4 Guitarists Who Wouldn’t Be the Same Without Jimmy Page

In the 2008 documentary It Might Get Loud, Jimmy Page mesmerizes The Edge and Jack White like awe-struck children when he begins playing the guitar riff to “Whole Lotta Love”. Now, White and The Edge are both iconic players, of course. However, when Page picks up a guitar, it’s like Mozart walking into a room of pianists. With a profound influence on generations of guitarists, let’s look at four who wouldn’t be the same without Page.

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Jack White

When The White Stripes rose to prominence in the early 2000s, the Detroit duo was part of America’s garage rock revival scene with The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and others. On paper, the minimalism of Jack and Meg White may seem at odds with Led Zeppelin’s arena rock. However, Jack White was also shaped by early blues and became a new kind of guitar hero with his distinctive fuzzy riffs and high-pitched solos. Like Page, White had updated the blues, creating something entirely new from a traditional source.

Slash

Page set the standard for any rock star with a low-slung Gibson guitar. And it’s hard not to think of Slash when you spot a cherry sunburst Les Paul. He may have resembled Marc Bolan, with his corkscrew curls barely contained beneath a black top hat, but Slash created his signature style by blending Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, and Page. (He also borrowed from Joe Perry—more on that in a minute.) Slash is famous for burning epic guitar solos, but his rhythm playing echoes Page’s kind of boogie. Without a great riff, groove, or song, there wouldn’t be a guitar solo worth paying attention to.

Joe Perry

Before Aerosmith became a legendary rock group, critics viewed the Boston band as a cheap knockoff of The Rolling Stones. Steven Tyler and Joe Perry certainly did their best to earn a Glimmer Twins-like reputation, but Perry’s (and Brad Whitford’s) riffs probably share more DNA with Page’s take on Willie Dixon. Perry resembled Page’s aesthetic, and after Toys In The Attic, Aerosmith could no longer be viewed as a parody. “Walk This Way” is as recognizable as any Led Zeppelin classic.

Eddie Van Halen

The guitar solo in Led Zeppelin’s “Heartbreaker” foreshadowed how Eddie Van Halen would transform the electric guitar. Van Halen expanded on Page’s fury of notes by hammering on with his picking hand. He may not have been the first to do it, but once people heard “Eruption”, any guitarist with a similar technique forever lived under Van Halen’s giant shadow. As with The White Stripes above, both Van Halen and Led Zeppelin introduced rock music to its future by updating the past.

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