Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British musician Jimmy Page.
Last updated on December 24, 2024.
James Patrick Page is an English musician who achieved international success as the guitarist and founder of the rock band Led Zeppelin. Page is prolific in creating guitar riffs and his varied style involves various alternative guitar tunings, technical, and melodic solos coupled with aggressive, distorted guitar tones as well as his folk and eastern-influenced acoustic work. He is also noted for occasionally playing his guitar with a cello bow to create a droning sound texture to the music.
If I pick up a guitar, I don't practise scales. I never have. I come up with something I haven't done before, new approaches to chord sequences, riffs, rhythms, so it becomes composition. It's not like the music I'm doing is just a single thread.
The whole thing about 'The Rover' is the whole swagger of it, the whole guitar attitude swagger. I'm afraid I've got to say it, but it's the sort of thing that is so apparent when you hear 'Rumble' by Link Wray - it's just total attitude, isn't it?
I would say New York, Chicago, Memphis, and Los Angeles were my favorites.
Time sometimes passes quite quickly.
Isolation doesn't bother me at all. It gives me a sense of security.
I'm involved in all things musical. It's all consuming, even if it doesn't necessarily manifest as a record or a concert.
I play like I play. You hear it on 'Celebration Day.' It's pretty good for a one-night shot.
From the first album, Led Zeppelin was always going to be a totally new approach from what had gone before - whether it was approaching the blues or folk music like 'Babe I'm Gonna Leave You': nothing existed like that.
I don't think the critics could understand what we were doing.
If people want to find things, they find them themselves.
Playing in my early bands, working as a studio musician, producing and going to art school was, in retrospect, my apprenticeship. I was learning and creating a solid foundation of ideas, but I wasn't really playing music.
It was an extraordinary connection, the synergy within the band. There was an area of ESP between Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, John Bonham, and myself.
But to put out a greatest hits on one CD was totally impossible, I just couldn't do it. The best compromise was to put out two CDs - Early Days - which is what it is - and Latter Days.
I think it was that we were really seasoned musicians. We had serious roots that spanned different cultures, obviously the blues.
I can't think of a greater guitar icon than someone who has the musical intellect to change what was there before and take music in another direction. That's a guitar hero for me.
Zeppelin vinyl is quite revered in audiophile circles.
In the 1960s and into the '70s, everyone in their own way was trying to open up the musical horizon. There shouldn't be a wall that you're going toward and bouncing off.
Every musician wants to do something which will hold up for a long time, and I guess we did it with 'Stairway to Heaven.'
My vocation is more in composition really than anything else - building up harmonies using the guitar, orchestrating the guitar like an army, a guitar army.
That's one of the problems with the Zeppelin stuff. It sounds ridiculous on MP3. You can't hear what's there properly.
I wasn't on 'You Really Got Me,' but I did play on the Kinks' records.
'Boogie Chillen',' by John Lee Hooker - that is a riff.
Certainly, as a guitarist, I was aware of descending chromatic lines and arpeggios long before 1968.
I believe every guitar player inherently has something unique about their playing. They just have to identify what makes them different and develop it.
I may not believe in myself, but I believe in what I'm doing.
I seem to have tireless energy when I get involved in things, on an almost OCD basis, which is a good way to do things because if you're gonna do something, you'd better make sure you do it well.
Because somebody plays guitar, why does it mean they need a singer? Because people already have this image of things? No, I'll put my music together, then think about whether I need to embellish it with a singer.
You get a chance like that maybe once in your lifetime, and you are lucky to sustain it over that period of time. It doesn't mean to say that whatever I do in the future has no substance to it - I may present some new material I've got, and there are definitely new angles of doing it - but I'm not looking to recreate another Led Zeppelin.
I really don't listen to Led Zeppelin that much.
I don't think drums had ever sounded so big until Led Zeppelin's first album.
The Stones are great and always have been. Jagger's lyrics are just amazing. Right on the ball every time.
The passing of John Bonham... Let's just put it... Before we say, 'the passing of John Bonham,' the introduction of John Bonham on the first album and 'Good Times Bad Times,' it changes drumming overnight.
I wanted to emulate music from America - young punks playing rock n' roll is what it was. I read part of Keith Richards' autobiography, and it was totally parallel with me, learning from American records.
With Led Zeppelin, it has always been that mystique of how the music is done - how it works, why it works.
Right from the first time we went to America in 1968, Led Zeppelin was a word-of-mouth thing. You can't really compare it to how it is today.
The Yardbirds folded in 1968, and within a handful of months, Led Zeppelin was not only a band but also a very successful one.
You shouldn't really have to use EQ in the studio if the instruments sound good. It should all be done with microphones and microphone placement.
That's exactly why I came into music in the first place: to be inspired by what I hear to make it something else, to make it my own. That's how culture, creativity, moves, isn't it?
Led Zeppelin was an affair of the heart. Each of the members was important to the sum total of what we were.
Almost the moment he died, they put him in Playboy as one of the greatest drummers, which he was - there's no doubt about it. There's never been anybody since. He's one of the greatest drummers that ever lived.
I do know there's a lot of music where Led Zeppelin has been leant on. We didn't do anything about it. And I wouldn't want to, either.
I always felt if we were going in to do an album, there should already be a lot of structure already made up so we could get on with that and see what else happened.
Let me explain something about guitar playing. Everyone's got their own character, and that's the thing that's amazed me about guitar playing since the day I first picked it up. Everyone's approach to what can come out of six strings is different from another person, but it's all valid.
I'm always looking for the creative spark. Always.
I wasn't a very good draughtsman.
The benchmark of quality I go for is pretty high.
My first guitar was like a campfire guitar. And it was left at a house that my family had moved into... and the guitar was at the house. It was all strung up. It's normally something that would be beyond a bit of rubbish.
I'm pretty loyal to my guitars, you know, but then they're pretty loyal to me, too.
The instruments that bleed into each other are what creates the ambience. Once you start cleaning everything up, you lose it. You lose that sort of halo that bleeding creates. Then if you eliminate the halo, you have to go back and put in some artificial reverb, which is never as good.
I always believed in the music we did and that's why it was uncompromising.
I liked the Sex Pistols' music. I thought it was superb.
The only way to have time is to shut down and then do what you want to do.
My influences were the riff-based blues coming from Chicago in the Fifties - Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Billy Boy Arnold records.
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.
I'm just looking for an angel with a broken wing.
I am very good at remembering music and am absolutely certain that I never heard 'Taurus' until 2014.
I've never mastered the guitar. Either I was playing it, or it was playing me; it depends how you look at it. As a kid, the only things I had to do was go to school, do my homework, and play guitar.
I wasn't into jazz so much - I preferred things raw.
The Yardbirds sort of disbanded, and I was disappointed because I thought what we were doing was really good. I thought we were really onto something. I thought I was really onto something with these ideas that I had.