News The “phenomenal” singer Jimmy Page was blown away by: “He was then and still is”
There’s probably not much that impresses Jimmy Page in the world of rock. Since half of the greatest bands of all time have stolen pages from Led Zeppelin, chances are Page sees many copycats out in the wild alongside the occasional outfit that plays the kind of bluesy tracks he loves. Although nothing can replace the kind of magic that Zeppelin had in their early days, Page was still blown away when he heard Paul Rodgers sing.
Before he had even started with Zeppelin, Page already had a high pedigree of singers to work with. Since he had already worked with Keith Relf in The Yardbirds, Page knew exactly what he wanted when he struck out on his own, initially asking Terry Reid and Steve Marriott to join an early version of Led Zeppelin before getting Plant.
Page didn’t have to look far when it came to finding good blues singers. While the Summer of Love was happening half a world away in America, the British blues boom was still going strong, bringing with it the kind of guttural singers that usually had to be imported from the US. In the midst of bands like Fleetwood Mac and The Bluesbreakers clogging up the club scene, there was the beginnings of another supergroup named Free.
Featuring the Page-esque guitar wizard Paul Kossoff, the real star of the show was Rodgers, having the kind of tasteful bluesy tone that fell somewhere between Janis Joplin in his high register and Marriott. By the time Kossoff died of a drug overdose, Zeppelin wasn’t about to see one of the greatest voices of their generation go down the same path.
After bringing together Boz Burrell on bass and Mick Ralphs of Mott the Hoople, Bad Company was one of the few blues-soaked bands that could rival Zeppelin, which Page thought enough of to sign them to their label, Swan Song. Even though Page had no hands-on experience with the group, he knew that Rodgers was one of the best in his field.
While Page was selling out stadiums worldwide at that point, he believed that Rodgers’s voice carried the outfit’s protégés, telling Uncut, “Bad Company was more Peter Grant’s (Led Zeppelin’s manager) thing, Peter had the Bad Company thing and put that together. That was really a great band to have on there because of Paul Rodgers. He’s phenomenal. He was then and still is.”
Compliments are one thing, but Rodgers earned the distinction that very few artists get: having Jimmy Page play behind him. After the demise of Zeppelin, Rodgers helped get Page back on his feet, forming the basis of The Firm after Bad Company had gone on hiatus.
Although countless vocalists have tried to emulate Plant’s vocals to varying degrees of success, Rodgers’s husky blues tone is probably a lot more influential than most realise. If you listen to the bluesy lower register of a song like ‘Bad Company’ or ‘Shooting Star’, he almost sounds like Eddie Vedder’s deep baritone, which would go on to have its own legion of imitators. Grunge didn’t exist yet at the time, but that bluesy soulfulness in Rodgers’s throat may have inadvertently pioneered the alternative rock vocal technique without knowing it.