. The passion and commitment is breathtaking, and Brian’s guitar totally matched the incredible moments in that song. His sound burns and pierces the very heart of things. He played ‘All Right Now’, with his massive chord sound, banks of Vox AC30s hooked up together. He uses a six-pence, which is an old silver U.K. coin, for a plectrum, which gave the strings a metallic overtone. After a show the stage was littered with them.”

Jeff Beck

“Now, Jeff Beck took no prisoners. He was outstanding amongst outstanding guitar players, in a league of his very own out in the stratosphere.

“Don't believe me? Listen to ‘Shapes of Things’ with Rod Stewart. The solo on that recording can't fail to blow your gaskets. He was a towering monster on guitar. There's also a track he did in the same time period, the B-side of ‘Tallyman.’ Just listen and you will know what I'm talking about. Actual words fail me, he was just so gut wrenchingly awesome.

“In 2002, Jeff invited me to perform a couple songs with him in London at the Royal Festival Hall. Sharing the stage with him was an exhilarating experience and one that I will never forget. I remember touring with Jeff, Ann Wilson and Deborah Bonham in 2018. Jeff and I would, flip-flop: One night he would close the show, the next night I would close with my solo band. It was so surreal on the nights when he was closing to stand at the side of the stage with my wife, Cynthia and listen to Jeff. It was absolutely breathtaking.”

Steve Cropper

“Steve Cropper was a staple in my listening and learning curve. He followed the emotion of the song and was the gold standard by which I viewed every guitar player. His playing really moved me.

“Steve was a sensitive yet powerful member of Otis Redding’s band on the Otis Blue album, the first vinyl album I ever bought with my own hard-earned cash, and my first love in terms of music. I still have that album. Steve Cropper, Duck Dunne, Al Jackson and Booker T Jones — the core band on ‘A Change is Gonna Come’ — build it incredibly to a climax that moved me to tears, the band working with Otis to tear your heart out.

“And Steve is such a big part of that emotional climb, hitting just the right notes in just the right place — sometimes chordal, sometimes playing lead. He was very, very restrained, nothing flashy or extraordinary until required, as in ‘Rock Me Baby,’ which has such an incredible groove.

“And when he lets it loose on the solo — every note counts with Steve. I was blessed to work with him a few times, most recently in 2021 on his last solo album, Fire It Up. We cowrote a song together: ‘She's So Fine.’ He’s sadly missed, but his contribution to music will always be remembered and appreciated.”

Slash

“Slash played on ‘The Hunter,’ a Steve Cropper/Albert King song on my Tribute to Muddy Waters blues album in 1993, and gave the recording his own inimitable interpretation of the blues with a fiery solo and some outstanding rhythm guitar playing. I think Slash is influenced by all the right people, old-school and blues, with his powerful Les Paul and his Marshall stack. He has great stage presence, witnessed when he joined me and performed at Woodstock in 1994. He was ripping it up in the rain and sounding good with Andy Fraser on bass and Jason Bonham on drums.

“I invited him up for a jam when Queen and I played in Los Angeles at the Hollywood Bowl in 2005. The crowd loved it and so did I. Most recently we performed together as a tribute to Lynyrd Skynyrd's Gary Rossington on the CMT Awards show. That same year I also sang on his latest album, Orgy of the Damned, on which Slash's guitar playing once again shines a light on the blues with his excellent sound and unique style, pure gold, raw and bluesy.”

Joe Bonamassa

“When I first met Joe, he told me that he was a huge Free fan, which impressed me, because most people in America are aware of Bad Company, not Free, other than ‘All Right Now.’ He had taken a deep dive into Free’s catalog, and the songs that he preferred weren’t the commercial songs, which intrigued me — songs like ‘Walk in my Shadow’ and ‘Fire and Water.’

“So when he asked me to join him at New York's Beacon Theatre in 2011 to record a live DVD, I accepted. And which songs did we decide to play? ‘Walk in My Shadow’ and ‘Fire and Water.’ Joe and his band were tight and nailed both songs. I really like his tone and sound and his phrasing is blinding liquid.

In 2024 Joe organized a tribute album to B.B. King, B.B. King's Blues Summit 100 [out February 6, 2026]. He asked me to record a track and I chose ‘The Night Life.’ I have always liked that track; the sentiment spoke to me. The next generation of guitar greats has arrived, and Joe is leading the way.”

“Stairway to Heaven” is one of the most famous rock songs ever recorded. It’s also one of the most overplayed. So overplayed, in fact, that it has been banned from guitar stores, immortalized in Wayne’s World and become the subject of a long-running copyright battle over its opening guitar figure.

But Robert Plant once went a step further: He paid a radio station to stop playing it.

The Led Zeppelin singer revealed the story in a 2002 interview with NPR, recalling a drive through Oregon that ended with a speeding ticket — and an unusual pledge to a local community radio station.

“I was in Portland, Oregon,” Plant said. “I was driving along in my car, heading for Lincoln City, which is out on the coast. I wanted to drive down to Eureka.

“Just before the black-and-white [the highway patrol] caught me doing 90mph, [I was listening to] KBOO.”

KBOO is a volunteer-run community radio station that was founded in 1964. At the time of Plant’s drive, the station had a tongue-in-cheek approach to raising money from its listeners.

“It had this amazing music,” Plant recalled. “It was kind of a mixture of sad outtakes of doo-wop and a very droll DJ, who sounded like somebody from Marin County in 1967.”

Then the DJ made an offer Plant couldn’t refuse.

“The guy came on saying they were looking for sponsorships: ‘Please send in $10’ or whatever, and if people in the area did that, KBOO would promise never to play ‘Stairway to Heaven,’” Plant explained. “So I called him up and pledged my money. I was one of the KBOO sponsors.”

It’s unclear exactly how much Plant paid. Some reports have claimed he donated $10,000, but there’s no concrete evidence to support that figure. Plant’s own story suggests the pledge may have been closer to the station’s suggested $10.

Either way, he was apparently willing to pay to avoid hearing his own band’s biggest song.

Plant’s apparent ambivalence toward “Stairway to Heaven” contrasts with Jimmy Page’s longstanding enthusiasm for the track. Page has described wanting the song to begin with a “fragile acoustic guitar,” played like “a poor man’s ‘Bourrée’ by Bach,” before the addition of recorders gave the opening a medieval quality. From there, the song gradually builds into a blues-rock epic before exploding into one of the most celebrated guitar solos in rock history.

Page has also discussed the unusual tonal possibilities created by the Gibson EDS-1275 electric guitar he used to perform the song live, switching between its 12-string and six-string necks. The guitar had been discontinued when Page acquired it via special order, but his use of the guitar on tour inspired Gibson to bring the model back in 1974.

As for Plant, though, the song’s greatest achievement may be that he once paid money not to hear it.

Forty-one years ago this weekend, on July 13, the Live Aid concerts kicked off at London’s Wembley Stadium with the British rock group Status Quo. Armed with Telecasters and described by organizer Bob Geldof as “ordinary blokes with long hair and denims,” the group opened the day’s festivities with the 12-bar rock of John Fogerty’s “Rockin’ All Over the World.” It sent an unintentional but perceptible message that, even in the synth-saturated mid 1980s, “the boys and girls with guitars” — as Geldof described them — would rule the day.

Live Aid did rule, on that day (as well as 20 years for its follow-up event, Live 8). True to Fogerty’s anthem, the benefit for African famine relief was a global event, ping-ponging between Wembley and Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium, as well as locales in Europe, Australia and Japan. Styled as a “global jukebox,” Live Aid presented most of the biggest acts at the time to nearly two billion viewers in 169 countries. Along the way it raised about $140 million for the Band Aid Charitable Trust, which Geldof launched with the all-star “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” single released eight months prior.

Live Aid’s 20 or so hours of music played out as a day for guitar heroics that were at times notable, notorious, triumphant and tepid. The players came from the worlds of rock, metal, blues and jazz, and nearly three dozen of them went on to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Here we recall some of the most notable guitar stories from Live Aid.

Led Zeppelin: Like a Lead Balloon

Led Zeppelin grounded itself immediately after drummer John Bonham died in September 1980, with the three surviving members going their own ways. But with Jimmy Page’s the Firm and Robert Plant both on the road, circumstances dictated an ascent back up the stairway to heaven, if just for one day. Plant was the first to sign on and wanted Page to be involved — but not necessarily to get the Led out.

“The original idea was not to do a Robert Plant set as such, but something a little lighter — like the Honeydrippers,” Plant said at the time, referring to an ad hoc all-star band he’d put together to record an EP of rock and R&B oldies in 1984.

“As Jimmy was part of the Honeydrippers I phoned him and said, ‘Would you like to be part of it?’ He did, and as we got to talking about it, we said, ‘While we’re doing it, why not do two of our [Led Zeppelin] songs?’ The whole thing really evolved.”

It ultimately sounded better in discussion than onstage. With former Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones on keyboards rather than bass, Paul Martinez from Plant’s band on bass, and Chic’s Tony Thompson and Phil Collins on drums, the shambolic three-song set felt like a genuine moment for the euphoric crowd at JFK Stadium, but not beyond.

Collins, who had flown in on the Concorde to play at both the London and Philly shows, introduced Zeppelin after playing solo piano renditions of a couple of his hits. He hadn’t rehearsed, and it showed, as did any lack of plan between him and Thompson on songs — “Rock and Roll,” “Whole Lotta Love” and “Stairway to Heaven” — that really weren’t made for two drummers.

Jones also had a small amount of rehearsal on the day of the show, Page — who busted out his Gibson EDS-1275 double-neck electric guitar for the occasion — sounded out of tune at times, and Plant was a bit hoarse from playing the night before in Detroit. To make matters worse, the stage monitors reportedly weren’t working properly. Plant later termed the performance “horrendous.”

The dissatisfaction was evident during a tense post-show interview with MTV’s Alan Hunter, which Collins dominated when the others proved truculent. The drummer later wrote in his 2016 memoir, Not Dead Yet, “If I’d known it was to be a two-drummer band, I would have removed myself from the proceedings long before I got anywhere near Philadelphia.”

Collins, who’d played on Plant’s first two solo albums and toured with him in 1983, also took exception to Page laying blame for the failure on him for “bashing away cluelessly and grinning.” Collins noted, “If you look at the video, you can see Jimmy dribbling [cocaine] onstage, Robert not hitting the notes and me miming, playing the air.”

Not surprisingly, Page, Plant and Jones refused to allow the performance to be included on Live Aid’s subsequent official DVD release. Led Zeppelin would have more satisfying reunions at the Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary Concert in 1986, its Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 1995 and the 2007 Ahmet Ertegun Tribute Concert in London, which is, as of now, its final performance.

The Who: Before They Got Old

There are several tellings of how the Who came to be part of Live Aid’s London program, the group’s first time onstage since breaking up after a farewell tour in late 1982. In his memoir, Is That It?, Geldof says Townshend suggested it after he invited the guitarist to take part on his own. That led to a series of protracted negotiations with singer Roger Daltrey, who refused to play with drummer Kenney Jones, and bassist John Entwistle, who refused to not play with Jones.

Townshend, however, subsequently accused Geldof of blackmailing and bullying the band into being part of the show. In his memoir, Who I Am, Townshend wrote, “When Bob sensed I might refuse to appear, he took the gloves off...‘Every pound we make will save a life. Do the fucking math. And do the fucking show!’”

Geldof denies he blackmailed or bullied the guitarist but makes no secret of how important it was for the Who to be part of Live Aid.

“I live, die and swear by this band,” he explained recently. “I really minded that the Who reformed and did it, ’cause it’s significant. I felt that 20 million people would watch that; if five percent of them contribute, we’re home.”

Though Townshend contended that “the Who were out of practice and should probably have left it to Queen and George Michael, who stole the show,” the four-song evening set — part of a killer chain that included U2, Dire Straits, Queen and David Bowie — was one of the day’s most exciting, despite any flaws — and stage monitor issues. “My Generation,” “Pinball Wizard,” “Love Reign O’er Me” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” crackled with vintage Who energy. Townshend was in full, furious, windmilling form, while Daltrey opened his shirt, twirled his microphone and jogged around the stage like a marathoner in training.

Even Townshend would acknowledge, perhaps grudgingly, that “we all felt proud to be there” and happily helped Paul McCartney close the show with “Let It Be,” with the two rock icons hoisting Geldof on their shoulders at the end of the song.

Bob Dylan: Too Rolling Stoned

It was another Live Aid collaboration that probably looked good on paper.

Bob Dylan, who’d sung on USA for Africa’s famine relief single “We Are the World,” was chosen to close the show in Philadelphia and in turn recruited Rolling Stones Keith Richards and Ron Wood. The trio, along with Faces/occasional Rolling Stones keyboardist Ian McLagan, gathered at Wood’s New York home to rehearse, with Dylan ultimately choosing two deep cuts — “Ballad of Hollis Brown” and “When the Ship Comes In” — along with the iconic “Blowin’ in the Wind” to play on the night.

There was undoubtably tension in the air at JFK Stadium, not only because of the occasion but also because the trio was directly following Mick Jagger’s explosive performance — backed by Daryl Hall & John Oates, and with Tina Turner guesting — at a time when Jagger and Richards were on the outs.

What’s more, Dylan’s performance was followed by a group performance of the hit “We Are the World” that would close the event.

“The sound guys had no idea we were going on,” Richards recalled the following year. “Here’s three guys with acoustic guitars and they were getting ready for [sings] ‘We Are the World’ with 50 people behind us.

“They were tuning up and we were trying to play,” Richards explained a few years later. “It was like, ‘shut ’em up, Bill Graham, or we’ll shoot the lot of them!’ Bob and I kept looking at each other like, ‘Where’s the blindfolds and the last cigarettes?’ But it was all for a good cause, so what the hell?”

Their performance was plagued by problems. The stage curtain had fallen in front of the stage amplifiers, preventing Dylan, Richards and Wood from hearing each other and causing them to play out of sync. When, early on, a string broke on Dylan’s guitar, Wood gave him his and used a cheap instrument a crew member handed him. The new guitar was out of tune. Wood wound up playing slide on only one of the strings.

Dylan, meanwhile, caused a stir when he suggested that, “I hope that some of the money that’s raised for the people in Africa, maybe they can just take a little bit of it, maybe one or two million, maybe, and use it...to pay the mortgages on some of the farms that the farmers here owe to banks.” While Live Aid did eventually spawn the charity Farm Aid, Dylan’s comment showed he had no grasp of the event’s purpose. “Something so simplistic and crowd-pleasing was beyond belief,” Geldof wrote. “[Dylan] displayed a complete lack of understanding of the issues raised by Live Aid.”

Seven other notable guitar moments...

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, on hiatus after his sophomore solo album About Face in 1984, played with Bryan Ferry’s band during the Roxy Music frontman’s four-song set in London.

Five of B.B. King’s songs from his set at the North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague, Netherlands, including “Why I Sing the Blues” and “Rock Me Baby,” were carried as part of the global telecast.

Dire Straits, which was in the midst of its own 12-show run at Wembley Arena next door, was joined by Sting to recreate his guest vocal on “Money for Nothing.”

David Bowie tapped Kevin Armstrong, who had played on the Absolute Beginners soundtrack, as his guitarist for Wembley Stadium. Bowie subsequently asked Armstrong to be a fifth member in Tin Machine after he played on the group’s debut album (he turned it down), while Armstrong co-wrote the title track to Bowie’s Outside album in 1992.

Pat Metheny sat in with Santana for its five-song set in Philadelphia, which included “Brotherhood,” “Open Invitation” and “Right Now” (verify song title — may need clarification).

Chic was on hiatus but Nile Rodgers brought his guitar to Philadelphia to play with Madonna (“Love Makes the World Go Round”), and the two of them joined Thompson Twins for a rendition of the Beatles’ “Revolution.”

After landing in Philadelphia, Phil Collins first got onstage with Eric Clapton for his set, which included Cream’s “White Room,” Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla” and “She’s Waiting” from the Collins-produced Behind the Sun album

John Bonham’s untimely passing in 1980 not only brought Led Zeppelin’s world-conquering antics to an end, but it also made Jimmy Page fall out of love with the instrument he’d spent the last few decades obsessing over. In his mournful haze, even mentioning the guitar around the then-jaded musician was ill-advised.

Paul Rodgers heard that advice and ignored it. It proved to be a pivotal moment in Page’s life.

“Led Zeppelin were very good to us,” Rodgers told Howard Stern two years ago. “We were the first signing on their new label, Swan Song. It was just so great because we were kind of nobodies at that point; it was so great to have somebody so monstrously big in rock and roll introduce us to the American people.”

Bad Company stayed part of the Swan Song pack for their first three albums, as Rodgers, paired with guitarist Mick Ralphs, went on to write a slew of rock anthems. But he says Bonham’s passing also impacted him, ultimately bringing the band to an end.

“It was a real shock to the system, and at that point I decided I didn’t want to tour with Bad Company anymore,” he details. “And Led Zeppelin basically stopped working at that point because Jimmy just didn’t want to play. He didn’t play for two years.”

Then, out of the blue, he got a phone call from Page, who was intending to come over to his house to visit his old friend.

“All the people around him said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t ask him to play guitar when he gets to your studio.’ I said ‘Okay.’

“So, as soon as he got to the studio, I said, ‘Hi Jimmy, did you bring a guitar? Let’s have a jam,’ and they all went, ‘Oh my God, shh, don’t do that.’

"But by the end of the evening, I have to say he was playing and he was playing brilliantly. I think, because he was in deep mourning about the loss of a good friend, a great drummer, and somebody he deeply loved, I thought, ‘The best way for anybody to bring them out of a depression like that is to do the thing they love.’”

That evening planted a seed, and though The Firm, the group they would go on to form together was short-lived, it proved an important step for Page to re-grease his wheels.

Speaking to Uncut in 2019, Page admitted that he was at a loss when Bonham died, and Led Zeppelin went down as collateral damage. Yet he has no regrets about his period of inaction.

“Paul Rodgers is one of the best singers this country has ever produced, and any musician would want him on a record,” he had said. “But if you’re asking me if I’d drifted a bit after the end of Led Zeppelin, then I’m not going to argue with that.

“I don’t want to labor the point, but it was the perfect vehicle for me to express everything I wanted to express, and it had gone before its time. You’d be asking a lot to expect lightning to strike twice in the same place like that with a whole different bunch of musicians.”

Rodgers, meanwhile, has revealed he declined an offer to appear on the forthcoming Van Halen album, spearheaded by Steve Lukather and featuring unreleased material penned by Eddie Van Halen. Lukather says he can’t believe these songs haven’t been released sooner.

As the Kinks' rhythm and lead guitarist, Dave Davies inspired a generation of players with his innovative use of power chords and distortion.

Pete Townshend often cited the group as a major influence, and was motivated particularly by Davies’ aggressive rhythm playing and distorted tone. The Who guitarist admitted that “You Really Got Me” inspired him to write “I Can’t Explain” in a similar style. Meanwhile, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton all took note of Davies' use of distortion, which was far more aggressive than what anyone had been doing in rock.

But Davies’ influence wasn’t limited to guitarists of rock’s 1960s wave. Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi cited him as an early influence on the heavy, down-tuned riffs that defined Sabbath’s sound and acknowledged the importance of the Kinks in creating the blueprint for heavy guitar riffing. The Kinks even inspired Al Di Meola to write a jazz-fusion classic.

And then there’s Eddie Van Halen, who was a fan of the group’s straightforward but powerful approach to rock. Van Halen famously covered two songs by the Kinks: "You Really Got Me," which the California-based hard rockers released as their 1978 debut single, and "Where Have All the Good Times Gone,“ which appeared on their 1982 album, Diver Down.

To be clear, Davies appreciates that he and his brother Ray had an impact on rock and, particularly, rock guitarists.

“It’s always very flattering for people to copy you, but it’s only music, isn’t it? It is an important vehicle, but we shouldn’t take it too seriously,” Davies told Guitar Player in our March 1990 issue. “We’ve been copied more than a lot of people would care to admit. Ray’s music has impressed upon and influenced a lot of people in many different ways, but that’s good.

But, with that said, Davies wasn’t a fan of Van Halen’s take on the Kinks’ classic.

“When I first heard Van Halen’s version of ‘You Really Got Me,’ I laughed,” he said. “It just seemed so exaggerated. It really misses the point of the whole meaning of the song: four working-class guys, struggling to do something different. In the original record, you can sense that in its energy, the roughness. It’s very impure.

“The Van Halen thing; it’s very accomplished and flashy, but what does it mean?

“Whereas when the Stranglers did ‘All Day and All of the Night,’ I thought it was much more respectful, because they actually tried to get a similar snare drum sound and guitar sound, which I thought was strange. I can’t imagine anybody wanting to do that anyway.”

He laughed. “But at least it seemed more respectful to the original concept and feeling. Even the solo was like the original solo, which I thought was really nice and sweet.”

In the same interview, Davies also addressed claims that Jimmy Page had played the electric guitar solos on those early Kinks sides. Davies, who said he was all of 16 years old when he cut those solos in spring 1963, blamed Page's claim on a penchant for myth-building.

“You see, Jimmy Page was a friend of [producer] Shel Talmy’s, and was a session player who used to hang around and hope that he could get in on sessions,” he said. “And we locked him out.

“But he learned a lot, you know, like the many other people who wouldn’t admit borrowing from the Kinks. And I suppose when he became successful himself, all credit due to him, his ego was so inflated he probably thought he invented the bloody instrument anyway, being carried along on that crystal and glamour.

"It’s all an illusion, building your ego up, and eventually something’s going to pop it like a balloon and you’re back flat down on your ass again. Which is what happened, didn’t it?

“And I suppose it was a bit unfortunate of him; I thought he did me a great injustice by saying that. Besides, I can’t see anybody crazy enough to play a solo like the one on ‘You Really Got Me’ anyway.”

We've all seen the classic, grainy clips of Jimmy Page dragging a violin bow across the strings of his Telecaster or Les Paul to produce eerie, evil, previously unimaginable sounds.

He did it frequently in the twilight years of the Yardbirds and whipped it out again in the early days of Led Zeppelin.

Given the fact that violins, cellos, violas and other bowed instruments had already existed for centuries, it's not so shocking, profound and/or mind-blowing that an enterprising young Brit should decide to apply the concept to the world of electric guitars.

But was Page first rock star to do so? Not exactly.

U.K. guitarist Eddie Phillips beat him to it by a few years, it seems. According to some sources, Phillips first took "bow to guitar string" in 1963 and as a member of the Mark Four in the mid-Sixties. That band evolved into the Creation — a respected yet still commonly overlooked Swinging Sixties London band.

“With feedback came the violin bow idea," Phillips told journalist Chris Hunt in 1988. "I just wanted to make the guitar sound different to what it should sound like. I don't even know why I cottoned on to that idea, really, but it just felt like a good idea and a good visual thing as well, just to try and get a sound out of the guitar that no one had ever heard before, something that was against the rules.

"I was aware that [Page] was doing it in 1967 because we did a tour with the Stones in Germany, and one of the roadies was an ex-Jimmy Page roadie, and he said, ‘Oh, I see you're doing that, I've just been working with Jimmy and he's doing that.' By that time I'd been doing it for four years. That's all I can say really…

“For all I know, Jimmy might say he's been doing it since 1954… I don't know, but I can honestly say that it was an idea that I started doing because it was my own idea.”

Above, watch Page use a bow in 1967 as the Yardbirds perform "I'm Confused," which would emerge two years later as Led Zeppelin's "Dazed and Confused."

Now, watch Phillips and the Creation perform "Making Time" in 1966 above. (Side note: Director Wes Anderson used "Making Time" in his 1998 film, Rushmore.)

Phillips is still writing, recording and performing with the reformed Creation (which for a time included original member Bob Garner). In recent years, the Creation toured the UK, US and bits of Europe.

And, just for a laugh or nine, watch Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) drag an entire violin across his guitar strings in This Is Spinal Tap. Note how he pauses to tune the violin, as if that makes a difference.

In November 1964, the Who entered the studio to record “I Can’t Explain,” the single that would help launch their career.

But guitarist Pete Townshend and the session’s other guitarist, Jimmy Page, had something else on their minds that day: a woman they had both been sleeping with.

In fact, when Page arrived at the studio, the two guitarists spent much of their time talking about her.

By that point the Who were building a loyal following in London’s clubs, but their first single, “Zoot Suit,” released under the name the High Numbers, had failed to chart. Their next record needed to work. Townshend wrote “I Can’t Explain” with a clear objective — to capture the explosive sound producer Shel Talmy had recently helped create with the Kinks.

Talmy had produced the Kinks’ breakthrough hits “You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of the Night,” which served as Townshend’s template. The Kinks records had reset the expectations for British guitar-driven pop, and Townshend was deliberately aiming at that compressed, aggressive sound.

Talmy liked “I Can’t Explain,” but he wasn’t entirely confident the young band could deliver a tight studio performance. Keith Moon’s timekeeping could be unpredictable, and Townshend himself felt he wasn’t yet much of a lead guitarist.

So Talmy reinforced the session. The English vocal trio the Ivy League was brought in to supply backing vocals, and two session players were hired as insurance. The identity of the substitute drummer remains unknown, but the guitarist was Page, a favorite of Talmy’s and one of London’s busiest studio musicians.

Page’s presence later fueled speculation that he played the distinctive guitar solo on “I Can’t Explain.” Townshend has always rejected that idea. “The solo’s me,” he told Guitar World in 1995. “Jimmy doesn’t play like that.”

Townshend already knew Page from the London music scene — and from a more personal connection.

“Jimmy was a friend of mine,” he continued. “We’d had a mutual girlfriend. She’d been going out with Jimmy before and was still, you know… kinda hooked on him for a little longer than I was comfortable with.”

The situation, he admitted, left both young guitarists unusually entangled.

“Anyway, she was much older than us. We were 19 or 20 and she was about 30. And a fucking sexy woman! She’d obviously fucked him to death and then proceeded to fuck me to death. And we had her in common. We were both kind of cross-eyed with this woman.”

So when Page showed up at the studio that day, the conversation quickly drifted from guitars to their shared romantic history.

“We just started to talk about what we always talked about,” Townshend said. “‘How's Anya?' ‘How is she? What’s she going through? Has she called you? Has she called me?’”

Only after a while did Townshend ask the obvious question.

“And then I said to him, ‘What are you doing here?’ He said, ‘I’m here to give some weight to the guitar. I’m going to double the rhythm guitar on the overdubs.’”

Townshend had no objection. The two discussed their electric guitars and settled on their parts easily.

“He said, ‘What are you going to play?’ ‘A Rick 12,’ I told him. And he said, ‘Oh, okay, I’ll play a…’ whatever it was. It was all very congenial.”

Keith Moon, however, was less accommodating. Furious that another drummer had been brought in, he confronted the session player directly.

“Keith was over in the corner,” Townshend recalled, “telling the drummer, ‘Get out of the fucking studio or I’ll kill ya. Only Keith Moon plays the drums on a Who record!’”

Somehow, amid the tension — and while Townshend and Jimmy Page compared notes about the same woman they’d both been seeing — the band captured “I Can’t Explain,” the single that would launch the Who’s rise.

More importantly, “I Can’t Explain” confirmed for Townshend the group had a future.

“We had a hit record, ‘I Can't Explain,’” Townshend told The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in November 2025. “I was driving my mom's little yellow van back to Ealing, where we lived in West London. I heard it on the radio, and that was it. I thought, Wow, I'm communicating. I have an audience.”

Beverley Martyn, the British folk singer who collaborated with artists including Jimmy Page, Donovan and Nick Drake, has died. A statement from the family of her former husband, singer-songwriter John Martyn, said she died peacefully at home on April 27. She was 79.

Born Beverley Kutner, she moved to London in the early 1960s to attend drama school and was soon swept up in the city’s burgeoning folk scene. Not long after arriving she formed the group the Levee Breakers. Their 1965 single “Babe I’m Leaving You,” recorded when she was about 17, was not a commercial hit, though the band became a regular fixture on the southeast England folk circuit.

She found greater success on her second try the following year. Signed to the then-new label Deram as Beverley, she released the single “Happy New Year,” written by American composer Randy Newman, who at the time was supplying songs for British acts such as Cilla Black and the Alan Price Set.

For the session she was backed by future Led Zeppelin members Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, Rolling Stones sideman Nicky Hopkins, and Andy White, the session drummer who famously replaced Ringo Starr on an early version of the Beatles’ 1962 song “Love Me Do.”

“It was a remarkable session,” Page said later. “At the time it was recorded I knew that she was a shining talent in the world of performance and songwriting.”

Deram’s distributor, Decca Records, evidently thought so too and chose “Happy New Year” as the fledgling label’s debut single. The following year she released “Museum,” a song written by the Scottish folk singer Donovan.

During this time she developed a romantic relationship with acoustic guitarist Bert Jansch, who taught her to play guitar. She also became involved with Paul Simon during his pre-fame days in London.

“He had a Napoleon complex,” she recalled to The Guardian in 2014. “Very intelligent. Moody, but witty.”

Like Simon and his musical partner Art Garfunkel, Martyn performed in June 1967 at the celebrated Monterey Pop Festival, where the Who and the Jimi Hendrix Experience made their U.S. debuts. She later contributed to the song “Fakin’ It” on Simon & Garfunkel’s 1968 hit album Bookends. (She speaks the line, “Good morning, Mr. Leitch, have you had a busy day?”—a reference to Donovan, whose surname is Leitch.)

In 1969 she met John Martyn and married him soon after. Together they released two albums — 1970’s Stormbringer! and The Road to Ruin — and had two children. But once Martyn decided to pursue a solo career, she was left at home to raise the family.

“My career was over,” she said. “I had my hands full. I did the odd gig with John, and the odd one on my own, but I had no future.”

She continued to write songs and co-wrote “Reckless Jane” with the British folk artist Nick Drake, who also babysat her children. But her marriage to Martyn was troubled. He struggled with alcohol and drug addiction and became violent toward her.

“There was love there,” she said of their marriage. “It was the drink and the bad drugs, the very heavy ones, that changed his disposition, and they made life unbearable for anyone around him.”

Their marriage ended in 1980. By the 1990s she was making music again, working with Loudon Wainwright III and Wilko Johnson. She performed at the 2013 concert A Celebration of Bert Jansch alongside Donovan and Robert Plant.

In 2014 she finally released her first solo album, The Phoenix and the Turtle, which included the previously unreleased Drake co-write “Reckless Jane.”

“It was a great relief to finally do something on my own terms. That was a dream I’d almost given up on,” she said.

Aside from a compilation of her 1960s recordings, Where the Good Times Are, it would be her final release.

“Beverley was a remarkable woman of great inner strength,” Martyn’s family said in a statement announcing her death. “She was beautiful, intelligent, warm and kind.”

One of the earliest examples of psychedelic rock came courtesy of a folkie, of all people. Donovan, the Scottish troubadour, delivered the genre to 1966 rock fans via Sunshine Superman, a Trojan horse as it were for psychedelia’s entry into the mainstream.

When Sunshine Superman was released in the U.S. in September 1966, it not only topped the Billboard charts, it made Donovan a superstar and introduced elements of world music, Celtic mythology and Swinging London into the mainstream pop universe. The inspiration for it came from his girlfriend, Linda Lawrence.

“It's very important to remember that love songs are very important,” Donovan says about his extraordinary musical achievement, “and the love story of Linda — my muse and sunshine supergirl — and mine is all over this album.”

The story goes that he and Lawrence broke up prior to the album’s creation, and that his longing for her fueled its songs. Apparently so did drugs: “Sunshine” was a popular 1960s term for LSD.

Produced and recorded by Mickie Most in London at EMI and at Columbia Records in Hollywood, Sunshine Superman was Donovan’s most successful album, peaking at number 11 on the U.S. charts and remaining on Billboard’s Top LPs chart for six months. (Due to contractual disputes, the album wasn’t released in the U.K. until 1967.) Among the album’s tracks are two that became instant hits: “Sunshine Superman” and “Season of the Witch.”

So how did a folkie come to be a psychedelic pop artist?

“I was known as a folkie, yes, but my parents always played high-quality jazz at home, so that style was with me, as well,” he tells Guitar Player. “I was playing ‘Sunshine Superman’ in a kind of funky Latin-jazz way, and Mickie Most said, ‘That's the single! What do you hear on it?’

“I said, ‘A harpsichord, congas, bass and a jazz guitar.’

“I didn't have a band, you see, so Mickie introduced me to the jazz arranger John Cameron, and John said, ‘I love the song. Don't worry — I know what you need.’”

Among the musicians hired for the London session were Jimmy Page, who played the repeating guitar lick using a volume pedal for variation in attack, and John Paul Jones on bass. The two future members of Led Zeppelin would also feature on Donovan’s 1968 proto–heavy metal masterpiece, “Hurdy Gurdy Man.”

As for “Season of the Witch,” Donovan explains that its creation owes a lot to Scottish folk guitarist Bert Jansch.

“Bert Jansch taught me the descending pattern of the Am down to the G bass to the F# bass to the F bass, and also the shape of the D9 chord,” he explains. “The D9 helped me crack the song.”

The tune took shape in Jansch’s kitchen, where guests included his collaborator John Renbourn and the folk musician Shawn Phillips, who joined in, playing lines on a 12-string guitar.

“Bert always had players from all over Europe stay with him,” Donovan explains. The folk singer doesn’t say if drugs were involved, but his memory of the night comes courtesy of what Renbourn told him.

“John said that I played ‘Season of the Witch’ for seven hours straight, all night and into the dawn,” he reveals. “I didn't know what I had. I didn't know that I had something that would last this long.”

“Season of the Witch” is one of the album tracks cut in Hollywood. As Donovan explains, he and Phillips picked up some local musicians to help them achieve the rock-combo sound they wanted. Rather than playing acoustic guitar as he usually did, Donovan played electric on the track.

“When we recorded it, I used my first electric guitar — a white Telecaster — and started chunking the chords. Mickie said, ‘That's it!’ Then we added the spooky, Dracula-movie organ, bass and drums.

“It's funny — the engineers wouldn't let us turn up the bass because the signal was going into the red.”

Most changed their minds by invoking the name of Clive Davis, then president of Columbia Records, which owned Epic, Donovan’s U.S. label.

“Mickie said, ‘Listen, Clive Davis in New York just gave me three million dollars to record three British bands. Do you think if I called him and asked for a little bit more bass that he'd give it to me?’

“The engineers looked at each other and said, ‘Okay, Mr. Most, you can turn up the bass.’”

Donovan has said he believes his greatest contribution to music was the idea of fusing different styles. But while Sunshine Superman stands today as an early example of his achievement, he explains that he was aiming for a higher goal.

“The idea was this, and it was very simple — bring all world music together,” he says. “I wasn't in one genre like all the other bands at the time. I didn't have to do just jazz, blues or pop.

“I thought, If we're really going to be talking about unity, consciousness, meditation, peace, brotherhood and the coming together of all nations, this was going to have to be done musically.

“That was the concept.”

With members that included singer Rod Stewart, future Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood and drummer Aynsley Dunbar, the Jeff Beck Group looked like one of the most promising new acts when it arrived in 1967.

Following a brief but stunning turn in the Yardbirds, and a follow-up project with Jimmy Page that went sour, Jeff Beck turned down a gig with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers to do things on his own terms.

But as Stewart later revealed, the band’s brief lifespan was anything but rosy — largely because Beck struggled as a bandleader.

“Let me put it this way, he wasn't a good band leader,” the singer told The Howard Stern Show in 2023. “He didn't have the personal touch with the musicians. Ronnie and I sometimes had to steal eggs here in New York to survive. We weren’t given any money. We didn’t get any wages.”

The group released two albums — Truth and Beck‑Ola — before splitting in 1969. Stewart and Wood departed to form Faces, while Beck later revived the band with a new lineup for 1971’s Rough and Ready and 1972’s Jeff Beck Group.

It wasn’t until Beck struck out under his own name with the instrumental electric guitar masterpiece Blow by Blow that the version of Jeff Beck revered by players today fully emerged. Armed with his famous “Oxblood” Gibson Les Paul, Beck entered a new creative era — one that helped cement his reputation as one of rock’s most expressive players. No wonder that guitar sold for an eye-watering sum at auction last year.

Still, Stewart didn’t hold their floundering bandleader responsible for the band’s financial woes.

“It wasn't his fault,” he insisted. “It was Peter Grant, who was managing at the time.”

Grant, of course, was also managing Page’s new band, Led Zeppelin, who were busy pushing the blues to thunderous new extremes — leaving little time to further Beck’s career. Which is where the bizarre Woodstock situation enters the story.

The Jeff Beck Group had been booked to perform at the festival — now one of the most mythologized events in rock history — but they never made it. A rumor began circulating that Beck’s wife was having an affair, prompting the guitarist to abruptly return home.

“He thought the gardener was shagging his wife,” Stewart quipped bluntly. “It was bullshit.”

There’s even a fan theory floating around on Reddit that Page himself started the rumor to scupper Beck — despite the two guitarists being longtime friends and occasional collaborators. It’s a bold theory, though the poster doesn’t appear to have convinced many commenters.

Either way, Stewart doesn’t dwell on what might have been. In fact, he believes skipping Woodstock may have spared them from being “labeled a Woodstock act for the rest of our lives” — a fate he suggests befell Ten Years After.

Stewart was also asked who the better guitarist was between Beck and Wood, but the “Maggie May” songwriter refused to take the bait.

“You can't compare the two,” he said. “Ronnie's got an innate sense of rhythm and riff writing, whereas Jeff — the sounds he gets out of his guitar. He's an entrepreneur of the guitar.”

Beck, who died in 2023, left behind a singular legacy — from his groundbreaking work with the Yardbirds to the genre-defying solo career that followed (including an album’s worth of unreleased recordings).

“We really fell in love with Led Zeppelin,” Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson once said. “Jimmy Page was probably the biggest influence on me. I loved everything that he represented — his style, the looseness of his playing. I learned an awful lot from him.”

Page’s influence extended well beyond Lifeson’s guitar approach. As the guitarist has noted, Kashmir directly inspired “Passage to Bangkok,” a deep cut from Rush’s prog landmark, 2112.

Page famously described the polyrhythmic drive of “Kashmir” as a “great hypnotic beast,” and its Eastern tonalities, coupled with interlocking rhythmic pulses, sparked something in Rush as they set about writing their most ambitious record to date.

For understandable reasons, the 20-minute title suite — the work that transformed them from a blues-rooted band (their first tour saw them opening for Rory Gallagher) into progressive-rock heavyweights — tends to dominate discussion of 2112. But the album’s second side is filled with concise, sharply defined songs that reveal a different dimension of the band. Among them, “Passage to Bangkok” offered Lifeson the opportunity to channel his own interpretation of “Kashmir.”

“Alex Lifeson said the music was inspired by ‘Kashmir,’” notes author Daniel Bukszpan. “That song influenced a lot of musicians at the time, who were essentially thinking, ‘We need our own Middle Eastern–flavored epic.’”

“Passage to Bangkok,” however, is no direct replica. At under four minutes, it’s far more concise. Bukszpan points instead to Stargazer by Rainbow as a closer parallel to Zeppelin’s sprawling approach. The broader point stands: Zeppelin had expanded rock’s sonic vocabulary, and Rush — ever eager to experiment — seized the opportunity to explore those new textures in their own way.

Placed after the conceptual density of 2112’s first side, the track also provides a tonal shift.

“It has a more exotic melody, so it creates a kind of break from what precedes it,” Bukszpan explains. “Side one is so heavy, both musically and conceptually. Then you flip the record, and here’s something looser — essentially a song about getting high.”

“It’s about a fun little journey to all the good places you could go to have a puff,” Lifeson said in an interview with High Times magazine (via Ultimate Guitar). “We. “We thought it would be fun to write a song about that, and Neil [Peart] handled it in a very eloquent way.

“That song was probably written in a farmhouse, on an acoustic guitar, in front of a small cassette recorder. We’d sketch ideas like that and then take them down to the basement to rehearse.”

Lifeson’s connection to Page dates back to 1969, when he first saw Led Zeppelin perform in Toronto.

“I waited in line for 15 hours,” he recalled. “We were sitting on the floor, just a few rows back from Jimmy. I was completely blown away. I wanted to look like him, play like him — be him. If there was one person I ever wanted to meet, it was Jimmy Page, but I never thought I’d get the chance.”

He finally did in the mid-1990s, when he and Rush bassist Geddy Lee met Page and Robert Plant backstage during their No Quarter Tour stop in Toronto.

Now, decades later, Lifeson is once again looking forward. With renewed activity in the Rush camp thanks to the addition of drummer Anika Nilles — and even the possibility of new music — the long arc of influence that began with “Kashmir” may yet echo into another chapter.

Long before they became rock legends, three teenagers absorbed the raw power of American blues — and carried it into history.

In 1962, a young Jimmy Page traveled to Manchester for the American Folk Blues Festival, a tour that brought Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and other blues legends from the U.S. to England. He wasn’t alone — future Rolling Stones frontmen Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were in the crowd too. For these teenagers, it wasn’t just a concert. It was a revelation.

“We could hardly believe that real blues artists were going to appear here in our country,” Page recalled in David Williams’ book The First Time We Met The Blues. “They were regarded somewhat like mystic gods within our circle.”

The American Folk Blues Festival was one of the first tours to showcase authentic American blues to European audiences. While folk revivalists explored acoustic traditions, this festival brought raw, electric energy that British teens had rarely experienced firsthand.

The 1962 event was the festival's inaugural run, and the lineup at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall read like a who’s who of blues royalty: T-Bone Walker, Memphis Slim, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, John Lee Hooker and Willie Dixon.

For Page, Jagger and Richards, it was a musical awakening. Page absorbed the tone and phrasing of blues guitarists. Jagger and Richards were captivated by the rhythm, storytelling and emotional intensity. More than inspiration, it was a blueprint for their future music careers.

At the time, Page was performing in Neil Christian and the Crusaders, whose setlists mixed R&B and Top 20 material.

“But I was really keen to play the blues,” Page told Guitar Player in 2024. “And when I say 'the blues,' definitely the Chess catalog, and it was in advance of everything that was going to come.”

Page described the festival as a pilgrimage for him and fellow young blues enthusiasts. It was also where he first met Jagger and Richards.

“At the Manchester festival, I met Mick and Keith,” Page said. “They didn’t have the Stones then; they were just blues enthusiasts on a pilgrimage, like all of us, and we were in a house where the guy had just got the Howlin’ Wolf album with the rocking chair on the cover.

”Nobody had heard it up until then, but we all heard it that day. So yes, that was one life-changing thing, but everything is changing your perspective on things, broadening your outlook and opening it out.”

For Richards, who had only known these artists through crackly imported records, seeing them perform live was a visceral shock. He speaks with particular reverence about T-Bone Walker, the suave showman of the electric guitar, and his large Gibson hollowbody.

“You wouldn't be able to get me out of that place,” Richards later remarked of his dedication to seeing every note.

Within a few years, Page was experimenting in local bands, refining the riffs and textures that would eventually define Led Zeppelin. Jagger and Richards channeled that same energy into the Rolling Stones’ early blues covers, bridging the Atlantic in sound and style. The festival became a touchstone: an experience that informed every note these young musicians would play.

“I was seduced by the beauty of what a six-string instrument could do,” Page told Guitar Player.

That Manchester festival wasn’t just a show. It was a crossroads where three teenagers encountered the blues in its purest form and walked away changed. From Led Zeppelin’s heavy riffs to the Stones’ swaggering covers, traces of that night remain in every iconic lick.

Page, Jagger and Richards may have gone on to define rock music, but they never forgot the lesson the blues taught them: music is more than technique — it’s communication, connection and feeling. And it all started that night in Manchester.

Perennially outspoken guitarist Pete Townshend has made no shortage of controversial claims over the course of his long career. But do his famously derogatory remarks about Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin truly reflect what he thinks of his groundbreaking peers?

This is, after all, a guitarist who once said Jimi Hendrix wasn’t “creative,” dismissed Ritchie Blackmore as overrated among rock’s most famous electric guitar players, and, in a 1989 interview with Guitar Player, harshly criticized the musical substance of heavy metal acts, despite acknowledging the technical proficiency within their ranks.

“I’d trade 150 Def Leppards for one R.E.M.,” he remarked. “It’s as simple as that.”

Not even his bandmates exempt from his inflammatory remarks. As recently as 2019, Townshend said he was glad drummer Keith Moon and bass guitarist John Entwistle were gone, adding that they had been “fucking difficult to play with.”

Given that history, it’s hardly surprising Led Zeppelin were not spared his criticism.

“I don’t like a single thing that they have done. I hate the fact that I’m ever even slightly compared to them,” he said in 1995. “I just never, ever liked them. It’s a real problem to me because, as people, I think they are really, really great guys. I just never liked the band.”

While he conceded that some of his resentment may have stemmed from the fact that Led Zeppelin “became so much bigger than the Who,” he stood by his assessment.

Page, for his part, was far less severe. Speaking to Trouser Press in 1977 (via Rock and Roll Garage), he offered a measured evaluation: “Really good. He had his limitations, though. He was no Beck, but he was all right.

“Beck, myself, and Clapton were sort of arch-buddies,” he added, referring to Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton. “Townshend was sort of on the periphery. He was like a white elephant, but he was very good.”

In recent years, Townshend has suggested his earlier comments were often more impulsive than deeply held.

“In the years when I drank and shot from the hip, I rarely got into the kind of trouble I could get into today,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 2022. “I once said some stuff about Led Zeppelin, that I’d never heard one of their songs, and about Eric Clapton, that after his experience as an addict, he’d never play as well as when he was a young man, and in every case, I’ve been forgiven. I suppose that’s because people see you as a big-mouth rock star, and this is what they expect from you—to be full of shit.”

In that same conversation, he also acknowledged the musical potential he once saw between the two rival camps.

“I’ve always felt there was a real potential for something explosive and nuts with the Who and Led Zeppelin,” Townshend said. “The principals in Led Zeppelin are much more musicians than they’re perceived to be by the heavy metal fans who just think it’s about heavy shit.”

That hasn’t stopped Townshend from delivering headline-grabbing quotes in recent years, including describing himself as a “dangerous fucker” when discussing the Who’s future and threatening to turn to AI in apparent retaliation against segments of his fanbase.

Eric Clapton’s departure from the Yardbirds was a touchstone moment in the history of electric guitar. It opened the door for future members Jeff Beck and, later, Jimmy Page, both of whom brought a more energetic and sonically innovative sound and style of playing to the group. And it was Clapton’s follow-up stint with John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers that brought him acclaim and set in motion his move to form Cream, rock's definitive virtuoso power trio.

But while it’s often said Clapton left the Yardbirds out of a desire to play in a bluesier style, a former bandmate reveals there was another catalyst.

“That is partly the reason,” former Yardbirds drummer Jim McCarty told Forbes in 2019. “But he also had a bit of aggravation with the bass player, Paul Samwell-Smith.

“The two saw life differently. Eric aligned himself with the lower class, the working class, at that time. Paul wanted to be much more upper-crust, even though he was from the working class as well.

“His parents adopted the last name Samwell-Smith — they put their two names together so his mother would not have to be Mrs. Smith. From that, Paul wanted to be upper-class. I think that was the basis of their differences.”

Clapton's roots were indeed working class. He was raised in Ripley, Surrey, by his grandmother and her second husband, whom he believed were his parents. HIs discovery around the age of nine that his “sister,” Patricia, was actually his biological mother left him feeling unwanted and abandoned.

“Eric was coming from a difficult upbringing, because he wasn’t really brought up by his parents,” McCarty told Guitar Player. “He was brought up by his grandmother, who he thought was his mother. We met her, and she was a lovely woman, very chatty and very friendly. But that gave him a challenged outlook on things, and I think he took the blues up as his personal crusade.”

McCarty also compared and contrasted the Yardbirds’ three most famous guitarists for Forbes, noting, “Eric was a great purist. If he ever stayed with you, he’d be up early in the morning, playing before he even had breakfast. He was very dedicated and also very much into clothes.

“Jeff was completely different from Eric,” he continues. “He couldn’t care less what he wore. He’d just wear dirty old jeans that he could lie under his car with. His playing had much more variety to it. He liked jazz, rockabilly, and old-time electronic music. He loved Les Paul, double-tracked stuff. He would play much wider than Eric, who stuck to B.B. King and Buddy Guy.

“Jimmy was different again. He was the ultimate professional because he used to play in studios in London on other people’s records. He did what people asked him to do, very exact and businesslike. He was a session man.”

Beck and Page worked together fleetingly after Beck left the Yardbirds, while Page went on to form Led Zeppelin from the ashes of the Yardbirds.

Clapton, meanwhile, features on Joe Bonamassa’s new B.B. King tribute album after a singer demanded his presence on a cover of his most challenging track.

When Link Wray recorded “Rumble” in early 1958, most rock-and-roll guitarists were doing everything they could to avoid distortion. Wray did the opposite, unabashedly leaning into it and, in the process, creating rock and roll’s seminal distorted-guitar instrumental. Unlike any song before it — and like few since — “Rumble” captured the raw essence of adolescence. It was the perfect soundtrack for a ballroom brawl or a backseat bump.

Wray’s ambitions for a singing career had nearly been derailed when he contracted tuberculosis. He spent a year in the hospital and had one lung removed. Though he eventually developed a distinctive, rough-edged vocal style, in the months that followed he focused on his guitar playing. It was during that period, one night at a sock hop, that he spontaneously wrote “Rumble.”

Wray’s use of distortion, his primitive energy, and his do-it-yourself ethic inspired countless guitarists. His legacy stretches from ’60s British rock — Dave Davies followed Wray’s DIY path to distortion on early Kinks hits — through ’70s punk and metal, into ’80s thrash and hardcore, and on to ’90s grunge. Along the way, distortion became available as a pedal effect, putting it within reach of every young rebel eager to follow in Wray’s footsteps.

When Guitar Player caught up with Wray for a November 1993 interview, he was 64 and living in Denmark with his 39-year-old wife, Olive Julie, and their 10-year-old son, Oliver. He had just released Indian Child, his first “commercial” effort in more than a decade. While the album had come out in the U.S., Rhino’s recent compilation Rumble! The Best of Link Wray provided the perfect excuse to have Wray revisit how his journey with distortion began in the 1950s.

“Back in the old days, the good guitars were too clean in sound,” Wray explained. “I was trying to find some off-brand guitar.” He recorded “Raw-Hide,” his second single, released in January 1959, with a Danelectro electric. “I ordered it out of a catalog for 60, 70 bucks. They sent me this longhorn guitar with mandolin pickups and more frets than a normal guitar. I ordered three or four of them.”

His love of distortion, it turned out, came from a simple need to be heard.

“When I was trying to get my music happening back in the ’40s, I was backing up all the cowboy stars like Lash LaRue, Wild Bill Elliott, and Sunset Carson. I played through these Sears and Roebuck amplifiers. They would burn up on me because I wanted to turn them up to 10.

”I bought four of them and hooked them all together. My brother said, ‘You’re crazy, Link.’ I said, ‘I’m not crazy. I just want to hear myself.’”

Wray’s brother Vernon was a recording artist himself, scoring a hit with “Remember You’re Mine,” released on the Cameo-Parkway label. The song was written by Cal Mann, who also penned Elvis Presley’s “Teddy Bear.”

“Bernie Lowe, who owned Cameo-Parkway, wanted Vernon to change his name,” Link recalled. “He said, ‘What are you going to change it to?’ Bernie said, ‘Instead of Vernon Wray, let’s call you Ray Vernon.’ So he changed it backwards. Ray wrote a song on the flip side called ‘Evil Angel.’”

As Wray tells it, “Remember You’re Mine” never stood a chance. Pat Boone, the clean-cut version of Elvis Presley, covered it three days after its release and took it to number one.

“He was covering everybody in those days. It killed my brother as an artist.

“Later on, God gave me ‘Rumble.’ I said, ‘Ray, let’s see Pat Boone cover this motherfucker!’”

That gift, Wray said, arrived at a teen dance party where Link Wray & His Wray Men were on the bill.

“I was playing record hops with Milt Grant in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He was the big disc jockey there — like a Dick Clark, but local to the Washington, D.C., and Maryland area.

“Milt says [in a low voice], ‘Link, play “The Stroll.”’”

“The Stroll,” a 1957 hit by the Diamonds, was accompanied by a slow line dance of the same name.

“The Diamonds, who had the number-one hit, were going to dance the Stroll while I tried to play jive,” Wray said. “I told him, ‘I don’t know the fuckin’ Stroll!’ My brother Doug said, ‘I know the Stroll beat. Just start playing something on the guitar.’

“So God zapped it. I just started playing it.”

The sound that night, Wray recalled, was cataclysmic.

“Ray had stuck the microphone in front of the amplifier, and it was just pouncing all over the place. The kids were going wild. Nobody put microphones in front of amplifiers in those days.”

Built from just three power chords, the improvised tune was such a hit that the crowd reportedly demanded it be played four times that night. Grant financed a studio recording on the condition that he receive a songwriting credit alongside Wray.

But once in the studio, Wray couldn’t recreate the sound he’d unleashed in Fredericksburg — which led to one of rock’s most infamous acts of sabotage.

“When we went to record ‘Rumble,’ I didn’t get that live sound. It was too clean. In Fredericksburg, those Sears and Roebuck amplifiers were jumping up and down, burning up with sound.

“Ray said, ‘What are we going to do about it?’ I said, ‘I’m going to fuck with the amplifier like it was fucking up at the live gig.’”

Armed with a pen, Wray punched holes in the tweeters of his Premier amplifier.

“Ray said, ‘You’re just screwing up your amplifier.’ I said, ‘Who cares as long as we get a fuckin’ sound, man!’”

His gamble paid off.

“I started playing and got that distorted sound, plus the tremolo — ‘chik, chik, chik, chik.’ We got the song in three takes, on one track, for 57 bucks.” Wray laughed. “Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t God wonderful?”

“Rumble” went on to light the way for generations of guitarists, including Jimmy Page. “The first time I heard ‘The Rumble,’” Page said in the 2008 documentary It Might Get Loud, “it had such profound attitude.” Pete Townshend wrote in the liner notes for 1974’s The Link Wray Rumble that the song inspired him to play guitar. Bob Dylan was so taken with it that he opened four shows during his 2005 Brixton Academy residency with “Rumble,” calling it the greatest instrumental of all time.

The song’s sense of menace nearly kept it from being released at all. Archie Bleyer, owner of Cadence Records, hated it and initially refused to put it out until his teenage stepdaughter convinced him otherwise. Phil Everly of the Everly Brothers, a Cadence act at the time, suggested calling it “Rumble,” since the sound reminded him of a street-gang fight.

Between its music and name, “Rumble” proved too dangerous for some radio stations, which banned it, keeping the song from climbing higher than number 11 on the charts.

Even so, Wray — who would go on to perform with rockabilly revivalist Robert Gordon in the 1970s — built an entire career around it, rerecording “Rumble” in the 1960s and collecting royalties from covers by everyone from surf-rockers the Trashmen to jazz guitarist Bill Frisell.

Wray gave all credit to God.

“My 10-year-old son says, ‘Daddy, you’re very spiritual.’ He asked me, ‘Daddy, does God love rock and roll?’ You know, because some churches say rock and roll is evil.

“I said, ‘Well, honey, he pulled me out of the death house and gave me “Rumble.” I recorded it three months after I had my lung taken out. It was a four-million seller.’ So I said, ‘Yeah — I think God loves rock and roll.’”

Guitar Player is closing out 2025 by republishing 25 of your favorite stories from the past year. We thank you for spending the past year with us and look forward to bringing you more of the stories you want in 2026.

Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page had been close friends ever since they met in their teens. It was Page who recommended Beck as Eric Clapton's replacement in the Yardbirds in 1965, after Clapton flew the nest to join John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Beck and Page would even work together in the Yardbirds for a brief period, before the former departed and began to build his solo career.

Despite being as close as brothers, the two never saw eye to eye on one thing: who should get writing credit for "Beck's Bolero," the 1966 instrumental featuring Beck, Page, Who drummer Keith Moon, keyboardist Nicky Hopkins and future Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones. .

Beck's decision to create a group was inspired in part by the guitarist he replaced in the Yardbirds — Eric Clapton. Following his brief spell with the Bluesbreakers, Clapton departed in mid 1966 to form the supergroup, Cream.

Although Beck was invited to take Clapton's place in the Bluesbreakers, he opted instead to follow the guitarist's lead and form his own supergroup, doing so just days after Cream was formed.

With Page's help, Beck put together his ad hoc group to record “Beck’s Bolero,” a riff-driven instrumental inspired by French composer Maurice Ravel's 1928 orchestral piece, Boléro. The final result was considerably heavier than Ravel's, thanks to the pair’s electric guitar talents — featuring Page slashing away at the chords on a Fender Electric XII 12-string — and proto-heavy metal panache.

In the years after, Beck would say of "Beck's Bolero" featured “the first heavy metal riff ever written,” and I wrote it.”

Page disagreed and said so in his 1977 cover story with Guitar Player.

“Even though he says he wrote it, I wrote it," the guitarist insisted. "I’m playing the 12-string on it. Beck’s doing the slide bits, and I’m basically playing around the chords.”

“It’s got a lot of drama to it,” Page added. “It came off right. It was a good lineup too, with Keith Moon and everything.”

Of course, Page has been involved in other, more famous disputes over songwriting credits. In 2020, he won a long-running lawsuit alleging his famous 1971 Led Zeppelin track "Stairway to Heaven" infringed on the copyright of the 1968 instrumental "Taurus," composed by Randy California and recorded by his band Spirit. This past May he faced a fresh lawsuit over "Dazed and Confused" from its songwriter, Jake Holmes.

However, he handily won authorship of "Beck's Bolero" without litigation, much to Beck's dismay. Although he believed he had changed Page's core ideas enough to earn at least a co-writing credit, Beck stepped aside and let Page take the honors.

“No, I didn’t get a songwriting credit,” the guitarist conceded, “but you win some and lose some down the years.”

He was likewise unlucky with the formation of his supergroup. Despite the promising results of "Beck's Bolero," the band never gelled.

“I don’t know if it would have worked or not, but it sounded so great in the studio,” Beck once said (via Far Out). “I couldn’t believe it when we went back and listened to it in the control room. We were going: ‘This is amazing. What can we do with it?’

“You can hear Moon screaming in the middle of the record over the drum break. If you listen, you can only hear the cymbal afterwards 'cause he knocked the mic over.”

Ultimately, the band disintegrated once recording wrapped.

“The next thing we know, Keith is back with the Who, and the whole thing never got off the ground,” Beck sighed. “But all we needed was a singer.”

There were even disputes over the production credits, perhaps given the song's success when it was eventually released. During his GP chat, Page said producer Simon Napier-Bell ghosted the band during its recording.

“The producer just disappeared,” he said. “He was never seen again; he simply didn’t come back. He just sort of left me and Jeff to it.”

Conversely, Mickie Most, who Beck later employed for his debut solo album Truth and 1969 follow-up, Beck-Ola, claimed he was the man behind the desk.

"Beck's Bolero" wouldn't see the light of day for another year, when it became the B-side to Beck's U.K. debut solo single, "Hi Ho Silver Lining." The guitarist handled the bulk of the vocals, with Rod Stewart, who would go on to front the Jeff Beck Group, providing backing vocals. When John Paul Jones left to form Led Zeppelin with Page, Ronnie Wood took his place, and Beck finally got his supergroup of sorts.

“I was using a Les Paul for the lead guitar and for the backwards slide guitar through a Vox AC30,” Beck says of his gear on the track. “It was the only amp I had, and it was covered with beer! Actually, I think it was the beer that gave it its sound!”

Led Zeppelin are often credited for creating some of the heaviest music in the hard-rock canon. But Jimmy Page, the group’s main songwriter, was anything but one-dimensional in his output.

Perhaps no track in the band’s catalog demonstrates this better than “The Rain Song,” the second cut on Zeppelin’s fifth album, 1973’s Houses of the Holy. Combining guitar work inspired by folk, blues and jazz with a sentimental orchestral score and Robert Plant’s romantic lyrics, “The Rain Song” is a track you either skip over or submit to.

But where did the inspiration for such an atypical Zeppelin track come from? Apparently from a Beatle: George Harrison.

Page explained the song’s genesis to former Guitar World editor Brad Tolinski in his book Light and Shade: Conversations With Jimmy Page. As he revealed, Harrison — newly solo following the Beatles’ breakup — was discussing Zeppelin’s music with the band’s drummer, John Bonham.

“George was talking to Bonzo one evening and said, ‘The problem with you guys is that you never do ballads.’ I said, ‘I’ll give him a ballad,’ and I wrote ‘Rain Song,’ which appears on Houses of the Holy.

“In fact,” Page continued, “you'll notice I even quote ‘Something’ in the song's first two chords.”

Page — who tuned his electric and acoustic guitars to D G C G C D for the track — does in fact follow the same descending progression heard in the verse from Harrison’s “Something,” from major to major 7 to 7.

The irony is that Harrison himself took his opening lyrics to “Something” from the James Taylor song “Something in the Way She Moves,” from Taylor’s 1968 self-titled debut. Harrison knew Taylor’s song well, since the folk singer was among the artists signed to the Beatles Apple label. Both he and Paul McCartney had been key in bringing Taylor aboard, and even contributed performances to his debut.

Harrison was correct in his appraisal of Zeppelin’s catalog, and Page was resolute in making his response. “The Rain Song” is profoundly unlike anything else the band created.

Page seemed the know the band was treading far from their well-beaten path. His working title for the tune was “Slush,” a word that among the Brits informally refers to something overly sentimental. The song’s orchestral passages, performed by bass guitarist John Paul Jones on a Mellotron, recall Muzak, the anonymous easy-listening music once commonly played in department stores for ambience.

While the song has its detractors (Rolling Stone’s reviewer slagged it and “No Quarter” as “drawn-out vehicles for the further display of Jones’ unknowledgeable use of Mellotron and synthesizer”), “The Rain Song” touched a nerve in many record buyers and future musicians, including producer Rick Rubin.

"I don't even know what kind of music this is,” Rubin declared in a 2010 artists picks feature for Rolling Stone. “It defies classification. There's such tasteful, beautiful detail in the guitar, and a triumphant feel when the drums come in — it's sad and moody and strong, all at the same time. I could listen to this song all day. That would be a good day."

And while there’s no denying that it’s the odd duck among the vibrant rockers on Houses of the Holy, “The Rain Song” is a fitting entry in a catalog that defied convention and both established and expanded the hard-rock repertoire. The track arguably paved the way for the power ballad.

While we don’t know if Harrison ever had a response to “The Rain Song,” we do know he wasn’t a fan of the heavier guitar sounds that players like Page pursued in the wake of Cream-era Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.

For that matter, we have a record of when Harrison first heard about Led Zeppelin in a January 1969 recording session during the making of Let It Be. Asked if he’s heard the album from Jimmy Page’s new band, Harrison seems a bit confused.

“Jimmy Page? Is he the one that was in the Yardbirds?” he asks.

Told it is indeed the very same Jimmy Page, Harrison pointedly demurs.

“Uh… I think is lunch ready?” he replies.

Though he’s been on the road with the Joe Perry Project, guesting at the VMAs, lending a hand to Bad Company at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and recording the newly released One More Time EP with old friend Steve Tyler and new pal Yungblud, Joe Perry still craves more.

He’s 75, but he refuses to rest on his laurels. The guitarist — who told us the top 10 records that changed his life — insists that, while he might take a moment to catch his breath at the end of 2025, he’s looking ahead to 2026.

Unfortunately, it may not include Aerosmith, whose future is uncertain. There are whispers of a final show, and maybe even a documentary about the band’s journey, neither of which Perry will dismiss. But in the meantime, his focus is on One More Time,.

Beyond that, he managed to find time to dig in with Guitar Player, where he peeled back the onion on lessons learned from — and friendships with — Alice Cooper, Johnny Winter, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and Slash.

Alice Cooper

“The first time I met Alice was when we were making the Sgt. Pepper movie [Aerosmith recorded a highly praised cover of the Beatles’ “Come Together” for the star-studded 1978 feature film, in which Cooper appeared the character Father Sun]. Around 1980 or ’81, when I was away from Aerosmith, my manager got us together to see if we could write some music for Alice’s next album.

“So we got to hang out and got to be friends. When they were working on the first Hollywood Vampires record, they asked me to sit in on a couple of songs. I ended up becoming part of the nucleus of the band.

“Years before, I remember reading that he was supposed to be the reincarnation of a 400-year-old witch — you know, that was part of his thing. But that paved the way for a lot of bands to make performance art part of their show, on top of playing great rock and roll.

“The nice thing about the Vampires is that he didn’t have to put on that persona. He got a chance to just be a real rock singer and talk to the audience, so it was a whole different thing for him.

“The process of making albums with Alice was really easy. He’s not interested in ego; his ego is in his back pocket. For him, it’s about whatever is best for the band. It’s a reflection of his personality, and he's just a really good guy.

“Of all the lead singers that I’ve worked with, I have to say that he’s neck and neck in terms of most fun. And that’s not to cast aspersions on some of the other guys. He's just got a great sense of humor.”

Johnny Winter

“I remember seeing him live with Rick Derringer. That band was killer, and I remember seeing him play at the old [Boston] Tea Party club, which was probably 800 seats, and he just killed it. He played slide most of the night.

“Back then, our paths never crossed, but the bus driver that we had for almost 11 years had been Johnny’s bus driver, so I had a couple of secondhand stories about him.

“When he was in L.A., I had a chance to meet him. He remembered that we had played our first big gig at the Academy of Music. They put us on the bill with Humble Pie and Edgar Winter and Johnny. I think this was his first appearance since he’d gotten out of rehab, and that was an amazing show to watch. We got to watch him, and when his brother announced that he was coming out to play, the roof just came off the place.

“Johnny was really personable and really nice. When you get a chance to meet somebody like that, who you’ve worked up to and admired for decades, it was just really great to be able to shake his hand.”

Jimmy Page

“I’ve been influenced by Jimmy. I mean, he was a real pioneer, not only with the music he was making but with his production and writing. Jimmy was at the forefront of all that was happening in rock.

“For a while in the 1960s, he was like the most sought-after young studio guitar player. That’s how he made his living and learned to produce from being in the studio all of the time. He knew how to get what he wanted out of a recording session. I don’t think he gets enough credit for that. Everybody puts him in the guitar hero bag, but his production skills… there aren’t many guys who can do what he was doing.

“That’s one of the things that I learned from him, along with how used instruments and wrote those songs and use the blues format — although there’s a lot of Zeppelin that doesn’t sound anything like the blues. They were into world music from Morocco and India, and they brought those sounds into the mainstream.

“It meant a lot to befriend Page. When they don’t have guitars in their hands, these guys are just another person.”

Jeff Beck

“When it came to using the whammy bar, Jimi [Hendrix] was at the forefront of that, but Jeff took it further. You know, you put some Super Slinky strings on there, and you adjust the whammy bar, and you can do things and get sounds that no one ever heard before from not just the electric guitar but any instrument.

“Jimi used it for an effect, but Jeff used it more as a musical tool than anybody. He was two steps ahead of everybody else.

“That’s just what Jeff was about. He had a sense of melody and dynamics, where some of the most beautiful music on any instrument was played by Jeff Beck on a Stratocaster. And I think that when he put down the Les Paul and really started using the whammy bar, that’s when he started finding his voice.

“But he never could really work with a singer. He tried once in a while, and would play some one-off stuff as his career went on, but really, in the last 20 to 25 years of his career, he really started doing things with the guitar that no one had ever heard before.

“But they’re all people. You know, they say that you should never meet your heroes because you might not find the person that you think they are. It’s like, ‘Wow, man, if I could just get in a room with him, and party with him…’

“I’ve been lucky to meet some of the guys that I really respected in terms of ability and their career, and they were also really nice guys — like guys I would give the keys to my house to. Jeff was one of those guys.

“So it was really cool being able to meet Jeff. He had a wicked sense of humor, but he was quiet for the most part. I got a chance to spend enough time with him to find out what kind of person he was, and he and his wife are pretty cool and a really nice couple.”

Slash

“And Slash is one of those guys I’d give the keys to my house to. When I first heard Guns N’ Roses’ music on Appetite for Destruction, I was like, “Okay, this is it. This is a great fucking record.” They paid their dues, and that summer they opened for us, and we saw them going from learning and being a club band to becoming an arena band.

“They learned how to carve their own space, because you can do things really differently, like Kiss or Alice [Cooper], you know, by bringing performance art, but still rock out. And I hand it to Kiss — they were fucking amazing, and different. But we just wanted to play rock and roll, and that’s what Guns ’N’ Roses was all about, too.

“They were all about just getting out there and rocking and giving the audience something to fucking see. And then they left the arena, or club, or theater, or whatever; they were two feet off the ground, you know? I could always tell if we did a good show or not — because we always thought that we weren’t as good as we should have been — was we’d be sitting in the dressing room, and as the kids were leaving, if I heard bottles breaking, and kids laughing, I knew we did a good show.

“Slash and Axl Rose would come into our dressing room, and they’d just rocked the shit out of the audience, and they’d talk with us and ask us questions about this, and that. That’s how I got to know Slash. They were still young, and trying to find their place in the hierarchy, and you’re always wondering if you’re ever gonna be as good as the headliner, you know?

“I mean, jeez, we opened for so many bands, and a lot of them were bands we really liked. We’d always wonder if we were ever going to be able to keep doing it, thinking, How long will it last? But they were finding their way, and they did, and they came out of that by the end of the summer and were ready to blow the top off the world, which they did, and still do.

“And a lot of that has to do with Slash and his guitar playing, you know? You can tell that with the kind of guy that he is, he never gives it up. You can never accuse him of phoning it in. I can’t say that about all the people that I’ve bumped into.

“You gotta have respect for someone who can make it in this business as a career, but the music business is a bitch, man. You can have talent dripping out of your fingers, but you can get passed right by. But getting to know Slash over the years, and finding out what he’s all about, even with their ups and downs, and breaking up and all that, it’s been really cool.”

From writing timeless prog-pop anthems with Toto to working with Alice Cooper when he was just 20 and forging chart-topping hits with Michael Jackson, Steve Lukather has had a colorful career.

And Jimmy Page says Luke has something that made him stand out from his peers, Eddie Van Halen included.

Lukather says he’s met the Led Zeppelin icon only once, but the encounter is deeply embedded in his memory, thanks to Page's praise.

“I have a funny story about Jimmy,” he recounts to Ultimate Guitar. “It was the one and only time I ever met him. I went over to this Guitar Center thing honoring Nigel Tufnel from Spinal Tap. In fact, I ended up producing four tracks on their next record because of that night.

“I showed up with Eddie [Van Halen] and my boys,” he continues. “Hey, we're going to meet Jimmy Page, [it’s] a big deal, right?”

Luke met his hero, who, much to his surprise, singled him out.

“Jimmy's standing there, greeting everyone,” he says. “He points at me. I think he's pointing at Ed, of course, but it's me, and he motions for me to come over.

“He said, ‘You have something that these other guys here don't.’ And I go, ‘What's that, Jimmy?’

“He said, ‘You understand, and I understand, but those other guitarists don't. We were studio players. They don't know what that means.’”

Speaking to Guitar Player in 2023, Page relayed the importance that his early session work had on his craft. The diversity of work he performed, in turn, helped him survive in the cutthroat world of studio musicians.

“The bottom line is that, in the studio world, all the musicians were considerably older than I was,” he said. “So, suddenly, I come in as this new kid on the block, and I’ve got all of these strings to my bow. I was playing fingerstyle guitar and slide, and I was playing harmonica.

“If you made mistakes or you mucked about, you would never be seen again. So, clearly, I was able to deliver. And if they asked me, 'Can you come up with something on this?' I’d say, ‘Sure!’”

Similarly, Lukather — whose exhaustive session résumé fills 18 pages of his own website –— says session work was a scary, yet deeply educational environment.

“I showed up blind, man,” he tells Guitar Player of one particular session with Lionel Richie. “We never got demos. We never got to rehearse. I think James Carmichael, his producer, had a road map, but it was all A minor. I said, ‘Let me fuck around with it,’ and they rolled the tape.”

Despite having cut some very notable guitar solos in his time, Lukather has also been eager to dispel a myth about session work.

“I've been paid to play rhythm guitar 90 percent of the time,” he reveals.

And players without a solid grasp of rhythm won't survive.

“Ever hear someone pick up a guitar and start strumming a blues shuffle or something, and it feels so good it just makes you want to jump in and play with them?” Lukather asks. “That’s the kind of player people want to hire in the studio — the person who comes up with parts that make the song feel better.

“Kids can learn every lick in the world from the internet now, but a lot of them have no groove.”

By the dawn of the 1970s, hard rock had entered a new arena, and Jimmy Page wanted Led Zeppelin to be its leader.

After his tenure in the Yardbirds, the guitarists laid the groundwork for his new group with the band's 1969 self-titled album. For its followup, he says he wanted Led Zeppelin II to be an “extreme” representation of the band’s rapidly evolving sound — one that was taking the British blues template to unapologetically heavier and more creatively expansive places.

His comments come from a recently resurfaced Mojo interview, plucked from its archives, that shows how Page sought to evolve a band already making waves following the breakup of the Yardbirds.

Emerging from the British blues explosion of the mid 1960s, Page was all about pushing boundaries even before he formed Zeppelin. That much was evident when he and his former Yardbirds bandmate Jeff Beck teamed up for "Beck's Bolero," the 1966 track that many consider to be ground zero for heavy metal.

Although the project went no further, Page turned to its bass guitar player, John Paul Jones, when it came time to launch Led Zeppelin. Their 1969 debut album was a huge success, helped along by tunes like “Dazed and Confused” and the single "Good Times, Bad Times."

But Page wanted to take things up several notches for II and showcase the band's talents.

“I wanted it to be quite extreme, and that’s what I was going for: something that showed all the peaks of what we could do,” he details. “I could really hear the acoustics in John Bonham’s playing, and I knew that the more space we could allow for that, the better it was going to sound.”

That mantra was typified by the track "Ramble On," a song that married Zeppelin's heavier and softer sides.

“It was starting to get interesting at that point, because you’ve got the acoustic rolling through, and there’s the drums, the bass, and the electric guitar. So it’s a case of ‘Okay, is it going to start on an acoustic or an electric?’ In this day and age, you’d just have a click track and you would just lay things on, but back then we had to do proper planning to make it work.”

The album also became something of a response to their critics. The band were in the U.S., supporting Vanilla Fudge on tour in early 1969 when Rolling Stone published a double-edged review of their debut. The article suggested Zeppelin could “fill the void created by the demise of Cream.”

But while it went on to call Page “a proficient blues guitarist,” it also dubbed him “a writer of weak, unimaginative songs” and said singer Robert Plant was “prissy” and “foppish.”

“I was surprised that it was negative to that degree and how cutting it was,” Page reflects. “It wasn’t just sticking in the knife; there was serious twisting involved. But I knew it was unfounded and that [the reviewer] just didn’t get it.”

While Page admitted “there are some bands people bloody hate... you couldn’t deny what we were trying to do, and that we were trying to move the boundaries of what music was.”

With Led Zeppelin II tracks like “Ramble On” and the instant classic “Whole Lotta Love” the band made its intentions far more obvious. That said, Zeppelin had no intentions of becoming a singles band.

“Singles were for AM radio stations, and we weren’t interested in that,” Page stated. “We were looking for FM radio play where they would play whole sides of albums. That meant that in some cases, they would play 20 minutes of your music.

“That’s how we sequenced II, to ensure listeners wouldn’t get bored. The album reflects the energy of being on the road.”

The band’s evolution would continue on its follow-up, Led Zeppelin III, as Page and his cohorts continued to marry their electric and acoustic extremities and take Led Zeppelin to the next stage.

In related news, lost footage of Led Zeppelin playing Denmark in 1979 has resurfaced and been restored, and Donovan has claimed Led Zeppelin only saw the merit of their proto-metal pomp after helping him record a song in 1968.

With Chris Dreja’s death this past September 25, Yardbirds drummer Jim McCarty is the only member left who knows what each phase of the band was like with its three most famous guitarists: Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page.

As he shared with us recently, Clapton’s tenure was marked by a lack of commercial success. Once it ended, Clapton departed to join John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, opening the door for Beck’s arrival and the group’s most commercially successful period, from March 1965 to October 1966.

For a brief period, the Yardbirds sported not only Beck but also his good friend Jimmy Page, who originally joined as bassist when Paul Samwell-Smith left he group. Once rhythm guitarist Chris Dreja got his bass chops down, Page was freed up to fire up the band’s two-guitar tandem, featured on “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago.”

Unfortunately, the pairing wasn’t ideal, as Page indicated.

“Sometimes it worked really great, and sometimes it didn't,” he said in a 1977 interview with Guitar Player. “The point is, you've got to have parts worked out, and I'd find that I was doing what I was supposed to, while something totally different was coming from Jeff.”

Part of the problem was down to Beck’s erratic behavior, which led him to abruptly depart the group in late 1966. (He briefly considered following Clapton’s path and joining Mayall’s group, but ultimately decided to form his own band.)

Page continued with the Yardbirds, seeing them through some of their least commercial recorded output, while their live performances became increasingly more experimental. As band members peeled off, Page reconfigured the group into the New Yardbirds and, eventually, Led Zeppelin.

Continuing in the vein of his earlier comments about Clapton, McCarty here talks us his views of Beck and Page, as well as the late Dreja, singer/guitarist Keith Relf and Gypie Mayo, who played guitar in the revitalized lineup from 1996 to 2004.

Jeff Beck

“Jeff was very amenable to what we wanted. He wasn’t so dedicated into the blues, first of all. He gave the band more than we ever thought, ’cause he was so out there in terms of sounds. He loved all the weird and wonderful sounds, and he would create them all and really go for it and pull out all the stops and really took it into that next chapter and really took the Yardbirds sound to what people remember of it.

“It must have been quite incredible when we first came to the States and were playing all these little clubs and people were seeing us. We heard so many reports — ‘What an amazing sound! I’ve never seen anything like it!’ — and that was a lot down to Jeff creating those weird and wonderful, supersonic type of sounds.

“Also, Jeff was very good at improvising. It was never the same; each and every night was different, a bit touching on the jazz thing where we’d improvise with each other. It was nice when it happened. When it took off it was great, and we did all those build-ups... We’d been doing those already with Eric but with Jeff it went even further.

“Jeff was also very different in that he didn’t care what he looked like. He would wear these sort of dirty jeans with oil on them from working on his cars, sort of a leather jacket and long, greasy hair — when we first met him, anyway. He and [Clapton] were totally different sides of the coin.

“I remember doing a show at the Hard Rock Cafe years later and they were both there and Jeff had great big sort of dirty boots on and jeans and Eric had a suit on and they were on the stage playing together, totally from different sides of the coin.

“He was a very, very nervous person — very nervous when he played and he got really worked up and more and more stressed out. You never knew what Jeff was going to do. He’d lose his temper and kick his amps offstage and things like that.

“And he was sacked, which is a terrible thing to say, isn’t it? We were doing this Dick Clark Caravan of Stars tour, which was a terrible mistake, going around the States in this Greyhound bus filled with all these sort of groups that were playing pop... nothing like what we were doing, and it was hard going.

“Beck thought, Oh no, this is terrible, and he just lost his rag and he smashed up his guitar in the dressing room. He said to Jimmy Page — or maybe it was Keith — ‘You could’ve stopped me doing that!’ [laughs]

“Then he just disappeared. He said, ‘I’m going off to stay with my girlfriend in L.A.,’ and that was it. He disappeared, and we were stuck doing the tour as a four-piece.”

Jimmy Page

“Of course we realized then that Jimmy was okay. It was fine with him playing lead, and it sort of worked. There were no antics or funny business going on.

“Jimmy brought a certain stability; I know it’s mad when you think of Zeppelin, but he did. Beck was very happy to accept Jimmy in the band; Jimmy was his old friend, and they’d been mates for years. And Jimmy was totally different. He was used to playing in sessions and playing for producers and doing what people wanted him to play, so he was listening to what we wanted him to play and he worked it all out.

“Jeff was the opposite; he’d just play off the top of his head, so with the two of them playing together I think it was very difficult for Jeff because Jimmy was always steady and always played a good show.

“So when we were a four-piece touring, it was a lot easier than it had been. It was a bit more professional in a way. It was stable and you knew what was gonna happen, and Jimmy was always playing the same.

“But there was something missing, that sort of creativity that we’d had with Jeff and the five-piece. I knew Jimmy went on to do some great stuff with Zeppelin, but it didn’t seem to work as well with us.

“And we were very much stuck looking for the next hit single. That was the real stress. Then we went with [producer] Mickie Most, and of course that was the kiss of death. He brought in these songs from other writers that never quite worked with us. It’s very easy to look back and say it was the pressure of constant touring. There wasn’t enough time to do an album, and you always had to have a hit single.

“The answer would’ve been to have six months off or something just to calm down and have a rest, maybe write a few songs and see what happened. But you couldn’t do that. You couldn’t step out of the public eye.”

Chris Dreja

“He was very solid, very reliable, very steady, and he was always there and he always looked the part. He was like a rock in the band. And he adapted; he went from rhythm guitar to bass, which wasn’t really easy, ’cause Paul Samwell-Smith’s bass parts were quite tricky, with all that doubling up. I thought Chris played really good bass, especially when we became a four-piece, without rhythm guitar, and he really did a great job. And of course he made up that middle bit of ‘Dazed and Confused’ — that bass riff that comes out of nowhere. He made that up and got no credit for that.

“He always looked the part, too — very smart. I remember going on a Greyhound bus overnight; we were all unshaven, greasy hair and everything — except for Chris. He always had nicely cut hair and good clothes. He didn’t take any drugs or anything; maybe he smoked a bit of dope later on, but I don’t think in the band he did anything like that. And he didn’t drink. He was just pretty reliable.”

Keith Relf

“He was a good musician, Keith. He could play good rhythm guitar. He had great timing. He played on some of the records; I think on ‘Heart Full of Soul’ he played the 12-string acoustic. When he was in Renaissance with me he played an electric guitar but didn’t play crazy solos, just quite nice little things he worked out.

“We were doing a show one day in Finland and John Mayall was on the show and showed up with only the bass player and him, and he said, ‘Can I borrow the drummer and the guitar player for my act?’ So Keith and I played with him, and of course Keith was very embarrassed that he had to play little solos and things, but he did pretty well. He played good harmonica as well.”

Gypie Mayo

“Gypie was great. He was very creative, a bit more like Jeff Beck. Some of those songs on the Birdland album, like ‘Crying Out for Love,’ two or three songs on there, he really made them into great songs with his guitar playing. He had a lovely feel, and he would sometimes come around my house and stay the night when we all lived in London; in the morning he’d go into the music room and play guitar, and it was really beautiful.

“He’d get this lovely sound going, just doodling and noodling. He wasn’t a particularly healthy guy [Mayo died in 2013 at the age of 62], but he was a lovely guy — very nice, and a great player.”

Did a Scottish folk-singer lay the groundwork for one of music's defining heavy rock acts?

Donovan thinks so. Speaking in a new interview, the 79-year-old musician claims he helped create Led Zeppelin with his 1968 hit "Hurdy Gurdy Man," thereby setting in motion the creation of hard rock and, subsequently, heavy metal.

Released in May 1968, "Hurdy Gurdy Man" was quite a departure for the folk guitarist. Although Donovan started his career in 1965 as a British version of Bob Dylan in his folk period, he soon took a more baroque/psychedelic approach to his folk and began incorporating Eastern instruments as well, including tamboura.

But "Hurdy Gurdy Man" was something altogether different — heavier, almost menacing. It was hard to tell if the titular character was kindly or demonic. And much of that has to do with the musical performance, which is built on a grooving melodic bass guitar line, thundering drums and heavily fuzzed electric guitar leads.

In short, it sounds a lot like Led Zeppelin.

For that matter, Donovan already had a history with two of that group's future members. Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones both performed on his 1966 hit "Sunshine Superman"; Page also played on "Epistle to Dippy," while Jones appeared on "Mellow Yellow."

As Donovan explains it, one year after Page and Jones appeared — for at least the second time ever — on "Hurdy Gurdy Man," the duo would form Led Zeppelin with singer Robert Plant and drummer John Bonham.

“John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page were very strong session guys for me,” Donovan tells The Telegraph. “At that period when ‘Hurdy Gurdy Man’ was released, that’s when those two guys put the band together.

“Is it possible that this anticipated heavy metal?” Donovan asks. He seems to think so. “After that came Black Sabbath, and after that came Deep Purple.”

The song's history is steeped in musical majesty. Donovan wrote “Hurdy Gurdy Man” while in Rishikesh, India, where he'd accompanied the Beatles on a spiritual sojourn to study Transcendental Meditation. The Beatles returned home with a cluster of new music for their 1968 White Album, while Donovan drew his own sonic inspirations from the trip.

In particular, he says he began writing "Hurdy Gurdy Man" on the tambura after George Harrison — who introduced sitar to rock music on the Beatles' "Norwegian Wood" — taught him sitar scales he learned from sitar master Ravi Shankar.

For the recording, Donovan turned to Jones, who was then a session musician. Jones was tasked with hiring the musicians, and while he reportedly claims Alan Parker played guitar and Clem Cattini performed drums, Page attests that he played guitar on the track alongside Jones and future Zeppelin drummer John Bonham. (For the record, Eddie Kramer, the song's engineer, confirms Page played on the song but says Cattini, not Bonham, is on drums.)

Donovan remains coy about his influence in the grand scheme of things. Indeed, he does not “want to say I created Led Zeppelin,” but he believes “John Paul Jones saw the possibilities” while they were committing the track to tape.

He may or may not have inadvertently helped sow the seeds for heavy metal, but what is indisputable is his wider influence on the guitar-playing community.

As he revealed another recent interview, a legendary prog-rock guitarist told him he bought his former cottage because “you wrote all those bloody songs there.”

Remarkably, Page wasn't Donovan's first choice for "Hurdy Gurdy Man." It was Jimi Hendrix, whom he had seen perform at the London club Bag O'Nails in his debut performance with the Experience.

“Everyone was there: the Stones, the Beatles, the Who, the Kinks. Chas [Chandler, Hendrix’s manager] had invited everyone,” Donovan tells Classic Rock. “And it was quite incredible. Such a superb blend of musicians.

“I didn’t see him much after that because we all went on the road and we all got famous and our paths only crossed occasionally. But when I wrote ‘Hurdy Gurdy Man’ I thought of Jimi. I said to [producer] Mickie Most: ‘This is for Hendrix… Let’s get Hendrix to play on it.’”

Hendrix’s relentless touring schedule meant Page got the gig instead. And Donovan got a heck of a story to tell for the rest of his career.

After his short-lived but electric guitar tandem with Jeff Beck in the Yardbirds, Jimmy Page flourished as the lone guitarist in that group, which led to the formation of Led Zeppelin.

Yet, despite conjuring some intricate and iconic riffs during his days with the band, it was perhaps one of the simplest that became one of his favorites — and certainly the most hypnotic.

By the time Zeppelin retreated once more to Headley Grange to write what would become the album Physical Graffiti, Page had an arsenal of riffs to his name. Chief among them was “Whote Lotta Love,” which regularly ranks high in lists of the greatest guitar riffs of all time.

Headley Grange, the historic former workhouse in Hampshire, England, had proved an inspirational base for the band on previous occasions, including the writing and recording of Led Zeppelin IV. It would prove to be influential again when Page’s jams with drummer John Bonham, and continued experimentations with DADGAD tuning, brought their next masterpiece — “Kashmir” — to life.

“It originated from playing around with the tuning,” he told the Edge and Jack White in the It Might Get Loud documentary from 2008. His relationship with the tuning, which has origins with the sitar, can be traced as far back as "Black Mountain Side" from the band's 1969 self-titled debut album. But where that was played on acoustic guitar, Page would go electric this time around.

“It just so happened that there was this song I had called ‘Swan Song,’ and it had these intricate parts at the end,” he added. They included “Kashmir”'s trademark climbing riff and the descending line that forms a bridge between the verses. At the point, the two parts were joined, with the descending line coming ahead of the climbing riff.

“John Bonham was there — and the others, I don't know where they were. They weren't actually at the house. I said, 'I've got this riff,' and I turned it 'round,” he says, by placing the trademark climbing riff first.”

It was certainly not the first or last time Page would work out a song with help from the drummer.

“It was always important for me to sketch things out with John Bonham, as there was always so much improvisation,” he said in the book 1975: The Year The World Forgot, expanding on the song’s genesis.

“We locked in, with a fusion between the guitars and the drums. There was a great understanding between us,” he went on. “We played ‘Kashmir’ over and over, just the two of us, because it was just this great hypnotic beast, with him appearing to reverse the beat.”

Page’s riff is actually in 3/4, and with Bonham plodding in steady, 4/4 time, the pulses of the two instruments constantly weave in around each other. Tesseract guitarist Acle Kahney, who is credited as one of the founders of the djent guitar movement, drew direct influence from this song, building the band’s foundation on DADGAD tuning and seven-string variants, as well as the hypnotic polyrhythmic feel it produced. That shows how, decades later, the magic of the riff still resonated with guitar players.

“Musically, it’s a round, like Frère Jacques, where you can lay things on top of it,” Page told Rolling Stone in a 2015 interview. “That was the idea of having this riff that was gonna be really intense, and probably pretty majestic as well, but quite intriguing.

“But the fact was, it was going to be built around the sound of Headley, and the drums in the hall. That’s how I heard it, and that’s how I saw it, but I also heard it with orchestra in mind.

“It was the first track where we actually heard the complement of a full orchestra on top of the brass, and the strings. We’d used strings on 'Friends,’ on the third album, just a small string session, but this was really something that was meant to be pretty epic and substantial.”

Speaking previously, Page had explained how many of Zeppelin’s strongest riffs came from his private practices.

“I play at home, and before I knew where I was, things would be coming out, and that’s those little sections or riffs,” he said. “At that stage, it’s selection and rejection. It’s whether you continue with something or you go, ‘No, that’s too much like something else,’ and then you move into something else.”

But sometimes, as was the case for “Rock and Roll,” which he say came to home “from the ether.” Albeit with a little help from Bonham.

“We were working on something else and John Bonham happened to play — just as you do sometimes, because we were recording — this intro from ‘Keep A-Knockin’,’ from Little Richard, and I went, ‘Oh, that’s it!’” he recalled. “I did this chord and half a riff that was in my head — ‘Let’s do this.’”

Page, who released his new signature Gibson SJ-200 late last year, has recently looked back on his Live at the Greek record, where he performed Led Zeppelin classics with the Black Crowes. And it provided an emotional experience for the guitarist, who got to do something he never could in the Zeppelin.

Meanwhile, Page's long-running copyright dispute with the "Dazed and Confused" songwriter has taken another twist in light of the recent Becoming Led Zeppelin documentary.

Jimmy Page has paid tribute to the late Yardbirds rhythm guitarist Chris Dreja, who died recently.

A founding member of the Yardbirds, Dreja passed away just weeks before his 80th birthday after battling a long-term illness, including the after effects of strokes he suffered in 2012 and 2013.

Dreja was a founding member of the Yardbirds, along with guitarist Top Topham. After becoming members of the Metropolitan (or Metropolis) Blues Quartet, they quickly added Keith Relf on vocals, Paul Samwell-Smith on bass and Jim McCarty on drums. Topham was just 15 when the band went professional and was forced to leave, opening the door for Eric Clapton to join, followed by Jeff Beck and Page.

Throughout those changes, Dreja remained a key force in the Yardbirds, either as rhythm guitarist or bassist, as Beck and then Page took the group’s music in a more psychedelic direction with their electric guitar talents.

Page reportedly tagged Dreja to play bass guitar in Led Zeppelin when the Yardbirds dissolved in 1968, but he was more interested in pursuing his passion for photography. Dreja would shoot the back cover photo for Zeppelin’s debut album as well as photograph the band on occasions.

Shortly after news of Dreja’s death broke on October 2, Page responded on Instagram.

“I heard today of the passing of musician Chris Dreja, who passionately played with the iconic Yardbirds, on rhythm guitar and then the bass,” he wrote. “I hadn’t seen him in a while, and I wish I had. RIP Chris.”

Dreja returned to music later in life, performing in the 190s with the Yardbirds spin-off Box of Frogs and playing rhythm guitar on the Yardbirds’ 2003 reunion album, Birdland. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the group in 1992.

“If you call me up to play, I’ve got to give you my best,” says Buddy Guy, whose ready-to-rumble attitude and no-holds-barred Strat attack have earned him eternal icon status.

Since B.B. King’s passing on May 14, 2015, Guy may have inherited the mantle of “Elder Blues Statesman,” but his in-your-face stage presence is a far cry from King’s gracious and kindly “grandfather” persona. Guy carries the torch with the devil-may-care attitude of a punk rocker.

“Thanks to the rappers, I can say whatever the fuck I damn well please these days,” announced Guy from the stage of the San Francisco Masonic while supporting Jeff Beck in 2016.

A few folks probably don’t appreciate Guy’s litany of f-bombs — or his over-the-top guitar antics — but most people find Guy’s firebrand blues a welcome presence in a genre watered down with each passing cliché. On his recent tours — Guy’s Damn Right Encore Tour wrapped this past August — the 89-year-old came across like a man possessed, as if he’s making up for lost time in the spotlight.

Throughout much of the ’70s and ’80s, Guy couldn’t even land a record deal, much less fathom being honored as a living legend at the 2012 Kennedy Center Honors by an African-American president.

No one can deny that Guy — who was born George Guy in Lettsworth, Louisiana — represents the ultimate long shot. The atomic energy he channels through a Fender Stratocaster and a Fender Bassman would be thrilling and impressive at any age, but it’s almost supernatural for an octogenarian to rock so hard.

In 2017, Guy sat down with Guitar Player to discuss the blues’ legacy, Jimi Hendrix and the finer points of his guitar tone. Here's what he had to tell us.

B.B. KING

Most blues musicians I learned my lessons from are no longer with us, and they didn’t print a lot of stuff about those guys. Every night I go to the stage, I stop and imagine the history of some of the guys like Lightnin’ Hopkins and T-Bone Walker.

The media didn’t get us until the British started playing blues. That’s when major newspapers started interviewing Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and people like that. Before then, we were playing to a 99.9 percent black audience. When the British started playing blues, the audience completely changed.

My late friend, B.B. King, and I were in Memphis once, and this lady ran up to him, and said, “Hey man, these white people are taking the blues from us.” B.B. said, “No, ma’am. They didn’t take it. You just quit listening to it.”

It’s a little lonesome now. B.B. and I talked about it before he passed away. As a matter of fact, we used to talk about it before Muddy and all of them passed away. They would tell me, “Man, if you outlive me, don’t let the blues die.” That’s exactly what I’m trying to do.

STRATOCASTERS

When I was coming up, it was Lightnin’ and T-Bone, and then up stepped B.B. King, Gatemouth Brown, and, of course, Guitar Slim. There weren't many guitar players way back when, because it was unheard of. You literally couldn't hear an acoustic guitar onstage. The guitar was getting obsolete until Leo Fender and Les Paul electrified it

When Leo Fender came up with that Strat, man, I didn’t know what the hell it was! Guitar Slim was the first I saw play one, and I thought it was a joke. But you had to keep the acoustic guitar out of the weather, and this solid piece of wood Leo came up with took more wear and tear. Guitar Slim’s Strat had scratches all over it. Well, you can’t do an acoustic like that. I’m not sure if Leo made the first solidbody, but his was the one that exploded. The Stratocaster got the guitar heard.

THE BASSMAN THAT GOT LEFT ON THE RUNWAY

Some people tell me I have a tone. I barely pay attention to that. Back when the British guys started mentioning my name, players like Jimmy Page would come up to me, and say, “Man, I didn’t know anyone could play blues like that on a Strat. What are you doing?”

The Chess brothers used to say, “If you want it played right — go get Buddy.” But even I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I got my tone from a ’57 Strat and an old Fender Bassman. You can’t get that tone anymore. The Fender people do a good job at trying to replicate that ’57 tone, but there’s something different about the wood, or something else that Leo took with him. I’ll tell you what else Leo took with him: whatever he had in that [original] Bassman transformer.

I turned the bass [control] all the way off from day one. There was no reason to do anything else, because that was exactly the sound I wanted. I never had to worry about changing the tone. All I would do was wrap up the guitar cord and come home. Nowadays, you get different tones at different clubs, but that thing had the same tone wherever I played — except some of the smaller clubs where grounding issues would produce a scratchy sound that you hardly hear anymore.

I’ve still got that old Bassman. I almost lost it when I went to Africa around 1969. I was sitting by the window watching my bags being loaded, and my amp was just sitting there. As the plane was going to take off, I jumped up. The stewardess said, “Mister, sit down. You’ve got your ticket for your bag.” I said, “My amp is out there past the wing of the plane!” They kept that amp for five years. When it finally came back to me, it was all rusted out.

JIMI HENDRIX

There’s a video clip of the night we met. When I first went to New York in 1967, I was into a solo with the guitar behind my head when somebody started hollering at me, “There’s Jimi Hendrix!” I was like, “Who in the hell is Jimi Hendrix?” And he came up and said, “Can I tape your show?” He had a reel-to-reel tape recorder.

I was into Arthur Crudup, T-Bone Walker, B.B. King, and all the old blues guys. I wasn’t into all the special effects. If I had been [into Hendrix], I probably would have got hooked myself. I liked what Hendrix was doing when I heard it. But I decided to let him have that. I figured my time would come.

THE WHAMMY BAR

I used a whammy bar. Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix would tell you that if you check your history. I cut a side at Chess [Records] using a whammy bar, but they weren't ready for it. They were like, “Nobody wants to hear that.”

These days, though, I don’t put a whammy bar on my guitars. Honestly, I stopped back when I was using very light strings because it made them break easier, and I couldn’t afford to keep buying new ones. Beck puts that whammy in the palm of his hand, and Stevie Ray Vaughan was good with that, too. Stevie, Beck, and Jimi are the best I’ve ever seen with that. A lot of guitar players couldn’t figure out how to work with it, but if you do it right — like Hendrix — it works.

ERIC CLAPTON, JIMMY PAGE & THE BRITISH BLUES BOOM

I couldn’t be B.B. or T-Bone, but they kept telling me, “Man, you got something there. You got a Buddy Guy tone.” I was so dumb. I didn’t even know that.

Even the Chess brothers told me. When I first went in there, they didn’t want to hear my noise. But when Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, and Eric Clapton all said, “I’ve been listening to Buddy,” the Chess brothers said, “Wait a minute. Let him come in and do what he wants.”

I was surprised. I said, “Man, what are you talking about?” They said, “These British guitar players are selling millions, and they’re eating up the shit you’ve been playing!”

Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page had been close friends ever since they met in their teens. It was Page who recommended Beck as Eric Clapton's replacement in the Yardbirds in 1965, after Clapton flew the nest to join John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Beck and Page would even work together in the Yardbirds for a brief period, before the former departed and began to build his solo career.

Despite being as close as brothers, the two never saw eye to eye on one thing: who should get writing credit for "Beck's Bolero," the 1966 instrumental featuring Beck, Page, Who drummer Keith Moon, keyboardist Nicky Hopkins and future Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones. .

Beck's decision to create a group was inspired in part by the guitarist he replaced in the Yardbirds — Eric Clapton. Following his brief spell with the Bluesbreakers, Clapton departed in mid 1966 to form the supergroup, Cream.

Although Beck was invited to take Clapton's place in the Bluesbreakers, he opted instead to follow the guitarist's lead and form his own supergroup, doing so just days after Cream was formed.

With Page's help, Beck put together his ad hoc group to record “Beck’s Bolero,” a riff-driven instrumental inspired by French composer Maurice Ravel's 1928 orchestral piece, Boléro. The final result was considerably heavier than Ravel's, thanks to the pair’s electric guitar talents — featuring Page slashing away at the chords on a Fender Electric XII 12-string — and proto-heavy metal panache.

In the years after, Beck would say of "Beck's Bolero" featured “the first heavy metal riff ever written,” and I wrote it.”

Page disagreed and said so in his 1977 cover story with Guitar Player.

“Even though he says he wrote it, I wrote it," the guitarist insisted. "I’m playing the 12-string on it. Beck’s doing the slide bits, and I’m basically playing around the chords.”

“It’s got a lot of drama to it,” Page added. “It came off right. It was a good lineup too, with Keith Moon and everything.”

Of course, Page has been involved in other, more famous disputes over songwriting credits. In 2020, he won a long-running lawsuit alleging his famous 1971 Led Zeppelin track "Stairway to Heaven" infringed on the copyright of the 1968 instrumental "Taurus," composed by Randy California and recorded by his band Spirit. This past May he faced a fresh lawsuit over "Dazed and Confused" from its songwriter, Jake Holmes.

However, he handily won authorship of "Beck's Bolero" without litigation, much to Beck's dismay. Although he believed he had changed Page's core ideas enough to earn at least a co-writing credit, Beck stepped aside and let Page take the honors.

“No, I didn’t get a songwriting credit,” the guitarist conceded, “but you win some and lose some down the years.”

He was likewise unlucky with the formation of his supergroup. Despite the promising results of "Beck's Bolero," the band never gelled.

“I don’t know if it would have worked or not, but it sounded so great in the studio,” Beck later pondered (via Far Out). “I couldn’t believe it when we went back and listened to it in the control room. We were going: ‘This is amazing. What can we do with it?’

“You can hear Moon screaming in the middle of the record over the drum break. If you listen, you can only hear the cymbal afterwards 'cause he knocked the mic over.”

Ultimately, the band disintegrated once recording wrapped.

“The next thing we know, Keith is back with the Who, and the whole thing never got off the ground,” Beck sighed. “But all we needed was a singer.”

There were even disputes over the production credits, perhaps given the song's success when it was eventually released. During his GP chat, Page said producer Simon Napier-Bell ghosted the band during its recording.

“The producer just disappeared,” he said. “He was never seen again; he simply didn’t come back. He just sort of left me and Jeff to it.”

Conversely, Mickie Most, who Beck later employed for his debut solo album Truth and 1969 follow-up, Beck-Ola, claimed he was the man behind the desk.

"Beck's Bolero" wouldn't see the light of day for another year, when it became the B-side to Beck's U.K. debut solo single, "Hi Ho Silver Lining." The guitarist handled the bulk of the vocals, with Rod Stewart, who would go on to front the Jeff Beck Group, providing backing vocals. When John Paul Jones left to form Led Zeppelin with Page, Ronnie Wood took his place, and Beck finally got his supergroup of sorts.

“I was using a Les Paul for the lead guitar and for the backwards slide guitar through a Vox AC30,” Beck says of his gear on the track. “It was the only amp I had, and it was covered with beer! Actually, I think it was the beer that gave it its sound!”

"There are only three things happening in England,” soul singer Aretha Franklin declared in 1968. “The Rolling Stones, the Beatles and Terry Reid.”

In a career that spanned 60 years, British guitarist Terry Reid rejected two notable close calls with fame. As the Yardbirds segued into the New Yardbirds in 1968, Jimmy Page asked Reid, then 18, to become the group’s new singer. Reid, whose solo career was turning hot, put stipulations on the agreement. When Page declined, Reid was gracious enough to suggest he call a young belter named Robert Plant for an audition. Together, Page and Plant would launch Led Zeppelin.

The following year, Ritchie Blackmore asked Reid to become Deep Purple’s new singer after founding vocalist Rod Evans quit.

But Reid, whose death was announced August 5, once again let opportunity pass him by, preferring to go his own way as a solo artist.

He certainly cut a unique path. Nicknamed Superlungs for his powerful falsetto voice, Reid was considered one of the best vocalists in an era full of mighty singers with remarkably high ranges, including Plant, Steve Winwood and Steve Marriott. He was also a guitarist of considerable talent and skill.

Although fame would elude Reid throughout his career, he enjoyed acclaim among his peers, who included not only Franklin but also Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt and Don Henley, on whose albums he appeared. He was also recognized for his songwriting by groups and artists that include Cheap Trick, Jack White, Chris Cornell, and Crosby, Stills & Nash.

Years before Page entered the picture, Reid was on the London scene as a guitarist with Peter Jay and the Jaywalkers, an instrumental group that opened for leading acts of the day and were included on a 1966 group tour featuring the Rolling Stones, Ike and Tina Turner, and the Yardbirds.

Once the band broke up, Reid signed as a solo act with producer Mickie Most, whose artists included the Yardbirds. Reid released his solo debut, Bang Bang, You’re Terry Reid, in 1968.

It was around then that Page became interested in him as a vocalist. The story goes that Reid had already committed to perform as a support act on the Rolling Stones’ celebrated 1969 U.S. tour.

“I was very friendly with Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones,” Reid recalled in a 2023 interview with Classic Rock. “Keith asked me to support the Stones in the States, but then shortly afterward Jimmy wanted me to join his new band. I was torn.

“In the end, I put the ball in Jimmy’s court. I said, ‘You’d better speak to Keith and tell him I’m not going.’

“But Jimmy bottled it. He said, ‘I’m not having him shoot me in the fucking leg.’ Even then, Keith had a reputation.

“So I ended up going to America with the Stones. I even played with them at Altamont,” he added, referring to the group's infamous December 6, 1969 free concert, where several concertgoers were killed.

In the end, Reid suggested Page audition Plant, who had impressed him after he saw his group, Band of Joy, perform as a support act at one of his shows. Page complied, and the rest is history.

Meanwhile, Reid broke his ties with Most and landed a contract at Atlantic Records. While there he recorded his 1973 album, River, with a band consisting of future Jackson Browne accompanist David Lindley.

While usually little is said about Reid as a guitarist, he was a fine blues-based player who owned one notable guitar: a white 1952 Fender Telecaster he’d purchased in Chicago during his time on the road with Cream. By the time the tour made its way to New York City's Madison Square Garden, the Tele’s neck pickup had died. Reid took it to Manny’s, where a humbucker was installed and has remained ever since. The guitar is currently owned by Joe Bonamassa, Reid’s friend and a fan.

Although Reid’s solo career never took off with the public, his work with Lindley gave him a connection to the West Coast and session work with Browne, Raitt and Henley. His 1991 album, The Driver, yielded a cover of the Spencer Davis Group’s “Gimme Some Lovin’,” which also appeared on the soundtrack for the 1990 Tom Cruise movie Days of Thunder. He subsequently had songs in movies like the Rob Zombie–directed The Devil’s Rejects and the crime drama Wonderland, both from 2003, as well as the 2017 film Win It All. He landed on the soundtrack to the 2009 movie Up in the Air courtesy of his song “Be Yourself,” recorded by Graham Nash for his 1971 solo album, Songs for Beginners.

Despite his low profile with U.S. record buyers, Reid was a big attraction as a club performer in the U.K. starting in 2002. Billed by one venue as “The Man With a Hell of a Story to Tell,” he became a legend in part because of the opportunities he’d forfeited years earlier.

He and his band regularly played Ronnie Scott’s in London, where they would be joined by a who’s-who of music’s greats. He also held a four-year Monday residency at the Joint in Los Angeles, where friends — including Plant, Richards, Roger Daltrey and others — dropped in to perform when they were in town.

Reid was battling cancer when he died and was forced to cancel a 2025 tour for treatment. He was 75. The exact date of his passing was unknown at the time of publication.

Bonamassa was among the first to pay tribute to Reid.

“Goodbye my friend,” the guitarist wrote on Instagram in the early morning hours of August 5. “It was an honor to get to know you as friend and a musical mentor. I will miss our hangs and stories in Palm Springs. One of the greatest to ever do it and a beautiful person and soul. Rest in peace Terry Reid. My deepest condolences to his family on this terrible day.”

Jimmy Page gave away a guitar as a competition prize more than 50 years ago. Now it could be fetch roughly $70,000 when it goes to the auction block.

The 1957 Gretsch Chet Atkins 6120 electric guitar was offered as the prize in a competition run by New Musical Express magazine, now known as NME. The contest was announced on the October 12, 1974 issue’s cover with a photo of Page holding the guitar like a cricket bat.

To compete for the prize, entrants had to correctly match six guitars with the celebrity artists who played them, with the winner selected from the correct entries.

The lucky winner was Charles Reid of Hornsey, north London, who was clearly thrilled with his prize.

“Page must be mental giving away such a terrific guitar as this,” Reid said at the time. “It’s the kind of instrument that every guitar player dreams of owning but can never really afford.”

As Page explained in an interview that accompanied the contest, he purchased the guitar in Nashville for £200 in 1972.

Reid held onto the instrument until September 1990, when he sold it to Phil O’Donoghue, of Chessington, Surrey, for £2,000, or roughly $7,800 in 2025. O’Donoghue had performed with a rock group in the 1970s known as the Wild Angels. He held onto the guitar until his death, in early 2025.

O’Donoghue’s family is now selling the guitar, which is expected to fetch between £30,000 and £50,000 — about $40,000 to $67,000 — when it goes on the block at Gardiner Houlgate on September 9.

Auctioneer Luke Hobbs notes that few of Page’s guitars ever come up for auction. “And when they do, they attract huge interest from collectors, investors and fans of Led Zeppelin.

“What’s so wonderful about this guitar is that we have the copies of the New Musical Express showing the competition and even a photo of Page giving the guitar to the winner, Charles Reid,” he says.

The guitar is being sold with original copies of New Musical Express, receipts and correspondence.

Page reportedly owned another orange Gretsch Chet Atkins in his early years, which he traded in 1961 for a Gibson Les Paul "Black Beauty."

Coincidentally, the guitar up for auction is the same year and model Gretsch owned by guitarist Randy Bachman.

Keith Richards once called Jimmy Page “one of the best guitar players ever known,” but believes his talents were overwhelmed in Led Zeppelin.

The Rolling Stones' linchpin and Page, who started life as a session musician before forming a brief tandem with Jeff Beck in the Yardbirds, rose through the ranks amid the British blue boom of the 1960s. As such, there is a great degree of adoration for one another.

Indeed, Page, speaking to Uncut, called his counterpart a “true devotee of the Chess catalog,” which paved the way for a mutuality that has never broken.

“It was similar to me and Jeff [Beck], where we’d just sort of lock in,” he adds. “Because there’s an automatic sort of mutual respect for each other that’s built up over the years.”

But while Richards has bags of superlatives to throw Page’s way, he says the band often sounded “hollow” as a result of the powerhouse drumming of John Bonham; a rambunctious ingredient to Zeppelin’s larger-than-life sonic boom.

“I love Jimmy Page, but as a band, with John Bonham thundering down the highway in an uncontrolled 18-wheeler, no,” he told Rolling Stone in 2015. “Jimmy is a brilliant player, but I always felt there was something a little hollow about it.”

His comments followed similar remarks made nine years earlier, in a video posted directly onto his website.

“As a band, I felt they were aptly named, but they never took off for me, musically,” he said. “At the same time, Jimmy Page is one of the best guitar players ever known, and Bonham was a hell of a powerhouse drummer. Although I think he was heavy-handed. That's where the 'led' comes in.”

But, he adds, “if you want to cut the story short: Led Zeppelin was Jimmy Page.”

In the wake of Richards' Rolling Stone chat, Page hit back when talking to Classic Rock, but kept his response tactful and diplomatic.

“Keith can say what he wants. He’s Keith Richards,” the guitarist quipped. “I think he’s done some amazing work. I respect his playing.

“[But] I’m not sure what he means by calling Led Zeppelin hollow. I think he’s got his tongue in his cheek. What we did was really cool.”

It's an interesting point of friction. United by their deep-seated love for traditional American blues, the players have followed similar paths and influences. But when it came to the beating hearts of their respective bands, John Bonham and Charlie Watts, who kept the Stones ticking until between 1963 and his death in 2021, were, stylistically speaking, worlds apart.

Richards has gone on record multiple times during his career to say that he and the Stones “needed” Charlie Watts. The way he described Watts' playing to Howard Stern last year shows what he really wanted from his drummer.

“He had feel,” Richards explained with great enthusiasm. “He had intelligence. Rock and roll doesn't necessarily need the whole battery of drums. It's got to do with when not to hit. If you're making music, silence is your canvas.”

The truth of the matter, of course, is that neither band would have succeeded in the manner they did had they swapped drummers. Led Zeppelin’s take on the blues was heavier, more animalistic. The Stones were slinkier, a little more prim and proper, to borrow a well-used British phrase. Which drummer one prefers is a matter of preference.

Meanwhile, Richards has been discussing the differences between the guitar players he shared studios and stages with across the Stones' various eras, and he says one player was the wrong fit. Equally, he once told Guitar Player that Jeff Beck, who almost joined the Stones, Pink Floyd, and the Bluesbreakers in his early days, wouldn't have worked because he was “an individualist.”

He's also revealed how acoustic guitars, alternate tunings, and a cassette recorder saved two stone-cold hits from the cutting room floor, while Harvey Mandel believes he was better suited to the Stones than Ronnie Wood, the man he lost the gig to in 1976.

"It was a pivotal moment for my sound," Jimmy Page has said of when he met electronics wizard Roger Mayer at Surbiton, a suburb in South West London not far from his home in Epsom and Jeff Beck’s in Wallington. It was the early 1960s, and Mayer, who had worked for the Admiralty, had begun turning his attention to electric guitar effects.

“He asked me if I needed anything for my guitar,” Page continued. “He came over to my house one day and I played him a song with electric distortion and said, ‘I want to find a way to sustain it.’ He went away and came back with this box with an on/off switch — that meant you could control the distortion.”

As Mayer told Guitar Player in 2023, Page and Beck were among his earliest customers.

"I met Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page at the same time when I first started going to local music venues where they played around here — what we called the ‘Surrey Delta’ — in ’62, ’63, when I was a teenager. Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page started out playing what you might call youth clubs, where kids used to get together.”

Both were interested in fuzz, which they’d heard on that record Page had spun for Mayer: the Ventures’ tune “The 2000 Pound Bee.”

“We sat there listening to it and Jimmy said, ‘Can we do this?’ I think they went up to a music shop in Shaftsbury Avenue to have a look at a Maestro [FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone], but it didn’t have enough sustain. I said, ‘I can improve it,’ so Jimmy said, ‘Okay, Rog. See what you can do.’”

Mayer tweaked the circuit, he said, “from square one, really. As a scientist, I could come up with an alternative solution — one that’s better.”

As Page told Uncut, Mayer’s invention revolutionized the guitarist’s sound. "It was phenomenal," he says. "When I started taking it to sessions, the other guitarists were blown away. The blood drained from their faces. But the guys doing the arrangements loved it."

Page was less interested in what he called Mayer’s "other box,” an octave-doubler with fuzz. "It was difficult to control in the studio from the guitar, so I said it wasn’t for me," he recalled.

Another guitarist would put Mayer’s octave-doubler to use: Jimi Hendrix. The American guitarist was making waves in England by the time Mayer met him at a club in 1967. According to the inventor, two weeks later he was in the studio as Hendrix was overdubbing the solo to “Purple Haze,” using his “other box,” the Octavia.

Mayer — who would famously help another guitarist, Bob Marley, completely revamp his tone — subsequently worked with Hendrix on his next album, Axis: Bold as Love, and then accompanied him and his group on their 1968 tour of America.

As Mayer told Guitar Player in our May 2012 issue, in the days before the effects box explosion, inventors like himself often worked directly with guitarists and studio engineers to create effects to their specification, a truly bespoke approach that was essential to the development of both new sounds and the pedal market that would emerge in the 1970s. He gave us insights into his method of working with Hendrix, the guitarist who was perhaps most interested in new sounds at the time.

What were some of the sonic goals you and Hendrix discussed when you started working together?

We talked about creating new soundscapes. Jimi was most interested in making new sounds for the records, because if you were going to be successful back then, you had to have a hit record. He felt he needed to be on the cutting edge with new sounds, so we were following a sort of Formula One racing approach, where you had constant development to keep moving on.

After Hendrix’s success with the Octavia, did you think the effect should be available to other guitar players?

No. This was a time when most recording studios manufactured their own consoles and other gear, and the electronics side of it was highly proprietary and quite secretive, really. When I was making effects for Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, and Jimi, I was one of their best-kept secrets.

Did Hendrix express interest in having a definitive sound?

Jimi wasn’t as interested in having a definitive sound as he was in having the right sound for the soul. His sounds had to be crafted for each particular song, and Jimi knew that if he got the right tone, it could be almost magical. He and I talked about what hadn’t been done, and one of the main things was panning the signal so as to move the sound around in the mix while manipulating the echo to create different spatial awareness.

To our way of thinking, echo was a way of adding more information and color to the sound in order to create ambience and a sense of mood alteration. Like if we panned the echo left to right while changing its EQ, suddenly the guitar could sound like a spaceship coming toward you. So using a combination of tape delay and EMT echo plates, and by manipulating the delay, the panning, and the EQ, we were able to make the music move and sound more three-dimensional.

Jimi was the happiest when he was getting sounds that were spinning in his head onto records. If he had a new idea for something, it wasn’t a matter of how much it was going to cost. It was always, “When can we do it?”

Does it surprise you that the sounds Hendrix got using fuzz, wah, and feedback are still considered the holy grail by guitarists?

Well, after Jimi did “Voodoo Chile” and some other records, there really wasn’t much else you could do with a wah. Jimi was so prolific in the way he used things like feedback and distortion, so it’s pretty hard to come up with something else that sounds as fresh — especially when it has to be incorporated into the framework of a great song.

What was the most important thing you learned from Hendrix?

Dream the impossible and have the spirit to play to the edge. That’s what Jimi showed me.

Forty years ago on July 13, the Live Aid concerts kicked off at London’s Wembley Stadium with the British rock group Status Quo. Armed with Telecasters and described by organizer Bob Geldof as “ordinary blokes with long hair and denims,” the group opened the day’s festivities with the 12-bar rock of John Fogerty’s “Rockin’ All Over the World.” It sent an unintentional but perceptible message that, even in the synth-saturated mid 1980s, “the boys and girls with guitars” — as Geldof described them — would rule the day.

Live Aid did rule, on that day and through 40 years of memories (as well as 20 years for its follow-up event, Live 8). True to Fogerty’s anthem, the benefit for African famine relief was a global event, ping-ponging between Wembley and Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium, as well as locales in Europe, Australia and Japan. Styled as a “global jukebox,” Live Aid presented most of the biggest acts at the time to nearly two billion viewers in 169 countries. Along the way it raised about $140 million for the Band Aid Charitable Trust, which Geldof launched with the all-star “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” single released eight months prior.

Live Aid’s 20 or so hours of music played out as a day for guitar heroics that were at times notable, notorious, triumphant and tepid. The players came from the worlds of rock, metal, blues and jazz, and nearly three dozen of them went on to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Four decades later, we still remember these most notable guitar stories from Live Day.

Led Zeppelin: Like a Lead Balloon

Led Zeppelin grounded itself immediately after drummer John Bonham died in September 1980, with the three surviving members going their own ways. But with Jimmy Page’s the Firm and Robert Plant both on the road, circumstances dictated an ascent back up the stairway to heaven, if just for one day. Plant was the first to sign on and wanted Page to be involved — but not necessarily to get the Led out.

“The original idea was not to do a Robert Plant set as such, but something a little lighter — like the Honeydrippers,” Plant said at the time, referring to an ad hoc all-star band he’d put together to record an EP of rock and R&B oldies in 1984.

“As Jimmy was part of the Honeydrippers I phoned him and said, ‘Would you like to be part of it?’ He did, and as we got to talking about it, we said, ‘While we’re doing it, why not do two of our [Led Zeppelin] songs?’ The whole thing really evolved.”

It ultimately sounded better in discussion than onstage. With former Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones on keyboards rather than bass, Paul Martinez from Plant’s band on bass, and Chic’s Tony Thompson and Phil Collins on drums, the shambolic three-song set felt like a genuine moment for the euphoric crowd at JFK Stadium, but not beyond.

Collins, who had flown in on the Concorde to play at both the London and Philly shows, introduced Zeppelin after playing solo piano renditions of a couple of his hits. He hadn’t rehearsed, and it showed, as did any lack of plan between him and Thompson on songs — “Rock and Roll,” “Whole Lotta Love” and “Stairway to Heaven” — that really weren’t made for two drummers.

Jones also had a small amount of rehearsal on the day of the show, Page — who busted out his Gibson EDS-1275 double-neck electric guitar for the occasion — sounded out of tune at times, and Plant was a bit hoarse from playing the night before in Detroit. To make matters worse, the stage monitors reportedly weren’t working properly. Plant later termed the performance “horrendous.”

The dissatisfaction was evident during a tense post-show interview with MTV’s Alan Hunter, which Collins dominated when the others proved truculent. The drummer later wrote in his 2016 memoir, Not Dead Yet, “If I’d known it was to be a two-drummer band, I would have removed myself from the proceedings long before I got anywhere near Philadelphia.”

Collins, who’d played on Plant’s first two solo albums and toured with him in 1983, also took exception to Page laying blame for the failure on him for “bashing away cluelessly and grinning.” Collins noted, “If you look at the video, you can see Jimmy dribbling [cocaine] onstage, Robert not hitting the notes and me miming, playing the air.”

Not surprisingly, Page, Plant and Jones refused to allow the performance to be included on Live Aid’s subsequent official DVD release. Led Zeppelin would have more satisfying reunions at the Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary Concert in 1986, its Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 1995 and the 2007 Ahmet Ertegun Tribute Concert in London, which is, as of now, its final performance.

The Who: Before They Got Old

There are several tellings of how the Who came to be part of Live Aid’s London program, the group’s first time onstage since breaking up after a farewell tour in late 1982. In his memoir, Is That It?, Geldof says Townshend suggested it after he invited the guitarist to take part on his own. That led to a series of protracted negotiations with singer Roger Daltrey, who refused to play with drummer Kenney Jones, and bassist John Entwistle, who refused to not play with Jones.

Townshend, however, subsequently accused Geldof of blackmailing and bullying the band into being part of the show. In his memoir, Who I Am, Townshend wrote, “When Bob sensed I might refuse to appear, he took the gloves off...‘Every pound we make will save a life. Do the fucking math. And do the fucking show!’”

Geldof denies he blackmailed or bullied the guitarist but makes no secret of how important it was for the Who to be part of Live Aid.

“I live, die and swear by this band,” he explained recently. “I really minded that the Who reformed and did it, ’cause it’s significant. I felt that 20 million people would watch that; if five percent of them contribute, we’re home.”

Though Townshend contended that “the Who were out of practice and should probably have left it to Queen and George Michael, who stole the show,” the four-song evening set — part of a killer chain that included U2, Dire Straits, Queen and David Bowie — was one of the day’s most exciting, despite any flaws — and stage monitor issues. “My Generation,” “Pinball Wizard,” “Love Reign O’er Me” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” crackled with vintage Who energy. Townshend was in full, furious, windmilling form, while Daltrey opened his shirt, twirled his microphone and jogged around the stage like a marathoner in training.

Even Townshend would acknowledge, perhaps grudgingly, that “we all felt proud to be there” and happily helped Paul McCartney close the show with “Let It Be,” with the two rock icons hoisting Geldof on their shoulders at the end of the song.

Bob Dylan: Too Rolling Stoned

It was another Live Aid collaboration that probably looked good on paper.

Bob Dylan, who’d sung on USA for Africa’s famine relief single “We Are the World,” was chosen to close the show in Philadelphia and in turn recruited Rolling Stones Keith Richards and Ron Wood. The trio, along with Faces/occasional Rolling Stones keyboardist Ian McLagan, gathered at Wood’s New York home to rehearse, with Dylan ultimately choosing two deep cuts — “Ballad of Hollis Brown” and “When the Ship Comes In” — along with the iconic “Blowin’ in the Wind” to play on the night.

There was undoubtably tension in the air at JFK Stadium, not only because of the occasion but also because the trio was directly following Mick Jagger’s explosive performance — backed by Daryl Hall & John Oates, and with Tina Turner guesting — at a time when Jagger and Richards were on the outs.

What’s more, Dylan’s performance was followed by a group performance of the hit “We Are the World” that would close the event.

“The sound guys had no idea we were going on,” Richards recalled the following year. “Here’s three guys with acoustic guitars and they were getting ready for [sings] ‘We Are the World’ with 50 people behind us.

“They were tuning up and we were trying to play,” Richards explained a few years later. “It was like, ‘shut ’em up, Bill Graham, or we’ll shoot the lot of them!’ Bob and I kept looking at each other like, ‘Where’s the blindfolds and the last cigarettes?’ But it was all for a good cause, so what the hell?”

Their performance was plagued by problems. The stage curtain had fallen in front of the stage amplifiers, preventing Dylan, Richards and Wood from hearing each other and causing them to play out of sync. When, early on, a string broke on Dylan’s guitar, Wood gave him his and used a cheap instrument a crew member handed him. The new guitar was out of tune. Wood wound up playing slide on only one of the strings.

Dylan, meanwhile, caused a stir when he suggested that, “I hope that some of the money that’s raised for the people in Africa, maybe they can just take a little bit of it, maybe one or two million, maybe, and use it...to pay the mortgages on some of the farms that the farmers here owe to banks.” While Live Aid did eventually spawn the charity Farm Aid, Dylan’s comment showed he had no grasp of the event’s purpose. “Something so simplistic and crowd-pleasing was beyond belief,” Geldof wrote. “[Dylan] displayed a complete lack of understanding of the issues raised by Live Aid.”

Seven other notable guitar moments...

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, on hiatus after his sophomore solo album About Face in 1984, played with Bryan Ferry’s band during the Roxy Music frontman’s four-song set in London.

Five of B.B. King’s songs from his set at the North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague, Netherlands, including “Why I Sing the Blues” and “Rock Me Baby,” were carried as part of the global telecast.

Dire Straits, which was in the midst of its own 12-show run at Wembley Arena next door, was joined by Sting to recreate his guest vocal on “Money for Nothing.”

David Bowie tapped Kevin Armstrong, who had played on the Absolute Beginners soundtrack, as his guitarist for Wembley Stadium. Bowie subsequently asked Armstrong to be a fifth member in Tin Machine after he played on the group’s debut album (he turned it down), while Armstrong co-wrote the title track to Bowie’s Outside album in 1992.

Pat Metheny sat in with Santana for its five-song set in Philadelphia, which included “Brotherhood,” “Open Invitation” and “Right Now” (verify song title — may need clarification).

Chic was on hiatus but Nile Rodgers brought his guitar to Philadelphia to play with Madonna (“Love Makes the World Go Round”), and the two of them joined Thompson Twins for a rendition of the Beatles’ “Revolution.”

After landing in Philadelphia, Phil Collins first got onstage with Eric Clapton for his set, which included Cream’s “White Room,” Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla” and “She’s Waiting” from the Collins-produced Behind the Sun album

As he proved once more at Back to the Beginning, where he performed a double shift by shredding with Ozzy and Pantera, Zakk Wylde is a versatile musician with a deep-rooted appreciation of the classics.

Having already shared his personal riff rundown with Guitar Player, Zakk Wylde sat down with Metal Hammer to discuss the greatest songs ever written, and locked in on a collection of riffs that underpin the history of rock guitar.

His first pick goes right back to the start of most players’ electric guitar journey.

“I think all us rock and metal guys have to learn ‘Smoke on the Water,’” he begins, believing that mastering its double-stop shifts is a rite of passage. “As soon as you hear that riff, it's just like Wow! The simplicity and power is just amazing.”

(I’m sure this writer wasn’t alone in first learning it the easy way — all on the low E string — but Simon McBride, who replaced Steve Morse in Deep Purple in 2022, says many guitarists are actually playing the song wrong.)

For Wylde, the riff also shows why guitarists should put songwriting, rather than outright showboating, first.

“For me, it was Sabbath first, and then I found Zeppelin and Deep Purple,” he says of his earliest rock discoveries. “And aside from the great musicianship of all three bands, they have great songs, they have iconic riffs.”

Another undeniable classic is one he has played countless times in front of an unfathomable amount of people since becoming Ozzy's foil in 1987: Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man.”

“You can play these riffs on one string — that's how iconic and classic they are,” he explains. “The great thing about Ozzy's singing is that, if the riff is powerful, he'll sing along with it.”

Discussing the origins of the riff with Guitar Player, Tony Iommi said the idea came from Bill Ward’s kick drum.

“I was in a rehearsal room, and Bill started playing this boom, boom, boom,” he recalled. “To the guitarist, the pounding sounded ominous. “In my head, I could hear it as a monster.”

The fact that Ozzy lifts the guitar melody for the vocals is inspired, not lazy. It showcases one of his greatest strengths as a songwriter.

“From all the years of me playing with Oz, whether it was ‘Miracle Man,’ ‘Crazy Babies,’ ‘Perry Mason,’ ‘No More Tears’ or ‘Mama I'm Coming Home,’ it would always be the first thing that came to his head,” he explains. “Very rarely did he go, ‘I've gotta come up with something better.’

“It's mindblowing; he really is the king of melody. Maybe it's because of his love of the Beatles; because Oz wouldn't know if it's major or minor — he'd just like the sound of it.”

The guitarist also believes “Jimmy Page could have quit right after ‘Rain Song’: That’s lights out, game over right there with the tuning and composition.”

He adds that Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe” was “a big deal when I learned it,” praising its chord-based composition rather than turning to the iconic guitarist's more fretboard-burning creations.

The quintet of Zakk-approved tunes is rounded out by AC/DC’s “Back in Black,” a riff that had a much younger version of the guitarist stumped when he first tried to master it.

“I was able to play the chords, but I couldn't play to lick,” he reveals. Eventually he can't the hang of it. “You’ve gotta do a little by day by day: put another brick on the empire. Then I could play along to the record like, ‘Oh my god, this sounds amazing.’”

In related news, Wylde has recalled his audition for Ozzy's band, what surprised him about other candidates, and the strange gear quirks that the singer had when it came to writing riffs for him

He could have added another sterling name to his already-stacked resume, but says a Guns N' Roses audition lost him his place in Ozzy's band and sidelined his career.

Last year, he dished out his hacks for more creative guitar playing, and it’s a trick that has been the foundation of his career.

Jimmy Page has called playing with the Black Crowes an “infectious” experience as the blues-rock stalwart and the Atlanta, Georgia band look back on their iconic Greek Theatre show 25 years later in a newly released short film.

The milestone anniversary was celebrated with a well-warranted 36-track anniversary reissue in March. This new film looks into the genesis of their unlikely union.

The reissue has been produced, mixed and remastered by Kevin Shirley and includes 16 previously unreleased tracks, mainly Black Crowes songs which were omitted from previous versions. For Page, it represents some of the best examples of his Led Zeppelin “guitar orchestrations” live, having been sonically limited in his band’s heydays.

During a decade when grunge hit fever pitch, kicking traditional blues rock out of the limelight, the Black Crowes — spearheaded by singer Chris and guitarist Rich Robinson — were a trend-bucking success. They were five albums deep into their career when they joined forces with Jimmy Page for the historic shows in New York and Los Angeles in what felt like a passing of the blues rock torch.

In the film, Page is full of kind words for a band he watched grow first-hand. They’d supported him on one of their first-ever tours, Chris Robinson says, and Page instantly knew the band was a shining light for the future of the genre.

“I really admired them,” he says. “They definitely came from the same school that I’d come from. They're a band that clearly understood its roots and knew its roots. So there was already bond as far as I was concerned”

Fast forward the best part of a decade and the band, having superlatively put themselves on the rock scene’s radar with their 1990 debut album, Shake Your Money Maker, were getting ready to play London’s historic Royal Albert Hall — where standout shows from Cream and Joe Bonamassa have taken place, to name but two. That afforded them the chance to rub shoulders with the Led Zeppelin guitar hero once more, and a few days later he was on stage with the band in Paris “to play some blues.”

“The place went absolutely mental,” Rich Robinson says, beaming.

The show was so successful that Page couldn’t turn down an offer to do it again on the other side of the Atlantic and commit it all to tape. The result was Jimmy Page & The Black Crowes: Live at the Greek, recorded over two nights at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles, in October 1999. Twenty-six years on, it stands as one of the finest blues-rock live albums.

However, contractual restrictions saw all Black Crowes tracks removed from the original two versions of the record, meaning the 2025 reissue is the first time their performances have been heard in their unfiltered glory.

The plan for the shows went far beyond just playing the blues as they had done in the French capital. As Page says, their ambitions were far more “panoramic” than that, with blues jams interlacing with Led Zeppelin covers and Page adding his flair to Black Crowes originals.

For Page, it was an exciting opportunity to perform Zeppelin songs in a way Led Zeppelin never could.

“‘Ten Years Gone’ was something I'd worked on at home. It had all this sort of guitar orchestration on it, but I'd never heard it like that apart from on record,” Page explains. “Because in the days of Zeppelin, I'd try and do as much as I could just with the one guitar. Suddenly I heard all these harmonies going on. It was like I had died and gone to heaven. It was a really emotional moment.”

The 2025 reissue of Live at the Greek was released in March 2025 with Kevin Shirley’s sonic touches giving it a crystal-clear production that shows the magic of those special shows in 4K.

“From my point of view, it was absolutely incredible,” Page says, smiling. “I mean, there was not going to be Led Zeppelin, but this was absolutely parallel because it had all the augmentation of all the guitar parts and more.”

The accompanying short film also reveals behind-the-scenes rehearsal footage alongside plenty of visuals from those electric shows.

When it’s revealed that the first song they practiced for the shows, Page quips: “That was brave, wasn’t it?”

But fortune, of course, favors the brave, and their union went down in the history books.

In June 2024, a contingency of record labels — including three of the world's biggest, Sony Music, Universal Music Group, and Warner Records — sued AI firms Suno and Udio for copyright infringements on an "almost unimaginable scale."

Now Bloomberg reveals that those very labels are in talks with the two businesses over a deal that would put the lawsuit to bed and establish a degree of cooperation between the opposing factions.

If successful, those negotiations will establish a framework that outlines how major labels make deals with AI bodies using the music they own for catalog training. That will see record labels profiting as AI increases its intelligence.

In short, the labels — 12 months after going on the attack — appear to have done a 180. It now remains to be seen if the artists whose intellectual property is being bargained over get a say in the make-up of any prospective deal.

Suno and Udio, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and New York, New York respectively, want to harness copyrighted music to learn at a faster level. The ongoing talks currently revolve around how that work is licensed, and the scale of compensation granted to artists whose work is analyzed.

However, as MusicRadar reports, the negotiations bear striking similarities to how, in the late 2000s, musicians were kept away from discussions between labels and streaming platforms as both parties thrashed out a deal relating to the money an artist receives per stream.

In 2025, Spotify pays on average $0.003 – $0.005 per stream, a figure countless musicians have derided. And of course, when a song is released via a label, there is another pair of hands for revenue to pass through before it reaches the people responsible for its creation.

In the U.K., two of rock's most prominent figures, Brian May and Jimmy Page, have been ardently speaking out against the government's proposed law changes regarding AI and copyright. The changes, which center on an "opt-out" policy, would rule in favor of AI companies and result in thousands of hours of copyrighted music landing in the crosshairs of AI learning machines.

May said that “nobody will be able to afford to make music” if “monstrously arrogant” tech companies are allowed to train technologies without requiring a license from the artist or their publisher.

He added that the U.K.'s decision could have a domino effect, impacting U.S. policies, where a great emphasis has been placed on investment into AI. The country wants to become a global superpower in that regard.

“My fear is that it’s already too late," May sighs. "This theft has already been performed and is unstoppable, like so many incursions that the monstrously arrogant billionaire owners of Al and social media are making into our lives. The future is already forever changed."

Page, meanwhile, tried to flip the situation the other way around to solidify his argument against the changes.

“When AI scrapes the vast tapestry of human creativity to generate content,” he had said, “it often does so without consent, attribution, or compensation. This is not innovation; it’s exploitation.

“If, during my session days, someone had taken my riffs without acknowledgment or payment, it would have been deemed theft. The same standard must apply to AI.”

Sharooz Raoofi, the founder of royalty-free audio firm Wavetick predicts the grim reality that any deal agreed between Universal/Sony and Suno/Udio might mean to the market. If the labels are invested in AI, he says, artists will suffer.

“You can imagine what the next step in this process will be,” he says via LinkedIn. “The further devaluation of music by flooding major label–controlled DSPs with major label–owned generative AI fodder fed by major label catalog.

“The end result — rights holders get paid even less, nobody has the right to opt in or out, and as artists we have zero visibility on what these license details will entail or whether we’ll even receive a royalty for being training fodder”

Speaking about what a deal could mean, Ivors Academy Chair Tom Gray theorized, “It appears recordings would be licensed to AI companies to ingest music-makers work without their permission and without reference to their personality or author rights.”

Moreover, in contrast to the U.K.’s suggested policy, “these licenses appear to not offer creators an 'opt-in,’ an ‘opt-out’ or any control — whatsoever — of their work within AI.”

It feels inevitable that record labels, once they sniff the money to be made, will begin to cozy up with the AI firms they once deemed a threat to their existence. The hopes that a fair deal that considers artist sentiment can be struck remains, but is to be seen to be believed.

If you’re a die-hard Zeppelin fan like me, you went to see Becoming Led Zeppelin at the iMax theater. You may also now appreciate that the film is now available on streaming services, allowing guitarists observe more closely the intimate details it reveals.

Personally, I can’t stop thinking about the huge role the acoustic guitar plays in Zeppelin’s origin story. These tales have been told before, but it’s endlessly interesting to hear them directly from the entire band — Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham — while looking back on many previously unseen photos and film clips.

The key moment for me is the first time Plant comes to Page’s house and starts flipping through his albums.

Before the two even begin to cast the die for modern heavy metal, they bond over a folk singer.

“Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You”

Page recalls, “I played him the Joan Baez version of ‘Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You’ and said, ‘If you can sing that top line there, I’ve got an arrangement that goes with it. And it really dovetailed together. He just sang beautifully.”

Plant adds, “We knew something was in the air. I could feel this stuff around me. Jimmy’s guitar playing was just tremendous, amazing.”

Led Zeppelin

As it turns out, guitars of every variety were always part of Page’s plan for the group’s debut album.

“I was going to throw everything I could at it,” the multidimensional guitarist says with a chuckle. “I was going to play acoustic guitar. I played pedal steel guitar, slide guitar, and electric guitar. I wanted to have so many different textures and moods on it that the whole album would totally arrest the listener and take them into a realm that they’d never been in before.”

As Page describes the material for the first Zeppelin album coming together at his home on the River Thames in Pangbourne, the film displays photos of him with his trusty Harmony Sovereign, the primary songwriting and recording acoustic that would eventually be heard on “Stairway to Heaven.”

According to the Met Museum, it’s a Sovereign H1260, serial number 9631111260. It’s worth noting that the contrasting acoustic delicacy and electric bombast were there on the first album in the form of “Babe” as well as “Your Time is Gonna Come.”

“Black Mountain Side”

The fact that Page decided to include a solo acoustic guitar piece on the band’s blistering debut demonstrates his conviction about a diverse guitar vision and for his dedication to the unplugged side of the equation. It’s often pointed out the Jeff Beck Group’s Truth album paved the way for Led Zeppelin.

While Beck did play a solo acoustic instrumental, he simply took a quick pass at the standard “Greensleeves,” whereas Page drew on his deep folk guitar affinity, specifically Bert Jansch’s version of “Black Water Side,” as well as his own appreciation for Eastern music to render “Black Mountain Side.”

“The guitar is not in a regular tuning on ‘Black Mountain Side,’ ” Page states about his use of DADGAD. “It’s very much like a sitar tuning.”

In addition to Page’s insights, the film displays amazing footage of him playing the piece on what appears to be a sunburst Gibson SJ-200 using all sorts of unique, Eastern-influenced improvisation. He employs a hybrid picking style — his advanced technique is quite precise — and throws in a nice behind-the-nut bend at the very end. Page must have felt this was the best footage of him playing the tune, even though it’s partially compromised and runs with a disclaimer, “Original master tape damaged.”

“Jimmy and John Paul were really at the top of their game,” Plant adds. “They’d played on so many diverse pieces of music that there was no where they couldn’t find themselves comfortably going. So that gave us a whole magnificent bunch of colors to play with.”

Led Zeppelin II

Becoming Led Zeppelin addresses the band’s first two albums, and the acoustic continues to play a large role in the latter. “Thank You” even includes a rare acoustic guitar solo. It’s particularly fascinating to hear the band members describe how the group first heard crushing tunes such as “Whole Lotta Love” and “What Is and What Should Never Be.”

“Jimmy would sit down with an acoustic guitar, and we’d work the songs out,” Jones explains.

Another voice that must be Bonham’s confirms, “Jimmy would sit down with an acoustic guitar, and we’d work the songs out.”

“I just really wanted to make sure that this album was really going to get everybody excited,” Page says. “I wanted it to be something that they hadn’t heard before with the acoustics, the electrics, the more radical and even avant-garde.”

Coda

The public largely considers Led Zeppelin the prototypical heavy metal band. Hipper folks are aware of the band’s acoustic side.

But there’s a bit of a misconception about Led Zeppelin III being the acoustic departure from the more electric first two albums. While the third may be the Zeppelin album where the acoustic guitar was primary rather than secondary in instances such as “Tangerine,” “Gallows Pole” and “That’s the Way,” Becoming Led Zeppelin clearly depicts Page starting out on acoustic playing skiffle music inspired by Lonnie Donegan, and it was in the folk arena where Page and Plant first found common ground.

Zeppelin’s ability to seamlessly incorporate the acoustic guitar into heavy tunes as well as to completely surrender to the acoustic realm on master strokes such as “The Battle of Evermore” with John Paul Jones switching to mandolin is what truly set them apart from all other hard rock groups in the end. And it was always there, right from the beginning.

Jimmy Page faces a fresh lawsuit over the song “Dazed and Confused” in the wake of the band’s recently released documentary, Becoming Led Zeppelin.

American musician Jake Holmes' track of the same name appears on his 1967 debut album, The Above Ground Sound. Soon after its release, the song was picked up by the Yardbirds after they toured together, and the band — then featuring Jimmy Page — began performing their version during live shows.

Page liked the track so much that it made its way onto Led Zeppelin's self-titled debut album two years later. The liner notes listed Page as the sole songwriter. When Holmes wrote to Page seeking a correction, his request was reportedly ignored.

In an interview with Furious, Holmes says his show at the Village Theatre in New York on August 25, 1967, with the Yardbirds “was the infamous moment of my life when 'Dazed And Confused' fell into the loving arms and hands of Jimmy Page.” He says he “had no idea” the band had adopted the track until they returned to New York a year later.

Over the years, he has also drawn parallels between Page’s descending guitar riff and the riff that ices his original version.

A lawsuit filed in 2010 retained Page as the sole writer but added the credit “inspired by Jake Holmes."

Tensions between Page and Holmes had simmered down, but Holmes is now suing Page and Sony Pictures, the firm behind the new doc, for incorrectly crediting the song, which features in the film.

Homes’ complaint has been filed in California, and it also claims that two early live recordings of the song were used without his permission or any payment.

The complaint says Page and Sony Pictures have “willfully infringed the Holmes composition by falsely claiming that the Holmes composition is the Page composition, by purporting to license use in the film of the Holmes composition as if it was the Page composition, and by collecting license fees for use of the Holmes composition in the film."

What that ultimately means is that, though the Zeppelin version of the track includes the “inspired by…” tag, the Yardbirds version of the song is merely down as being “written by Jimmy Page.”

Page — who released a signature version of Gibson’s SJ-200 acoustic last year — has also been accused of releasing other live recordings of Holmes’ song without proper credit. If Holmes’ lawsuit is successful, he's set to receive $150,000 for each copyright infringement.

Comments from Yardbirds’ then-drummer Jim McCarty in 2023, made during an interview with Something Else, do little to hide that the band had lifted Holmes’ track for their own ends.

“As usual, I wandered backstage to watch the support act and heard some quite pleasant folky songs,” he recalls. “Then they played this song in a minor key with a very haunting guitar run down, and I immediately thought it would suit us.

“I went down to the record store in Greenwich Village, bought Jake’s album, and we worked out our version — later to be recorded by Zeppelin, becoming one of the classics of all time."

Although the Holmes-versus-Zeppelin narrative is one of rock’s most notorious lawsuits, the scene isn’t short of others. Gibson and Dean remain locked in disputes over Dean's use of the Z and V body shapes, and Gibson issued a cease and desist to Trump Guitars for its use of the Les Paul body shape last year.

John Fogerty, meanwhile, says his legal wranglings with his ex-manager caused his songwriting inspiration to “wither and die.”

Kiss were also subject to a lawsuit in the late '90s when a cut from their reunion album left the Alice Cooper camp seething.

There’s a great deal of symmetry to be found in the early years of Jimmy Page and Ritchie Blackmore. Both would leave behind their small village of Heston in Middlesex to become two of British rock and roll’s most prolific guitar players.

Once they’d mastered their craft enough to join bands, each cut his teeth in similar circles. And as Blackmore reveals, he knew Page was destined for greatness when they met some seven years before Led Zeppelin’s 1969 debut album.

Discussing their shared early influences in the 2015 documentary The Ritchie Blackmore Story, Blackmore says it was the guitar-wielding sidemen, rather than the star singers, who grabbed their attention from the very beginning.

“When I was 11 it was about Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly,” he says, “and they had brilliant guitar players. You had Scotty Moore [in Elvis’s band], Buddy Holly played, and you had Cliff Gallup playing for Gene Vincent. We all idolized them. It was a very exciting time.

“I think at the age of 11 or 12 we all had first our acoustic guitars and then later on we got our electrics that we’d plug into the back of a two-watt radio,” he recalls.

“But it is strange how we all come from a similar area. Jimmy Page was from the same village, it wasn’t even a town, and Clapton was a few more miles out.”

Blackmore's first Fender Stratocaster actually belonged to Eric Clapton, whose roadie sold it to him for £60 — about $523 today — in 1969.

Jeff Beck meanwhile was going through the same motions at a similar age. He idolized Gallup above all others. When Guitar Player presented him with one of his hero's picks in 1993, Beck exclaimed, “I'm having a religious moment.”

As with Beck and Clapton, that symmetry could be extended even further, but it was Page that Blackmore met first.

“I met Jimmy Page in ‘62 when I was playing with a band called Screaming Lord Sutch & rhe Savages,” Blackmore explains. “We used to dress up like cavemen. I was thin as a rail at the time, so I was totally embarrassed to have this loin cloth on and all my bones showing. I was 16 or 17, and all the rest of the guys in the band were built like Charles Atlas.

“We played with a band called Neil Christian and the Crusaders, who I played with later, and [Jimmy] was playing his Gretsch guitar,” he continues.

Interestingly, Jimmy Page’s first proper guitar is believed to be a Gretsch Country Gentleman, which he used throughout the ‘60s, but it was cast aside by the time his recording career began. He'd switched to a Telecaster for his time with the Yardbirds.

“I knew he was going to be somebody then,” Blackmore remembers. “Not only was he a good guitar player, he had that star quality. There was something about him he was very poised and confident, but not arrogant. So I thought, He's going to go somewhere that guy, he knows what he's doing.

“He was way ahead of most guitar players and he knew he was good too. He was very comfortable within himself.”

Yet, his comments contradict the scathing retorts he had for his peers in Page and Clapton some 40 years earlier.

In March 1975 he was the cover star for International Musician & Recording World magazine. Speaking to American producer/guitarist Jon Tiven for the article, Blackmore was short on compliments for the pair.

“I'm not too struck on Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton," he said. "I never saw what was in Clapton at all.” However, it could be easy to dismiss those comments as ways of shooting down the competition. Perhaps Blackmore possessed an arrogance which he didn't reckon Page had.

That being said, Beck didn't find himself in the firing line.

“I like Jeff,” he told Tiven. “He's my favorite guitarist... a very natural guitar player. Being a guitarist, I obviously know a lot of tricks of the trade, but whenever I watch Beck I think, How the hell is he doing that?”

Ironically, when the pair did play togeher in those embryonic years, it was Beck doing the hand watching.

“In ‘64 or '65 I did a couple of sessions," Blackmore recalls. "Actually, one was with Jimmy Page, and one was with Jeff Beck.

"Jeff took the solo and everybody was raving about the solo, and I thought, Yeah that was a really good solo. But I noticed when I was playing that he was looking at my hands.

"I'm like, ‘Why are you looking at my hands?’ And he goes, ‘I don't know where we are; I'm just following your chords.’”

Ritchie Blackmore turned 80 years old yesterday. To celebrate, Guitar Player reached into the archives to resurrect his 1996 interview with the magazine, in which he spoke passionately about why the world needs more guitarists like Django Reinhardt.

The Black Crowes' Rich Robinson says being awe-struck by playing alongside Jimmy Page was not really an option when it happened 25 years ago.

"It's one of those things you can't process in the moment, 'cause you're in it," Robinson tells us via Zoom from his home in the Los Angeles area. "You have a job to do. You can't look over and be, 'Omigod! I'm playing these songs with Jimmy Page!' You've got to play the fuckin' song. Do the gig! That's the best way to honor the man and the work."

But with the passage of time, and with an expanded edition of 2000's Jimmy Page & the Black Crowes: Live at the Greek, out March 14, Robinson says he's more able to take a step back for perspective.

"Once you get outside of it and you spend some time thinking about it, it's like, 'Fuck, man, what an amazing thing to have done,' Robinson acknowledges. "Who wouldn't want to play those songs with Jimmy, right, and also just how cool it was and how we fit so effortlessly with one another. We really feel great about it."

Page certainly felt the same way at the time. "It's a good fit," he noted after one of the combination's three performances during October 1999 at the Roseland Ballroom in New York. "They're younger, but they come from the same place with their music. It's quite easy, really. It's very...complementary."

To which Robinson adds, "We were like old friends, in a weird way. Instantly, it just felt comfortable. We all came from had understanding of the same kind of music. We knew the stuff Jimmy and Robert were influenced by, and then we were also influenced by them — and then we took that to our level. It was such a cool thing."

The joint project was, indirectly, generated by Page's Led Zeppelin bandmate Robert Plant, who introduced the guitarist to the Black Crowes in January 1995 when the American group — then three albums into its career — was performing at London's Royal Albert Hall. (Plant had previously worked his magic in a similar fashion for Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson around that same time.)

A week later Page joined the Crowes onstage in Paris for encore renditions of Elmore James' "Shake Your Moneymaker" and Little Walter's "Mellow Down Easy." The Crowes subsequently played on some bills with Page & Plant during their 1997 tour and backed Page for a short show at the Cafe de Paris in London.

The 1999 dates — just eight, in London, New York, Los Angeles, Worcester, Mass and at the NetAid benefit in New Jersey — were the idea of the Crowes' then-manager Pete Angelus, while Page's manager, Bill Curbishley, ran with the collaboration the following year, constructing a full-scale arena tour with his other client, the Who. The two acts played back-to-back nights in each city, limiting costs by using much of the same stage gear.

The shows blended Zep and Crowes songs and a few select covers, which gave Robinson in particular a chance to play songs he hadn't before because he was writing and playing his own material since he was a teen.

"I started playing guitar when I was about 15," says the guitarist, who spoke with us about the special acoustic guitar, a 1954 Martin D-28, behind the Crowes’ signature tune, “She Talks to Angels.” “And we didn’t' go through the phase of learning how to play riffs, learning songs and being in a cover band. We started playing our own stuff pretty quickly.

“I always loved Zep and the Stones, and I think it had magical quality to it because I didn't look behind the curtain in that sense. Once you learn it and get know it, it's like, 'Oh shit, this is how he did this and blah de blah. Back then it was an untouchable thing, so I could enjoy it purely as a fan.

"And then to get into it and start listening to all the parts and listen to the brilliant composing that Jimmy was doing — the layering of guitars and the melodies and counter melodies and different parts —it was amazing to see. Then to be able to bring that to the stage with him and cover all those parts was amazing."

Robinson says he and fellow Crowes guitarist Audley Freed deferred to Page on guitar arrangements for the songs. "That was really up to him — 'What do you want us to play?'" he remembers. "When he played with Zeppelin, he'd have to cover all those parts himself. He sort of chose what he felt was most important to put forward, and it always sounded amazing. With three of us a lot more of those parts could be played."

That was not lost on Page, either. "This covers a lot more ground than I could on my own, or even just out with Robert," he acknowledged in New York. "We just have to decide which one of us is going to play which part, which is exciting."

Robinson says that the trio was not tied to slavishly recreating Page's variety of recorded parts, either. "He would say, 'This is how we did it live,' and we'd just build off of that," he recalls. "He was very specific; he knew what he wanted, and these parts really were brilliant.

“To peel the curtain back and see the compositional sort of elements he was doing, and to have Jimmy at the helm, knowing exactly what he wanted, there's really nothing better than that. What a really cool way to support him and his legacy."

The Crowes also deferred to Page on repertoire, though Robinson says there was a unified sentiment that favored "some slightly more obscure stuff, off the beaten path — like, we didn't choose 'Stairway to Heaven,' but 'Whole Lotta Love, oh, that was cool. 'Custard Pie,' 'In My Time of Dying,' those kinds of things. We did 'Nobody's Fault But Mine.' 'In the Light,' that was really cool to do." The selection also included an arrangement of things that mashed elements of the Yardbirds' 1966 original with the Jeff Beck Group's heavier treatment of it two years later.

“Jimmy was way up for it," Robinson says. "We were mainly focused on the Jeff Beck version, but the Yardbirds version had this really cool solo that Jimmy really wanted to do. So we did basically the Jeff Beck Group version, but for the solo we went into this really cool Yardbirds thing, and then it kicked back into the Jeff Beck version.

"Things like that were always so cool. I remember we did [Pink Floyd’s] 'Lucifer Sam,' we did a lot of really cool stuff, and Jimmy was always up for it. His positivity and his exuberance were so palpable."

Page was equally enthused about being part of the Crowes’ songs, which were left off the initial Live at the Greek release because of legal issues between the band and its original record label.

"He really liked 'Horsehead,'" Robinson says. "He played one of the most beautiful B-bender parts on 'She Talks to Angels.' He played an amazing solo on 'No Speak, No Slave.' To think about this guy Jimmy Page, this legend, playing on my songs was such an honor, I don't even know how to describe it. To be able to just have and hear the amazing parts and playing he brought to those songs is just mind-blowing to me."

The Crowes were planning to perform even more shows but he dropped out due to a claimed back injury. In his 2019 memoir Hard to Handle: The Life and Death of the Black Crowes, original Crowes drummer Steve Gorman wrote the excuse was fabricated, and that Page left because Robinson had rebuffed his invitation to write new material together — which the guitarist unequivocally denies.

"That's just not true," he says. "No one respected Jimmy more than me. I told him if he ever wanted to do anything I'd be more than happy to help in any way, shape or form." Page has, in fact, joined the Black Crowes onstage since the tour and attended the group's show in London last year while supporting its latest album, the Grammy Award–nominated Happiness Bastards, for which Robsinson used resurrected Guilds and an unusual Fender amp for the resurrected Crowes’ first album in 15 years.

Robinson also says Page sent him and his older brother, Crowes frontman Chris, a message complimenting their performance of "Going to California" with Slash at last month's Fire Aid benefit concert in Los Angeles.

"We've always kept in touch," Robinson says. "Chris just went to dinner with him recently. I think the actions speak louder than words."

As Live at the Greek comes out, the Robinsons are "pretty far along" in writing for the Crowes' next album. "I’ve sent Chris 30, 35 songs, and then he gets them and does what he does, then we'll get together and finish them," Robinson says. "I'm really liking what we have now. There's some cool shit I'm really looking forward to recording with the band."

And while that goes on the Crowes are also nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for the first time ever. Fan voting runs through April 21 via vote.rockhall.org, and Robinson acknowledges that "it's cool just to be nominated.

“I know it sounds cliché, but just to be acknowledged is cool. We appreciate it, which is very unlike the Black Crowes.’ He laughs. “It would be cool to get in and be honored like that."

Jimmy Page is credited with writing some of the greatest riffs in rock guitar. “Whole Lotta Love,” “The Immigrant Song,” “Kashmir,” “Stairway to Heaven”… At the heart of it all is his deep love of blues, which informs much of his work with Led Zeppelin.

As Page explained to Dangerous Minds, riffs often come to him when he's practicing.

"I play at home, and before I knew where I was, things would be coming out, and that’s those little sections or riffs or whatever,” he said. “At that stage it’s selection and rejection. It’s whether you continue with something or you go, ‘No that’s too much like something else,’ and then you move into something else.

"If you’ve got an idea and you think that’s quite interesting, then I’d work and build on it at home.”

Other times, however, the riffs have come to him spontaneously, as they did when he wrote “Rock and Roll.”

“‘Rock and Roll’ was something that came purely out of the ether,” he said. “We were working on something else and John Bonham happened to play — just as you do sometimes, because we were recording — this intro from ‘Keep A-Knockin’,’ from Little Richard, and I went, ‘Oh, that’s it!’ — I did this chord and half a riff that was in my head — ‘Let’s do this.’ ”

But not all of Led Zeppelin’s riffs were written by Page. In fact, one of the group’s most famous — and most difficult to perform — riffs was composed by Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones.

It’s “Black Dog,” the lead track to Led Zeppelin IV.

And as both Page and Jones have said, it’s a riff that proved one almost impossible for the group to get their heads around.

“I wrote Black Dog on a train,” Jones told our sister magazine Bass Player in its February 2008 issue. “My dad taught me how to write musical notation without using manuscript paper — just with numbers and note values — and I wrote that riff on the back of a train ticket coming back from a rehearsal at Jimmy Page’s house.”

In early interviews, Jones attributed the song’s influence to Muddy Waters’ 1968 album Electric Mud. “There was a Muddy Waters song I was attracted to at the time,” Jones said. “It was a rolling blues with a riff that never ended. I fancied writing something that did the same thing. Just when you think the riff is going to finish, it goes off somewhere else.”

But in 2007, Jones clarified that he’d actually meant to credit the repeating riff in Howlin’ Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightning” as his inspiration.

Either way, the line proved difficult from the start. As Jones told Classic Rock magazine in 2007, “It was originally all in 3/16 time, but no one could keep up.”

Even once Jones and Page put the song in 4/4 and slowed it down, it continued to frustrate the group's efforts. Bonham had difficulty navigating its rhythmic shifts as he tried to locate the “one” in each shift in the pattern.

It was Jones who hit upon the solution.

“I told Bonzo he had to keep playing four-to-the-bar all the way through,” he told Bass Player. “If you go through enough 5/8s it arrives back on the beat.”

The riff was compelling and ear catching on its own. There was no need for vocals, nor was there any likelihood singer and lyricist Robert Plant would be able to compose something to fit the snaky, circular riff.

This time it was Page who found the solution by following the example of “Oh Well, Part 1,” Peter Green’s monumental riff-driven tune from Fleetwood Mac’s first album, Then Play On. Instead of playing the riff straight through, Green interspersed its repetition with a vocal break, creating a call-and-response motif reminiscent of early blues, R&B, folk and gospel.

Although Jones and Page play the “Black Dog” riff in tight unison, Jones lays back on the middle-eight breaks to give the guitarist plenty of room to work out.

“I think you have to make a decision to support the guitar,” he explained to Bass Player. “Sometimes you can be really sparse and that will really highlight what the guitar’s doing. Or you can do a repeated pattern and build up intensity.

“In ‘Black Dog’ I would leave a lot of space and Page could come out in those spaces. You’ve got to look at the whole picture.”

And bassists, take note: While Jones was predominantly playing fingerstyle at this point in his career, he used a pick when playing his bass guitar on “Black Dog.”

“My preference is always to play fingerstyle, but I often had to play with a pick in the session days, so I got quite used to it,” he said. “I can play ‘Black Dog’ with my fingers, but it just sounded better with a pick. It just gives you different phrasing, and a more metallic, guitar sound. I didn’t see any reason not to swap one for another if the occasion demanded it.”

For his part, Page played his Number 1 Gibson Les Paul, a 1959 ‘Burst he purchased in 1969 from Joe Walsh.

“We put my Les Paul through a direct box, and from there into a mic channel,’ he told Guitar World. “We used the mic amp of the mixing board to get distortion. Then we ran it through two Urie 1176 Universal compressors in series.”

But Page didn’t just record his guitar part once. No — he triple-tracked it, creating a potent Les Paul–on-steroids tone.

“Curiously, I was listening to that track when we were reviewing the tapes and the guitars almost sound like an analog synthesizer,” Page noted.

As for the song’s title. Although it appears nowhere in the lyrics, the name refers to a black Labrador Retriever that wandered the grounds of Headley Grange, the former workhouse in Headley, Hampshire, England that Zeppelin converted into their home/studio for Led Zeppelin III, IV, Houses of the Holy and Physical Graffiti.

The dog would go out at night and return exhausted every morning, leading Plant to believe it was having sex in the woods. Using that as his premise, the singer composed lyrics befitting a classic blues tune as well as the life the bluesmen who inspired “Black Dog” in the first place.

For all Jones' contributions to "Black Dog," 'in the end the song was the result was a group collaboration. As Page explained in conversation with All The Songs, “We were always trying to encourage him to come up with bits and pieces, so to speak. Because that’s what they usually were. He never came up with a complete song or anything.”

When GP asked Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera to name the 10 albums that changed his life, he laughed.

“How long have you got?”

Of course, time wasn’t an issue, which is a good thing, as Manzanera, who, in addition to Roxy Music, has collaborated with everyone from good pal David Gilmour to John Cale, along with embarking on a lengthy solo career. Along the way, he's become famous for playing the Cardinal Red Gibson Firebird VII electric guitar that's been a constant companion since his days with Roxy.

To that end, if you dug into Manzanera’s records, you know that his influences run the gamut, meaning they’re not strictly guitar-based. “I love Mozart,” he says. “It’s like rock and roll — it has a great beat. I’ve always been attracted to music with a strong feel and pulse to it.”

But that doesn’t mean Manzanera — who recently shared with us the stories behind his top five tracks — isn’t into guitar music, too. He holds a special place for Jeff Beck, who, like Manzanera, was never content to just be a strummer.

“Without a shadow of a doubt, Jeff Beck was the best British guitarist ever,” he says. “He could do things that nobody else could do. And technically, his sense of pitch was extraordinary.”

Before revealing his 10 choices, Manzanera continues, saying, “I can keep going. I could go on forever. There’s just so many great albums in so many different genres. There’s just been so much great music over the last 50 years. I love all different kinds of stuff.”

Revolver — The Beatles (1966)

“It shouldn’t come as a surprise that when Brian Eno and I had a chance to do an experimental record called 801 Live with our band 801, we chose ‘Tomorrow Never Knows.’ It’s a track you should never attempt live, because it’s an amazing construction made in the studio using tape loops. But we did it a live version anyway and made it the first track on the album.

“Revolver was important as the first album where the Beatles used the studio as an instrument. It showed what was possible.”

Are You Experienced — The Jimi Hendrix Experience (1967)

“You have to remember, there was nothing like him when he arrived. It was just a mind-blowing thing to guitarists. When I first saw him on Top of the Pops in England, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was just so incredibly exciting. He was doing things that defied anything that I’d seen before or read about in any ‘teach yourself guitar’ books. He showed us all what could be done.”

My Generation — The Who (1965)

“Roxy Music was an art rock band, and at the time of this album, the Who made their statement that they were the first art-rock band. Pete Townshend played with feedback, and what he did was a statement of art that really appealed to me. The interesting thing was the person who taught him at art school was the same person who taught Brian Eno when he was in art school. What they got from it was a way of thinking and a sort of attitude toward music.

“But, obviously, the great thing about Pete is that he could write amazing songs and lyrics as well as put them across with the real strength of the sound of his guitar playing. And it was also at this time that you get the arrival of the big Marshall 4x12 speaker cabinets, as well as Pete Townshend, Clapton, and soon after, Hendrix. These were all guitarists who were able to control feedback from their guitars.

"And My Generation is where it started. It really wasn’t much in evidence before they unleashed sonic experience.”

In a Silent Way — Miles Davis (1969)

“The thing that I took from Miles was his sonority, his idea of what pitch was. It’s a different kind of in-between-the-cracks kind of attitude, with space and improvisation. It’s not as if you stuck a tuner on his trumpet said, ‘That’s out of tune’ — because it’s not. And as far as I know, with those sessions, he would just play and then choose the bits he liked and stick it all together.

“I was thinking about this the other day: You can give any title to an album you like, but it doesn’t describe that album. And that’s true here, especially the title track itself. There’s a sort of calmness about it, and with beauty; it’s very much like a sort of painting. The sounds Miles painted are the absolute essence of less is more and are about tone and texture. That’s what I took from him.”

Sketches of Spain — Miles Davis (1960)

“Sketches of Spain is based on Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez. Miles didn’t just copy what Rodrigo wrote but did an impressionistic version of it, so you almost get abstract art. In that period, with how things worked in the ’60s, there was a lot of improvisation and experimentation of sound — and that’s what I love about it all.

“Funnily enough, that’s what we’ve returned to now with my new project with Andy Mackay. It’s about 80 percent of his input, though it’s not jazz. It’s about sound, texture and space, and it’s about being in the moment. So we don’t expect big audiences for that, but we’re very happy to get small again, make it intimate, and connect with the audience.”

Canciones de Mi Padre — Linda Ronstadt (1987)

“I love this album, which is Linda Ronstadt singing in Spanish, and it was beautiful. I had no idea of her Mexican background and no idea that she could speak Spanish. So in a lot of those songs — and remember, the title of the album is ‘Concerning songs of my father’ — they’re like classic, evergreen songs, and she does them so incredibly well. And those are songs that I grew up listening to and knowing while in Cuba. I come back to this album a lot, actually. I love her voice.”

Led Zeppelin — Led Zeppelin (1969)

“Jimmy Page’s playing on the first Led Zeppelin album — we just hadn’t heard someone let loose like that. And John Paul Jones and the power trio, with, of course, Robert Plant, whose voice was just absolutely, well, you just can’t do a three-piece without having an incredible singer.

“Those guys had so much experience, meaning John Paul Jones and Page playing sessions, and they could really play. It’s not easy to play those twelve-string parts on double-neck guitars, and the way they looked was just exciting, and it was a very exciting kind of music. I mean, you could say that about Jeff Beck with Rod Stewart, too. That was a little bit like what they could have been like.”

Pablo Honey — Radiohead (1993)

“Some of the guitar playing was just jaw-dropping. They’re doing these crazy things, and you’re thinking, How did you do that? That is very, very rare. You could hear people making technically brilliant sounds and things like that, but the combination of this sort of very advanced level musicianship and the songs they brought to a musical environment was great. They were definitely a unique band.”

Fresh Garbage — Spirit (1968)

“I loved the band Spirit from the West Coast of America. I love Randy California’s guitar playing and the way he seemed to be able to play with harmony. It still baffles me how he did it. One of my friends came back from being over in LA, saw them, and came back raving about them. But for me, with Spirit, the most important album was Fresh Garbage, which was just fantastic.”

The Soft Machine — The Soft Machine (1968)

“The first Soft Machine album was fantastic. I loved the way that Mike Ratledge played the Hammond organ through a fuzz box so that it sounded a bit like a guitar. And in the end, it sounded like the guitar playing that Robert Fripp ended up doing. So that was my ultimate ambition: to sound like the organ playing of Mike Ratledge on Soft Machine’s albums.”

Phil Manzanera's memoir, Revolución to Roxy, was published in 2024 and is available for purchase.

Never-before-seen footage of Led Zeppelin performing in Denmark in 1979 has surfaced online.

The fan-shot movie, captured on Super 8 film during the band’s July 24 show at the Falkoner Theater in Copenhagen, had been stored in a drawer for the past 45 years.

Danish Led Zeppelin fan Lennart Ström revealed the film's existence last year on the Heart of Markness podcast website in response to an episode covering the two Copenhagen shows, which Zeppelin booked as warm-up concerts for their two Knebworth dates.

Until then, Ström had only shown the footage — which was filmed without audio — to friends. The U.S.-based Reel Revival Film has since digitized the footage and had it color corrected by the Pink Floyd Research Group. The visuals have also been paired with audio recordings from the night.

The 13-minute movie, which is now available to watch online via the ledzepfilm YouTube channel, features snippets of 17 classic hits, including “Nobody’s Fault but Mine,” “Black Dog” and “Whole Lotta Love." It also includes a clip of Jimmy Page playing a guitar solo.

The film begins with the band swinging through “The Song Remains the Same” as an energetic Page wields his twin-neck Gibson ED-1275. His “Number 1” Les Paul — a guitar Joe Walsh convinced him to buy — also makes an appearance.

“We brought the Super 8 camera to test a new film that would work indoors,” Ström tells Led Zeppelin News. “It was no problem getting the camera in. It was quite small and I think I had it in my trousers on my back."

Led Zeppelin's show included a laser light cone pyramid display, which was used to spotlight Page during the violin bow segment of his guitar solo. While other large touring acts, like the Who, had begun using lasers in the 1970s, Zeppelin were the first to use a high-powered laser, which unfortunately could cause problems with voltage, as it did during the Copenhagen stop.

“The gig the night before was, according to the papers, a disaster due to the electric failures that the laser had brought,” Ström continues. “So there were generators standing in the alley we passed before going in. We were of course concerned about the gig.

“I have kept this film in a drawer all the years. I made a digital copy and showed it to some friends, guitarists who went nuts. And that was the silent version.”

The release of the footage is timely, coming right after the cinematic release of the new documentary, “Becoming Led Zeppelin,” during which Page calls their first jam session together “devastating.”

The band split up just a year after the Knebworth shows in the wake of John Bonham’s passing, with a triumphant 2007 reunion the only Led Zep shows to have happened since.

Although Alex Lifeson cites many influences on his playing — including Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend and Steve Hackett — the biggest is, without a doubt, Jimmy Page. Here Lifeson tells Guitar Player about meeting the electric guitar player who once called Rush "One of the young bands that I like."

"I saw Led Zeppelin in Toronto in 1969 after waiting in line for 15 hours,” Lifeson recalls. “We sat on the floor in front of Jimmy, about three people back. I was so impressed. I wanted to look like him, and play like him, and be just like him. If there was any single person I ever wanted to meet, it was him, but I never thought I would have the opportunity.”

That changed in the mid 1990s, when Page and Robert Plant began touring together as Page and Plant following the release of their Platinum-selling live album, No Quarter. Some time prior to that, Rush bassist Geddy Lee met Plant while in Morocco, as he describes in the video clip below. When the Page and Plant tour landed in Toronto, Geddy and Lifeson were on the guest list.

"Robert invited us to the Page/Plant show in Toronto,” Lifeson continues. “When we went backstage, Jimmy came into the room, and I started shaking. I was that excited. He was so sweet, and so charming and engaging. It was incredible.”

Lifeson had recently put out his 1996 solo album, Victor, and brought along a copy to give to Page.

“I built up the nerve to give it to him,” he recalls. “I had written in it that he was such an inspiration, and that his influence was all over the record. I said, 'I hope you don't mind, but this is my solo record and I'd like you to have it.' He stood up and gave me a hug and thanked me. We walked down to the stage with them, and they had set up a couple of chairs for us by the [monitor mixing] board. Jimmy kept looking over and smiling at me when he would play these great signature parts.

“He played so well. Just incredible. I was like kid. I can picture the dressing room, with Robert sitting across from me and Jimmy sitting to my left asking me questions. I can take myself right back there, and it just feels great.

“You meet your hero, and he's a hero! He was everything I hoped he would be. I'll never ever forget that."

As Lifeson has explained to Guitar Player on previous occasions, he gives special props to Pete Townshend for inspiring him both as a rhythm guitarist and as a songwriter. Townshend is himself known to declare himself rock's finest strummer, having said, "There's no one to touch me." His influence on Lifeson, Lee and the late Rush drummer Neil Peart played out when the group recorded their 2004 EP Feedback, featuring covers of songs by 1960s groups that were influential to the band, including the Who's 1970 single "The Seeker." .

“When Geddy and I were going through a list of influential songs that we were going to do for Feedback, I realized how much of Pete was in my playing,” Lifeson says. “That's how I learned to play rhythm guitar. In a three-piece band, you really have to be aware of your rhythm playing. It's all about how you fill in the space, and how you move in and out of the melodies, especially with a rhythm section like Geddy and Neil.

“And I just learned so much from Pete. He's such a great strummer — so unique. His style of soloing was so effective, and he was the only guy who could make an acoustic guitar sound heavier than a Les Paul. He's such a well-rounded, fantastic guitarist, as well as a fabulous songwriter.

Lifeson adds that Townshend’s progressive-rock approach to songwriting informed his own, particularly during the era of 2112 and Hemispheres.

“Absolutely. We learned a lot about songwriting from them,” he says. “I think you can be influenced by someone, and not sound anything like them. There are bands like Porcupine Tree that cite Rush as a major influence. They don't sound like us, but I hear it in their arranging and their dynamics.”

And when it comes to the guitarists he’s toured with over the years, Lifeson said a few players stand out in his mind.

“A great bill was UFO and Rush. We had such a ride together,” he says. “Michael Schenker and I got along so well. What I remember most about Michael was showing up for soundcheck at 4:00, and Michael would already be there, warming up for a couple of hours. He would play constantly. There was always so much passion in his playing."

He likewise praised Steve Morse, who recently told Guitar Player how he manages to stay in love with guitar playing after so many years.

“Steve Morse is one of the nicest people I've ever met. He's another guy where we'd be onstage doing soundcheck, and he'd be walking around the arena practicing incessantly. He's an incredible musician. He's such a great player that he deserves more.

Lifeson also weighed in on Eric Johnson, who recently spoke of his friendship with fellow Austinite, the late Stevie Ray Vaughan.

“Eric Johnson did two tours with us," Lifeson noted. "I used to go watch him play almost every night. What struck me most was the beautiful sensibility in his playing —so warm and complete and articulate. And the guy is just nuts with his tone. I've always loved his guitar playing.”

In related news, Lifeson recently revealed that he and Lee still get together and jam on a weekly basis. While they record their sessions, Lifeson says they have no plans to make another run together as Rush.

"Once a week I go to Ged’s — it’s in the calendar — keep my fingers moving, play Rush stuff, new jams," he told Classic Rock. “We do record it, but I couldn’t even begin to tell you where it’ll go.”

When it comes to guitar in modern music, Dweezil Zappa says the guitar riff has lost its place as the hook of the song, or even part of the song at all.

It’s no secret that the electric guitar has faded in stature within popular music since the 1990s. Some outliers buck the trend, of course. Taylor Swift’s popularity has helped shine a fresh light on the acoustic guitar as a songwriting tool, and contemporary pop queens Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan find themselves in the center of a guitar solo revival.

But for the most part, the decline of the instrument has ultimately starved modern music of guitar riffs.

“A riff, in general, is a thing that has disappeared from modern music,” Zappa tells Matt Pinfield. “It used to be that you would have a singular type of phrase that was played on a guitar mainly, and — because of the personality of the guitarist, and the tone, and the vibe of it — you got into the song straight away. It wasn’t about all these other production elements. It was the real hook of the song.”

Taking Zappa’s comments at surface level, it would be easy to dismiss them as mere nostalgia chasing. Dig a little deeper, though, and it becomes an interesting observation of how songwriting, as an art form and a product has developed beyond the riff and the earworm it represented.

“You had guys like Jimmy Page, Ritchie Blackmore and Jimi Hendrix that were great at writing these small, micro-encapsulated things that would stick in your head," Zappa says. "That also inspired you to pick up the guitar because it was so cool-sounding that you’re like, ‘I gotta find a way to do that.’”

Zappa has previously spoken about how he became obsessed with Van Halen’s music after hearing "Eruption" for the first time, which sent him down his pathway to shred. Little would he know his guitar hero would come to his house less than a year later, allowing him the rare chance to learn from him up close. Soon after, Eddie Van Halen showed up at his school talent show to gift him a rare Kramer guitar.

But apart from those lucky close encounters, Dweezil and so many impressionable teens like him were motivated to take up guitar by the power of guitar riffs.

Zappa points to some classic examples of rock tunes that remain popular today, many generations on, as evidence of the guitar power and the important role guitarists used to play in music writing.

“‘Smoke on the Water,’ ‘Purple Haze’ and songs that have these immediate things where you get into it as soon as you hear the guitar — that’s a really interesting way of thinking about how songs were written back in the day and what guitar players brought,” Zappa adds.

“‘Smoke on the Water’ is one of those riffs because it’s simple sounding. Compared to other things, it is easier to play on guitar, but it’s the feel and the timing and the way that he attacks the strings that gives it the personality that makes you really go, ‘Oh yeah, I’m into this.’”

As Deep Purple’s latest recruit, Simon McBride recently revealed, however, it’s a riff that many guitarists play wrong. The Irishman has stepped into Steve Morse's shoes after a lengthy 28-year spell as the band's lead guitarist and he's found that, when it comes to that iconic riff, simplicity is best.

“Some people overcomplicate the ‘Smoke’ riff by playing it like a guitar player — you know, they throw vibrato and other things into it – but then the riff loses its essence,” McBride says. “You just have to keep it simple. There are plenty of other places in the set for me to try new things.”

Dweezil doesn't go as far as to voice concerns about whether that could contribute to lower numbers of people wanting to learn the instrument, but it’s certainly clear that mainstream music is light on riffs and those eye-opening moments they can bestow on listeners the world over.

A new clip gives a glimpse into the first officially licensed Led Zeppelin documentary, which finds Jimmy Page and company recounting their “devastating” first jam together.

Produced by Sony Pictures Classics/Sony Pictures U.K., Becoming Led Zeppelin features all-new interviews with surviving band members Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones, as it charts the group's meteoric rise over a whirlwind first 365 days together.

Spearheaded by Emmy- and BAFTA-nominated director Bernard MacMahon, the docu-concert film pieces together a kaleidoscope of unseen performance footage to offer a unique insight into the band's earliest tours, with the trailer taking things back to the very beginning.

“I said the first number that I want to do is 'The Train Kept A-Rollin,'” Page says in the preview, shown below. “We just kept playing it, doing little solo breaks and all the rest of it and Robert's improvising.”

Plant's voice was akin to nothing that bass player Jones had heard before. “I was expecting some cool soul singer, and there's this screaming maniac with this fantastic voice and fantastic range," he says. "I was, like, 'What are you doing up there? You'll hurt yourself, man.'"

“It was devastating,” Plant adds, “because it seemed like that is what I had been waiting for.”

Bonham, who passed away in 1980, is also featured via archival footage “I was pretty shy," he recounted, "and the best thing to do when you're in a situation like that is not to say much and soldier along and suss it all out.”

Led Zeppelin came together in the wake of Page's spell in the Yardbirds, which included a brief dual lead guitar sojourn with Jeff Beck in the summer of '66. Tiny Bradshaw's "Train Kept A-Rollin' "and Jake Holmes' "Dazed and Confused," which Zeppelin would later reconfigure in their image, were staples of their live set.

As Yardbirds' lineup morphed from into the New Yardbirds, Page pursued a heavier blues sound. His preferred vocalist of choice, Terry Reid, had declined to join, but he recommended Band of Joy singer Plant for the spot. Page in turn brought Bonham with him. (Bonham's son, Jason, would fill the vacant drum throne for Zeppelin's 2007 reunion shows. He spent much of last year on tour with Sammy Hagar and Joe Satriani as part of the Best of All Worlds tour.)

Jones was the last piece of the puzzle, arriving after putting himself forward for a role originally intended for Yardbirds' bassist Chris Dreja.

The teasing documentary clip homes in on the process of the four band members feeling one another out as Page looked for musicians to go above and beyond the competition.

“I didn't want to have a band with just the guitarist and the other guys are bit players,” he says. “There was a lot of bands like that. I wanted each and every musician in it to be equally as strong. I believe that the first album, the musicians had never played at that level of intensity. But it all joins together into something really special. And that never stops.”

The arrival of Becoming Led Zeppelin is notable for the fact that it was nearly sidelined due to a lack of early footage of the band.

“We spent five years flying back and forth across the Atlantic scouring attics and basements in pursuit of rare and unseen film footage, photographs, and music recordings,” writer/producer Allison McGourty reveals.

The film is set for a cinematic release on February 7.

Page's "Number 1” 1959 Gibson Les Paul would prove a pivotal part of the band's sound, having bought it at the insistence of Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh, first using it on Led Zeppelin II. He’d recorded their debut LP on a Fender Telecaster.

Meanwhile, the guitarist, recently honored with a brand new signature Gibson SJ-200 acoustic, has discussed the player he admires the most and underscored the word he hates when a certain word is used to describe rock guitar players.

Whenever a list of the world’s greatest guitar players is compiled, Jimmy Page makes the top bracket.

But who does he put in the upper echelon of his own greatest-guitar roster?

We know a few already. The Led Zeppelin guitarist, who was honored with a new Gibson signature SJ-200 acoustic guitar last month, has referred to many of his guitar heroes in various interviews over the years.

For example, Page was influenced early on by Elvis Presley guitarists Scotty Moore and James Burton, Gene Vincent, and blues guitarists Elmore James and Muddy Waters, to name a few.

But who among his peers did he feel was outstanding?

“Out of all the guitarists to come out of the 1960s," he once offered when asked about his contemporary favorites, "Beck, Clapton, [Alvin] Lee, Townshend and I are still having a go. That says something."

Page has also had praise for the great Elliott Randall, who played the solos on Steely Dan's "Reelin' in the Years."

And, “in a totally different style,” Page offered “the guy who played on the Maria Muldaur single, "Midnight at the Oasis," Amos Garrett. He’s Les Paul oriented, and Les Paul is the one, really. We wouldn’t be anywhere if he hadn’t invented the electric guitar.”

But if one player tops Page's list — a guitarist who was at one point his contemporary — it's Jimi Hendrix.

“We’ve lost the best guitarist any of us ever had, and that was Hendrix,” he told Rolling Stone in March 1975, just five years after Jimi's death. “It is just kind of a shame that I never really had a chance to talk with him or hear him. I heard his records, naturally, but it would’ve been a thrill to see how he worked things out onstage. That’s quite another ballgame, as you know."

In his Rolling Stone chat, the guitarist, who helped launch London's new Gibson Garage earlier this year, singled out the one word he hates hearing when it comes to guitar players.

“The only term I won’t accept is ‘genius’,” he said. “It gets used far too loosely in rock and roll. When you hear the melodic structures of what classical musicians put together and you compare it to that of a rock and roll record, there’s a hell of a long way rock and roll has to go.

“There’s a certain standard in classical music that allows the application of the term ‘genius’, but you’re treading on thin ice if you start applying it to rock and rollers.”

It was fall 1970, and having finished much of the work on Led Zeppelin’s now-iconic Led Zeppelin IV, Jimmy Page turned his attention to a slew of upcoming tour dates beginning March 5, 1971. Though the album would not be released until November ’71, the band planned to debut future classics like “Black Dog,” “Rock and Roll,” “Going to California,” and the evocative piece that was to become their signature song: “Stairway to Heaven.” There was just one catch.

“I was so involved in creating the guitar parts for ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ on the acoustic guitar and two [tracks of] electric 12-string” Page recalls in Jimmy Page: The Anthology, “that I hadn’t been thinking about how I was going to perform it all live. That’s where the Double-Neck came in.”

Gibson had been making a model designated as the EDS-1275 SG Double-Neck since 1963 (Elvis Presley even totes one in his 1966 film Spinout), and while the guitar fell off Gibson’s price list in 1968 (only to be re-continued in 1974), Page was able to custom-order one, which he received in early 1971, just in time for the tour.

It’s this very same 1969 EDS-1275 that provided the model for last year’s limited-edition run of the Gibson Jimmy Page 1969 EDS-1275 Double-Neck Collector’s Edition. Custom-aged to the original’s exact wear detail by Gibson’s in-house Murphy Lab, only 50 Collector’s Editions were made, each hand-signed and actually played by Page himself, all for a tidy $49,999.

While those have sold out, Gibson is soon to announce its plan to begin producing the Gibson Custom Jimmy Page EDS-1275 VOS, with some differences in specs, starting this December, at the more manageable price-point of $9,999.

It’s worth noting that the Collector’s Edition, as well as the forthcoming Jimmy Page VOS model, are not mere approximations of Page’s instrument. Instead, using advanced 3D scanning technology, in tandem with CAD diagrams and CNC machining equipment, each and every component of the guitar, including the mahogany body, the ABR-1 bridges, and even the headstock logos, are scanned and then tooled to duplicate the parts on Page’s EDS to the minutest detail. And that’s not even to mention the minutiae behind replicating Page’s original T-Top pickups, where readings for ohm resistance, gauss (the magnetic charge in a pickup), number of winds, and more were all duly registered.

“All of the parts will match exactly what was used in 1968/’69,” explains Mat Koehler, Gibson’s vice president of product, “down to the precise material of the chrome-plated bridges, the exact saddle contour and shape, the butyrate [speed] knobs and even how the reflectors are mounted within those knobs. We now have what’s known as a five-axis CNC machining tool, which allows us to do incredibly intricate carvings, and this means a lot more attention to detail.”

Calling Page’s original EDS “the lightest solid-body double-neck I’ve ever played,” Koehler says his other first observation of the guitar when he met with Page at his home near London last year to conduct the scans was its overall condition. “Especially for a guitar that saw as much touring as Jimmy’s did, his EDS is in excellent shape,” Koehler says. “It was obvious that he’s very proud of it, and that he’s been a really great caretaker.”

SPECIFICATIONS

1969 Jimmy Page EDS-1275 Double-Neck Collector’s Edition

Body Material One Piece Mahogany

Body Finish Murphy Lab Aged Nitrocellulose Lacquer

Scale Length 628.65 mm / 24.75 in

Fingerboard Material Indian Rosewood

Fingerboard Radius 304.8 mm / 12 in

Neck Material Mahogany

Nut Width 42.8625 mm / 1.687 in

Tuning Machines Kluson Double Line, Double Ring with Keystone Button

Neck Pickup Jimmy Page EDS-1275 Custombuckers, Double Black Bobbins, Alnico 5

Bridge Pickup Jimmy Page EDS-1275 Custombuckers, Double Black Bobbins, Alnico 5

Controls 2 Volume, 2 Tone; Hand-wired with CTS Potentiometers and Period-correct Ceramic Disc Capacitors

Pickup Selector 3-way Switchcraft plus 3-way Switchcraft Neck Select Switch

For a brief period in 1966, the Yardbirds had not only one of the most formidable electric guitar tandems of their day, but what to this day remains one of the most formidable two-guitar attacks in rock history.

Amidst a series of personnel shuffles, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck would serve as the band's two guitar players, touring together with the group and recording the seminal single, Happenings Ten Years Time Ago.

Though the two budding virtuosos had plenty of mutual respect for one another – indeed, their friendship would extend far, far beyond their time together in the Yardbirds – it perhaps isn't a huge surprise that their respective styles occasionally clashed in the band.

“Sometimes it worked really great, and sometimes it didn't,” Page said of his musical interaction with Beck during that time in a 1977 interview with Guitar Player. “There were a lot of harmonies that I don't think anyone else had really done, not like we did. The Stones were the only ones who got into two guitars going at the same time, like on old Muddy Waters records. But we were more into solos rather than a rhythm thing.

“The point is, you've got to have parts worked out, and I'd find that I was doing what I was supposed to, while something totally different was coming from Jeff,” Page went on. “That was all right for the areas of improvisation, but there were other parts where it just did not work.”

Page was quick to clarify that the occasional musical disharmony came not from any deficiency of character on anyone's part, but different six-string evolutions from shared musical roots.

“You've got to understand that Beck and I came from the same sort of roots,” Page told GP in the same interview. “If you've got things you enjoy, then you want to do them – to the horrifying point where we'd done our first LP [Led Zeppelin] with You Shook Me, and then I heard he'd done You Shook Me [on Truth]. I was terrified because I thought they'd be the same. But I hadn't even known he'd done it, and he hadn't known that we had.”

Though Beck had left the Yardbirds by the end of 1966, Page stuck with the ever-evolving band until their dissolution in 1968, and was even left with their name. With vocalist Robert Plant, bass guitar ace John Paul Jones and drummer John Bonham, Page formed a band initially christened “The New Yardbirds.” The New Yardbirds, of course, would then become a little band called Led Zeppelin...

Jimmy Page used a number of combos and heads during his time with Led Zeppelin. They include his Marshall Plexi 1959SLP and the modified two-channel 1959 Supro Coronado 1690T combo that fuels the fury on Led Zeppelin’s 1968 debut album.

But as Page tells Guitar Player in the December 2024 issue, one amp stands above the rest for him. That’s his 1969 Marshall JMP Super Bass 100, Page’s principal amp for recording and live work from 1969, which he’d had heavily modified by amp tech and Unicord/Marshall man Tony Frank in the late ’60s. (Frank is often credited as being the inventor of the master volume control in the 1970s, as well.)

Page describes his original Super Bass as, “a really hot-wired Marshall, the main one that I would play all the way through my career. It was just the best amp that I’d ever had in my collection. And it was so roadworthy. It did all those Led Zeppelin tours, and all the recordings. It did flippin’ everything, y’know?”

Since the ’80s heyday of Soldano and Marshall Silver Jubilees, many of us likely think of a “hot-wired” Marshall as one that boasts more gain and onboard saturation — and perhaps even features diode clipping. What Page means by the term — or at least what Tony Frank’s mods would produce for him — is an appreciably cleaner amp than either a classic Super Bass or a Super Lead. It’s worth noting that in 1970, it was less common to mic guitar amps onstage, and monitor systems were still in their infancy as late as 1969. Page’s impetus then with the changes he wanted made to his Super Bass — including swapping out the stock EL34 power tubes for much cleaner 6550s — was to increase volume, clarity and dynamic range, choices that speak as much to his distinctive playing style as they do to the audio demands of the time.

Throw on your vinyl copy of Zeppelin’s 1977 dusky jewel Presence (you do own a vinyl copy of Presence, don’t you?). Listen to the glistening phased minor-chord slashes of “Achilles Last Stand,” the popping Leo Nocentelli–style funk stabs of the majestic “Royal Orleans” or the syncopated rockabilly double-stops of “Hots on for Nowhere.” Presence is a master class in the art of how to make “clean” sound “heavy.”

Page describes Presence as “the best example of the sound of my Marshall Super Bass, because it was an album we made in about three weeks, in Munich, Germany. So I wanted to work very efficiently, and that entire album is all Super Bass, along with mostly my Number One 1959 Les Paul.”

Both the Super Bass and Page’s Supro Coronado combo were the basis for new Page-approved amplifiers from Sundragon, the boutique amp company he founded in 2017 with former Marshall/Vox executive VP and Park Amps chief Mitch Colby, and noted producer and vintage gear collector/curator Perry Margouleff. It was Margouleff who, among other things, famously rescued Page’s long-missing 1960 Gibson Les Paul “Black Beauty” from obscurity back in 2014.

The resulting signed, limited-edition models — the Sundragon 12-inch combo and Super Dragon 100-watt head and 4x12 cabinet — not only passed what Page calls his own “acid test” for authenticity but also quickly sold out despite their hefty list price of $12,500 and $22,500, respectively. Adding to Page’s current enthusiasm is the imminent release of Sundragon’s brand-new Nymph, a more compact, low-wattage take on the Sundragon in a one-watt (switchable to ¼-watt) single eight-inch combo with two 12AX7s, which will be widely available in 2025

Pick up Guitar Player’s December 2024 issue, the last in the magazine’s 58-year history, to learn more.

In late spring of 1970, Jimmy Page did a rare thing. He performed on solo acoustic guitar, without the other members of Led Zeppelin, on the BBC’s Julie Felix Show.

Felix, an American folksinger from California, was nevertheless so popular in Britain at the time that she was dubbed “Britain’s First Lady of Folk.” Page, whose affection for folk music ran deep — in particular for fingerstyle guitar greats like Davey Graham, Bert Jansch, and Doc Watson — performed a semi-improvisational medley combining his “White Summer” and “Black Mountain Side.” Both tunes, like the later Zeppelin epic "Kashmir," are played in the evocative DADGAD modal tuning, popularized by Graham.

Page’s guitar of choice for the Felix performance was a 1964 Gibson J-200, with the classic “Flowers & Vines” splayed pickguard, a Sitka Spruce top, and flamed maple back and sides, belonging to noted British pop producer Mickie Most. Page had first borrowed the guitar from Most in September 1968 for the Olympic Studios recordings of “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You,” “Your Time Is Gonna Come,” and “Black Mountain Side.”

Now that guitar has provided the inspiration for two new models created by Gibson in partnership with Page: the Jimmy Page 1964 SJ-200 and 1964 SJ-200 Collector’s Edition from Gibson Custom. Only 50 of the 1964 SJ-200 Collector’s Edition and 100 of the Jimmy Page 1964 SJ-200 will be available worldwide in this extraordinary limited run via authorized Gibson dealers and online at Gibson.com.

“Mickie’s J-200 was a dream to play,” Page recalls fondly in Jimmy Page: The Anthology, “and it was a beautiful guitar. I remembered it had such a wonderful recording sound.” Put on Zep I’s “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You,” and listen carefully to Jimmy’s subtle dynamic shifts within that descending A minor–based rhythm pattern, and the gorgeous flamenco-inspired lead figures from 4:52–5:25, and you’ll hear it: a sound that is at once feathery and bold, jangly and structured, resonant and chimey.

Unfortunately, the guitar was stolen and its whereabouts remain a mystery, according to Led Zeppelin News. As a result, Gibson says it developed the Jimmy Page 1964 SJ-200 models in close collaboration with, and with significant input from, Page to ensure it met "his exacting standards and recollection."

Robi Johns, the Gibson Senior Product Development Manager in Bozeman, Montana heading the team behind the new models, provided Guitar Player with details on the Page signature models. Johns explains that while all J-200s feature a distinctive “Moustache-style” bridge plate, the Page/Most J-200 boasted a Les Paul-style Tune-o-matic bridge with nylon bridge saddles — not atypical for a 1960s ABR — which add a pleasing, almost papery, sitar-like timbre to the notes.

“Those nylon saddles give the guitar a very balanced sound, but it’s also jangly in a nice musical way.” (Gibson also includes an additional brass Tune-o-matic bridge with every Page SJ-200, as Page evidently enjoyed experimenting with those during the development process.)

The new models feature a subtly curved or “domed” top, a Cherry Tea nitrocellulose lacquer finish, highly flamed AAA maple back and sides and an AAA Sitka spruce top, as well as a highly-flamed three-piece maple neck with a rosewood fretboard. Gibson describes the neck shape as "round profile" and has sculpted it based on Page's memory of the original and a similar model from 1965 that resides in the guitarist's collection.

In addition, the models feature increased depth around the neck joint and mother-of-pearl graduated crown fretboard inlays. Appointments include TUSQ bridge pins, gold hardware finish, Kluson Waffleback with Keystone button tuners, the Murphy Lab’s Custom Light Aged treatment and mother-of-pearl Graduated Crown inlays.

Each Collector’s Edition guitar is signed by Page on the back of the headstock, and was personally played by Page himself in early September at Nashville’s storied RCA Studio B, the legendary recording home of the great Chet Atkins — one of Page’s formative influences — currently under the able helm of producer Dave Cobb (Brandi Carlile and Rival Sons). (Other than the signed headstock and being Page-played, the non-“Collectors” models are identical instruments, and each features an individually signed sound-hole label.)

Page was clearly pleased with the results, starting with the prototype he received. “When I took it out, I thought, ‘Wow, they've got it straightaway,'" he says. "I could see all the flame coming out on the side of it, I went, 'Oh my goodness gracious, it’s just so beautiful.' It was so authentic, and yet it was so new at the same time.”

When it came time to view the finished models, Page had to play every one.

“We weren’t quite sure if maybe he’d just a play a few chords on each one,” Johns says, “but not only did he play each of them for three or four minutes, he even suggested that some of them be put in alternate tunings, so he’d be surprised with each SJ-200 that he played. That’s pretty cool.”

The two models are priced at $12,999 for the 1964 SJ-200 and $19,999 for the 1964 SJ-200 Collector’s Edition. For more information, visit Gibson.

After nearly 58 years in print, Guitar Player magazine will cease publication with its December 2024 issue.

The magazine's editor, Christopher Scapelliti, will become digital editor-In-chief of GuitarPlayer.com, where he and the magazine's contributors will continue to serve the interests and needs of the guitar-playing community.

Founded in 1967, Guitar Player is the world's oldest continuously published magazine devoted to guitarists, guitar gear — including electric guitars and acoustic guitars — and instruction. Over nearly six decades of publication, GP has featured some of music's most important and iconic guitarists, beginning with its December 1968 cover story on Jimi Hendrix.

For its final cover, the magazine presents a brand-new interview with Jimmy Page, who discusses upcoming re-creations of the guitars and amplifiers he used on Led Zeppelin's classic recordings and tours. The issue comes out October 15 and can be purchased at newsstands.

Scapelliti's final editorial is printed in full below:

You have witnessed a revolution. When Guitar Player made its debut 58 years ago in 1967, it marked a new era for guitar. For the first time, the instrument was celebrated in a regularly published magazine devoted to furthering guitarists, guitar gear and its makers, and guitar virtuosity. What founder Bud Eastman began laid the first stone of an empire that would go on to launch many other magazines — including Bass Player, Frets and Keyboard — publish books, release records and videos, and much more. Guitar Player’s success also opened the door for numerous other titles, including our sister magazine Guitar World, further enriching the lives of guitarists everywhere.

And now our print run has come to an end. With this issue, Guitar Player will move fully online to GuitarPlayer.com, where we’ll continue to bring you the same great content you’ve come to expect, as well as video interviews and lessons, and more.

The “why” will be obvious even if you don’t keep each issue tucked away chronologically on shelves. These increasingly slim volumes demonstrate our almost heroic efforts to persist in an era where advertisers find greater opportunities online. Throughout the ups and downs of these years, we’ve appreciated the support of those readers and advertisers who have kept Guitar Player’s print edition a going concern.

While longtime readers will lament this change, there’s much more to come in Guitar Player’s future. As for this final issue, what better way to wrap up our history than to have Jimmy Page help us do what we’ve always done best — bring you the finest interviews with your favorite players.

And now, a few last matters:

TO OUR SUBSCRIBERS: We’ll automatically transfer your subscription
to our sister title, Guitar World magazine. If you prefer a refund of your remaining subscription term, we’ll be happy to assist you at help@magazinesdirect.com.

IN THANKS: My six years at Guitar Player wouldn’t have been as fulfilling without the support of our managing director Stuart Williams, content director Scott Rowley and head of design Brad Merrett. So much of your enjoyment of these pages is also due to our art editor, Philip Cheesbrough, whose designs led one publicist to call Guitar Player “the most beautiful music magazine.” My gratitude extends as well to my longtime guitar magazine compatriot and music editor, Jimmy Brown, whose deep knowledge of music theory and passion for guitar have directed our lessons content since 2016.

Many of the stories you’ve enjoyed these past six years are thanks to our writers and my longtime friends in guitar publishing. To that end, I’m indebted to Joe Bosso, Gary Graff, James Rotondi, Rich Bienstock, Tom Beaujour, Bill Milkowski, Dave Hunter, Jim Campilongo, Terry Carleton, Jude Gold, Alan Paul, Ken Sharp, Jim Beaugez, Joe Matera, Andrew Daly, Martin McQuade, Mark McStea, Chris Buono and Jeff Jacobson.

I also owe deep thanks to two Guitar Player family members who were here long before me: senior editor Art Thompson and Frets editor Jimmy Leslie. Both have been my touchstones throughout this journey, and I’ve published not a single issue without trying to make them proud of the magazine they’ve served well for so long.

Finally, my thanks to you for supporting us. I look forward to seeing you at GuitarPlayer.com, where we’ll continue to bring you the best in guitar stories, interviews, gear reviews and lessons.

Christopher Scapelliti, Editor-in-Chief