Foxy Frank

Stairway To Heaven

Rank: 3
Album: Led Zeppelin IV

Jimmy Page trampled over two rules of pop music with this masterpiece: it’s more than eight minutes long, a previously prohibited length for pop radio formats, and the tempo speeds up as the song unfolds. “Stairway” is the epitome of Page’s brilliance as not only a guitarist, but a composer and arranger, as he layers six-string acoustic and 12-string electric guitars throughout the song in a gradual crescendo that culminates in what many consider to be the perfect rock guitar solo, performed on his trusty 1959 Fender “Dragon” Telecaster (his go-to guitar in the early days of Led Zeppelin).

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tangiblejackwhite:

a—tout-le-monde:

Jack speaks the truth

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Building The Stairway

Jimmy Page, Hard rock’s greatest guitar god on the roots of his sound and the secrets of Zeppelin’s finest moments:

Every song you played at Led Zeppelin’s reunion show in London in 2007 started off with or was based on a killer riff. What makes a great Zeppelin riff?

It is something you know instinctively. It has energy and attitude. There’s sex in it as well. It was definitely my concept to have a riff-based band. My influences were the riff-based blues coming from Chicago in the Fifties - Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Billy Boy Arnold records. “Boogie Chillen’,” by John Lee Hooker - that is a riff. But you take it, absorb it and apply your own character, so it comes out another way.

If anyone ever asks me about them again I will always refer to this post.

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(Source: sassygaypaul)

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(1995, Page, Plant, Bonham (Jason) and Jones for Rock N Roll Hall of Fame induction)

Led Zeppelin Bring It All Back Home: 1995

Led Zeppelin’s induction couldn’t have come at a more awkward time for the band. Months earlier, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant had reunited for an album and made plans to tour without bassist John Paul Jones. He first heard about the tour when he read about it in a newspaper. At the podium to accept the award, Jones couldn’t resist a dig at his bandmates: “Thank you, my friends,” he said,”for finally remembering my phone number.”

Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith inducted Led Zeppelin. Tyler started off his speech with a rock & roll yowl. (Standing at the side of the stage, Plant whispered to himself, “You wish.”) Tyler went on to talk about the opening for the Yardbirds in the late Sixties and how page stole his girlfriend, but that “Jimmy was such a motherfucker onstage, I couldn’t hold it against him.” Plant played down all the talk of the band’s old debauchery, saying “I don’t remember a single television set going” out the window.

The speeches paled in comparison to the epic reunion: Tyler, Perry and the late John Bonham’s son Jason joined them for a scorching “Bring It on Home.” Neil Young - who was also inducted that night - came onstage for a sloppy eight-minute rendition of “When the Levee Breaks,” featuring distorted Crazy Horse-style solos, with Plant adding lyrics from one of his favorite songs, Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.”

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Drive My Car

Writers: McCartney-Lennon
Recorded: October 13, 1965
Released: June 15, 1966
Appears On: Rubber Soul
(Not released as a single)

On his way to a writing session with Lennon in 1965, McCartney came up with a melody he liked - but lyrics that merely recycled the idea of buying a girl a diamond ring from “Can’t Buy Me Love.” Lennon suggested a sexual metaphor - “drive my car” - and the two devised a lyric about a fame-hungry wanna-be. “To me it was [about] L.A. chicks - ‘You can be my chauffeur,’ ” said McCartney, who supplied the twist ending, when the girl admits she doesn’t have a car.

“Drive My Car” is one of the most overtly R&B-flavored songs in the Beatles’ catalog, thanks mostly to Harrison, who based the taut guitar lines and funky bass part on Otis Redding’s “Respect.”

“Drive My Car” was removed from the U.S. version of Rubber Soul: with folk-rock craze at its height, Capitol Records tweaked the American album to focus more on acoustic songs. “Drive My Car” would show up six months later on the compilation LP Yesterday and Today, but for a whole generation of Americans, Rubber Soul was missing its most soulful cut.

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Just a little bit more….

(Source: annavonzeppelin)

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This era of music has come to an end. Something new has to come, and I will be there. With the music we will pain pictures of Earth and Space, so that the listener can be taken somewhere.

Jimi Hendrix

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Robert saying his favorite word (;

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Jimmy Page by Joe Perry

Listening to what Jimmy Page does on guitar can transport you. As a lead player he always plays the right thing for the right spot - he’s got such remarkable taste. The solo on “Heartbreaker” has such incredible immediacy; he’s teetering on the edge of his technique, and it’s still a show stopper. But you can’t look at just his guitar playing on its own. You have to look at what he did with it in the studio and how he used it in the songs he wrote and produced. Jimmy built this incredible catalog of experience playing with The Yardbirds and doing session work, everything from commercial to Goldfinger theme - that’s a lot of studio time and a lot of time watching how engineers got sounds and how different acoustic guitar players recorded their guitars. He had all the stuff in his head when he went in to make the first Led Zeppelin record, so he knew exactly what kind of sounds he wanted to get - and it continued from there when started to have more and more freedom to experiment.

With Zeppelin, sometimes the riffs took their form in acoustic-guitar parts or things that you wouldn’t normally think of as being heavy metal - Jimmy showed that being heavy wasn’t about playing loud. He had this vision of how to transcend the stereotypes of what the guitar can do. If you follow the guitar on “The Song Remains The Same” all the way through, it’s brilliant in its complexity: It evolves through so many different changes - louder, quieter, softer, louder again. He was writing the songs, playing them, producing them - I can’t think of any other guitar player since Les Paul that can claim that.