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Credit: Far Out \/ Dana Wullenwaber<\/p>\n
Thu 23 July 2026 17:00, UK <\/p>\n
There was always more on the table for Jimmy Page<\/a> than being a session player for the rest of his life. <\/p>\n The Yardbirds were a fine place for him to start his musical journey, but having full creative control in Led Zeppelin was the first time he felt safe to be himself in the studio and make as many strange new sounds that no one would have heard before. But he also wouldn\u2019t have been able to make all of those classics without having more than a few clunkers in his back catalogue as well.<\/p>\n And Page usually didn\u2019t need to be pressed too much to bring up some of the songs that he didn\u2019t care for in Zeppelin\u2019s catalogue. \u2018Living Loving Maid\u2019 was one of the worst songs that they had ever made, as far as he was concerned, and while he was still proud of all of their albums on the whole, he did have more than a few issues when listening to what the band made on their final project, In Through the Out Door<\/a>.<\/p>\n Still, he was much better off working with the band than having to go back to playing session work. It was a decent-paying gig for him and John Paul Jones when they first started making music, but it can be a little stifling when you\u2019re only making music that someone else wants to be made. There\u2019s no way to really stretch, and that same thing applied to what was happening with The Yardbirds.<\/p>\n The blues band already couldn\u2019t hang on to a guitar player when Eric Clapton first decided to leave after they started recording tracks like \u2018For Your Love\u2019<\/a>, but Page and Jeff Beck at least gave them a breath of fresh air. They wanted to make new sounds that wouldn\u2019t have been in Clapton\u2019s style, but when listening to the way that the band was heading, Page couldn\u2019t take the idea of working on songs that were lousy takes on British invasion pop songs.<\/p>\n The other bands coming out of the woodwork, like The Beatles and The Animals, had their own sound, and Page needed to have something that was a bit more eclectic than playing the same cookie-cutter rock and roll songs. But even when being presented with a tune like \u2018Ten Little Indians\u2019, Page felt that the song needed a little extra punch before he ended up stumbling on the strange echo effect that he would use in Zeppelin.<\/p>\n In his own words, Page was only hoping to salvage the song, but he ended up with one of his signature effects, saying<\/a>, \u201cDuring one session, we were recording \u2018Ten Little Indians\u2019, which was an extremely silly song that featured a truly awful brass arrangement. In fact, the whole track sounded terrible. In a desperate attempt to salvage it, I hit upon an idea. I said, \u2018Look, turn the tape over and employ the echo for the brass on a spare track. Then turn it back over, and we\u2019ll get the echo preceding the signal.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Further reading: From The Vault<\/p>\n And you can hear it on a lot of the tunes that he was working on during those early days of Zeppelin. \u2018You Shook Me\u2019 had the exact same kind of effect on the way that Robert Plant\u2019s vocal was mixed, and when you look at \u2018Whole Lotta Love\u2019<\/a>, a lot of that middle section involved Page doing the same thing, only this time throwing in a few more bells and whistles to make it sound like some strange blues seance going on before his guitar solo comes in to tear everyone\u2019s faces off.<\/p>\n So while Page would have been happy to not work on a song like \u2018Ten Little Indians\u2019 ever again, it sometimes pays to have a few more blemishes on your resume. Because you never know when one piece of trash could have one little element to it that could come in handy when working on some more songs later down the line.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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