{"id":45326,"date":"2025-08-05T09:56:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-05T09:56:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/45326\/"},"modified":"2025-08-05T09:56:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-05T09:56:11","slug":"one-of-jimmy-pages-led-zeppelin-best-solos-was-an-afterthought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/45326\/","title":{"rendered":"One of Jimmy Page’s Led Zeppelin best solos was an “afterthought”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Jimmy<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out \/ Andrew Smith)<\/p>\n

Mon 4 August 2025 20:55, UK <\/p>\n

Jimmy Page<\/a> was a master craftsman. Not just the guitarist for Led Zeppelin, he was the band\u2019s chief coordinator. It was under his guidance that they first achieved worldwide fame. <\/p>\n

A dutiful session musician, what Page crafted while in the studio was the stuff of magic. A uniquely gifted performer and thinker, Page was able to write and record some of the finest rock songs in existence. But, like every lover of music, sometimes the best things simply happen. <\/p>\n

More often than not, the greatest songs seem to fall out of thin air \u2013 as if there were some great big cloud of music up there in the stratosphere which, ever so occasionally, lets slip something fully-formed and utterly sublime. All a songwriter can hope for is that one of these pieces of music finds them when they are clutching their guitar or sitting at the piano \u2013 hands poised. <\/p>\n

Led Zeppelin guitarist\u00a0Jimmy Page<\/a>\u00a0rarely left his instrument and was subsequently a frequent recipient of these droplets of musical brilliance, some of which found their way onto his group\u2019s sophomore album,\u00a0Led Zeppelin II.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Led Zeppelin\u2019s\u00a0<\/a>second studio album was written during a particularly busy time in the band\u2019s career. In 1969, they were on top of the world, having embarked on four American and European tours. As you would expect, the band spent a lot of time on the road, where they would jam to pass the time.<\/p>\n

\"Jimmy<\/a>Jimmy Page (Credits: Far Out \/ Alamy)<\/p>\n

Many of the songs on Led Zeppelin II are a product of those extended improv sessions, and a good deal of them were recorded at separate studios around the US and UK while the band were still on tour. Hoping to record their second album while they were on the rise, Page and the band were forced to carve out chunks of time wherever they could, going so far as to jump from an afterparty following their sell-out show New York City\u2019s Fillmore East to a recording studio that same night. It is this urgency that drives Led Zeppelin II, forcing Page to come up with many of his guitar lines on the spot.<\/p>\n

An excellent example comes in the form of Page\u2019s solo on \u2018Heartbreaker\u2019. Another essential riff in the curriculum of Rock History 101. Rooted in the classic blues scale, it\u2019s transformed by searing overdrive fuzz and the unstoppable force of Bonham and Jones into something that feels like a drunken dinosaur rampaging across the earth.<\/p>\n

As Page once recalled, the solo was entirely improvised, plucked seemingly from nowhere when the band were looking for something to give the track a much-needed edge. \u201cI just fancied doing it,\u201d Page explained in a 1993 interview.<\/a> <\/p>\n

\u201cI was always trying to do something different or something that no one else had thought of,\u201d he added. \u201cBut the interesting thing about that solo is that it was recorded after we had already finished \u2018Heartbreaker\u2019 \u2013 it was an afterthought. That whole section was recorded in a different studio and was sort of slotted in the middle. If you notice, the whole sound of the guitar is different.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s right, the solo is markedly different in tone. Unlike the previously recorded guitar tracks, Page employed his Gibson Les Paul for the \u2018Heartbreaker\u2019 overdubs, choosing to hook it up to a red-hot Marshall stack. <\/p>\n

The pairing was thrown together out of sheer necessity but would end up becoming Page\u2019s signature combo, going on to define the sound of Led Zeppelin\u2019s subsequent records \u2013 and it was all little more than an afterthought. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n

The Far Out Led Zeppelin Newsletter<\/p>\n

All the latest stories about Led Zeppelin from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ Andrew Smith) Mon 4 August 2025 20:55, UK Jimmy Page was a master craftsman.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":45327,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[96,23795,25705,10866,128,23837,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-45326","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-jimmy-page","10":"tag-john-bonham","11":"tag-led-zeppelin","12":"tag-music","13":"tag-robert-plant","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45326\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}