“So fresh”: Jimmy Page names the Led Zeppelin riff that still stands up

Keith Richards once proclaimed in his typically prickly fashion, “To me, Led Zeppelin is Jimmy Page if you wanna cut the story short.” While that doesn’t give much credit to the vocal acrobatics of Robert Plant, the thunder of John Bonham’s dominant drums, or John Paul Jones’ filigreed arrangements, perhaps structurally, Keef’s quip does hold a grain of truth. His guitar was the world of Led Zep, and his bandmates were characters within it.

There is something ethereal about Page’s dark and mystic playing that brought a unique identity to the searing band. The likes of Eddie Van Halen might have called his style a little sloppy in retrospective appraisals, but the counter-argument is that it contained untold depth and a wealth of nuance that outstripped any traditional ideals of refinement. Page’s playing is a world unto its own—channelling the troubling swirl of the 1970s zeitgeist.

However, the true beauty of it was that it channelled the zeitgeist of bygone eras, too. The world had heard nothing like Led Zeppelin, and yet, if you put their music under a microscope, as many legal teams suing them for plagiarism went on to do, their songs are heavily rooted in the blues. Rather than representing a covert robbery, this proved that Page and his fellow maestros simply recognised that if you’re trying to reinvent the wheel, then a wheel itself is a pretty good place to start.

One anthem that perfectly captured this attitude was ‘Whole Lotta Love’. The finger shapes are familiar when you strum this classic riff, but that adds a sense of poignancy to the invention. It feels natural, and that familiarity, married with the evident uniqueness of the sound, is what makes it so beautifully catchy. In fact, scientists have quite literally found that surprising originality partnered with a knowable melody is what makes a song stick in our head.

Whether Page was aware of that when he was writing ‘Whole Lotta Love’ or not, he certainly thought he had tapped into something timeless. “With ‘Whole Lotta Love’,” he told Total Guitar, “that was clearly going to be the track that everybody was going to go to, because that riff was so fresh and it still is. If somebody plays that riff it brings a smile to people’s faces. It’s a really positive thing.”

In his view, it plays into a niche canon of classic riffs that people will naturally play when they pick up a guitar, for, well, as long as people are playing guitar. However, the song is also far from simple. It expands upon this simple, bluesy centrepiece and exemplifies the scope of Led Zeppelin’s sound. As it happens, it was actually writing the riff that led to this new development.

“I knew with ‘Whole Lotta Love’ that there weren’t going to be any edits,” he said. “I insisted that they kept the middle section in it, which of course they didn’t like, but they had to do it. So I thought, well, if you just keep making the numbers longer and longer.” Buoyed by the confidence of having an irrefutable classic in their catalogue, Page was now primed to push for progressive calls, and the sound of Led Zeppelin was born, timelessly capturing the sound of their era in a glowing way that has remained free from erosion.

It has long been established that society seeps into art long before art is wrung back out as an era’s ‘culture’. Even Aristotle said so when he laid down his mantra: “The purpose of art is to represent the meaning of things. This represents true reality, not external aspects.”

Little did the old Greek know that his statement would beget a bunch of scallies from Birmingham who would change the world with heavy metal music—Page’s guitar serving as a conduit of capitalist realism as their city became shrouded in heavy metal of a different kind.