25 years ago, electric guitar legend Jimmy Page and the Black Crowes teamed up on Live at the Greek – a historic live album that celebrates both Page’s and the Crowes’ rich repertoire, with some old blues and rock standards thrown in for good measure.
Most of the tracks were recorded at L.A.’s Greek Theatre (thus the album name) on October 18 and 19, 1999 and released a year later. The resulting album captured some of Page and co’s most thunderous live performances together.
In a new mini-documentary celebrating the anniversary of the historic team-up, Page sits down with Crowes’ Chris and Rich Robinson to reminisce about how the opportunity to play together came about.
“We were in London, we were doing a couple nights at the Royal Albert Hall,” Chris recalls. “Robert [Plant]’s like, ‘Can I bring Jimmy down?’ We were like, ‘We’d love to meet Jimmy! Of course!’ And we just hit it off like that.”
To which Page adds, “It was really good for me to meet them because I really admired them from the recording work that they’d done. They were definitely from the same school I come from.”
As opposed to – as the Zeppelin guitarist puts it – “just hustling a few jams together”, the collaboration transpired into something “more epic”.
For Page, one of the most standout moments was re-interpreting the track Rick Rubin famously likened to “nature coming through the speakers” – Ten Years Gone – from Led Zeppelin’s 1975 record, Physical Graffiti.
“Ten Years Gone was something I’d worked on at home,” he explains. “[It] had all this sort of guitar orchestration on it, but I’d never heard it like that, apart from on record, because in the days of Zeppelin, I’d try and do as much as I could just with the one guitar.
“And suddenly I had all these harmonies going on, like I died and gone to heaven! And I mean this for sure – [it was] really emotional moment.”
Page also contributed his guitar chops to one of the Crowes’ signature tracks, 1990’s She Talks to Angels. It was a pivotal moment for the band that led them to perceive the song differently.
“[It’s] definitely our most popular song, and Jimmy, adding something that was different, took on something else musically,” Chris recounts. “She Talks To Angels was never the same after that, because he elevated this thing [to the point] of, ‘Oh, this is what it could be.’”
An expanded and remastered version of the live album dropped on March 14 – and it includes Crowes songs that were omitted from the original release due to contractual restrictions from their record company, plus a previously unreleased soundcheck jam.
In more recent Jimmy Page news, singer-songwriter Jake Holmes – hailed as the original songwriter of Dazed and Confused, later popularized by Zeppelin – revived a copyright lawsuit against Page over songwriting credits and royalties.
