The 1973 album cover Jimmy Page thought was far from picture perfect: “He had some balls”
No one has ever had more control over their sound than Jimmy Page.
When he originally started Led Zeppelin, it’s safe to say he knew exactly what he was doing. There had been a few moments in his life that had led to him developing the understanding necessary to put together a band like Led Zep.
The first was playing with The Yardbirds, and enjoying the freedom that came with being in such a band. Having the opportunity to play around with different ideas and essentially run free with various styles and sounds led to him tracing an outline of what would eventually become the classic rock behemoths we know.
“I had a lot of ideas from my days with The Yardbirds. The Yardbirds allowed me to improvise a lot in live performance, and I started building a textbook of ideas that I eventually used in Zeppelin,” said Page, “I wanted Zeppelin to be a marriage of blues, hard rock and acoustic music topped with heavy choruses, a combination that had never been done before […] Lots of light and shade in the music.”
The second thing that prepared him for life in Led Zeppelin was his knowledge of the inner workings of a studio. Before he joined The Yardbirds, he spent his time working as a session musician for a number of different artists, and in doing this, he learned about the studio effects he could use to really bring new life to his songs. He even outsmarted engineers from time to time, as his understanding about how you could add something exciting to a track was second to none.
“I told the engineer, Glyn Johns, that I wanted to use backwards echo on the end,” said Page when discussing the recording of the song ‘You Shook Me’, “He said, ‘Jimmy, it can’t be done’. I said, ‘Yes, it can. I’ve already done it’.” This led them to getting into an argument, where the frontman got his way eventually, but not before he had to raise his voice: “He started refusing to push the fader up so I could hear the result. Finally, I had to scream, ‘Push the bloody fader up!’ And lo and behold, the effect worked perfectly.”
Why is all of this important in an article about an album cover? Well, it’s important to understand just how much time and effort Jimmy Page put into the music that he worked on. The construction of different songs and the recording process are both a fine art, and one that he took very seriously.
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