A biography for Jimmy Pagehasn’t been written yet.
“Time sometimes passes quite quickly.”
“I always felt if we were going in to do an album, there should already be a lot of structure already made up so we could get on with that and see what else happened.”
“I am very good at remembering music and am absolutely certain that I never heard 'Taurus' until 2014.”
“I wasn't a very good draughtsman.”
“I'm just looking for an angel with a broken wing.”
“The benchmark of quality I go for is pretty high.”
“I would say New York, Chicago, Memphis, and Los Angeles were my favorites.”
“I do know there's a lot of music where Led Zeppelin has been leant on. We didn't do anything about it. And I wouldn't want to, either.”
“If I pick up a guitar, I don't practise scales. I never have. I come up with something I haven't done before, new approaches to chord sequences, riffs, rhythms, so it becomes composition. It's not like the music I'm doing is just a single thread.”
“Playing in my early bands, working as a studio musician, producing and going to art school was, in retrospect, my apprenticeship. I was learning and creating a solid foundation of ideas, but I wasn't really playing music.”
“The whole thing about 'The Rover' is the whole swagger of it, the whole guitar attitude swagger. I'm afraid I've got to say it, but it's the sort of thing that is so apparent when you hear 'Rumble' by Link Wray - it's just total attitude, isn't it?”
“The thing about Led Zeppelin was that it was always four musicians at the top of their game, but they could play like a band.”
“Nobody could have predicted the effect of John Bonham's drum introduction on 'Good Times, Bad Times,' because no matter what he'd played in before, he'd never had the chance to flex his muscles and play like John Bonham.”
“Almost the moment he died, they put him in Playboy as one of the greatest drummers, which he was - there's no doubt about it. There's never been anybody since. He's one of the greatest drummers that ever lived.”
“The one person who's disappeared out of the business is the A&R man. Because the listener at home becomes the A&R man. He's the one who chooses what tracks he wants on the album. And that's cool.”
“In the Led Zeppelin shows of the Sixties and Seventies, it was the same numbers every night, but they were constantly in a state of flux. If I played something good, really substantial, I'd stick it in again.”
“'Communication Breakdown' - it was punchy and direct, with a real attitude that was different to other bands going around.”
“But to put out a greatest hits on one CD was totally impossible, I just couldn't do it. The best compromise was to put out two CDs - Early Days - which is what it is - and Latter Days.”
“I was excited about opening for Vanilla Fudge because I was a big fan of theirs.”
“I think it was that we were really seasoned musicians. We had serious roots that spanned different cultures, obviously the blues.”