(Credits: Far Out / 2025 Paradise Pictures Ltd)
Sat 14 February 2026 16:30, UK
Anyone who has built their career on trying to copy Led Zeppelin is better off going back to the drawing board.
There’s no chance that anyone was going to write as many classic riffs as Jimmy Page could, and even if some Zeppelin copycats were successful, there is only so much time for throwback acts to make a dent in the zeitgeist before they start running out of ideas. We’ve seen it happen with everyone from Kingdom Come to Jet to Wolfmother, but Page knew when a throwback act was worth making a big fuss about.
Because, for all of the great bands that have been trying to bring rock bands in recent years, the ones that stick around are those that have something to say. As much as Greta Van Fleet might try to take the bones of what bands like Zeppelin, Rush and Aerosmith used to do in their prime, it’s always better to listen to artists like Rival Sons that are actively trying to build on what those bands did in the first place.
After all, rock and roll didn’t become one of the greatest musical forces in the world by staying stagnant. Even Page wanted to move outside the confines of what rock and roll could be when he first formed Zeppelin, and some of his biggest proteges have been able to make a name for themselves as legends in their own right, whether it was Aerosmith jacking a few Zeppelin riffs for their songs or Judas Priest taking that brand of heaviness and helping form the basis of heavy metal.
But by the time Zeppelin called it quits, Page was more content to reinvent music with his blues vocabulary. A lot of The Firm’s greatest songs had a lot more to do with old-school classic rock, and while his one-off collaborations with David Coverdale and Robert Plant were definitely fun, there were clearly some licks that felt like they could have been the successor to anything that turned up on Physical Graffiti.
That was the genre he was most comfortable with, but that didn’t mean that bands like The Black Crowes couldn’t absorb that kind of music as well. They were students of the blues from the time they started working on tracks like ‘Hard to Handle’ or ‘Twice As Hard’, but when Page actually worked up the nerve to join them onstage, he remembered feeling that same rush that he had when working up ‘Dazed and Confused’ for the first time.
Compared to every other collaboration, Page felt that his work with The Crowes was as good as any Zeppelin rehearsal, saying, “From my point of view it was absolutely incredible. There was not going to be a Led Zeppelin for me, so this was a parallel. I’m not going to say it was the next best thing. It was the parallel because it had all the ornamentation of the guitar parts. And I’m playing their stuff as well and having a great time.”
And it’s not like Crowes sheepishly mustered their way through the tracks by any stretch. They had clearly done their homework before the guitar legend had even walked in the door, and by the time they kicked off tunes like ‘In My Time of Dying’ or ‘Ten Years Gone’, there were moments where you had to rub your eyes to make sure that Chris Robinson hadn’t morphed into Robert Plant for a few seconds whenever he started singing.
They weren’t looking to be the latest incarnation of Zeppelin by any stretch, but that was never the point. Page simply wanted an excuse to play some of his old tunes again, and even if they didn’t have the name recognition of his old band, it was a dream for him to hear songs like ‘Ten Years Gone’ come to life like they always were meant to be.
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