Q&A: Jimmy Page

Below is an excerpt of an article that originally appeared in RS 1054 from June 12, 2008. This issue and the rest of the Rolling Stone archives are available via Rolling Stone Plus, Rolling Stone's premium subscription plan. If you are already a subscriber, you can click here to see the full story. Not a member? Click here to learn more about Rolling Stone Plus.

Every song you played at Led Zeppelin's reunion show in London last year started with or was based on a killer riff. What makes a great Zeppelin riff?

It is something you know instinctively. It has energy and attitude. There's sex in it as well. It was definitely my concept to have a riff-based band. My influences were the riff-based blues coming from Chicago in the Fifties — Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Billy Boy Arnold records. "Boogie Chillen'," by John Lee Hooker — that is a riff. But you take it, absorb it and apply your own character, so it comes out another way.

Which happened that night. Your guitar-vocal interplay with Robert Plant, especially in "In My Time of Dying" and "Nobody's Fault But Mine," sounded brand-new, born on the spot.

In the Led Zeppelin shows of the Sixties and Seventies, it was the same numbers every night, but they were constantly in a state of flux. If I played something good, really substantial, I'd stick it in again. But Led Zeppelin were a working band in the truest sense. Even the rehearsals, in the run-up to that night in London, were dramatically different, in content and drama, from the show, which had its own character.

How hard was it to hear American blues and rock & roll records in Britain when you were growing up in the Fifties?

To hear current releases, you tuned in to AFN, the Armed Forces Network in Europe, and hoped that you could catch the title of something after they played it. We never got to see Elvis Presley until we saw his films. But the people who got sucked into rock & roll were collecting records, studying what was coming out of America. I had a friend who was not interested in a record unless it was by a black artist.

There was some blues in skiffle music. You got the songs, but the attitude and playing were not there yet. It was a learning experience, tracking these records down and finding the original sources — the Sleepy John Estes version of "Milk Cow Blues," Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup doing "That's All Right."

You just played along to the records?

That's what most of the British guitarists from that period did. You listened to the solo, lifted the tone arm and put it back down to hear it again. Once I was able to get a good guitar, my ability to work out what was being played on those records came in leaps and bounds.

How did your experiences as a studio guitarist in the Sixties — playing behind so many different singers — influence your writing and playing for Zeppelin?

I was very inspired by the [vocal] groups of the Fifties. I loved the way they worked, the perspective of the guitar within that sound. Blues was a pivotal thing on the first Zeppelin album. But I was playing acoustic guitar as well as electric in sessions, and I was into people like [American studio guitarist] James Burton. I wasn't into jazz so much — I preferred things raw.

For a short time, you and Jeff Beck both played lead guitar in the Yardbirds. Did you ever consider having a second guitarist in Led Zeppelin?

In the Yardbirds, when Jeff was there, we played the riffs in harmony. The approach was almost like a big band with brass — the power of that applied to guitars. In Led Zeppelin, I never considered having anything duplicated, because we were such a complete unit. We felt we could do anything in-house, certainly on the records. Once a song got on the road, those parts would change, especially where there were numerous guitar parts on the record. We used to do "Ten Years Gone" [on Physical Graffiti], and that's got lots of guitars. We did a pretty good version. It wasn't until I played it with the Black Crowes [in 1999] that I heard all of those parts live. That was a thrill.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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