(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Tue 9 September 2025 15:30, UK
No one should be clamouring for the next Led Zeppelin.
As much as classic rock fans would love the idea of someone coming out and having the same impact as the British heavyweights did back in the day, those kinds of acts don’t happen simply because people will them into existence. It takes the right musicians working in exactly the right way, and even Jimmy Page admitted that even the best bands weren’t going to hold a candle to them.
But, really, the idea of Page thinking that anything could best Led Zeppelin would have been impossible. The band had been Page’s brainchild ever since they began, and when John Bonham passed away, they lost a core part of their identity. No one ever had a thought of continuing without their musical brother, but Page knew he couldn’t simply stop making music, either.
While John Paul Jones turned to a solo career and session work and Robert Plant went in every direction he could think of, Page was always dipping his toes back into the blues. Zeppelin’s demise didn’t mean that he had to give up sounding like Jimmy Page, and looking through his collaborations with everyone from Paul Rodgers to David Coverdale, it was always easy to tell when his guitar came screaming in.
Even if he wasn’t going to have Zeppelin again, there was always a hunger from fans to hear at least something close to it. Everyone may have had to settle for the pretty boys on MTV trying to make their stabs at rock and roll in the late 1980s, but right before grunge came in, a more rootsy form of rock had started to take hold of the zeitgeist for a split second.
As much as Nirvana gets the credit or blame for killing hair metal, Page had been paying attention to what had been going on with the blues acts of the time. Stevie Ray Vaughan had his place on the charts before his untimely death, but right in the era between Warrant’s ‘Cherry Pie’ and Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, there were bands like The Black Crowes carrying the torch for Page’s brand of hard rock.
It was rootsy when it wanted to be and could rock as hard as anyone else, and when Page got to perform with them, he did at least get a few whiffs of that Zeppelin magic, saying, “From my point of view, it was absolutely incredible. There was not going to be a Led Zeppelin for me, but this was a parallel. I’m not going to say it was the next best thing, it was absolutely parallel, because it had all the augmentation of all the guitar parts, and more, and I’m playing their stuff as well and having a great time.”
And even if Page was enthusiastic about the project, the fact that he refuses to call it the “next best thing” to Zeppelin is more out of reverence than anything else. Whenever they performed songs like ‘Ten Years Gone’ live, it was out of remembrance for the brilliant music that Page made back in the day, even if the drums didn’t exactly have the same power as Bonzo did in his prime.
It was a great treat for people who had been waiting to hear what Page could do, but since Plant had left his ‘Percy’ persona behind and started making genre detours, this was the closest anyone was going to get to hearing the band’s music done justice this well. The Zeppelin reunion that went on in 2007 may have been one thing, but The Black Crowes looked like the young apprentices learning from the master whenever Page stepped onstage with them.
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