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Tue 17 March 2026 18:30, UK
When Jimmy Page first left The Yardbirds, he wasn’t looking to become just another blues-rock guitar player.
Led Zeppelin had to be their own unique entity when they first began, and even if they had a few of the blues tropes on their first records, Page had the idea for the band to become a much bigger musical force than what they ultimately became. He liked the idea of a group that was constantly evolving sounds, and that meant not being tied into one box when it came to all of their classic tracks.
Because when going through all of Zeppelin’s albums, it’s not like they fit into any one genre to begin with. Blues is obviously where everything got started, but there are also tunes that seem to defy any kind of category. No one knew what to classify ‘Kashmir’ as when they first heard it, and even when they started moving well outside of traditional rock and roll, how the hell are you supposed to compare ‘Whole Lotta Love’ with songs like ‘Achilles Last Stand’ that they did later on in their career?
Those don’t even sound like they come from the same band in places, but that was all part of the point behind Page’s playing. He loved the idea of keeping the audience on their toes when they picked up one of their records, but just because they moved outside of their comfort zone didn’t mean that there weren’t some pitfalls along the way when they first started reaching outside of their wheelhouse.
Then again, it’s not like Zeppelin were exactly critical darlings to begin with. The first few Rolling Stone reviews they got weren’t all that flattering to their sound, and even if they did get mountains of praise from the audience, it was much better for them to turn their noses up at any critic who only wanted to attack them. But even by those standards, Page felt that Led Zeppelin III was going to generate controversy regardless.
The band were no strangers to mixing things up, but to have an album kick down the door with ‘Immigrant Song’ and then going into some of the band’s best acoustic work was going to be a gamble. Not everyone was on board with hearing an unplugged version of the group, but even when they did dive back into blues covers like ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’, Page was furious when he heard some people calling them copycats for jumping on the folksy bandwagon that Crosby, Stills and Nash had started.
Page had a great deal of respect for all forms of music, but he didn’t want to be in the same category as CSN if he could help it, saying, “I remember an absurd press comment comparing us to Crosby, Stills & Nash because of the acoustic elements on the third album. I thought that’s absolutely pathetic, because acoustic guitars were all over the first two albums. It was always there—it was right at the core of everything; it was always meant to be there. The third album was just another evolution.”
Granted, it’s not like Page didn’t have a few things in common with what his folksy counterparts were doing. He was writing those kinds of songs years before the supergroup had formed, but when you look at the strange tunings that he was incorporating into his songs, it wasn’t that hard to find the same thing in many CSN songs, including the strange open tunings that turned up on ‘Suite Judy Blue Eyes’.
Both bands did have a habit of making the acoustics sound beautiful, but it wasn’t about Page trying to change with the times by any stretch. He had done a deep dive into that music in the days of The Yardbirds, and he wasn’t about to be called a copycat strictly because he had the nerve to make an intense song that didn’t need a massive amplifier behind him.
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