“When we first met it was just to see if we could even stand each other,” Jones told BP. “Robert had heard I was a session man, and he was wondering what was going to turn up – some old bloke with a pipe? Concentration is what made it successful – anybody could take anything anywhere, and we’d all follow.”
Gibson, Fender, Manson and Alembic bass guitars have all fallen into the hands of John Paul Jones at some point. He was also one of the first bassists to experiment with an 8-string bass. “I had to fill out a wide frequency range – just low bass with drums wouldn’t do the trick, but an 8-string covers the bass and the midrange very well. When Jimmy Page first saw my 8-string rig, he said, ‘I’m not playing to that!’ But of course he did. It covered most of the stage and the parking lot; it wasn’t a subtle instrument.”
With all the majesty of the greatest riffs in rock, Good Times Bad Times is the perfect introduction to Led Zeppelin’s singular bass man. Jimmy Page explained how it came together in his 2012 Rolling Stone interview: “John Paul Jones came up with the riff. I had the chorus. John Bonham applied the bass-drum pattern. It was like, ‘Wow, everybody's erupting at once.’” After the rocking root-5-root movement in the second bar of the main bass riff, Jones cuts loose with some killer fills into the song's breakdown sections. (guitarworld)
Recently Jimmy Page have released an interview on Led Zeppelin.
The guitar guru was so bursting with creative inspiration 50 years ago that he felt compelled to pick up a brush and use his skills from art school to take poster paints to his favorite instrument, a 1959 Fender Telecaster, and decorate it with a psychedelic beast.
He calls the axe "the Excalibur" that he wielded through the wildly eventful year of 1968, when his old band, the Yardbirds, crashed, and his new band, Led Zeppelin, was born just two months later.
He found his first ally in singer Robert Plant, whom he invited to his house to thumb through records and talk music.
Page said he used an unlikely bit of folkie inspiration - Joan Baez - to show Plant the sound he wanted, playing her recording of the song "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You" and telling him to emulate the way she sang the top line of the song. Zeppelin would put the tune on its first album.
"My whole life is moving so fast at that point," Page, now 74, said as he reflected on Led Zeppelin's 50th anniversary in an interview with The Associated Press at the Fender guitar factory in California. "Absolutely just a roller-coaster ride."
