Jimmy Page Jams ‘Rock and Roll’ with Nirvana, GN’R Members at EMP Tribute
For the entire night, the party line was that there was absolutely no way that Jimmy Page was going to perform. No matter that this event, a benefit show held Thursday at Seattle’s Experience Music Project Museum, was built to honor the guitarist; Page’s people insisted that he wasn’t going to take part in the festivities.
Then, as the night was winding to a close, Page, wearing all black and with his white hair pulled back into a small ponytail, scurried on stage and was handed a shiny Gibson Les Paul. And before anyone could catch their breath, he and the rest of the all-star lineup of musicians on hand launched into a disorganized but exultant version of Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll.”
The vocals by Paul Rodgers (Page’s old bandmate in the Firm), Alice in Chains singer William Duvall and John Hogg were muffled and all over the place, and Page’s soloing was shaggy and tentative. Perfection wasn’t the point. When eight guitarists, including Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil and Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen, are pounding out that familiar boogie-blues riff at jet-engine levels of volume, no amount of gaffes were going to clean the smile from a spectator’s face.
The biggest grin of the night belonged to Page. There to receive the EMP Founders Award, an honor bestowed in the past on artists such as Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart and Jackson Browne, and then sit in the audience while a cadre of Seattle’s finest musicians and a smattering of special guests ran through classics from throughout his five decades as an artist and producer, he never stopped beaming the whole night.
Some of that joy was certainly to do with the fact that the evening was also a successful fundraiser for the museum’s youth-arts education efforts, but it was most likely a feeling of pride at watching how a successive generation of musicians expanded upon the mix of psychedelic rock, proto-metal and electric blues that he and his Led Zeppelin bandmates conjured up. As he said in his acceptance speech, it went beyond “the spark to be able to play and make that into a career. You need to pass the baton to the young people.”
The players and singers that were brought to EMP last night to reflect Page’s greatness back to him were, by and large, part of an era of musicians who carried that baton. The house band featured a rhythm section made up of former (and maybe future) Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan and ex–Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin, and the other cast of characters came mostly from that same Eighties/Nineties era.
Guitarist Rich Robinson, whose band the Black Crowes once toured with Page in the early 2000s, put his own twist on the familiar riffs of “Custard Pie” and “Ten Years Gone,” before laying into an acid-dripping solo on “Dazed and Confused.” That dark spirit didn’t get invoked again until Thayil was brought out to calmly tear his way through “Immigrant Song” and a particularly beastly version of “Out on the Tiles,” also featuring Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic.