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.
