During an interview, indie pop band The Lemon Twigs described The Beatles as a “finite thing”. They elaborated, “I wouldn’t wanna model my career after them because it’s such a moment in time and combustible”. This could apply to a number of bands, where the circumstances leading up to and following their getting together had to be perfect for it to work. One of these finite musical outfits was Led Zeppelin.
Led Zeppelin ended up becoming one of the biggest rock bands on the planet, but for that to happen, a lot had to go right. Jimmy Page was one of the most instrumental components; his back catalogue of work prior to being in Zeppelin was the clear image he had in his mind for the band when they met.
After playing as a session musician for some time and following a stint in The Yardbirds, Page had eclectic talent and a clear image of the music he wanted to make. “I had a lot of ideas from my days with The Yardbirds. The Yardbirds allowed me to improvise a lot in live performance, and I started building a textbook of ideas that I eventually used in Zeppelin.”
The sound he was keen on capturing was a barrage of various styles and sounds he had been exposed to during his work as a session musician. “I wanted Zeppelin to be a marriage of blues, hard rock and acoustic music topped with heavy choruses – a combination that had never been done before,” he explained, “Lots of light and shade in the music.”
While the vision might have been clear in Page’s head, there was a lot resting on the first band practice. If fellow band members weren’t on board with what the guitarist was trying to achieve, Led Zeppelin could have been over before it even began. And so, in a small room on Gerrard Street, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, Robert Plant, and John Bonham all got together, and the first Led Zeppelin jam happened.
“We first played together in a small room on Gerrard Street, a basement room, which is now Chinatown,” recalled John Paul Jones, “There was just wall-to-wall amplifiers, and a space for the door – and that was it. Literally, it was everyone looking at each other – ‘What shall we play?’ Me doing more sessions, didn’t know anything at all.”
After a few moments of awkward silence, the band started playing, and it was clear they were on to something special. “There was an old Yardbirds tune,” said Jones, “Called ‘Train Kept a Rollin’… The whole room just exploded.”
Robert Plant recalls the session, too, saying that he was happy with how things were going but also cautious, given how special what the four of them seemed to have stumbled upon was. “I remember the little room, all I can remember it was hot and it sounded good – very exciting and very challenging,” he said, “Because I could feel that something was happening to myself and to everyone else in the room. It felt like we’d found something that we had to be very careful with because we might lose it.”
The band went on to conquer the world with a sound that was equal parts powerful and fragile. Combustible indeed, Led Zeppelin’s explosive sound is one of the pivotal foundations of modern rock music.