SILENCE THE CROWD YOUR PIECE OF HAND-MADE HISTORY
MARSHALL.COM and really, it was a square peg shoved very hard into a round hole. It wasn’t a comfortable fit at all. I know it’s wildly popular and people still sing along to it now… but I like to think that “Beck’s Bolero”, which I wrote and recorded, stands the test of time. The instrumentation and the people involved (Beck, Page, Keith Moon, Nicky Hopkins and John Paul Jones) pointed the way to Led Zeppelin. Keith Moon was a great drummer – but fortunately there was another master of that particular instrument waiting to be recruited.
A friendly rivalry with Jeff Beck runs through your life. There’s a story he cried with envy at some of the things you did with Zeppelin… What’s great is that we have endured through it all. We’re like 15-year-olds when we see each other – we will always be young boys who started exploring the blues on homemade instruments. But there was always a rivalry of a kind because everyone was listening to everyone else as the scene evolved. The thing that separated us, I suppose, was that I had a three-and-a-half-year apprenticeship as a studio musician. I learnt about microphone placement, compression, reverb and echo – how to record and produce. By the time we went in to make
Led Zeppelin I, I could call upon all that. I don’t know if that made Jeff or anyone else cry – but it did make me a master of my own destiny in terms of the choices I made.
Did you ever make mistakes in your career?
When I was a studio musician I did a few TV jingles that paid a lot for an hour session. There was a bit of muzak, too, which was actually really hard work. The red light came on and you had to read and play without making a mistake for 20 minutes. Great discipline, but soul-destroying. There might be some dodgy muzak and some TV jingles out there, but overall I’ve been pretty good at stopping when something doesn’t
