Jimmy Page never entered the music business to be considered a guitar legend. From the time he attended his first session as a guitarist, Page was looking to serve the song and occasionally showcase his technique, playing lead breaks that always had taste whenever the tape started rolling. Although he may have been able to create magic whenever he had an electric guitar in his hands, he considered one Led Zeppelin song to show his worst tendencies.
By the time Page had gotten Led Zeppelin off the ground, though, he was already confident in making some of the most primal rock music ever. With The Yardbirds long since fading from view, Page would cultivate the sounds of hard rock with every guitar riff he came up with, blending blues and darkness on tracks like ‘Whole Lotta Love’.
That’s not to say he wasn’t willing to experiment with different sounds, either. By the time Zeppelin had created their third record, Page was looking to make sounds he wasn’t hearing in traditional rock and roll, blending folk tunes like ‘That’s the Way’ with outlandish harmony on ‘Friends’.
When the band decided to release their fourth album with no title, Page knew their sound was nailed down to a science. Putting together the basis of their masterpiece ‘Stairway to Heaven’, the rest of the album featured a treasure trove of Zeppelin’s greatest work, including the sonic detour ‘The Battle of Evermore’.
Featuring the only time that Zeppelin had a guest vocalist on record, Robert Plant and Sandy Denny play different characters in this middle-aged tale as Page supports on both acoustic guitar and mandolin. Though Page ended up taking a liking to the tune, he never had confidence in delivering any fingerpicking style to a Zeppelin track.
As opposed to the fretboard fireworks that would emanate off his guitar in the early days, Page thought that ‘The Battle of Evermore’ was an example of how ill-equipped he was at fingerpicking, saying, “That’s fingerpicking again, going on back to studio days and developing a certain amount of technique. At least enough to be adapted and used. My fingerpicking is sort of a cross between Pete Seeger, Earl Scruggs, and total incompetence.”
While the inspiration of artists like Seeger is evident in Page’s playing, his delicate touch when fingerpicking is far from the incompetence he is referring to. Despite being a bit rough around the edges, those various technical flubs help give the track character, almost like the listener hears the song in passing as they work their way through this epic battle.
That kind of unsteady playing was also a pivotal part of Page’s sound whenever he played the electric guitar. Although a song like ‘Heartbreaker’ boasts one of the most celebrated solos in rock history, Page is more than a little bit sloppy during the final take, bringing a sense of anarchy and wild abandon to the way he approaches his instrument.
For all of the technical finesse that Page can pull off on any Zeppelin record, ‘The Battle of Evermore’ is an excellent example of him embracing the chaotic side of rock and roll. No great song is meant to be perfect, and it’s always more about the mojo behind a song than getting every single note to ring out correctly.
