(Credits: Far Out / Andrew Smith)
Anyone who ever witnessed Led Zeppelin in their prime and lived to tell the tale will be happy to tell you about their raw power onstage. They may have loved to play their favourite blues tunes, but the energy of seeing every member unleash hell whenever they played was the stuff of legend that birthed the concept of hard rock, as most of us know it today. Jimmy Page might shy away from the genius label some might throw at him, but for him, the true stroke of genius was seeing Bob Dylan perform in his prime.
At the same time, Dylan was never known to play up himself in front of the camera. Whenever he was onstage, he was usually just saying what was on his mind half the time…it’s just that what was on his mind had a lot more to do with the world at large. He may have been looking to make simple folk songs like ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’, but that wasn’t going to be able to compete in the era with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.
Dylan needed something different, which meant doing one thing that horrified most folkies…actually plugging a guitar in. As much as Dylan got ridiculed for going electric, there’s a good chance he would still be playing folk halls throughout his prime. He still had the songs to back him up, and no matter how many purists complained, hearing ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ blare out of the speakers sounded like the wake-up call for the rock and roll generation.
For Page, hearing Dylan with just an acoustic guitar was more than enough, recalling on Instagram, “In May 1965, I experienced the genius of [Bob Dylan] at the Royal Albert Hall in London. He accompanied himself on acoustic guitar and cascaded images from such songs as ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’, ‘Chimes Of Freedom’ and ‘She Belongs To Me’ to a mesmerised audience. It was life-changing”.
He may not have had the electric guitar yet, but the gig that Page saw marks Dylan in a state of transition. He had the makings of songs that would eventually appear on the album Bringing it All Back Home, but that album’s mix of both folk and rock instrumentation was the first time that fans were puzzled, getting pissed off at the idea that their idol had somehow cowered to the trends of the time.
Trends sometimes exist for a reason, though, and Dylan’s way of embracing rock and roll left a lot of room for people like Page to explore new avenues. Since he had been known to play on the session scene before joining The Yardbirds and Zeppelin, Page probably saw Dylan’s eclectic style as a way for him to move past just blues rock.
For all the comparisons made to people like Joni Mitchell and Pete Seeger for Zeppelin’s ballads, a song like ‘Going to California’ or their interpretation of ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’ wouldn’t have been nearly as memorable without hearing Dylan wail over electric guitars first. Page was always a child of influences in more ways than one, but thanks to Dylan breaking down barriers in the 1960s, musicians were free to go down any road that their music took them.
