“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.

Rock was still very much a boys’ club in the mid 1970s, a fact that Ann Wilson and Nancy Wilson learned firsthand as their band, Heart, fought its way into the spotlight.

Ann Wilson is revisiting those early battles in her new documentary, In My Voice, which traces her career with Heart and as a solo artist. The film features appearances from Paul Stanley of Kiss and rising pop star Chappell Roan, who has been covering Heart’s classic “Barracuda” on tour.

But long before Heart delivered arena-ready riffs and radio staples like “Crazy on You,” the Wilson sisters were teenagers trying to figure out how two women from the suburbs might fit into rock’s loudest, most swaggering world.

The sisters were adolescents in 1966 when they had the life-altering experience of seeing the Beatles in concert. Four years later, they caught Led Zeppelin live. Watching Robert Plant stalk the stage with what Nancy later called “super-suggestive” moves was electrifying — and eye-opening.

“We were in a little folk band at the time,” Nancy recalled. “We were from the suburbs, so we were square little hippie chicks to be unenlightened.”

Like countless guitarists of the era, the Wilsons were struck by Zeppelin’s thunderous rock — but they filtered it through their own mix of folk harmony, acoustic textures and hard-rock muscle. Before long, Heart were earning comparisons to Zeppelin themselves.

Breaking through, however, meant navigating a music industry that didn’t quite know what to make of two women fronting a hard-rock band.

“You would build yourself up and do something really great, and you’d feel really good about it — then you could get put down and squashed down very easily by the rest of the men,” Ann told Rolling Stone. “They could make you feel like you were really silly for even trying.”

Women in rock were still a rarity at the time, though trailblazers like Suzi Quatro were beginning to crack open the door.

Heart kicked it wider. When the band released its debut album, Dreamboat Annie, in 1975, Nancy’s razor-sharp rhythm work and Ann’s seismic vocals powered songs that could pivot from acoustic guitar intimacy to full-throttle hard rock — proof that women could command the same sonic territory as their male peers.

Nearly five decades later, that breakthrough still resonates. But as the Wilson sisters have often pointed out, the path there required more than talent — it required resilience in an industry that didn’t always believe they belonged on the same stage as the men they grew up idolizing.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Scottish folk guitarist Donovan may not be the most famous musician to emerge from the British Isles in the ’60s, but his influence proved vital to a score who went on to eclipse his career. So much so that two household names sought to capture a little of his genius for themselves, while another praised his inventiveness.

Jimmy Page, glam-rock pioneer Marc Bolan, David Gilmour, Nick Drake and Beatles John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison all admired his songwriting talents. His genre-blurring work, which fused folk, pop, psych rock, and jazz, became a totem of the flower-power movement.

Other musicians took notice, and for Harrison and Gilmour, in particular, it had a lasting effect on them. They didn't shy away from telling Donovan that.

When Louder Sound recently asked the 79-year-old guitarist what he considered his greatest achievement, he shared something Harrison had said about his music.

“I suggested you could do with blending and fusing styles of music — and write more than just ‘I love you, why’d you make me blue?’ in a popular song," he said.

"I didn’t know what to call that achievement, but I worked it out when George Harrison said, ‘Donovan is a catalyst.’ A catalyst can put two things together and create something completely different.”

The fact that Harrison, who outsold his Beatles bandmates when they embarked on solo careers in the early ‘70s, saw Donovan as an innovator alone is impressive. But he then turned his attention to an interaction he once had with David Gilmour.

“He said, ‘You know I bought your cottage?’” Donovan adds, recounting the moment. “I said, ‘Yeah? Why’d you buy my cottage?’ He said, ‘You wrote all those bloody songs there.’

“One song on Sunshine Superman [his third album, from 1966] was called ‘Three King Fishers,’ and he said, ‘When I heard that song, my future with the band I was with' — which I suppose was Floyd — 'I knew my direction.'

“That’s the effect of a catalyst: He bought my cottage. He said, ‘Maybe all that happened there would rub off on me.’”

Gilmour had joined Pink Floyd in 1967, shortly after the group made a peculiar trip to the U.S., where they house-shared with Alice Cooper. That makes it possible Gilmour is referencing his early days with the band here.

The song certainly has the kind of slow-burning, hazy quality that the band would later forge a reputation for with Gilmour at the songwriting helm, although the folk elements are a little out of the Floydian remit.

Later in his career, Donovan had both Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones play on his 1968 track “Hurdy Gurdy Man.” But it was another member of Led Zeppelin who took a leaf out of Gilmour’s book.

“Robert Plant said to me one night, ‘You know I bought your 1965 Aston Martin.’ I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Cause it was so beautiful. You had a headlining put in it [in the car roof] and it was custom-made.'”

Donovan was convinced there was an ulterior motive. When he pushed the singer for the real reason he bought the sports car, he confessed, “Maybe you wrote a couple of songs in that car.”

While Donovan’s contributions haven’t received the attention given to those of his contemporaries, his impact on music in the latter half of the 1960s is evident. Although the folk music scene had long faded long before, he managed to keep it alive not by combining it with folk rock as the Byrds had, but by fusing it with psychedelia and Indian music, making it a distinct facet of the 1960s scene during a time when popular music was branching off into myriad new directions, including hard rock, heavy metal and progressive rock.

Gilmour, meanwhile, has admitted he never resonated with Pink Floyd's prog rock tag, while naming one prog guitarist who can “really do their stuff.”

He's also looked back at how blues players were key influences of his sound, with his infamous vocal-like playing style ultimately born from an inability to shred.

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!”

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.

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

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.

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.

Robert Plant has listed a treasure trove of gear for sale to raise funds for charity, including a golden-era Stratocaster and a leftfield piece of Gibson history.

Cheltenham, UK-based guitar emporium ATB Guitars is handling the charity drive, with proceeds being donated to “charities close to Robert's heart.”

Incredibly, four pieces, including a 1990 Les Paul Standard gifted to Plant by Les Paul himself while backstage at a Page/Plant show at Madison Square Garden in 1995, have already sold. But arguably the most storied instrument of the collection is still up for grabs.

Plant’s 1962 Fender Stratocaster is heralded by ATB as “a guitar with a wonderful history and no doubt many stories to tell”—and with good reason. Its finish has been stripped, revealing the alder body’s wood grain, and the guitar has seen plenty of action in the 63 years since it left the factory.

The singer bought the guitar from Stan Webb of '60s blues band Chicken Shack in the 1970s. The pair first crossed paths during the early British blues boom in which the band enjoyed its heyday.

Led Zeppelin were said to be huge fans of the band, and so Plant is said to have jumped at the opportunity to own a Webb-played six-string and either Webb or Plant pulled the trigger on several modifications.

Most notably, it passed through the workshop of Tony Iommi-approved luthier John Birch. There, its fingerboard was lacquered, and, curiously, an extra pickup selector switch added for “more tonal options”.

Elsewhere, new saddles and Schaller tuners were installed, and two Suhr vintage V60LP single-coil pickups were placed in the bridge and neck positions. The middle pickup remains untouched—an original “black-bottomed” single-coil.

Unusually for a Stratocaster of that era, the headstock decal has been changed. It’s clear that Plant, Birch, and co. weren’t overly concerned with preserving historical accuracy during the guitar's transformation.

The headstock has also been repaired, with a visible scar running through it and ending beneath the D-string tuning peg. ATB assures buyers the instrument is “totally stable,” and the damage is considered historic.

The guitar is available for £19,995 (approx. $26,650).

Other listings came at more modest price points, including a 1993 Dobro F-60 Resonator, which sold for £1,995 (approx. $2,650), and a 1992 Washburn M-1S/TS Mandolin, which fetched £495 (approx. $659) and was described as a “no-nonsense workhorse.”

A Gibson A-1 Style has also been sold. It was crafted in Gibson’s famous Kalamazoo, Michigan factory—now home to a Hard Rock Hotel—and features a design that became the precursor to Gibson’s iconic arch-top builds.

Visit ATB Guitars to see the full collection.

The sale follows the success of the band's new documentary, which traces Led Zeppelin’s earliest days, including a “devastating” first jam session that gave no hint of the success to come.

In addition, lost footage of Led Zeppelin playing in Denmark in 1979 has resurfaced after sitting in a drawer for 45 years. It’s now been restored with original audio and gives fans a rare glimpse of the band just before their legendary Knebworth shows.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

“The music of your youth stays with you throughout your lifetime,” says guitar legend Steve Stevens. “I think it’s because the music that’s important to you during your teens comes at a time when you’re experiencing so many things for the first time. You’re becoming sexually aware. You’re learning to form your own opinions and speak your mind. Music plays a key part in all of it.”

When asked to compile a list of the 10 records that had shaped him as a guitarist (presented here in no particular order), Stevens — who plays a Knaggs Steve Stevens Signature electric guitar — reflected on the social aspect of music during his teens. “Anytime you got a new record, you’d get together with your friends. You turned on the stereo, opened the album gatefold sleeve and read the lyrics. Somebody would say, ‘Play that song again,’ so you’d pick the needle up and put it back down — hopefully in the right place. You’d listen to the song again and go, ‘Wow!’ It was a shared experience, and it was great. I know people today get that when they go to a concert, but I think the act of listening to music together has been lost to a certain extent.”

Yes — Close to the Edge (1972)

“It seemed like the culmination of that era of progressive rock. The first Yes album I bought was their previous record, Fragile, which was fantastic. I learned ‘Mood for a Day’ and a lot of songs on it. But that album seemed more about the individual players, whereas Close to the Edge was truly a band effort — there were no solo pieces. To me, the record summed up what was possible as a group.

“It also demonstrated how many different guitar styles were possible in an ensemble piece. Steve Howe wasn’t blues based. I later learned that his influences included Chet Atkins and Wes Montgomery. It all sounded space age to me. He played steel guitar, slide guitar, acoustic guitar, psychedelic guitar — and all of his parts were so well composed. You couldn’t compare him to anybody. He and the band were truly unique.”

Joni Mitchell — Ladies of the Canyon (1970)

“I was at summer music camp when this record came out. I was already playing guitar, but I hadn’t yet moved on to an electric, so the timing was kind of perfect as there seemed to be a huge explosion of folk rock and pop songs played on acoustic. Everybody wanted to know how to play something by James Taylor, Neil Young or songs from Ladies of the Canyon. I’d get together with five or six other campers, and we’d sit around playing these songs.

“The album was important to me in other ways. I fell in love with Joni — her photos, her voice, everything about her. All of this coincided with my attraction to girls. If you could play a Joni Mitchell song, you had an immediate ‘in; with girls. Joni’s music taught me that it was okay to be a sensitive kid. I could express myself on the guitar and play these non-macho tunes.”

Genesis — Selling England by the Pound (1973)

“By now, I was really into rock hard and heavy. I saw Genesis on the Midnight Special, and I thought, ‘These English musicians look like they’re from another planet.’ That was especially true of Peter Gabriel — where did he come from? I got this record and fell in love with it. I was such an Anglophile. I loved Monty Python, and I would listen to this show ‘Things from England’ on WNEW radio. Scott Muni played all of this great music from Britain, and I’d go out and buy the imports. This record was right at the forefront of what was going on in England at the time.

“I really liked Steve Hackett’s guitar playing, but I was equally impressed by the other members of the group. Like Yes, you couldn’t compare Genesis to anyone. I think this was the first time I heard a band play in 7/8 time, though I didn’t know what it was. I just thought, Where’s the beat? Whatever they’re doing, it sounds challenging.”

The Beatles — Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)

“It’s Ground Zero for progressive rock. What I loved about the record was the journey it took me on. Every song went somewhere new — there were different sounds, moods and melodies. I remember thinking, ‘What instruments are they playing?’ They would manipulate guitars so they didn’t sound like guitars. I wasn’t particularly great at sports as a kid, so I disappeared into my record collection. When I’d put my headphones on and listen to Sgt. Pepper, I was transported away from my mundane suburban experience.

“Everything was changing so fast when this record came out, and it’s impossible to separate the music from the culture. Head shops started appearing in my neighborhood. People were putting black light posters up in their rooms. Indian music was creeping into popular songs. Pot was happening, though I was too young for that. There was now a clear-cut line being drawn between what your parents liked and this new movement of music and fashion. We had our own identity, and the Beatles were the driving forces behind it.”

Led Zeppelin — Led Zeppelin IV (1971)

“When this record came out, everybody in my neighborhood was playing electric guitar, including me. I was friends with three other guys, and the race was on to see who could learn these songs the quickest. One guy knew ‘Black Dog,’ and the other guy knew “Rock and Roll.’ I was in my first garage band, and I couldn’t wait to play those songs.

“Sonically, the album is a tour de force. There was nothing else that sounded like it. I think it represented everything that Jimmy Page had learned about the ins and outs of recording as a session musician, and the album game him a huge canvas to do whatever he wanted. The guitar playing on ‘Stairway to Heaven’ — what more can be said? The acoustic work took you on this beautiful journey, and then he goes into what is probably the greatest electric guitar solo of all time. It’s so composed, but it still sounds off the cuff. Even with how jaded we’ve become, I think that solo has stood the test of time.”

XTC — Drums and Wires (1979)

“This cassette lived in my Walkman, which I had just bought. It was such an incredible experience to walk around Manhattan and listen to this record. Anytime I hear something from it, I go right back to that time of having mobile music. It was also my first exposure to what we might describe as post-punk new wave music. To me, it was the next generation of what was to come from the guitar sonically. It ushered in these new sounds that we would hear from bands like the Police and Siouxsie and the Banshees. I could finally step away comfortably from some of the prog stuff, which had gotten a little stale. I was like, ‘Oh, this is the next level of guitar playing.’

“I can’t recall how I first heard XTC. I must have heard the single ‘Making Plans for Nigel’ on the radio. Whatever it was, I got into XTC and listened to this record all the time.”

The New Tony Williams Lifetime — Believe It (1975)

“I was still pretty happy to play rock songs, but I was starting to hear some jazz fusion stuff, like Jeff Beck’s Wired, as well as Mahavishnu and Return to Forever. Then I heard Allan Holdsworth on this album, and I couldn’t fathom what in the world he was doing. I brought the record to my music teacher, who was a jazzer, and he said, ‘Oh, the guitarist is playing Coltrane licks.’ I had no idea who John Coltrane was, so he gave me a record — ‘Here, take this home’ — and I started to listen to Miles Davis and John Coltrane.’ I just let it seep in a little. I never thought about listening to horn players before, so I have Allan Holdsworth to thank for that.

“To be honest, my hands were too small to play his stuff, but he opened my eyes to a different way of thinking. To this day, I love that era of Allan’s playing. Everything he did back then was great, and he had a really beautiful guitar sound, as well.”

Emerson, Lake & Palmer — Emerson, Lake & Palmer (1970)

“My dad didn’t have an electronics background, but he built a home stereo from a Heathkit. He bought this album called Moog: The Electric Eclectics of Dick Hyman, and it seemed tailor-made for that stereo. I’d never heard a Moog synthesizer before, and I couldn’t believe the frequencies it produced.

“My older brother was into Keith Emerson’s band the Nice, and then he brought home the debut album by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. I remember him saying, ‘Hey, Dad, it’s that crazy instrument you’ve been talking about — the Moog or whatever it is.’ The advent of synthesizers ran parallel to me getting my first electric guitar. I was fascinated by what Keith was doing, and I recognized Greg Lake’s voice from King Crimson. I noticed Eddy Offord’s name as the engineer, and I went, ‘Oh, he’s the guy who does the Yes albums.’

“I loved listening to the record on headphones — it sounded so great. It’s kind of funny, though: I feel as if everything ELP had to say was said on their debut album. It was a bit naïve and a bit ‘Where do we go from here?’ They could only play better, and I think there’s something to be said for playing for musicians.”

The Jimi Hendrix Experience — Axis: Bold as Love (1967)

“There was nothing like smoking marijuana for the first time, putting headphones on and listening to this record. For my money, Axis: Bold as Love has Jimi’s best songs. It’s not just the wild man craziness, but there’s also the Curtis Mayfield influence. The debut album was kind of shocking, but Axis is a beautiful album in terms of songwriting and ensemble playing. The band had toured by now, and I think Jimi was really starting to realize the potential of the recording studio.

“There’s so many great songs on it — ‘Castles Made of Sand,’ ‘Little Wing.’ ‘If Six Was Nine’ was in Easy Rider, and I still can’t hear that song without thinking about the movie. I was 10 years old when my brother took me to see it. We had no idea what the ending was, and we were like, ‘They killed them!’ It really affected me.

“This is another record that sort of represents the line being drawn between young people and our parents. Jimi was the king of all that. He was African-American, but white kids liked him. He crossed all barriers.”

The Rolling Stones — Sticky Fingers (1971)

“It’s my favorite Rolling Stones record. I loved the sound of it, but what was important to me at the time was, I could play these songs on my shitty guitar. It brings to mind something Ozzy Osbourne said to me when I was working with him. He said, ‘Come up with guitar parts that make people want to pick up a guitar and learn it. Don’t write stuff for people who already know how to play.’ I thought that was great advice.

“The album cover was pretty taboo, but it went along with everything you heard about the Stones being bad boys. This album solidified that status. There’s so many great tracks on it, especially ‘Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,’ which is probably still my favorite Stones song.

“Mick Taylor was the perfect guitar foil for Keith Richards; they filled in the gaps for each other beautifully. I always loved rock bands that knew how to use acoustic guitars, and you can hear that on ‘Wild Horses.’ That’s another song you could sit around and play on acoustic with your friends.”

Jimmy Page has played a number of electric guitars over the course of his career, including the Danelectro 3021, the Fender Telecaster, the Gibson Les Paul Deluxe and the double-neck Gibson EDS-1275, most famously used during live shows to perform Stairway to Heaven, among other classic Led Zeppelin songs.

But the guitar with which Page is most closely linked is his 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard with a sunburst finish, a guitar he played for many years of his career with Led Zeppelin. Page had owned and played a three-pickup Les Paul Custom in the early Sixties and played a Fender Telecaster while with the Yardbirds. He was still playing the Telecaster when Led Zeppelin played their first gigs in 1968.

But early the next year, Page bought the Les Paul Standard — his first — from Joe Walsh (who, Page says, “insisted that I buy it, and he was right”), paying $500 for it. He used it to record Zeppelin II that May. The guitar became and remained his favorite guitar throughout his years with Zeppelin, and as he acquired others, he started referring to it as Number 1.

Over the years, Page gave due credit to Eric Clapton for pairing up the Les Paul with a Marshall amp. “Eric was the first one to evolve the sound with the [Les Paul] and Marshall amps,” Page told Trouser Press in a 1977 interview. “He should have total credit for that.”

But Page continued that evolution in the Seventies with Led Zeppelin, demonstrating to guitarists what the Les Paul was capable of in the right hands.

In this vintage video, Page talks about his Number 1 and some of its unique aspects, such as the sealed Grover tuners and the push-pull knob that splits the bridge humbucker and lets him achieve a tone similar to that of Peter Green’s fabled Les Paul.

The clip was shot in 2003 when Gibson visited Page, presumably to create a reproduction of the model. In 2004, Gibson copied Page’s Number 1 for the company’s second run of Page signature models, with aging by luthier Tom Murphy. This run was limited to 25 copies signed by Page and a total of 150 copies with the Murphy-aged finish.

Earlier this year, Gibson rekindled its relationship with the Led Zeppelin legend, teaming up with him to create a new line of signature guitars, the first being an ultra-exclusive recreation of Page's 1969 EDS-1275 double-neck. Only available via the Gibson Garage, the meticulously built model is limited to a run of 50 Page-signed and -played instruments, at a cost of $50,000 each.

Jimmy Page has played a number of electric guitars over the course of his career, including the Danelectro 3021, the Fender Telecaster, the Gibson Les Paul Deluxe and the double-neck Gibson EDS-1275, most famously used during live shows to perform Stairway to Heaven, among other classic Led Zeppelin songs.

But the guitar with which Page is most closely linked is his 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard with a sunburst finish, a guitar he played for many years of his career with Led Zeppelin. Page had owned and played a three-pickup Les Paul Custom in the early Sixties and played a Fender Telecaster while with the Yardbirds. He was still playing the Telecaster when Led Zeppelin played their first gigs in 1968.

But early the next year, Page bought the Les Paul Standard – his first – from Joe Walsh (who, Page says, “insisted that I buy it, and he was right”), paying $500 for it. He used it to record Zeppelin II that May. The guitar became and remained his favorite guitar throughout his years with Zeppelin, and as he acquired others, he started referring to it as Number 1.

Over the years, Page gave due credit to Eric Clapton for pairing up the Les Paul with a Marshall amp. “Eric was the first one to evolve the sound with the [Les Paul] and Marshall amps,” Page told Trouser Press in a 1977 interview. “He should have total credit for that.”

But Page continued that evolution in the Seventies with Led Zeppelin, demonstrating to guitarists what the Les Paul was capable of in the right hands.

In this vintage video, Page talks about his Number 1 and some of its unique aspects, such as the sealed Grover tuners and the push-pull knob that splits the bridge humbucker and lets him achieve a tone similar to that of Peter Green’s fabled Les Paul.

The clip was shot in 2003 when Gibson visited Page, presumably to create a reproduction of the model. In 2004, Gibson copied Page’s Number 1 for the company’s second run of Page signature models, with aging by luthier Tom Murphy. This run was limited to 25 copies signed by Page and a total of 150 copies with the Murphy-aged finish. 

Earlier this year, Gibson rekindled its relationship with the Led Zeppelin legend, teaming up with him to create a new line of signature guitars, the first being an ultra-exclusive recreation of Page's 1969 EDS-1275 double-neck. Only available via the Gibson Garage, the meticulously built model is limited to a run of 50 Page-signed and -played instruments, at a cost of $50,000 each.

Immediately following the tragic death of their drummer, the incomparable John Bonham, in 1980, Led Zeppelin – who at the time had been in rehearsals for their first North American tour in three years – ceased to exist.

Though eschewing what one could only imagine was truckloads of money to continue touring in any consistent capacity, the remaining three members – Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, and John Paul Jones – did reunite for a couple of abbreviated, one-off performances in the 1980s. Both of these, however, were calamitous.

In the shadow of stunning, triumphant sets from the likes of Queen and U2, Led Zeppelin's performance at the 1985 Live Aid concert made them look like dinosaurs, a deflating display defined by a lack of rehearsal, Page's out-of-tune guitar, and Plant's vocals, which were in less than tip-top shape.

Their next set, at a 40th anniversary celebration for Atlantic Records in 1988, wasn't a whole lot better, and for the next two decades – though Plant and Page would record and tour as a duo during the intervening period – Led Zeppelin as a unit lay completely dormant.

Presented with another reunion opportunity in 2007 – a tribute concert for late Atlantic co-founder Ahmet Ertegun at London's O2 Arena – Page was determined to right previous wrongs.

“Initially there were going to be two nights, with us on one night, along with other Atlantic artists,” Page told Guitar Player in a 2020 interview. “The idea was that we would do a half-hour set, but I said, ‘I’m not rehearsing to do a half-hour set! We’ve got Live Aid to correct, and the Atlantic 40th.’

“I thought, ‘We’re gonna go out there and stand proud, you know?’ So that means we’ve got to do a proper set, and that’s what we did.”

The show was enough of a triumph that, inevitably, murmurs of a full tour soon followed. Facts on the matter are slim – rumors of dubious validity, meanwhile, ran rampant for years afterward – but it's widely believed that while Page, Jones, and drummer Jason Bonham (John's son, who played with the original trio at the O2) were game, Plant was not. It is known that Alter Bridge's Myles Kennedy jammed with Page, Jones, and Bonham, though the project – had it come to fruition – reportedly would not have been under the Zeppelin name.

“We’d had a lot of fun up to that point in the rehearsals, because mainly it was the three of us,” Page told GP. “There’d be Jason, John Paul Jones, and myself, playing together so that Jason felt really part of the band, as opposed to like he’s there because he’s John’s son. He was there because he was a damn good drummer, and it was right that he should be sitting in that seat. But he needed to know that.

“It had been said that there was going to be a tour,” he continued. “There weren’t any dates put in, but obviously we had honed ourselves to the point where we were ready. But then there has not been any discussion about any tour ever since, nor will there be. So there you go. It’s just one of those weird, odd things in the world of Led Zeppelin – really, another part of the Led Zeppelin phenomenon.”

When Peter Frampton co-founded Humble Pie in 1969, he was already regarded as one of England’s hottest guitarists, but his songwriting skills hadn’t yet blossomed. He contributed a number of strong cuts to the four studio albums he recorded with the band during his brief, two-year tenure, but it wasn’t until he turned solo and began issuing his own albums, starting with 1972’s Winds of Change, that his compositional chops began to equal his skills as an instrumentalist.

“I can’t say I always enjoy the process of writing,” he says. “I do like coming up with bits – a riff or a chord pattern. Sometimes a title comes to me that sparks something. But putting a song together and actually finishing it can be quite painful, especially when it comes to writing lyrics. That can take a while. It isn’t until I’ve got the whole thing down and I’ve got a little demo version of a song that I can feel enjoyment.”

In 1976, Frampton released his monster-selling concert recording, Frampton Comes Alive!. The album was something of an unofficial greatest-hits collection, containing the tastiest gems from his previous solo albums, among them Show Me the Way, Baby, I Love Your Way, Lines on My Face, and Do You Feel Like We Do. 

Although the two-disc set spent 10 weeks atop the U.S. Billboard 200 albums chart, none of its singles hit number one. At the height of his fame in 1977, Frampton came close to that mark when the title track from his studio album I’m in You reached number two on Billboard’s Hot 100.

“Everybody thought I’m in You would hit number one because the live album was enormous,” the guitarist tells Guitar Player. “It was the lead single from I’m in You, which certainly isn’t my favorite album or anywhere near my best, but it’s a great song and I thought it deserved to be a hit. 

“The truth is,” he continues, “I never thought about chart positions and things like that. After I left Humble Pie in 1971, I didn’t give any thought to having hits. That just wasn’t what I concentrated on. I was more concerned with being inspired, and writing good songs and making sure they were recorded right. My attitude was, ‘Do I like the song?’ It always came down to that.”

After announcing that he was suffering from a progressive muscle disorder called IBM (inclusion body myositis), Frampton embarked on a 2019 “farewell tour,” which fortunately didn’t live up to its billing. Last year, he came out of retirement and hit the road on his Never Say Never tour, which he’s extended into this year. 

Meanwhile, he’s combing through demos and planning a studio album of all-new material, but as he jokes, “I’ll probably be 86 by the time it comes out, because I’m such a perfectionist.”

Here, he shares the stories behind five key tracks from his storied career.

1. Stone Cold Fever – Humble Pie (Rock On, 1971)

“I came up with the opening riff the night before a rehearsal. I played around with it on an acoustic – it sounded kind of Zeppelin-esque. We were all influenced by them. In fact, if we were recording at Olympic Studios, we would often hear Zeppelin. To get to the mix room, we’d have to walk through the control room of Studio A. I’d see Jimmy Page sitting there, overdubbing in darkness.

“Anyway, I recorded the riff on a Sony recorder and I brought it in to play for the guys. We were rehearsing at this place in the country – Magdalene Laver Village Hall. The second Steve Marriott heard the riff, he jumped on it right away. He loved it. 

“We started arranging the song pretty quickly. I remember we would go into the kitchen to have a cup of tea or light up a joint – ’course, I wasn’t smoking then. Quite often we’d all come up with our words for verses, but for this song Steve wrote the whole thing. He did all the vocals.

“We had the song down before we started recording. It was a very special session for me, actually, because I played a very long solo at the end – it goes into a jazzy, almost freeform kind of thing. I tracked it live with the band, and then we went in the control room to listen back. I didn’t say anything to the band, but as I heard my solo I got this feeling in my stomach, and I thought, ‘I don’t think I’m copying anybody else anymore. I really believe this is me for the first time.’”

2. Lines On My Face – Peter Frampton (Frampton's Camel, 1973)

“My marriage was breaking up. It was a very sad time, and basically the whole Frampton’s Camel record is about lost love and wanting someone back who doesn’t want you. 

“I wrote the music to Lines on My Face in Manhattan. I was staying at my manager’s place on Park Avenue. I had a Martin D-45 that I bought at Manny’s, and with that I wrote the music and melodies. But I needed a quiet place to write the lyrics, so a good friend of mine, Frank Carillo, a wonderful guitar player and singer, said I could stay at his place on Long Island. Frank’s mom kicked his brother out of his room so I didn’t have to sleep on the couch. I sat on the bed and wrote the lyrics.

“Before we started recording, my drummer exploded, as usual, so [engineer/co-producer] Eddie Kramer gave me names of the best session guys in New York City. The only one who answered his phone was John Siomos, who turned out to be one of the best and most unique drummers I’ve worked with. Lines on My Face was the first song we did. It was me, Frank Carillo, Rick Wills on bass, Mick Gallagher on keys, and John on drums. Frank played a D-35 and I had my D-45.

“For the electric parts, I used my ’54 Les Paul – the one everybody knows as the Phenix. I remember we spent a whole day getting sounds, and Eddie Kramer was getting ready to leave. I told him I wanted to cut the solo, and he said we only had 25 minutes left. I said, ‘It won’t take long,’ even though I didn’t have anything worked out, which I never do. I never work out my solos in advance. What you hear on the record is one take.”

3. Show Me The Way – Peter Frampton (Frampton, 1975)

“I had three weeks to write before we started the album, so I took my Les Paul and an Epiphone acoustic and I went to the Bahamas, where I stayed at Steve Marriott’s cottage on the beach. I ran into Alvin Lee and his wife, and we spent two weeks hanging out and having way too much fun. Thank God I had eight days left after they left. On my first day to myself, I picked up the Epiphone, tuned it to open G, and within 20 minutes I had most of the music and melodies to Show Me the Way.

“I put the guitar down and said, ‘I’ve got to write.’ I started singing ‘show me the way.’ The words just came out – I was in the moment. As I’m doing this, I’m thinking, ‘What am I trying to say?’ But the words came easily and they fit, so I kept going. I put down what I had on my Sony CF-550A [boom box]. It felt pretty good.

“The band recording went smoothly. We did it as a three-piece: me, John and my old cohort from the Herd – Andrew Brown, on bass. This is the first time I used a talk box in the studio. I had been using one live since ’73, but I never recorded with it. Nobody was around except Chris Kimsey, the engineer, so we experimented with it and we loved it. It’s a very clean talk-box sound compared to the way it sounds on the live record. On Frampton Comes Alive!, we were a four-piece, so everything sounded bigger.

“Show Me the Way got tons of play on KSAN in San Francisco. That station jumped on the Frampton album – it was Frampton all the time. That’s why we recorded the live album at Winterland. San Francisco was our town. They were way ahead of Detroit and New York.”

4. Breaking All The Rules – Peter Frampton (Breaking All The Rules, 1981)

“I was going through old tapes of jams because I wanted to do a real rock and roll–type track. I found this jam of me and John Siomos and thought it sounded great. It was like we were doing the Stones. As I listened, I thought, ‘No, it’s more than that.’ John was just kicking ass. The riff was pretty powerful, so I finished up the music, and there it was.

“I was working with David Kershenbaum as my co-producer, and we talked about making a very live-sounding rock record. We recorded at a sound stage on the A&M lot. It was a blast cutting tracks. I had John Regan on bass, Arthur Stead on keys, and I had half of Toto: Steve Lukather on guitar and Jeff Porcaro on bass. We played like a real live band, and every time we did the song it kept getting better and better. Playing with Luke was scary. [laughs] He’s such a lovely, crazy man.

“I had lost my Les Paul by this time, so I used one of the very first Roland synth guitars. Actually, Luke had one too, so he showed me what it could do and what you could do with it. I didn’t demo the solo, as usual. It was all cut live, very spontaneous.

“It’s a pretty vicious song, and we felt like we needed strong lyrics, so I sent a cassette to Keith Reid. He was such a brilliant lyricist. We spoke on the phone and I told him what I was looking for, and he sent me back more than enough lyrics for a song – it was like a book. David Kershenbaum and I went through it and picked out all the lines that fit best. It was great. To think Keith and I did it all by mail. We didn’t have Zoom then!”

5. Dreamland – Peter Frampton (Frampton Forgets The Words, 2021)

“I watched a documentary on Jaco Pastorius and I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t done a ‘thesis’ on him before; that’s what I call it when I go deep into somebody’s playing. I started to listen to everything he did, and I became so enamored of him. Sure, he could play fast, but his sense of melody was something else.

“I called my keyboard player and band leader, Rob Arthur, and I said we had to do Jaco’s Dreamland. We got together and put down a click while I played Jaco’s parts on guitar. I inhabited the melody, which I love to do. I didn’t even have to think about it. After we finished it, we did the blues album [2019’s All Blues], so once that was done I told Rob that we needed to revisit Dreamland. 

“We put the band on the track, but I didn’t change anything about my guitar. What you hear on the record is what I did on day one. I used my ’60 ’Burst on the neck pickup.

“I’ve spoken to Jaco’s son and brother, so I feel like I know the family a bit now. When I finished the album, I sent it to Andrew Brown. He’s been my buddy since I was 16, and he’s played in my band. After he listened to the album, he emailed me and wrote one word: Dreamland. It meant a lot to me that someone I respect so much would pick that one song.” 

• For live dates and goings-on in Frampton's world, visit the guitarist's website.

It's pretty undeniable that Eddie Van Halen and Steve Lukather's most famous team-up was on Michael Jackson's 1982 smash Beat It — with Van Halen providing that iconic solo and Lukather taking care of just about every other guitar sound on the track.

However, the two shared studios and stages on many occasions over their careers. One of those times was for an all-star ALS benefit concert for Jason Becker, which featured not only EVH and Luke but also Zakk Wylde, Billy Sheehan and Becker's Shrapnel Records alumni Richie Kotzen, Marty Friedman and Vinnie Moore.

No official recording of the show (which took place on 17 November 1996 at the Rivera Theatre in Chicago) exists; however, thanks to a resourceful concertgoer with a camcorder, we can relive some of the guitar magic of that night in the video below.

Joined by Pat Torpey on the drums, Van Halen, Lukather and Sheehan appeared under the name The Lou Brutus Experience — a nod to the American radio DJ who helped promote the event. The "Experience" performed tracks from Jimi Hendrix (Little Wing, Fire), Led Zeppelin (Good Times, Bad Times), The Beatles (I Want You (She's So Heavy)) and The Surfaris (Wipe Out), as well as Van Halen's Ain't Talkin' 'bout Love with Lukather taking vocal duties on the night.

There are some truly immense musical moments throughout from all involved; however, Van Halen and Lukather's unabandoned guitar gymnastics, as they trade high-energy solos on each of the tracks, is the highlight. The event was a success in its fundraising efforts; however, due to his worsening condition, Becker could not attend on the night.

Less than a decade before, Jason Becker (teaming with Marty Friedman) had burst onto the scene with the release of Cacophony's Speed Metal Symphony in 1987 — before releasing his solo debut, Perpetual Burn, the following year. His star would continue to rise, garnering the attention of David Lee Roth; however, not long after taking over guitar duties from Steve Vai in Roth's solo band in 1989, Becker was diagnosed with ALS. He was 20 years old.

Before ALS took away Becker's ability to play the guitar, he managed to complete his contributions to David Lee Roth's third studio release, A Little Ain't Enough, by using lighter gauge strings combined with short productive bursts that would leave him physically drained. A Little Ain't Enough was eventually released in 1992, by which time Becker had lost control of most of his body.

Van Halen became aware of Becker's situation, and the two met at Becker's home in August of '96, where Eddie gifted Becker a "first run" (number 69) of his newly launched Peavey Wolfgang signature model and signed it, "Jason. We will play guitar together in the future. Love from heart to your soul. Eddie Van Halen, '96."

The guitar is set to go under the hammer on 14 December 2023 via auction house Guernsey's as part of its Iconic Items From The 20th Century collection. In deciding to part with the treasured instrument, Jason Becker told Guitar World, "A while ago, I was looking at the guitar Eddie Van Halen gave to me, hanging on the wall, covered in dust, and I thought that's a shame."

"It should be with someone who would love to have it and can give it the attention it deserves," says Becker. "I can't play it, and the best part of it for me now is the memory of his kindness."

Since Jake Kiszka burst on the scene six years ago with his hard-rock band Greta Van Fleet, the 27-year-old guitarist has captured the imagination of six-string fans and fellow players like few of his contemporaries. His adventurous and sophisticated approach to the guitar, much of it based on the traditions of blues and classic rock honed decades before he was born, has made him the preeminent axe hero for his generation. He’s topped readers polls – Best New Guitarist, Best Rock Guitarist, Best Guitar Solo... You name it. It’s enough to make any young player’s head swell, but Kiszka seems to be taking the acclaim in stride. When asked to explain why so many guitarists are drawn to his style, he addresses the topic thoughtfully.

“I do seem to encounter a lot of people who admire my playing,” he says. “They tell me that my type of playing is a lost art form. It’s like I’m a relic – my approach to playing is something from the past.” He chuckles at his own words. “I think people appreciate the way I embraced that tradition and evolved it to the contemporary world. I think there’s a lot of soul in what I do. I mean, people have said that they can feel my soul when I play. They appreciate that I’m trying to communicate.”

From all appearances, Greta Van Fleet – which includes Kiszka’s brothers, lead singer Josh and bassist-keyboardist Sam, along with drummer Danny Wagner – has caught all the breaks any modern-day rock band could possibly desire. They went gold with their first album, 2018’s Anthem of the Peaceful Army, and their 2021 follow-up, The Battle at Garden’s Gate, hit the upper regions of music charts across the globe. Their live shows grew from small clubs to bigger clubs, and it wasn’t long before they were packing theaters and sheds. This year they’ve graduated to the league of bona fide arena headliners, so it would seem when it comes to rock and roll bucket lists, the group’s members just might check off every item before they reach the age of 30. It’s enough to make Kiszka’s head spin.

“I can’t explain the success we’ve had, to be honest,” he says. “I think people are responding to our authenticity, which stems from our influences and what we grew up with. The purity of it and the truth of it resonates with people.”

New York City’s Madison Square Garden is one of the venues on the group’s 2023 itinerary. Kiszka’s eyes light up and his face fills with a sense of wonder at the very mention of the hallowed concert arena. “I was thinking about it at breakfast the other day,” he says. “I remembered how, when I was a kid and I wanted to be a guitar player, it seemed like every big band played the Garden. Cream and Zeppelin, the Who – the endless list of rock royalty. Then I realized that I’ll be playing Madison Square Garden. I’ll be walking in the footsteps of all those who’ve influenced me.” He smiles. “Madison Square Garden… It’s like the Garden of Eden.”

Greta Van Fleet appear to have nailed yet another rock tradition: The bigger they get with the public, the more critics have it out for them. When they arrived out of Frankenmuth, Michigan, with their first recordings – a pair of swaggering singles, “Safari Song” and Highway Tune,” followed by an EP, From the Fires – they elicited comparisons to Led Zeppelin, and rightly so: Every element of that group’s sound– from Robert Plant’s siren-like wails to Jimmy Page’s blues-drenched solos and John Bonham’s thunderous drum attack – seemed to have been re-created with uncanny, reverent precision. But as Greta Van Fleet strove to expand their sound on subsequent releases with splashes of country-folk, psychedelia, progressive rock and even hints of world music, the critics came at them with sharpened knives. In its review of The Battle at Garden’s Gate, entertainment-trade mag Variety likened them to Spinal Tap.

For his part, Kiszka dismisses the barbs like he’s swatting away a pesky fly. “I don’t think criticism has ever affected us,” he says. “It’s ponderous and intriguing to presume that somebody has spent time and energy to say how they’re indifferent to us or don’t like us, while we’ve put zero energy into caring what they think.”

He gives hosannas as much attention. “The praise rolls off our shoulders,” he says. “We’re musicians and artists, and if we’re to achieve any kind of perfection, then we have to let go of any sense of ego. It destroys talent. We’re always striving to be better musicians, and I’m striving to be a better guitarist. If I allowed all of that praise to go to my head, I’d be stagnant.”

Greta Van Fleet’s new album, Starcatcher (Lava/Republic), doesn’t depart from the band’s classic rock-based style – if anything, the group turbo-charges each tried-and-true component and drives it home. The set’s first single, “Meeting the Master,” begins as a contemplative, acoustic-laced ballad that explodes into a frenzied rock monster.

Similarly, the band eases its way into high-minded, trippy mood pieces like “Waited All Your Life” and “Farewell for Now,” drizzling bits of pastoral folk and spacey prog flourishes, before Kiszka flips a switch and takes off with brawny, go-for-the-gusto solos. While nothing on the record comes close to the nine-minute “The Weight of Dreams” (from The Battle at Garden’s Gate), each song feels like an epic, and Kiszka makes crafty use of every passage, layering elegant, arpeggiated lines and swooning leads between the various big spotlight moments. Sometimes the band needs no time at all to land a punch: On the aptly named “Runaway Blues,” they temporarily ditch their mystical shtick and blaze through a delirious rave-up that’s over in but a minute and a half.

The band relocated to Nashville several years ago, and for Starcatcher they tapped that town’s resident hitmaker, Dave Cobb (Brandi Carlile, Jason Isbell, Rival Sons and Grace Potter, among others), to produce. “Dave’s name was always on our radar,” Kiszka says. “He’s come into the scene as a prominent producer of rock and roll groups. We were like, ‘Is that a good thing or a bad thing?’ Maybe it would be stereotypical, but it was something we wanted to explore, regardless.”

A meeting between Cobb and the band went well, but Kiszka reveals that the members decided to “date” a few other producers before giving Cobb the nod. “In the end, we decided to marry Dave,” he says with a laugh. “It became obvious that he was going to be the one to help us create this record. It’s very challenging for producers to work with such a tight-knit group as ours. We speak the same language, and producers have to pick up on that vernacular. With Dave, it was easy because he shares our influences. He fell in seamlessly.”

You’ve never tried to hide your affinity for rock music from the ’70s. And, of course, some of the criticism you’ve endured is that you simply rehash that music. How do you think you take that influence and try to update it?

I believe our evolution, as well as my own progression, has always been a product of a contemporary world. A lot of the music and guitar playing which I’ve studied comes from a bygone era – the golden age of rock and roll. I’ve taken that heavy, guitar-based music and attempted a new approach, by giving it a modern perspective.

Can you elaborate on what that “new approach” means?

In terms of technique, there are many styles of contemporary guitar playing that have been seamed into my matrix. It’s an evolution of time and music; as the genres have progressed, so has the guitar playing. The sonic approach is complex and dynamic, because over the passage of time and technology, especially in terms of the studio, it has also advanced. This includes utilizing different microphones and different pedals, as the world of pedals has evolved as well. Given that expansion, I think a lot of the usage of those technologies has brought an absolute new and modern sonic approach to my guitar playing and our music.

The way I tend to write is coming from a very modern perspective. There have been many songs written since the advent of rock and roll until 2023 that observe the form of writing and its development – it’s come a long way. Let’s say if you’re using a 12-string in DADGAD, as opposed to a parlor guitar in standard, you’re going to hear and see an extraordinarily different outcome.           

Obviously, you and your brothers share the same influences. Can you speak to the innate connections family musicians have when they play together and how they inform the music?

Yeah. I think we have this sense of reinforcement of what we’re doing. It’s a pretty complex undertaking to communicate in general, as human beings, but on an instrumental level it’s an even larger feat. I think the fact that we all grew up together has certainly solidified our communication as musicians. When we’re onstage and we’re playing our instruments next to one another, it’s a form of communication. We understand each other’s nuances. We don’t like to play songs the same way each night. We like to jam and improvise.

Let’s pick up on that. When you jam – that is, when you’re not writing songs – what do you like to play? What’s a typical night like in the Greta rehearsal room?

It’s great. It’s everybody getting together and pulling out a bottle of tequila. I’ll show up last. [laughs] We’ll just kick it out. Even at soundchecks, we’re always playing. It goes back to that form of communication. Somebody will start playing something, and then somebody else will walk in the room and start playing.

But what are you jamming to? Original tunes? Covers?

A little bit of both. Usually, it’s original jamming, but other times I’ll have learned something. “Rock ’n’ Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” by AC/DC is something I just learned. I always liked the song and pulled it out. We all started playing it. You don’t have to rehearse for something like that. But it’s usually original stuff – that’s how it works in the studio.

Was the Starcatcher track “Runaway Blues” a jam? It sure sounds like it.

It was a jam in the studio. We were having a slow, sort of methodical day, and I just wanted to rip out something new. Nobody was around, so I started playing that riff. Danny and Sam came in, and we finished a take of another song. Then I kicked off with the riff. Dave Cobb started freaking out: “That song needs to be on the record!”

I have praise, and a complaint. I absolutely love the song, but I was bummed when you faded it so quickly.

Yeah. The reason why it’s so short is because Josh didn’t like it, and he wanted it to be brief. I think there’s an aspect to the song – you end up wanting more.

Van Halen used to do that. They would feature these awesome bits of rocking on their records that lasted only seconds.

Yeah. That song is part of the whole web of the record. It adds a lot of energy. It’s something that we may extend live. We like to do that sort of thing.

Not to belabor Led Zeppelin, but as you know, the critics do bring it up a lot. I wonder, is there something they’re not seeing? What influences are there that they don’t pick up on?

It’s pretty broad. The complexity of musical influence and the depth of that is extreme within the group. But it’s really everything – there’s not a lot of music that we dislike. We grew up with roots music. As for Led Zeppelin – we weren’t listening to rock music growing up; that happened in high school. So we’re talking about the originations of the genres that we now consider to be folk music, like Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. We had Alan Lomax records laying around. It was roots of the Great American South and the Blue Hills – bluegrass music and banjo playing.

And it goes into blues music and Native American music. People don’t know that we grew up with some Native American music, which was informed by blues. So you’ve got Robert Johnson and Charley Patton, Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, Albert King, John Lee Hooker and Son House – all of these collective blues influences. We saw our way into all kinds of stuff, even classical music like Frederic Chopin and Mussorgsky, Bach and Beethoven. We listened to Peruvian music growing up.

So the influences go beyond Zeppelin.

Yeah. Again, it’s pretty broad. And pretty extensive. Obviously, this could be a very complex answer, but these are just examples.

During the period when you were absorbing music and forming your style, was there a cut-off period for you? When you first heard what we call “shred,” did you say, “Not for me”?

I was never a big fan of shredding. It didn’t really interest me because I didn’t hear the soul and dynamics of an earlier style of guitar playing. When Jimi Hendrix played guitar, you could feel the soul coming out of his body. That moment right there probably defined my direction and approach. For me, shred music didn’t achieve that sort of thing.

We wouldn’t necessarily put Eddie Van Halen in that category.

Eddie Van Halen is an outlier. I like his approach – he inspired and created a type of music, but there was enough nuance in what he was doing that you could still hear a human element. Nowadays, the amps are so cranked and there’s so much gain and distortion. It’s less like painting and more like digital art. It’s like A.I. versus human art.

Moving forward, would I be right to assume that something like the djent movement didn’t hit you at all?

It does a little bit because, as a guitar player, I appreciate that it’s a duality of many different styles and genres and instruments. Even in, for instance, the eight-string guitar or something.

Would you even know what to do with an eight-string guitar?

I would have to figure it out. As a guitar player, it’s interesting to see the depth of complexity that people have brought in over time. Leo Kottke would be playing a 12-string steel guitar with a slide, so that’s three elements that are very interesting that you wouldn’t necessarily combine. But he did it, so we have that.

On this new record I toyed with new techniques and tunings. I used a B-Bender on “Fate of the Faithful.” “Falling Skies” is in DADGAD, “The Archer” is in open C, and “Meeting the Master” is in some strange tuning I made up – it’s a full step down, and then you drop the bottom D one more step. It’s crazy. And I was using a Taylor baritone that had two B strings. I tried toying with different sounds.

Did you try soloing outside of the minor pentatonic scale at all?

Sure. There are blues boxes, which are extremely helpful to me. It’s just a variation of the pentatonic scale from the base of the neck all the way up to the top. There are other phrases and movements inside of that, and you can configure them all the way up and get into Dorian-like scales. If you’re soloing in an open tuning, that’s completely instinctual. You just find what feels good and play those notes. It’s good to try open tunings.

A few years ago, you told me that you don’t really practice. Is that still true?

I still don’t practice. My practice is on the stage or when I’m writing songs on a guitar. In that sense, it keeps things frustrating. If I practiced all the time, it would be, for me, probably a moot point being that it’s not really my form of expression.

Back to your record. During the planning stages, did the band sit down and map out an objective, or did the album just evolve as a natural outgrowth of the songs?

There was a certain set of objectives that we had. We came out of our last record thinking we created this cinematic, almost orchestral record. On this one, I wanted to do something fairly aggressive.

In what way?

In terms of the emotional approach. Many of these songs are intense both emotionally and sonically. We also wanted to have a lot of dimension within the dynamics of our performances. Between “Meeting the Master” to “The Falling Sky” to “Farewell for Now,” the range is pretty diverse. Once we had those concepts in mind, it was really just going out and isolating ourselves in the country and writing these songs in two weeks. Then we went to RCA’s Studio A and recorded them.

Where exactly did you go to isolate yourselves?

We went to a cabin just south of Franklin [a city south of Nashville]. We brought all of our gear and set up – that’s how we like to operate. We like to get out of any city and be in the middle of nowhere, and live and breathe what we’re doing every day.

Was there anything significant in Dave Cobb’s method of recording that had a real impact on you?

It was a maximum impact. Most people set a mic right next to an amplifier and go, “There’s your sound.” But you and I know that the technique is to pull that mic away and get the ambience and the live sound. Dave would set the mic 10 feet away, but then he’d listen back and go, “Nah, it just doesn’t sound right.” It would sound bigger at 12 feet. We did a lot of stuff with delays and things like that.

Dave got things sounding so good that I didn’t have to worry about it. That was a big part of his impact. We didn’t have to worry about the sound; we only had to think about the music we were writing and how we were going to perform it. Our attention was right where it needed to be.

This record is like your others in that you didn’t use generic, dialed-in distortion. Your sound is big and powerful, but there’s a natural element to it.

Yeah, again, that’s a huge thing. Most players tell me that I play very clean. I do, I think, but I like the nuance of that style. You can hear the detail of my playing; you can hear the complexities of it. I can whisper something or I can profess it loudly from the top of a mountain. I have the ability to work with dynamics in terms of tonality and approach, and I like that.

What was Dave like as a guitar coach? I don’t assume everything you come up with is awesome right off the bat. When you played a part and it wasn’t quite right, how would he guide you?

It’s interesting: If I had a pre-chorus or something, he’d go, “That’s cool.” Luckily, he likes everything I do. But sometimes he’d say, “That pre-chorus is great and I like it, but it sounds really complicated. What if you simplified it?” And I’d say, “Okay, I can do that.” That’s the thing – he’d be into what I was doing, but he’d want to go more in this direction or that. I would just revise it.

Do you ever get bruised feelings in the studio? What happens if you play a part that you think is awesome, but you get criticism?

It has a lot to do with the producer. I’ve been hurt by constructive criticism in the past, but Dave works in a way that isn’t offensive. It’s not like, “Go rewrite that part. It’s shit.” Because I’ve had that way back, which was fine – I needed it then. Dave never changed anything that I wrote, but he made me utilize those notes and make a variation of it.

Beyond some of the new tunings and techniques that you’ve mentioned, do you feel like your overall guitar approach has changed in recent years?

I don’t think so. I’ll put it this way: I believe that every season changes who I am as a person, and that influences the way that I approach the guitar. I’ve played a lot of shows, and I’ve taken different approaches to the guitar both consciously and unconsciously. It’s like a personality or a spirit – it evolves with time. It’s difficult for us as human beings to identify our growth within ourselves. It’s the same thing with my guitar playing. I’m not sure how it’s evolved, but I feel like it grows as I grow.

One of my favorite solos is on “Frozen Light,” where you go absolutely bonkers. Was that done in one take? It doesn’t sound like something you played to death.

Yeah, that was another thing Dave brought to the table. I was like, “I want to take that solo again.” And he said, “No, you can’t take that solo again. That’s the solo.” The “Frozen Light” solo is probably a second take, I think. I don’t think I played any solos or improvisations more than five times.

You favor your ’61 Gibson SG, but what were some of the other guitars you used on the album?

I used that ’61 SG number one for the majority of some basic structures, but I used more guitars on this record than on anything else in the past. The RCA studio room is really big, so we took all these guitars off the wall. A friend of mine who owns the Chicago Music Exchange brought a bunch of guitars down. We laid them out on the floor, opened them up, and with every song I’d walk over and get another one to see how it sounded.

What were some of the guitars that made the cut?

There was the third ES-335 ever made – it had some country stars names on it. That one outshot all the other ones for a lot of things. It was amazing. There was a ’60s Telecaster. It’s challenging to remember all of them. Dave has his ’58 gold-top – I used that. There was a Stratocaster that I used for dive bomb– type sounds and stereo things. The acoustic world was crazy, too. We’d use old Martins and a lot of things like that.

Did Dave break out his nylon-string acoustic? I was talking to Grace Potter, who told me that she played that guitar and didn’t want to give it back.

Yeah, I wanted to steal it, too. Actually, I used one of his Princeton amps and fell in love with it. I was looking for one at some guitar function in Nashville, and I bumped into Dave. I told him what I was looking for, and he said, “Oh, man, you can have it.” Just like that, he gave it to me.

Have you decided on which guitars to use live?

I’m going to need a few more. I’m looking for some to replicate the parts on the record because of all the alternate tunings. I found this old Frankenstein Telecaster and I brought it to [guitar luthier] Joe Glaser. He put a B-Bender in it. So I’ve got that little creation to help me play “Fate of the Faithful.” I’ve still got to find some more guitars.

You mention the B-Bender. Did it take you a while to get used to playing with one? How did you approach it?

To be honest, it came rather immediately. I understood what was going on, and I didn’t really have to think about it. It came pretty naturally to me. Using it inside the solo of that song, as a technique within the soloing, was something I’d never heard before. I had to do it because it was totally weird and different. It’s a dance, the way you have to use it.

What about your live rig? Any changes to that?

I certainly might use the Princeton amp. I’m working out a wet/dry system right now. We’re playing these really big rooms, so I don’t need the reverb stuff that I’ve always had. I need to be clearer to cut through these arenas. I was put in touch with Peter Frampton, and I talked to him about his wet/dry rig. He’s really well versed in that system and how it works. He gave me some tips, and I think he’ll probably come by production rehearsals and help me get this wet/dry thing going.

Peter is a lovely guy.

He really is. He’s the kindest soul.

We started out this conversation by talking about how your fellow guitarists have responded to your playing. You’re now being called a guitar hero. How does that sit with you? How do you feel about it, and in your view, who is a guitar hero?

That’s kind of a broad concept. It seems to be a tradition, doesn’t it? There are generations of players who become icons of their times. You can go back to the British Invasion and people like Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page... And then there’s Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend, Rory Gallagher – these people became figureheads. Move it further and you’ve got Stevie Ray Vaughan and Slash. They all inspired me. To be considered a guitar hero for my generation is a lifetime achievement.

Order Greta Van Fleet's Starcatcher here.

Visit the Greta Van Fleet website for tour information, merch and more.

Led Zeppelin III might open with the rolling thunder of "Immigrant Song" but it's an album that debuted a more pastoral sound. Periodically switching to acoustic guitar to leave the electricity to Robert Plant's righteous wail, Jimmy Page integrated folk and alternate tunings into the mix, changing perceptions of what rock could be at the time.

It confounded critics, but then they were always confounded by Led Zeppelin. Maybe they shouldn't have been surprised. Led Zeppelin were never going to be just another rock band – new decade, new sound. As Jimmy Page said: “Our attitude was, ‘Fuck the ’60s! We’re going to chart the new decade!’ We were on a mission.”

1. "Immigrant Song"

Driven by a thundering Jimmy Page F# octave riff and Bonham’s propulsive beat, “Immigrant Song” kicks off Led Zeppelin III – the so-called acoustic album – with even more force than “Whole Lotta Love” launched Led Zeppelin II. 

And were Led Zeppelin ever more over the top than when Plant let loose with his chest-beating Viking wails on the song’s intro? (One need only witness Jack Black’s wild-eyed re-creation in the 2003 comedy School of Rock to confirm that, yes, this is quite possibly the most Zeppelin-y of all Zeppelin moments.) 

It’s a standout opener, as Page knew it would be. “With that hypnotic riff and Robert’s bloodcurdling scream, I thought, 'That’s the way to open an album,’” he once noted.

2. "Friends"

“Friends” features one of Page’s most intriguing alternate tunings: C6 (low to high, C A C G C E). His right-hand rhythm work and fret-hand pull-offs suggest a ragtime feel, but with its exotic chord shadings and John Paul Jones’ expert string arrangement, the song sounds decidedly more Eastern in nature. 

In addition to re-recording the tune in Mumbai in 1972, Page and Plant pulled it out again for 1994’s UnLedded project (a version appears on their album, No Quarter), where they were accompanied by an orchestra that included numerous Middle Eastern musicians.

3. "Celebration Day"

With its jaunty rhythm and slippery guitar riff, “Celebration Day” sounds as freewheeling and lighthearted as its title suggests. 

While it’s not one of the band’s heavier electric songs, famed producer Rick Rubin once correctly noted that it “feels like a freight train.”  Adding to the rollicking nature is the fact that the song seems to stumble in at the intro, a result of the original beginning having been accidentally erased by an engineer. 

Rather than re-record the part, Page extended the synth line from the end of “Friends” into the top of “Celebration Day,” filling the space until his guitar part came in. “That’s called ‘salvaging,’” he remarked.

4. "Since I've Been Loving You"

This Zeppelin original is quite possibly their greatest blues composition. Some critics and fans have pointed out similarities to Moby Grape’s “Never,” but the power of the song – Plant’s rafters-shaking wail, Page’s frenzied guitar solo and unique chord work, Jones’ warmly glowing organ and Bonham’s thunderous drums (squeaky bass-drum pedal and all) – is 100 percent Zeppelin. 

Page once called the song “sophisticated,” and it is, but the furious climax is also as primal and cathartic as any Zep moment recorded before or after.

5. "Out on the Tiles"

The title – British slang for a night out drinking – came from Bonham, who received a writing credit in return. His tight-but-loose drumming holds the whole thing together, not an easy task given the knotty riffing and herky-jerky chorus syncopations.

And while Zeppelin performed the entire song onstage just twice in their career, its opening salvo was later reassigned as the live intro to another heavily syncopated hard rocker, “Black Dog.”

6. "Gallows Pole"

This side-two opener has its roots in a centuries-old European folk number, “The Maid Freed From the Gallows,” though its most famous form before Zeppelin’s was the 1939 version, “The Gallis Pole,” by 12-string bluesman Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly. However, Page said he first heard the song “on an old Folkways” album as recorded by white American folksinger Fred Gerlach. 

While Zeppelin’s rendition is clearly rooted in folk-blues, Page and Jones’ expert layering of acoustic and electric instrumentation – including six-string guitars, banjos and mandolins – is practically symphonic in nature.

7. "Tangerine"

With hushed minor-key verses that give way to soaring major-key choruses and Plant’s yearning vocal, “Tangerine” demonstrates Led Zeppelin’s range as skilled pop balladeers. 

The song’s origins stretch back to a tune Page wrote while in the Yardbirds, “Knowing That I’m Losing You,” although “Tangerine” was also among the pieces he and Plant worked on at Bron-Yr-Aur. 

Like several of the acoustic-based tunes on III, the power of the song stems largely from the thoughtful arrangement, with Page on six- and 12-string acoustic, electric guitar and pedal steel, and Jones adding mandolin.

8. "That's the Way"

In a sense, “That’s the Way” is the most conventional of Led Zeppelin III’s acoustic numbers, carried along by little more than a strummed acoustic in open-G tuning and Plant’s poignant, affecting vocal and lyrics (which seem to address a relationship gone south but have also been said to be about Zeppelin’s ambivalent feelings toward America). 

Despite its simple arrangement – which includes pedal steel, dulcimer and mandolin – “That’s the Way” is one of the band’s most beloved songs and the acoustic track that critics and fans often single out for praise. A truly beautiful composition, it’s seemingly the essence of Bron-Yr-Aur brought to life.

9. "Bron-Y-Aur-Stomp"

Despite its unplugged arrangement, “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp” has its roots in a full-band jam called “Jennings Farm Blues” (included on the 2014 deluxe reissue of III), which featured several of the song’s riffs in heavy, electrified form.

For whatever reason, Zeppelin chose to rework the tune in a wholly acoustic arrangement for the record and onstage, where it was usually performed with Jones on upright bass. 

The title appears to incorporate both a reference to Bonham’s thumping rhythmic pulse and Plant’s Welsh cottage, whose name is, intentionally or not, misspelled.

10. "Hats Off to (Roy) Harper"

Featuring Page on acoustic guitar and Plant singing lines culled from old blues songs (most notably Bukka White’s “Shake ’em on Down”), “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper” is less a song and more a sound collage. 

Page frequently punctuates his rapid strumming with what appear to be random slashes of slide work, while Plant’s voice is fed through the tremolo channel of, according to Page, an old Vox amp. The song is psychedelic, spellbinding, perplexing and inscrutable. One thing it most certainly is not – critics take note – is a CSN&Y imitation. 

“We did a whole set of country blues and traditional blues numbers [see the Page/Plant acoustic jam “Key to the Highway/Trouble In Mind,” included on the 2014 deluxe reissue of III] that Robert suggested,” Page said. “But that was the only one we put on the record.” 

In a last bit of abstruseness, “Hats Off” was credited on Led Zeppelin III to Charles Obscura, a pseudonym for Page.

Order Led Zeppelin III here.

Growing up in classic rock’s golden years shouldn’t negate the possibility that you enjoy music made today. I may have an extensive vinyl collection of favorites dating back to my childhood, but I stream music everyday and constantly discover great songs by inspiring artists across the genres.

Yet, there are some who believe the modern music scene is a wasteland.

If you think that, you probably aren’t listening. But if one thing has suffered in the past two decades, it is the long-player. There are fewer epic albums being made today, and there is less reason to invest one’s time and ears in 40 minutes or more of an artist’s music.

Of course, I say this with the benefit – and certainly blessing – of having grown up at a time when the album was king.

Take 1973. A half century ago, we experienced one of the greatest years in rock and roll. It was a year that saw debuts from potent acts like Queen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Aerosmith, and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, as well as from guitar heroes like Tony Rice and Lindsey Buckingham, making his nod with Buckingham Nicks.

From my youthful vantage point, 1973 was lived as 52 weeks of breathless Saturday trips to the record store, where we were tempted by such epic albums as Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions, Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and the Who’s Quadrophenia, not to mention prog monsters like Yes’s live three-album set Yessongs, Manfred Mann Earth Band’s Solar Fire, Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard/A True Star, Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery and, the behemoth of them all, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon.

In 1973, we saw the last flashes of glam rock with Bowie’s Aladdin Sane and Pin-Ups, Rick Derringer’s All American Boy, Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies and the debut from the New York Dolls.

But it was a great year for art rock, with Fripp and Eno’s experimental tour de force (No Pussyfooting), John Cale’s orchestral pop masterpiece Paris 1919, Lou Reed’s dramatic Berlin, Camel’s brilliant self-titled debut, and a pair of landmark Roxy Music albums: For Your Pleasure and Stranded.

That was all but the tip of that year’s multi-genre, stylistically freewheeling musical iceberg.

For any album to stand out among this pack, it would have to be pretty freaking great. Which is the least you can say about Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, a compilation of eight wildly inventive songs that together serve as a cross-section of that year’s dizzying musical styles, including prog, reggae, glam, folk, funk and art-rock.

It was the first Zeppelin album I bought and the first – perhaps only – album they made that kept their bombast in check, served up an ear-catching range of styles and delivered with economical arrangements.

As Jimmy Page said: “You can hear the fun we were having.”

Indeed, we can, to this day. Here’s to singing in the sunshine and laughing in the rain.

It’s virtually impossible to pare decades of rock and roll down to a top-ten list. There are, however, some guitar solos every player needs to know about.

Here are some of the greatest ever committed to record...

10. "Statesboro Blues" by The Allman Brothers Band from 'At Fillmore East' (1971)

Guitarist: Duane Allman

Although the end of "Layla" may be more memorable to most folks, Allman’s Statesboro slide show verifies his title as the undisputed king of bottleneck guitar. 

Slick as oil but with the ability to stop on a dime, Allman not only redefined how slide guitar was played but also created a recycling market for empty Coricidin bottles.

9. "Sweet Child O' Mine" by Guns N' Roses from 'Appetite for Destruction' (1987)

Guitarist: Slash

While Axl swayed and sashayed like Steve Wonder around his mic stand, Slash laid back with his Les Paul, patiently waiting for his turn in the spotlight. 

Then, with his blistering ascent up the E harmonic minor scale – which kicks the second solo of this tune into high gear – the top-hatted genius single-handedly breathed new life into wah-pedal sales.

8. "Crossroads" by Cream from 'Wheels of Fire' (1968)

Guitarist: Eric Clapton

Slowhand? Not on this track. Clapton pulls out every blues-rock move in his lick-tionary for this roadhouse romper. 

The true voodoo of this solo lies at the crossroads where major and minor pentatonic tonalities meet, mingle and blast off from E.C.’s fretboard. 

Ol’ Scratch surely smiled when he heard this one.

7. "Crazy Train" by Ozzy Osbourne from 'Blizzard of Ozz' (1980)

Guitarist: Randy Rhoads

You almost wonder if Ozzy named this tune after hearing Rhoads’ white-knuckled rock and roll ride up and down the F# minor scale. 

What more could you want in a metal guitar solo? Tapping, rakes, bends, trills ascending legato runs... 

Rhoads set Eighties guitarists on the rails of neoclassical rock with this one. All aboard!

6. "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin from 'Led Zeppelin IV' (1971)

Guitarist: Jimmy Page

Jimmy Page's "Stairway” solo is nothing short of divine. 

His resolution to the natural F note in the opening minor pentatonic lick of the solo couldn’t have been more perfect if the Almighty himself had chosen the note.

5. "Sultans of Swing" by Dire Straits from 'Dire Straits' (1978)

Guitarist: Mark Knopfler

Sultan says, “Spend less time making your harem moan and more time making your guitar cry and sing!” 

For those of you who’ve learned the outro solo the lazy way – playing eighth-note triplets for the daunting Dm, Bb and C arpeggios – get your fingers back to the wood shed. 

Those are 16th notes that the “Sultan of Strat” rips off.

4. "Free Bird" by Lynyrd Skynyrd from 'Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd' (1973) 

Guitarist: Gary Rossington and Allen Collins

To paraphrase Adrian Belew in King Crimson’s "Indiscipline," "I repeat my licks, I repeat my licks, I repeat my licks…” 

This could go on forever – kinda like the outro solo to "Free Bird," in which guitarists Rossington and Collins double each other for most of this pull-off parade. 

It’s impressive not because of the degree of difficulty of the licks but because of the sheer volume they need to recall – 27, including variations!

3. "Eruption" by Van Halen from 'Van Halen' (1978) 

The Holy Grail for all aspiring rock guitarists. Learn Eddie Van Halen's "Eruption" and you’ve earned some serious bragging rights. 

But if you really want props, you’ve got to tame the whole volcano, not just the tremolo picking and tapping sections.

2. "All Along the Watchtower" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience from 'Electric Ladyland' (1968)

Jimi Hendrix offers plenty of reason to get excited in his "Watchtower" solo. 

Besides his masterful manipulation of the C# minor pentatonic scale, Hendrix’s wah-drenched octave climb and the double-stops in the latter half bear out his gift for melodic embellishment. 

It’s enough to make any cat growl.

1. "Little Wing" by Stevie Ray Vaughan from 'The Sky Is Crying' (1991)

With little bits of Jimi, Wes and Mayfield, and a whole lotta soul, SRV exhibits exceptional dynamic prowess throughout, making this reverent Hendrix cover his own. 

A seemingly lost art among modern-day guitarists, Vaughan’s R&B-style chord melody is like priceless art. It should be both admired and studied.

Brian May doesn’t recall particulars about every Queen show. But there is one – roughly 50 years ago at London’s Imperial College, where the guitarist had previously studied physics as an undergrad – that sticks with him.

Why?

For one, it was Queen’s first gig to be reviewed in a newspaper – and if you’re wondering, yes, it was a positive write-up.

For another, because, in the 75-year-old guitarist’s words, “We had our full complement – we knew we finally had the right people in the band.”

These people, of course, were drummer Roger Taylor, with whom May had previously played in the late-’60s rock-pop-blues-progressive outfit Smile, Zanzibar-born singer Farrokh Bulsara, who by that time was answering to the name Freddie Mercury, and fresh-faced bassist John Deacon.

“So that was a big deal, for starters,” May says. But beyond the good reviews and winning combination of players onstage, May also recalls that performance being a standout thanks to the audience’s reaction.

“We had our first album coming out, and it felt like, for the first time, people knew what to expect from us,” he says. “The effect was phenomenal, because instead of going onstage and trying to persuade people that they might like what we do, we went onstage to a crowd of people who knew our music and wanted it. And they were giving us the energy to propel us to make those sounds that they’d cottoned on to.

“The feeling was incredible – it was like having your finger in a dam and a little trickle of water is coming out, and then suddenly the whole thing breaks down and you have this great, wonderful flood of energy.”

Today, Queen may not look quite the same – Mercury passed away from AIDS-related complications in 1991, and Deacon retired from music toward the end of that decade. But that flood of energy persists, with May and Taylor continuing to rock arenas the world over with current singer Adam Lambert.

50 years after the release of their self-titled debut album in July 1973, Queen remain as resonant, beloved and popular as ever. The 2018 film Bohemian Rhapsody smashed box office records to become the all-time highest-grossing music biopic, with worldwide receipts of nearly $1 billion and a quartet of Academy Awards to its name.

As for the music? Using just one metric, Spotify, as an example, “Bohemian Rhapsody” has racked up well over two billion streams on its way to becoming the most-listened-to classic-rock song on the service, but Queen’s next four top-streamed tracks – “Don’t Stop Me Now,” “Another One Bites the Dust,” “Under Pressure” and “We Will Rock You” – all handily dwarf the numbers of anything by the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and many of their other rock-legend peers.

It’s a “phenomenon,” as May puts it, and one that seemingly has no end.

As for how he explains it? Despite Queen’s much venerated flair for grand and wildly dramatic musical gestures, “our songs were never elitist,” May says. “At their core, they were songs about the joys and the sorrows and the pain that every man, woman and child feels.

“They express the extreme emotions of non-extreme people – people that think they’re ordinary. And I think that’s why they have aligned with listeners.”

Voted by Guitar Player readers as one of the greatest solos of all time, May’s sonorous lead tone in “Bohemian Rhapsody” was created using a Rory Gallagher-inspired rig comprising a Vox AC30, a Dallas Rangemaster Treble Booster and little else.

“I used delays and stuff, but the fundamental tone that you hear is the [Red Special] and the treble booster and the AC30,” May told GP.

During the recording session, the 28-year-old maestro tracked rhythm guitar parts as the song came together in distinct sections. Along the way, the team felt a solo was needed to inject a different melody into the work and May decided he would approach it as if he were singing a verse on his instrument.

Although he has no idea where the melody came from, the guitarist recalls that he could hear the idea in his head long before the red light came on. And as is so often the case, after a few passes it was clear the first take was the best.

So how might today’s guitarist go about recreating that kind of magic? One approach could be to take some inspiration from the effects units in May’s current live rig as used during the epic Queen + Adam Lambert concerts.

Greg Fryer has been custom-building guitar gear for the Queen legend since the mid-‘90s, and his Treble Booster Touring unit was recently spotted in the live rig. Described as having “a balanced sound with sweet harmonic detail and smooth treble definition,” a new batch is currently in the pipeline, according to the Fryer Guitars website.

Other effects units in May's rig include a Dunlop DCR2SR Cry Baby Rack Module and a TC Electronic G-Major 2 multi-effects rack unit.

And if you're looking for some official Brian May gear including electric guitars and amplifiers you need look no further than the Brian May Guitars website. There you can find a plethora of Red Special-style six strings along with the new Vox signature series amps.

At the dawn of the 1970s, Led Zeppelin were one of the biggest rock bands in the world. Though the foursome of Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham had been in existence for just upward of a year, in that brief span of time the group had released two massive-selling albums – Led Zeppelin and II – and performed more than 150 live shows across the U.K., Scandinavia, Europe and North America. The U.S., in particular, had embraced the band, perhaps even more than its British homeland, with fans on these shores ravenous for the group’s heavy blues-rock sound.

Of course, Zeppelin were hardly the only British band playing that style in the late 1960s. During that time, Cream, Ten Years After, the Jeff Beck Group, Vanilla Fudge, Iron Butterfly and Page’s previous band, the Yardbirds, among others, had plundered black American blues music in the service of creating something more modern, multifaceted and riff-centric.

But arguably none of these acts did it with the same balance of bombast, agility, songcraft and barely restrained ferocity that Zep achieved in the studio and onstage. As Jimmy Page once remarked of the band’s arrival in America, “It felt like a vacuum, and we’d arrived to fill it. It was like a tornado, and it went rolling across the country.”

Zeppelin’s bombastic style was defined by Page’s “Whole Lotta Love”-style proto-metal riffing, Plant’s histrionic wail and Bonham’s cannon-blast drums. But there was always much more to the Zep sound – the “light and shade,” as Page so often referred to it. And nowhere in the Zeppelin catalog is that approach so clearly on display than on 1970’s Led Zeppelin III.

To be sure, there’s plenty of heavy rock on the album, starting with the thundering opener, “Immigrant Song,” and continuing with “Celebration Day,” the heated minor-blues workout “Since I’ve Been Loving You” and “Out On the Tiles.”

On the other side of the coin is the small clutch of songs that has served to forever define Led Zeppelin III as the band’s “acoustic album.” Those tracks include the folky, pastoral “That’s the Way,” the rustic hoedown “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp,” the traditional reworking of “Gallows Pole” and the Eastern-tinged, alternate-tuned “Friends.”

It’s certainly a fair categorization. Zeppelin never had, nor would again, explore acoustic instrumentation to such an extent. Yet these unplugged elements had been present in the band’s sound practically since the start of their existence.

In fact, the folk-blues “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” was among the first songs that Page played for Plant at one of their earliest meetings, in mid-1968, at the guitarist’s houseboat on the River Thames in the village of Pangbourne. The tune was written by a University of California, Berkeley student named Anne Bredon in the 1950s, and was subsequently adapted by folk singer Janet Smith. Joan Baez heard that version and made the song her own.

Page, a dedicated Baez fan, took a liking to the track, although he stated that by the time he played Baez’s version for Plant in Pangbourne, he had already decided upon his own approach to it, “using a more fingerstyle method and then having a flamenco burst in it,” he said. “It’s light and shade, and this drama of accents.”

Led Zeppelin recorded their version of “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” for their 1969 debut, complete with a newly composed, full-band instrumental assault in the choruses. That album also included another Page acoustic moment, “Black Mountain Side,” which borrowed heavily from British fingerstylist Bert Jansch’s interpretation of a traditional Gaelic folk tune known as “Down by Blackwaterside.” Jansch was a key figure in the British folk revival of the 1960s, and many of Page’s British guitar peers, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards among them, were avowed fans of his work. But neither Clapton nor Richards were able – or, really, even attempted – to synthesize Jansch’s approach into a rock context.

Page, on the other hand, incorporated the interlocking, baroque-sounding fingerstyle patterns and alternate tunings of British folk revivalists like Jansch and Davey Graham (whose “She Moved Through the Fair” Page used as the basis for his own instrumental, “White Summer”) to add a unique character to Zeppelin’s sound. 

Indeed, the hypnotic acoustic lines, incorporating unusual chord voicings and droning open strings courtesy of DADGAD tuning (which Graham had helped popularize) seemed to function as a portal into an antiquated and esoteric universe that existed far outside the more straightforward riff rock and earthy blues howls of Zeppelin and their peers’ primary source material.

What led Page to be so receptive? Perhaps it was down to his naturally omnivorous tastes. He grew up enamored of everything from blues, rockabilly and skiffle to folk, traditional music and jazz. But there was also his extensive history as a working guitarist in various styles, which led him to label himself an “all-arounder.” Page was only 24 when he left the Yardbirds and formed Led Zeppelin, but by that point he had already made his name as an in-demand session musician, playing, often uncredited, on recordings for artists in a wide range of styles.

“You just got booked into a particular studio at the hours of two and five-thirty,” he explained. “Sometimes it would be somebody you were happy to see, and other times it was, ‘What am I doing here?’” The idea of commiting to just one musical style might have never even crossed his young mind. “There’s such a wealth of arts and styles within the instrument… flamenco, jazz, rock, blues… you name it, it’s there,” Page once said. “In the early days, my dream was to fuse all those styles.”

And so, with Led Zeppelin, he did. But while Led Zeppelin III is commonly viewed as the band’s “acoustic album,” it is also so much more, taking the rock, blues and folk elements present on the band’s first two albums and synthesizing them into something unlike anyone else was making at the time, be it the exotic futurism of “Friends,” the otherworldly “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper,” which twists the Delta blues into an echoing miasma of harsh slide guitars and distorted wails, or the almost jazzy electric blues of “Since I’ve Been Loving You.”

“Led Zeppelin was definitely growing, there’s no doubt about that,” Page has been quoted as saying of the band at this time in its complicated history. “Where many of our contemporaries were narrowing their perspective, we were really being expansive.”

All of which is to say that, when it came time to begin work on their third album, Zeppelin were ready for something different. And so, after completing their fifth North American tour in April 1970, the band took a well-deserved break. Jones and Bonham returned home, but Page and Plant had other ideas. At Plant’s suggestion, the two headed to a cottage in Wales, near the town of Machynlleth, where the singer had spent time with his family when he was a boy. The 18th century home, named Bron-Yr-Aur (“The Golden Breast”) didn’t even have running water or electricity.

By this time, Page already had three new tunes in his pocket: “Immigrant Song,” “Friends” and “Since I’ve Been Loving You.” However, Page and Plant planned to spend their time at Bron-Yr-Aur relaxing, not writing, and taking a break from the demands of their band. “When I look back at what we actually did in 1969 alone, it’s absolutely mind-boggling,” Page said.

But soon enough, the duo began working on new songs – folky, acoustic material that mirrored their bucolic surroundings. “That’s the Way” was developed during a walk around the Welsh countryside, something Page and Plant did regularly during their time at Bron-Yr-Aur. “We had a guitar with us,” Page recalled. “It was a tiring walk coming down a ravine, so we stopped and sat down. I played the tune and Robert sang a verse straight off. We had the tape recorder ready and got the tune down.”

Although “That’s the Way,” with its languid, strummed chords performed in an open-G tuning, was the only full song to emerge from their time at Bron-Yr-Aur, Page also stated that, “It was the tranquility of the place that set the tone of the album.”

Of course, to say that the act of unplugging from urban life at Bron-Yr-Aur was on its own enough to spur Zeppelin’s move toward a more rustic sound would be reductive. “There were three acoustic songs on the first album and two on the second,” Page pointed out, with his admiration for Joan Baez and Bert Jansch made clear on Led Zeppelin, and songs like “Ramble On,” with its strummed acoustic verses offset by power-chord-fortified choruses, highlighting II.

Additionally, by 1970 both Page and Plant had been turned on to British folk acts like Fairport Convention and the more psychedelia-laced Incredible String Band, as well as artists like Joni Mitchell and the Band. “The places the Fairports and the String Band were coming from were places we loved very much,” Plant remarked. “The Zeppelin thing was moving into that area in its own way.”

But, Page noted, “I don’t think you’d ever confuse Led Zeppelin with Fairport Convention or the Incredible String Band. I think they were coming from a much more traditional place, and I was coming from so many different areas.”

Early sessions for Led Zeppelin III had already taken place in November 1969, at Olympic Studios in London, the same facility that birthed Led Zeppelin. But upon returning from Bron-Yr-Aur, Page and Plant reconvened with Jones and Bonham at a new locale, Headley Grange, described by Page as a “damp and cold” 18th century country house in Hampshire that, much like the beloved Welsh cottage, was far removed from the trappings of modern life. There, the group set to work on new material.

“The reason we went there in the first place was to have a live-in situation, where you’re writing and really living the music,” Page said. “We’d never really had that experience before as a group, apart from when Robert and I had gone to Bron-Yr-Aur.”

Recording sessions ensued at Headley using the Rolling Stones’ Mobile Studio, with additional work done at Olympic and Island studios. By this time, Page had his electric guitar setup more or less solidified. After playing a 1959 Fender Telecaster on Led Zeppelin, he came upon that most classic of combinations, a sunburst ’59 Gibson Les Paul Standard – purchased from Joe Walsh and subsequently nicknamed No. 1 – through a 100-watt Marshall (though it wasn’t his only amp on the record), just in time for Led Zeppelin II.

The Les Paul is heard on Led Zeppelin III as well, but when it came to the acoustic parts for the record, he turned to a trusty companion: a Harmony Sovereign H1260 that he first purchased in his Yardbirds days and subsequently employed to write all the acoustic songs, and some of the electric ones, on the first three Zeppelin albums.

For III, that modest Harmony also served as his acoustic guitar in the studio (although a 12-string, believed to be a Giannini GWSCRA12-P Craviola, was used sparingly, most noticeably on “Tangerine”). From there, the Harmony remained his primary acoustic both onstage and on record until 1973’s Houses of the Holy, when he acquired a Martin D-28.

As for what he liked about the Harmony? “It helped me come up with all these amazing songs!” he once exclaimed with a laugh. “It encouraged me. It didn’t fight back, and it didn’t go out of tune. It would say to me, ‘Go on, man, give me more! C’mon!’”

Led Zeppelin III was released in the U.S. on October 5, 1970, with advance orders registering at almost a million copies. Roughly three weeks later, it was issued in the U.K., where it immediately topped the charts (it soon hit No. 1 in America as well).

Critically, however, the record fared less well, and after its initial peak, sales lagged. While Led Zeppelin were never much of a critics’ band to begin with, this time around they were also, oddly enough, dinged for moving away from the sometimes bludgeoning, overly sexualized sound that many had criticized in the first place. 

Some journalists wrote off the acoustic material on III as a mere Crosby, Stills & Nash rip-off. Lester Bangs, writing in Rolling Stone, opined that “the acoustic stuff sounds like standard Zep graded down decibel-wise,” even as he singled out “That’s the Way” for praise.

But as Page commented, “We were so far ahead that it was very difficult for reviewers to know what the hell we were doing. They couldn’t relate to it. Very rarely could they get the plot of what was going on.”

And indeed, there was a lot going on. Led Zeppelin III’s first two tracks, “Immigrant Song” and “Friends” – also the first two composed for the record – laid out the album’s warring styles: electric vs. acoustic, aggressive vs. exotic. But even “Immigrant Song,” with its pile-driving riff and wailing lyrics, held unexpected musical treats, such as the stabbing G minor chords that accent the main F# riff during the outro. 

“It pulls the whole tension of the piece into another area or another dimension, just for that moment,” Page explained. “And a bit of backward echo makes it a bit more complete. It’s putting all these elements together that makes the music have depth.”

“Friends,” meanwhile, was the result of Page’s experimentation with an unusual tuning, in this case open C6 (low to high, C A C G C E). The churning, deliberately strummed acoustic rhythm is clearly rooted in folk, though Jones’ mesmerizing string arrangement – which serves as the main accompaniment, along with some light percussion and a hint of synthesizer – suggests an Indian flavor. (As if to acknowledge this fact, in 1972 Plant and Page traveled to Bombay – now Mumbai – and recorded a version of the song with a group of musicians, including sarangi, sitar and tabla players, that they credited as the Bombay Symphony Orchestra.)

The rest of side one held numerous treats, in particular “Since I’ve Been Loving You.” While on the surface it seemed of a piece with previous Zep slow-blues behemoths like “I Can’t Quit You Baby” and “You Shook Me,” it was anything but. For starters, unlike those songs, “Since I’ve Been Loving You” was a Zep original. What’s more, it introduced a sort of progressive blues built from a complex chord structure and movement, and used a slow build that erupted in a furious crescendo. Plant described it as “a bit more classy than a 12-bar.”

“It was meant to push the envelope,” Page said. “We were playing in the spirit of blues but trying to take it into new dimensions dictated by the mass consciousness of the four players involved. The same thing goes for the folk stuff, as well.”

Indeed it did. And all of that “folk stuff,” save for the previously mentioned “Friends,” was found on side two of the record, which kicks off with one of Zeppelin’s most stunning interpretations: “Gallows Pole,” which is based on the traditional tune “The Maid Freed From the Gallows.” According to Page, the song emerged suddenly, after he grabbed Jones’ Vega PS-5 Long Neck banjo, an instrument he claimed to have never played before. “I just picked it up and started moving my fingers around until the chords sounded right, which is the same way I work on compositions when the guitar’s in different tunings.”

On the recording, Page played banjo as well as acoustic and electric guitar, with Jones adding electric bass and mandolin. “What happened with Zeppelin was very organic,” Jones recalled. “You find yourself with a bit more time and you sit down with some acoustic instruments, and you start exploring.”

Jones also played mandolin on “Hey, Hey What Can I Do,” a country-inflected acoustic number from the III sessions that didn’t make the final album. He recalled that he had purchased his first mandolin while on tour in America, and said that he probably learned his first tunes for the instrument from the 1969 Fairport Convention album Liege and Lief. “Literally, it was sitting around a fire at Headley and picking things up and trying things out,” he explained.

As for the remainder of side two, “That’s the Way” featured Page on the Harmony acoustic in open-G tuning, as well as on dulcimer and pedal steel – believed to be a Fender 800 model – and Jones on mandolin.

There was also the sentimental pop ballad “Tangerine,” which once again combined Page’s acoustic and Jones’s mandolin to great effect in the verses, and was accented by more pedal steel from Page in the chorus. “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp” is a Lonnie Donegan-style skiffle tune that actually had its origins in a Zeppelin electric jam titled “Jennings Farm Blues.”

The closing track, “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper,” is an acoustic blues that sounds as if Page and Plant exploded the form from the inside out and reconstituted the pieces in cut-and-paste manner. The peculiarity was named for then-current British folk musician Roy Harper, with whom Page had recently struck up a friendship, as a nod to an artist he viewed as uncompromising. “I mean, hats off to anybody who sticks by what they think is right and has the courage not to sell out,” Page said.

The same, of course, could be said of Page and his cohorts with the making of Led Zeppelin III. And yet, while the record introduced a new facet of the band, its ethos was of a piece with their two previous efforts in that it saw them taking sounds and ideas present in rock, blues, folk and traditional music and twisting them into something entirely new.

To that end, the brilliance of Led Zeppelin III, and in particular its folk-based material, is that, while it often sounds like music from the past, it’s a past unlike anything we’ve heard before – and one that possibly never existed at all.

Led Zeppelin’s approach on the record also served to influence their musical future. For their subsequent fourth, untitled album, they returned to Headley Grange and further integrated their folk side into its tracks, in particular on “The Battle of Evermore,” “Going to California” and, most significantly, “Stairway to Heaven,” a song Page said “crystallized the essence of the band.” (The album’s lack of a title, meanwhile, was Page’s reaction to III’s chilly critical reception.)

The band reconvened again at Headley for 1975’s Physical Graffiti, an album that included a III outtake, the Page acoustic instrumental “Bron-Yr-Aur,” and saw them pushing their wide-ranging sound out even further.

But in the end, it’s Led Zeppelin III that, through its embrace of more traditional instruments, unlocked the musical adventurism that flowed freely throughout the band’s subsequent albums. As Plant stated, “The third album was the album of albums. If anybody had labeled us a heavy metal group, that destroyed them.”

For Led Zeppelin, taking a step back on III was a statement that there was really only one direction – forward. “Now that we’ve done [it], the sky’s the limit,” Plant said. “It shows we can change. It means there are endless possibilities for us. We won’t go stale, and this proves it.”

Or, as Page put it, “I was into the ’70s. Our attitude was, ‘Fuck the ’60s! We’re going to chart the new decade!’ We were on a mission.”

It was the iconic blues guitarists who birthed the rock-star persona.

Robert Johnson, Son House, Lead Belly, Memphis Minnie, Charley Patton, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf… History has a way of deifying names such as these, ensuring that they’re spoken about in awed, reverent tones because of their innovative musical inspiration.

In one respect, this reverence is completely justified. These blues guitarists are among the founders of rock and roll, and of popular music as a whole. Without them there would be no Chuck Berry, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Duane Allman, Samantha Fish or Gary Clark Jr., to name a handful of guitarists influenced by their music.

And so they are revered, not only for their music, guitar talents or songwriting abilities but also for the hard lives they led, which were more often than not painted into their music.

These legends of blues plied their craft during one of the ugliest periods of racial strife and economic disparity in America. Alcohol, drugs, crime and poverty were among the hardships that informed their music.

Lead Belly was a convicted murderer, Robert Johnson a serial womanizer. Son House was a hard-drinking ex-con, and boozy Memphis Minnie was known to hold her own in a fight.

Only a fool would mess with any of them.

The music itself often gets the hagiography treatment too, in a way that smooths its legacy and ignores the circumstances that bred it.

The likes of Lead Belly have been embraced as folk heroes by artists such as Bob Dylan, and by the most recent crop of new blues-rock bands, who have favored these older figures over the classic blues-rock explosion crowd of the 1960s, because they’re more authentic and raw.

Nirvana effectively turned the MTV generation on to Delta blues with their cover of Lead Belly’s “In the Pines”/“Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” But an artist like Lead Belly wasn’t trying to be restrained or virtuous. He was just working with the tools he had – that sparser sound he and his peers honed in the days before Marshall stacks and Fender Strats.

If Robert Johnson or Blind Lemon Jefferson had had access to an electric guitar, there’s every chance he would have cranked it all the way to 11, like the rock and roll stars who were to come.

Paying tribute to Robert Johnson, Led Zeppelin recorded an amped up cover version of his 1930s composition “Travelling Riverside Blues” for BBC radio in 1969.

Featuring a blistering 12-bar solo and some textbook slide work, Jimmy Page tips his hat to the iconic bluesman.

In 1990, the band released this unique promo video for the song featuring live and archive footage cut with various Mississippi-themed scenes.

We can only guess what Robert Johnson himself would make of it…

Order Annye C. Anderson’s Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It was very intentional what the first album was gonna be. There was gonna be a definite showcase of the blues. But it needed to have that Led Zeppelin character put into it.”

How did Zeppelin’s treatment of the blues differ from, say, John Mayall’s and Eric Clapton’s three years before? “Well, it’s the atmosphere and it’s the attitude that’s created on something like Muddy Waters’ ‘Standing Around Crying,’” Page says. “It’s like Howlin’ Wolf: When you hear Wolf, he’s not messing about. It’s like, ‘I’m coming at you – and I’m gonna get you!’ And that’s why I love him.

“So let’s put it this way: Whether it was the first album or whether it was ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’ [from Led Zeppelin III] or ‘Tea for One’ [from Presence], whenever Led Zeppelin do a blues, it’s not like anybody else doing the blues.”

Remarkably, Page says he wasn’t Zeppelin’s biggest blues fan. “We all had our roots,” he explains. “Each and every one of us had played the blues in some sort of department or other.

“What I would say is that Robert was a blues aficionado, but he was very into the country blues. He was a damn fine harp player.

“He was used to playing that acoustically, but I was keen to get him playing it through an amp. So then you get things like ‘When the Levee Breaks,’ which is really gonna scare the pants off you with what he does on harmonica.”

Order Led Zeppelin's 1969 debut album here.

Lead Belly was born Huddie Ledbetter in 1885 in Mooringsport, Louisiana, close to Caddo Lake, a tranquil spot far removed from the bright city lights of Shreveport, the nearest big town.

His parents were farmers, and by all accounts Huddie was a tough kid who was able to pick more cotton than anyone else.

He quickly came to like women, corn liquor and trouble in about equal proportions. He liked hanging out in Shreveport’s red-light district, and by the age of 16 had not only gained an enviable reputation for his sexual prowess but also heard the barrel-house piano players, whose walking-bass figures would become a trademark of his own powerful rhythmic style.

By the age of 33, Lead Belly had mastered the 12-string guitar, met up with Blind Lemon Jefferson and become a regular performer at local dances and fish fries.

But he soon ran into serious trouble.

After an assault conviction, he spent a year on a chain gang, from which he escaped. He subsequently adopted the name Walter Boyd.

At about the same time that the United States entered the First World War, Walter Boyd was with two friends on his way to a dance. After an altercation over a girl, one of the men drew a pistol, but Boyd shot him in the head before he could use it.

Six months later, in 1918, he was sent to Shaw State Prison with a 30-year sentence.

In a remarkable streak of luck – something that seemed to characterize his entire life – Lead Belly, as he was now known, charmed his way out of prison after serving only seven years by writing a song about the prison governor, Pat Neff.

But Lead Belly’s temper soon got the better of him again, and by 1930 he was behind bars once more, this time in Louisiana’s Angola prison, for attempted murder.

Incredibly, history would quickly repeat itself. In 1933, John Lomax arrived at Angola looking to record the songs of the inmates for the Library of Congress. 

Once again, Lead Belly sang a suitably ingratiating song he’d composed about the governor, and the next year he was released.

He lived a colorful life, but Lead Belly’s real claim to a place in rock history is his repertoire of songs, from cowboy ballads like “Out on the Western Plain” (covered by Rory Gallagher) to his takes on the old English ballad “Gallows Pole” (immortalized by Led Zeppelin), “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” (covered by Nirvana) and “Black Betty” (adopted by Ram Jam).

His final performance was a concert at Carnegie Hall in 1949. He died that year, aged 61.

Order The Definitive Lead Belly here.

Born Lizzie Douglas in Louisiana in 1897, Memphis Minnie rocked the blues with guitar in hand and a voice both honeyed and forceful.

She ran away to Memphis at 13 and honed her talent as a powerhouse singer, guitarist and writer of earthy blues tunes.

As skilled, charismatic and raunchy as her many male peers, Minnie challenged their monopoly on the genre with her songs and performances.

She moved to Chicago in the ’30s, where she famously beat Big Bill Broonzy in a cutting contest on his own turf.

Minnie’s early sides with her partner Wilbur "Kansas Joe" McCoy (1905-1950) secured her legend and made more than a few male artists richer.

She and McCoy cut “Bumble Bee” (a huge hit that inspired Muddy Waters’ “Honey Bee”), “If You See My Rooster” (which Willie Dixon remade as “Little Red Rooster”) and “When the Levee Breaks,” which Led Zeppelin famously appropriated for their fourth album in 1971.

"There are so many classics from way back which we can give a little of ourselves to take them through the years," singer Robert Plant told Melody Maker in the mid-‘70s.

“That’s one thing about blues – you can do more or less anything, around a very vague shell,” he later explained to the Guardian. “And the more of it you do, the better you get until at the end there’s very few boundaries to it at all, and yet it’s all very tight.

On her own, Minnie enjoyed numerous hits, including 1941’s “Me and My Chauffeur Blues.” She took up electric guitar as early as 1942 and began laying down the kind of gritty electric blues guitar Muddy Waters wouldn’t play for another few years.

Although ill health forced her to retire in the ’50s, Minnie got her due in the ’60s blues and folk revival and through covers of her music by Jefferson Airplane and Led Zeppelin.

She spent her last years in a nursing home and died penniless in 1973. She’s buried in Walls, Mississippi, under a tombstone paid for by her fan and musical beneficiary Bonnie Raitt.

Order the Memphis Minnie Essential Recordings here.

1973 was quite an eventful year. Then-Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned over charges of tax evasion as the Watergate scandal raged, the Miami Dolphins finished with a yet-to-be-repeated perfect NFL season, and director Martin Scorsese premiered his seminal film, Mean Streets.

Yet, even with these and many other newsworthy events swirling through the U.S. that year, the music world had its share of noteworthy releases. They include such albums as Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, Queen’s self-titled debut, Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions, and the album we’re celebrating in this lesson, Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy.

Arriving on the heels of that group’s massively successful 1971 release, Led Zeppelin IV (the album that featured “Stairway to Heaven”), Houses of the Holy was something of a departure, as the band’s previous albums were darker and more bluesy.

In fact, it’s the only record in the Zeppelin catalog that does not include a blues-based song.

So let’s mark this 50th anniversary with a Houses tour of sorts, wending our way through the album’s tracks in order, as we stop to take in some of the unique attractions along the way.

Houses of the Holy blasts out of the starting gate with the restless pulse of “The Song Remains the Same.” Guitarist Jimmy Page masterfully layers jangly electric 12-string guitar parts, all played on his Fender Electric XII.

With the absence of Zeppelin’s trademark distorted guitars and massive single-note riffs, this opening track signals that the band has something different in store this time out.

With a bright and relatively clean tone, Page’s guitars combine an open-D-string drone with staccato triad stabs.

The guitarist is often heralded for his savvy orchestration of guitar parts, and here, he characteristically demonstrates his creativity: The two guitars contributing the chordal jabs are not simply doubled, as would often be the case in a situation like this.

Let’s take a closer look.

In Ex. 1, inspired by the song’s intro, the two guitars start with the same open D chord.

But as Gtr. 1 moves up the fretboard with a series of climbing triad voicings on the top three strings, Gtr. 2 follows suit, but while playing different triads that, when heard against Gtr. 1’s, add “color tones” to the aggregate harmony that convey more complex and richer-sounding chordal qualities, namely Dm7 (bar 2), G6/D (bar 3) and A9/D (bar 4).

By orchestrating parts in this way, Page subtly creates a wider and more colorful tonal spectrum. Pretty cool. And there’s more magic to come.

Next is the beautiful acoustic ballad, “The Rain Song,” for which Page ingeniously employed what could be called open Gsus4 tuning (low to high: D, G, C, G, C, D).

With it, he explores and exploits simple chord shapes – just two fretted notes surrounded by ringing open strings.

Ex. 2 is inspired by Page’s acoustic playing throughout this track. Houses of the Holy would seem to be an album of dissonances, both melodically and rhythmically, and there are all sorts of examples scattered throughout.

Take the acoustic intro to “Over the Hills and Far Away.” Page’s strumming pattern accents beat 1’s eighth-note upbeat in a way that makes it feel as if it’s the downbeat (beat 1) and makes us think that perhaps the song isn’t in 4/4 time, even though it is.

It’s challenging for us to find the rhythmic home base – beat 1 – and for a moment, we lose our musical equilibrium, in a playful way.

But let’s discover an even more intricate example of “rhythmic dissonance” that comes a bit later in the song. Just after the guitar solo, at 3:01, there’s a short, musically enigmatic interlude, which has Page’s, bassist John Paul Jones’ and drummer John Bonham’s parts combining into what may be described as a polyrhythm, a simultaneous combination of contrasting rhythms.

Here, Page’s riff starts as a pick-up on beat 4, then continues for two bars in successive groups of three beats.

This creates the aural illusion of the guitarist playing in 3/4 while drummer John Bonham (seeming not to notice) grooves along in 4/4 with a straightforward rock beat – kick drum on beats 1 and 3, and snare drum on 2 and 4.

Ex. 3 offers a phrase constructed using a similar approach. Notice in “Over the Hills,” how the “three-against-four” polyrhythm ends with the band reconnecting at beat 1 of a bar of 2/4, which enables them to smoothly segue back to the song’s main instrumental hook riff together.

More rhythmic adventures appear at our next stop, the funky, obviously James Brown-inspired “The Crunge.”

Kicking off in 9/8 meter, the song features Page’s clean electric guitar “scratch” strumming a dominant 9th chord, with lots of fret-hand-muted 16th-note rhythms, as it syncs with Bonham’s tricky drumbeat and Jones’ nimble bass line.

The 9/8 meter here may best be reckoned as 8/8, which is the fractional equivalent of 4/4, with an extra eighth note tacked onto the end of each bar.

Using a foundational Dm7 chord grip, Ex. 4 offers a funky rhythm guitar part that’s rhythmically along the lines of what Page played.

A visit to this playful track wouldn’t be complete without stopping to notice vocalist Robert Plant’s humorous allusion to the Godfather of Soul, as he searches for “the bridge,” capping off the song with a tongue-in-cheek “Where’s that confounded bridge?!”

Onward to Houses’ next cut, “Dancing Days,” where we come upon an instance of melodic dissonance right from the get-go.

Page tuned his Gibson Les Paul to open G tuning here (low to high: D, G, D, G, B, D) and enters with a sinister guitar line featuring the raised 4th (#4) of the key.

We’re in G major, where the 4th degree would normally be C, but here the creatively clever guitarist gives a nod to the G Lydian mode (G, A, B, C# , D, E, F#), which is nearly identical to the G major scale, or G Ionian mode (G, A, B, C, D, E, F#), except that the 4th scale degree is raised a half-step, to C#.

This creates an interval of an augmented 4th (three whole steps) between the root, G, and the raised 4th, C#.

Sometimes referred to as the “devil’s interval,” its occurrence gives the distinct impression that something malevolent is afoot.

Ex. 5 presents a similarly styled riff that brings to mind the song’s intro.

Offering an interesting change of musical scenery, our next stop is “D’yer Mak’er,” a quasi-reggae song, the title of which pokes fun at the British pronunciation of “Jamaica.”

Once again, Page shows his mastery of layering complementary guitar parts, as he first adds a traditional reggae-style rhythm part consisting of off-beat chordal stabs, strummed with upstrokes.

He then works his magic by adding a second rhythm part, which evokes island rhythms by combining palm-muted single notes with Steve Cropper-like, R&B-style phrases, not unlike Ex. 6.

We next arrive at “No Quarter,” a dreamy song where JPJ’s keyboards take the lead, until Page’s dirge-like guitar riff enters on the song’s chorus.

The guitarist’s riff harkens back to the overdriven six-string sounds of previous Zeppelin classics, and the instrument being tuned down one half step (low to high: Eb, Ab, Db, Gb, Bb, Eb) adds even more “grunge” to the proceedings.

Speaking of which, in the 1990s grunge era, the opening riff to Soundgarden’s “Spoonman” seemingly hinted at Page’s prescient power chord-driven riff.

Ex. 7 brings it to mind as well, although it’s played in standard tuning.

Returning to the dreamier section of “No Quarter,” which serves as the backdrop for Page’s guitar solo, we find the guitarist venturing beyond the trusty familiarity of the pentatonic and blues scales with some colorful “cool jazz” licks that evoke the modal style spearheaded by trumpeter Miles Davis in the late 1950s.

Ex. 8 brings to mind some of the tasty licks Page crafted in his solo.

Playing over a Dm7 chord, his phrases come out of the D Dorian minor mode (D, E, F, G, A, B, C), which distinguishes itself from D natural minor (D, E, F, G, A, Bb, C) by its raised-6th scale degree, B.

Notice how this phrase emphasizes a C major triad (C, E, G), to stress the harmonic extensions, or color tones, of the Dm7 chord. (C, E and G are its b7th, 9th and 11th, respectively.)

The rhythm is exclusively triplet-based, creating a restless quality that contrasts nicely with the mellow rhythm-section accompaniment.

Our last stop is “The Ocean” – old-school Zeppelin… at least at the outset.

Up until now, we’ve experienced some rhythmic experimentation involving polyrhythms and songs in off meters. For the opening riff here, Page finds yet another avenue to explore – shifting meters – as he alternates between 4/4 and 7/8.

As with “The Crunge,” we can think of 7/8 as 8/8 – again, the same as 4/4 – but this time with one less eighth note.

It’s smooth sailing right up until the end of the two-bar phrase, where we take a sharp U-turn and head right back to the beginning.

Inspired by this riff, Ex. 9 shifts meters to achieve a similarly jarring effect.

Lastly, “The Ocean” features some of the same kind of arranging/orchestration techniques Page previously used in “The Song Remains the Same.”

The guitarist again stacks chords on top of each other, and here he creates the illusion of a guitar orchestra.

In the verses, Page plays a shifting-power-chords riff. But when the riff returns after the solo, he adds a higher-voiced guitar on top.

The combined parts result in some unexpected jazzy dominant 7th and major 7th chords, but played with semi-distorted guitar tones, which delivers a nice bite.

Ex. 10 is reminiscent of this section.

On our trip through Houses of the Holy, we experienced Jimmy Page’s creativity, as he pushed the boundaries of what Led Zeppelin had accomplished to date, searching for new sounds and styles.

He summed it up best, when he said in the Holiday 2014 issue of Guitar World, “I was pushing myself to explore new areas of harmony. I wanted to investigate those outside edges – maybe push myself over the edge!

“I’m surprised, really, that I’m here to tell the tale.”

Have a question or comment about this month’s lesson? Feel free to reach out to Jeff Jacobson on Twitter @jjmusicmentor or at jeffjacobson.net. Jeff offers private guitar and songwriting lessons virtually.

Led Zeppelin electric guitar legend Jimmy Page recently took to Instagram to tell the story of why the legendary 1959 Gibson Les Paul he bought from Joe Walsh became his number one guitar during his time with the groundbreaking band.

Page is synonymous with the Les Paul nowadays, but for almost all of Led Zeppelin's debut album, Led Zeppelin I, he used a Telecaster. Though he loved the Tele, Page explained, Led Zeppelin's needs – onstage and in the studio – began to rapidly change after the tremendous success of their debut album.

"Joe’s an old friend and our connection goes back to some of the American dates from my Yardbirds days," Page wrote. "He was in the James Gang, based in Cleveland, and he’d come and see us whenever we were in town. He is a really nice man and I enjoyed his company.

"Back then, Joe brought a Les Paul Standard along to a Fillmore East gig on the first leg of the American tour and said, ‘You’ve got to have this guitar.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t need it, Joe, I’ve got a Les Paul Custom.’"

Page, however, also knew that, as Led Zeppelin's popularity grew, the band would be headlining increasingly large venues, and foresaw how that might present problems for his Telecaster.

"I knew that Les Paul guitars were very user-friendly, insomuch as they put out a lot of level when you plugged them into the amplifier because they had a double-coil pickup, whereas the Telecaster had a single-coil pickup," he explained. "With the sort of volume that I now needed to put out in live situations, although I was using controlled feedback, I found that the Telecaster was starting to squeal a bit.

"I had to be very careful about where I was standing because of the unsympathetic feedback."

"With the Les Paul you’d get feedback through the amp and speakers, but you could control it more easily and work with it. You could actually change the literal note and frequency that was coming back on the feedback. I just really enjoyed playing Joe’s guitar, and so I agreed with him that maybe I should buy his Les Paul Standard after all."

Aside from the easiness with which Page could control feedback with the Les Paul, it also didn't hurt that the guitar sounded particularly good on some of the band's then-new material...

"I played the Les Paul on 'Whole Lotta Love' and 'What Is and What Should Never Be' and that decided it for me," Page said, "it was definitely going to be the Les Paul from then on. I always wanted to make a change for each album sonically and that was my first decision for Led Zeppelin II."

"Like I had built Led Zeppelin I around the Fender Telecaster, I built the second album around the sonic texture of the Les Paul Standard," Page concluded. "Neither Joe Walsh nor I realized at the time just what an important thing he had done by coming along with that Les Paul."

Walsh, for his part, has also told the story of how Page came to own his '59 Les Paul a number of times, though the James Gang and Eagles guitar hero maintains that Page approached him, rather than the other way around.

“Jimmy and I became friends,” Walsh recently told Cory Wong on the latter's Wong Notes podcast. “Jimmy said to me, ‘Look, The Yardbirds are great, and I played on so many records…’ He played on so many sessions. If you look up what he played on, you’ll be amazed. But he said, ‘This Telecaster ain’t cutting it for Led Zeppelin. And I don’t know what to do.' 

"Now, Les Pauls virtually didn’t exist in England at the time,” Walsh went on. “They didn’t hit popularity yet, and they were pretty easy to find because they hadn’t been discovered – and they didn’t cost very much.

“After the fact, when that became the guitar for rock ‘n’ roll, the rest is history. But he said, ‘I got to get a double-coil situation and I’ve looked for Les Paul, there aren’t any in England. Do you know any way you could help me get one? Because Led Zeppelin ain’t making it with a Telecaster.’”

Though their accounts differ in a couple of areas, the gist of the story – that Page felt he needed the Les Paul for bigger stages – is the same in both.

Jimmy Page also adorns the cover of Guitar Player's brand-new March issue, which features a comprehensive interview with the guitar titan about Led Zeppelin's 1973 masterpiece, Houses of the Holy. 

You can pick up a copy of the issue on newsstands now, or (starting February 7) at magazinesdirect.com.

2023 marks the 50-year anniversary of Queen's self-titled debut album. In celebration of that major milestone, the band's guitarist, Brian May, recently sat down for an extensive interview with Total Guitar.

In it, the electric guitar giant discussed that first LP, and the influence Led Zeppelin had on the fledgling group. Zeppelin, May explained, not only sold millions of records, they did so without making any compromises to their boundary-pushing, hard-rocking sound.

“Those guys [Led Zeppelin] were not far ahead of us in age,” May said, “but the first time we heard Zeppelin, we thought, ‘Oh, my God, this is where we’re trying to get to, and they’re already there!’ 

“So in a sense, there were times when we felt like we’d missed the boat,” he continued. “Like we wouldn’t be able to get our stuff out there. But our vision was slightly different from Zeppelin, musically. 

“It’s more harmonic and melodic, I suppose. But I would never be ashamed to say that Zeppelin were a huge influence on us, not just musically, but also in the way they handled themselves in the business, without compromising. 

“The way they handled their image, the integrity, the way they built their stage show – so many things," May went on. "I suppose between Zeppelin and the Beatles and the Who, you would see where we came from. That was the kind of platform that we bounced off.”

Along those lines, May, elsewhere in the Total Guitar interview, described how – from the beginning – Queen looked to follow their own playbook when it came to making records, even if that meant ignoring conventional wisdom.

“[On The Night Comes Down, from the band's debut], we’re doing something which people told us we couldn’t do,” May revealed. 

“People in those days used to say, ‘You can’t mix electric guitar with acoustic guitar.’ Nowadays that sounds pretty funny, but it was a belief that people around studios had, you know? They would say the electric guitar is too loud for the acoustic and I went, ‘Come on!’ It’s just a question of balancing in the mix. 

"So," May went on, "with The Night Comes Down, it’s based on acoustic guitar, my beautiful old acoustic. But the guitar harmonies are all electric. And that was a beginning, sort of like a demonstration: ‘Yes we can do this, we can make our own rules!’”

To read the full interview with May, pick up a copy of the latest issue of Total Guitar via magazinesdirect.com.

With Jeff Beck’s departure from the Yardbirds in 1966, Jimmy Page took over lead guitar duties and assumed a more directorial role.

Although this marked the Yardbirds’ most commercially unsuccessful period, it also produced some of their most overtly psychedelic rock.

On 1967’s Little Games, Page played his guitar with a bow on the middle break of “Tinker Tailor,” used DADGAD tuning on the acoustic guitar jam “White Summer,” employed audio loops on “Glimpses,” and combined distortion and wah on the October 1967 single “Ten Little Indians.”

As the Yardbirds transitioned to Led Zeppelin, Page’s psychedelic efforts continued to a lesser extent but with decidedly more skill.

The solo break on “Dazed and Confused” shows him merging psychedelic rock into hard rock, while the trippy “Whole Lotta Love” finds him conjuring atonal guitar swells and sirens sounds.

While the first psychedelic rock era had died out by 1970, Page continued to explore elements of it in songs like “Friends,” “Achilles Last Stand” and “Kashmir,” the latter two of which aren’t so far removed from the dirge-like incantations of Yardbirds cuts like “Still I’m Sad” and “Glimpses.”

Taking those signature sounds with him from the epicenter of ‘60s psychedelia, Page greatly expanded the sonic palette of ‘70s hard rock, though his taste for the exotic goes back a long way.

Speaking to Guitar Player in this exclusive interview, the guitarist revealed how after going to great lengths to source a sitar, he was finally shown how to tune the instrument by none other than Ravi Shankar.

“I’d listened to Indian music,” said the Led Zep legend. “I’d accessed that on the radio, and this was way in advance of the Beatles. My father worked in a factory near Heathrow where they made wire and cables. Not guitar cables – big industrial stuff.

“He was the personnel manager, and there were a lot of Asians working there, and I said, ‘Dad, would you ask around and see if anyone there knows anything about sitars? See if anyone can access one from over there.’

“There was a guy who said he’s going to get one sent over, and it arrived in this makeshift plywood box… I took out the sitar, and there was this beautiful thing. I had absolutely no idea how to play it. There are all these sympathetic strings on a sitar, so as I plucked one string, the whole thing started to resonate and I thought, Oh my God!

“Sonically, all my learning was from listening to things and making my own interpretations of what I heard, but this was something else! Of course, later I got to meet Ravi Shankar at a concert in London. My friend and I were the only two young people there, and he gave me the tuning for the sitar.”

Browse the Led Zeppelin catalog here.

History has not been kind to Randy California. His name is stubbornly linked to his estate’s failed lawsuit claiming Jimmy Page and Robert Plant copied his 1968 composition “Taurus” to write “Stairway to Heaven.”

He should be remembered instead for his work with the band Spirit and as one of the great early hard rock guitarists.

Born Randy Craig Wolfe, he was a 15-year-old Los Angeles transplant when he met Jimi Hendrix at Manny’s Music in New York City, in 1966, and joined his band, Jimmy James and the Blue Flames.

It was Hendrix who dubbed him “California,” to distinguish him from the group’s bassist, Randy Palmer (whom Hendrix nicknamed “Texas,” also for reasons of geography).

When Chas Chandler took Hendrix off to London, California and his stepfather, drummer Ed Cassidy, formed their own group with singer Jay Ferguson, bassist Mark Andes and keyboardist John Locke.

Calling themselves Spirit, the band debuted in 1968 with their self-titled debut, a psychedelic pop masterpiece that featured “Taurus.”

A U.S. tour that year saw Led Zeppelin as their opening act, a stint that would later bolster claims that Page had more than a passing familiarity with Spirit’s music.

The group drifted from psychedelia for its next two releases, although California’s “I Got a Line on You,” from 1968’s The Family That Plays Together, and “Dark Eyed Woman,” from 1969’s Clear, were cut firmly in the style.

Spirit returned to the genre in earnest with 1970’s Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, their lowest-charting album at that point, although, ironically, it included a song for which the band remains well-known today, the folk-rock tune “Nature’s Way.”

What’s remarkable about California’s guitar playing is not just his stinging tone or versatility with everything from blues and folk to the blistering maelstrom of wails that peals over the outro of “Nothing to Hide.”

It’s also his supreme gift for melody that graces his solos.

Early on, he used a Danelectro U56, but later photos show him with Fender Stratocasters, Gibson Les Pauls and an Ampeg Dan Armstrong Lucite guitar.

Consistent to his setup for at least the first four Spirit albums was a Jordan Bosstone jack-mounted fuzz unit, which he taped to his guitar’s body for extra security onstage.

Among the best examples of his psychedelic skills can be heard in “I Got a Line on You,” “Uncle Jack,” “Mechanical World,” “Dark Eyed Woman” and his harmonized solo on “1984.”

In this fascinating interview clip from the early '80s, California recalls his time spent with high priest of the psychedelic era, Hendrix, in New York during the mid-‘60s.

“We hooked up spiritually, mentally, and he invited me to play with him,” says the guitarist. “It was his first solo gig at the Cafe Wha?

“We played for three months together; five sets a night, every night of the week except Sunday.”

Browse the Spirit catalog here.

It's not often you get two of the world's biggest bands on stage at the same time. But at the 1995 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony, members of Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith joined forces for a spectacular live performance of six songs including "Train Kept a Rollin'," "For Your Love," "Bring It On Home," "Reefer Headed Woman," "Boogie Chillen" and "Baby Please Don't Go."

That year, Aerosmith vocalist Steven Tyler and guitarist Joe Perry had the honor of inducting fellow hard rock veterans Led Zeppelin into the esteemed ranks of the Rock Hall.

During the ceremony, the pair shared some thoughts on the group Rolling Stone called "the biggest band of the Seventies."

“I love this band because they had no limits,” said Perry. “They weren't musical snobs and never held on to any one style. Zeppelin would change gear six times on one album; they played blues, funk, rock, reggae and ballads with equal ease.

“I think it’s laughable that some people still consider them just a heavy metal band, since at least half of their best songs are acoustic. They were doing Unplugged long before it was a hip thing to do.”

Meanwhile, Tyler recalled some poignant memories of the early days.

“In 1969, I saw Led Zeppelin perform at the Boston Tea Party,” said the Aerosmith frontman. “They ran out of songs after they played their whole first album, so they had to do a bunch of Elvis tunes because they wouldn’t let them get off stage.

“I just sat cross-legged in the back of the room while they played the middle section of 'Dazed and Confused,’ and it was so fucking heavy that it made me cry.

“Another time I cried over Led Zeppelin was an hour later when Jimmy Page emerged from the dressing room with a beautiful girl on his arm. I would have been very impressed except it was the girl I’d been living with (up until that moment.)”

Interestingly, Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones recounted his own memories of performing at the Boston Tea Party in 1969 to NME .

“As far as I’m concerned, the key Zeppelin gig, the one that put everything into focus, was one that we played on our first American tour at the Boston Tea Party,” said the legendary bassist.

“We’d played our usual one-hour set, using all the material for the first album and Page’s ‘White Summer’ guitar piece and by the end, the audience just wouldn’t let us off stage…

“I’ve never seen that at a gig before or since, and when we finally left the stage, we’d played for four plus hours.

“Peter [Grant, Led Zeppelin’s manager] was absolutely ecstatic. He was crying, if you can imagine that, and hugging us all.”

Browse the Led Zeppelin catalog here.

Browse the Aerosmith catalog here.

Visit the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame online here.

When it comes to shaking up the guitar world, in many ways Led Zeppelin were to the ‘70s what the Beatles were to the ‘60s.

Around a fortnight after Led Zeppelin released their eponymous debut album in January 1969, the Beatles performed together for the final time on the rooftop of their Apple Corps headquarters in London.

And as the decade that gave us Flower Power crossfaded into the era of hard rock, the airwaves grew heavier with the sound of electric guitar riffs.

Leading the way for myriad bands the world over, Zeppelin’s far-reaching appeal has inspired generations.

From the British folk acoustic guitar brilliance of Bert Jansch to the Chicago blues genius of Willie Dixon, Led Zeppelin directly referenced guitar culture on both sides of the Atlantic, weaving the roots of rock together tighter than ever.

With the historic Beatles split coinciding with Led Zeppelin's meteoric rise, the music world was in a state of flux and some journalists were keen to dig deeper.

How much influence did the Beatles exert on ‘70s rock music?

What’s the difference between Led Zeppelin and the Beatles?

How does Jimmy Page feel about the Beatles?

All of these questions and more are answered by Robert Plant and Jimmy Page in this intriguing compilation of early interview recordings.

Interestingly, when asked about whether they hope to be awarded MBEs (as per the Beatles) Page replies, “I think they’ve given up on people like us for that.”

However, in 2005, the guitarist one-upped the Beatles while receiving an OBE from the Queen at Buckingham Palace for his humanitarian work in Brazil.

Similarly, Page’s award was trumped by Plant in 2009 when the singer received a CBE for his services to music.

Browse the Led Zeppelin catalog here.

By the mid-1960s, Jimmy Page had made his name as a formidable electric guitar player with a list of session credits too long even for him to remember. (Hey, it was the ‘60s!)

Another phase of his professional career kicked off when he joined the Yardbirds in 1966. Though he had already turned down previous offers, it was after a particularly rowdy gig in Oxford, U.K., that he was inspired to join the British rockers on bass.

“I went to a Yardbirds concert in Oxford,” Page told Guitar Player in a 1977 interview, “and they were all walking around in their penguin suits. [Singer] Keith Relf got really drunk and was saying, ‘Fuck you’ right into the mic and falling into the drums. I thought it was a great anarchistic night.

“I went back into the dressing room and said, ‘What a brilliant show!’ There was this great argument going on; [bassist] Paul Samwell-Smith saying, ‘Well, I'm leaving the group, and if I was you, Keith, I'd do the very same thing.’

“So, he left the group, and Keith didn't. But they were stuck, you see, because they had commitments and dates, so I said, ‘I'll play the bass if you like.’”

Page’s stint as bassist in the Yardbirds was short-lived, however. Having swapped roles with the group’s co-founder and guitarist Chris Dreja to play alongside his pal Jeff Beck, the Yardbirds boasted one of the most formidable electric guitar duos in the history of rock.

“It worked out that we did the dual guitar thing as soon as Chris Dreja could get it together with the bass,” recalled Page.

Interestingly, Page later suggested Dreja take up the position of bassist in his new band, but having decided a career in photography was the way forward for him Dreja declined the offer. 

In 1969, Dreja's photograph of Page’s ‘new band’ – originally billed as the New Yardbirds – famously appeared on the reverse of Led Zeppelin’s eponymous debut album cover.

In this historical clip of the Yardbirds filmed just weeks after Page joined the band in 1966 he is seen playing alongside a ‘Burst-toting Beck while Dreja plays a Gibson ES-335 semi-hollowbody electric. 

Though Page must have been itching to grab a six-string and let rip, his performance as a bass player here is exemplary.

Browse Jimmy Page's eclectic catalog here.

While the music world was looking to electronic means of reshaping guitar tone in the late 1960s, two young pioneering musicians were seeking a more mechanical route. Kevin Godley and Lol Creme would find fame and fortune in the 1970s as the drummer and guitarist, respectively, for the British art-rock quartet 10cc.

But in 1969, several years before they found international fame with the 10cc track “I’m Not in Love,” Godley and Creme, along with future band members Graham Gouldman and Eric Stewart, were running Strawberry Studios in England, where they wrote and demoed songs for other performers.

In need of a string section for one tune, Godley and Creme pondered whether it were possible to make an electric guitar sound like an orchestral stringed instrument.

“We began thinking that maybe what we were looking for wasn’t bowing in a traditional sense” Godley told Tom Avis. “So the thinking was, and it was a very spur-of-the-moment thing, ‘What if we got an electric drill and we put a piece of rubber on the end of the drill bit and hold it against the strings?’”

The results were encouraging enough that they hired an engineer to create a prototype device featuring six nylon wheels, each with 48 ridges that worked like tiny guitar picks to pluck a string 100 times per second when pressed into contact with it.

The Gizmotron was born.

Unlike the EBow, the handheld, monophonic string-sustaining device developed independently at the same time, the Gizmotron was mounted to the guitar and could be used on all six strings simultaneously.

Though it wasn’t put into production at the time, the battery-operated hurdy-gurdy made appearances on various 10cc tracks between 1972 and 1976, the heyday of the group’s original four-piece lineup.

In 1977, Godley and Creme left 10cc to focus on the Gizmotron and released the album Consequences – with contributions from comedian Peter Cook and jazz singer Sarah Vaughan – as a demonstration record for the device.

Unfortunately, the Gizmotron was temperamental.

“Some days it sounded absolutely beautiful and other days it sounded like shit,” Godley said. “Sometimes it was like a chainsaw, and sometimes it sounded like a cello, and other times it varied between the two.”

Musitronics, maker of the Mu-Tron III, was brought on in 1978 to take the device into production, but the company was sold to synth maker ARP the following year.

The device it brought to market was even less musical than Godley and Creme’s prototype, and the spinning Delrin wheels wore down quickly in the hands of guitarists who pressed them too forcefully against the strings.

ARP recalled the Gizmotron, and by 1981, both were history.

For the next few decades, the Gizmotron was lost to the ages, its canon confined to a few cuts, like the intro of Led Zeppelin’s “In the Evening,” and the background pads of Paul McCartney’s “I’m Carrying,” as well as a handful of 10cc tracks.

Then, in 2015, Aaron Kipness brought the device to market as the Gizmotron 2.0, a re-engineered version of the original with improved design, performance and sound.

He finally got it right – and with Godley’s blessing too.

Click here for more information on the Gizmotron 2.0.

“My next guest this evening is a member of certainly the most successful group to come out of Britain in the last couple of years,” begins "Britain's First Lady of Folk" Julie Felix (1938-2020) as she introduces Jimmy Page onto her BBC TV show in 1970.

“The Led Zeppelin LP topped both the British and the American charts. And the lead guitarist in that group is definitely a very talented and special musician.”

This classic clip, though visually askew, captures a brilliant rendition of the guitarist's beloved “White Summer/Black Mountain Side” solo acoustic guitar highlight played on a Gibson J-200.

While Page also played Martin guitars and is undoubtedly the best-known endorser of the Harmony H-1260 Sovereign flat-top, the acoustic tracks on Led Zeppelin’s self-titled 1969 debut album were all recorded using a borrowed Gibson J-200.

“The J-200 used on Led Zeppelin I belonged to Mickie Most, the producer of the Yardbirds,” Page told Guitar World in 2014. 

“It was an amazing-sounding instrument. He graciously let me use it for the first album but didn’t let me use it for the second album, because, I think, by then he knew he wasn’t going to be the producer.” [laughs]

Many moons ago, Guitar Player also spoke to Page about his use of this fabled Gibson J-200 on 1969's Led Zeppelin. The following interview extract originally appeared in the July 1977 issue of Guitar Player…

What kind of acoustic guitar are you using on "Black Mountain Side" and "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You?”

That was a Gibson J-200, which wasn't mine; I borrowed it. It was a beautiful guitar, really great. I've never found a guitar of that quality anywhere since. I could play so easily on it, get a really thick sound; it had heavy-gauge acoustic strings on it, but it just didn't seem to feel like it.

Do you just use your fingers when you play acoustic?

Yes. I used fingerpicks once, but I find them too spiky; they're too sharp. You can't get the tone or response that you would get, say, the way classical players approach gut-string instruments. The way they pick, the whole thing is the tonal response of the string. It seems important.

Can you describe your picking style?

I don't know, really; it's a cross between fingerstyle and flatpicking. There's a guy in England called Davey Graham, and he never used any fingerpicks or anything. He used a thumbpick every now and again, but I prefer just a flatpick and fingers because then it's easier to get around from guitar to guitar. Well, it is for me, anyway. But apparently he's got calouses on the left hand and all over the right as well; he can get so much attack on his strings, and he's really good.

Get Led Zeppelin on vinyl here.