Jimmy Page Talks Guitar and Blues
Finally Jimmy Page has admitted he ripped off the old 50's Chicago blues artists. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Jimmy stated the following:
Every song you played at Led Zeppelin's reunion show in London last year started with or was based on a killer riff. What makes a great Zeppelin riff?
It is something you know instinctively. It has energy and attitude. There's sex in it as well. It was definitely my concept to have a riff-based band. My influences were the riff-based blues coming from Chicago in the Fifties — Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Billy Boy Arnold records. "Boogie Chillen'," by John Lee Hooker — that is a riff. But you take it, absorb it and apply your own character, so it comes out another way.
How hard was it to hear American blues and rock & roll records in Britain when you were growing up in the Fifties?
To hear current releases, you tuned in to AFN, the Armed Forces Network in Europe, and hoped that you could catch the title of something after they played it. We never got to see Elvis Presley until we saw his films. But the people who got sucked into rock & roll were collecting records, studying what was coming out of America. I had a friend who was not interested in a record unless it was by a black artist.
There was some blues in skiffle music. You got the songs, but the attitude and playing were not there yet. It was a learning experience, tracking these records down and finding the original sources — the Sleepy John Estes version of "Milk Cow Blues," Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup doing "That's All Right."
It was actually a good interview from a magazine destined to be the poster child of the Democratic party and the irrelevant list magazine. Read more at RollingStone.com.
Every song you played at Led Zeppelin's reunion show in London last year started with or was based on a killer riff. What makes a great Zeppelin riff?
It is something you know instinctively. It has energy and attitude. There's sex in it as well. It was definitely my concept to have a riff-based band. My influences were the riff-based blues coming from Chicago in the Fifties — Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Billy Boy Arnold records. "Boogie Chillen'," by John Lee Hooker — that is a riff. But you take it, absorb it and apply your own character, so it comes out another way.
How hard was it to hear American blues and rock & roll records in Britain when you were growing up in the Fifties?
To hear current releases, you tuned in to AFN, the Armed Forces Network in Europe, and hoped that you could catch the title of something after they played it. We never got to see Elvis Presley until we saw his films. But the people who got sucked into rock & roll were collecting records, studying what was coming out of America. I had a friend who was not interested in a record unless it was by a black artist.
There was some blues in skiffle music. You got the songs, but the attitude and playing were not there yet. It was a learning experience, tracking these records down and finding the original sources — the Sleepy John Estes version of "Milk Cow Blues," Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup doing "That's All Right."
It was actually a good interview from a magazine destined to be the poster child of the Democratic party and the irrelevant list magazine. Read more at RollingStone.com.
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