There’s no right or wrong way to approach the guitar whenever someone straps it on for the first time.
Sure, many people can spend their time practising scales trying to be the next Joe Satriani, but if legends like Steve Vai have taught us anything, the real genius behind playing is about trying to make something that’s a little bit more left field compared to what everyone else is doing. It might be nice to play everything in a scale and not stray too far from the rules, but Jimmy Page strived on teetering on the edge of musical sanity whenever he made any Led Zeppelin record.
The whole point behind the band was to break out of the cookie-cutter-sounding music that The Yardbirds were heading in, and when people got a load of ‘Dazed and Confused’, the temperature of rock and roll changed. The genre could now play around with something a bit more adventurous, and a lot of that came from what Page was doing with his guitar. He started with the blues like everyone else, but there was much more for him to explore.
And he wasn’t the only one, either. While Jimi Hendrix deserved a place in the rock and roll heavens before he shuffled off this mortal coil, Page already saw people progressing by leaps and bounds in the British music scene. Jeff Beck was already crafting his musical language by going into the world of jazz, and while Eric Clapton pretty much stuck with the blues for the rest of his career, there would always be moments where he flew off the handle and gave us some of the greatest licks known to man.
But the adventurousness that Page was looking for always came from him listening to people like Peter Green. The future Fleetwood Mac guitarist already had the chops to become a great guitar player when he took over for Clapton in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, but when he struck out on his own, a lot of the best playing he ever did came from when he was breaking out of the blues formula.
Even ‘Black Magic Woman’ had the traditional bluesy chord progressions, but his phrasing on songs like ‘Oh Well’ or the massive cries from his guitar on ‘The Green Manalishi’ are sure to blow anyone away who only knows Fleetwood Mac for their soft-rock hits when Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham came into the picture. And during the band’s bluesy prime, Page paid attention to everything Green put his hands on.
As far as Page was concerned, Green was everything anyone could ask for in a guitar player, saying, “I have total respect for the work of Peter Green. He had the complete package. He was a beautiful guitar player, a fantastic songwriter, and his vocal delivery was just superb. I just think he was so unbelievable at the point in Fleetwood Mac’s career when they did ‘Oh Well.’ It’s a brilliant track. The whole construction of it, as a piece of work, was just fantastic. It’s a great one to play.”
Despite Green’s output being far too limited during his time with Fleetwood Mac, his influence is still felt in many of Page’s best solos. He spent his fair share of time quoting blues legends in the limelight, but it’s hard to think of a song as brilliant as ‘Ten Years Gone’ without ‘Albatross’ coming first.
Because for as much as Green and Page progressed as players beyond their bluesy roots, both remembered the first rule of playing. It was about sharing music as much as it was about playing music, and while Page did play fast and loose with what the term “sharing” meant when copying somebody’s sound, he knew enough to give credit where it was due.