John Bonham’s untimely passing in 1980 not only brought Led Zeppelin’s world-conquering antics to an end, but it also made Jimmy Page fall out of love with the instrument he’d spent the last few decades obsessing over. In his mournful haze, even mentioning the guitar around the then-jaded musician was ill-advised.
Paul Rodgers heard that advice and ignored it. It proved to be a pivotal moment in Page’s life.
“Led Zeppelin were very good to us,” Rodgers told Howard Stern two years ago. “We were the first signing on their new label, Swan Song. It was just so great because we were kind of nobodies at that point; it was so great to have somebody so monstrously big in rock and roll introduce us to the American people.”
Bad Company stayed part of the Swan Song pack for their first three albums, as Rodgers, paired with guitarist Mick Ralphs, went on to write a slew of rock anthems. But he says Bonham’s passing also impacted him, ultimately bringing the band to an end.
“It was a real shock to the system, and at that point I decided I didn’t want to tour with Bad Company anymore,” he details. “And Led Zeppelin basically stopped working at that point because Jimmy just didn’t want to play. He didn’t play for two years.”
Then, out of the blue, he got a phone call from Page, who was intending to come over to his house to visit his old friend.
“All the people around him said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t ask him to play guitar when he gets to your studio.’ I said ‘Okay.’
“So, as soon as he got to the studio, I said, ‘Hi Jimmy, did you bring a guitar? Let’s have a jam,’ and they all went, ‘Oh my God, shh, don’t do that.’
“But by the end of the evening, I have to say he was playing and he was playing brilliantly. I think, because he was in deep mourning about the loss of a good friend, a great drummer, and somebody he deeply loved, I thought, ‘The best way for anybody to bring them out of a depression like that is to do the thing they love.’”
That evening planted a seed, and though The Firm, the group they would go on to form together was short-lived, it proved an important step for Page to re-grease his wheels.
Speaking to Uncut in 2019, Page admitted that he was at a loss when Bonham died, and Led Zeppelin went down as collateral damage. Yet he has no regrets about his period of inaction.
“Paul Rodgers is one of the best singers this country has ever produced, and any musician would want him on a record,” he had said. “But if you’re asking me if I’d drifted a bit after the end of Led Zeppelin, then I’m not going to argue with that.
“I don’t want to labor the point, but it was the perfect vehicle for me to express everything I wanted to express, and it had gone before its time. You’d be asking a lot to expect lightning to strike twice in the same place like that with a whole different bunch of musicians.”
Rodgers, meanwhile, has revealed he declined an offer to appear on the forthcoming Van Halen album, spearheaded by Steve Lukather and featuring unreleased material penned by Eddie Van Halen. Lukather says he can’t believe these songs haven’t been released sooner.
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