Jimmy Page
Traveling the world was a constant thing, rich with experiences. But all of it was relative to being able to play live onstage and really stretch out.
Listening to John Bonham is just a sheer celebration of his playing - it can't help but fill you with so much joy.
Because Led Zeppelin weren't having to worry about doing singles, each time we went in to record, it was a body of work for an album. So you could get the shift and the movement forwards as opposed to having to be rooted back to a single that might have been done a year ago.
I prefer to hear an artist's work and what they can do, so as far as I'm concerned, I'd get a lot more out of a collection of songs to be able to understand what the musician is doing.
'Boogie Chillen',' by John Lee Hooker - that is a riff.
In the Led Zeppelin shows of the Sixties and Seventies, it was the same numbers every night, but they were constantly in a state of flux. If I played something good, really substantial, I'd stick it in again.
I wanted to emulate music from America - young punks playing rock n' roll is what it was. I read part of Keith Richards' autobiography, and it was totally parallel with me, learning from American records.
The fourth album encapsulated some remarkable music that was really groundbreaking. We were able to have something like 'When the Levee Breaks,' which, sonically, was very menacing. But then you had the flip side: something like 'Going to California,' which is really intimate.
I don't really know anything about sales figures, to be honest with you.
You shouldn't really have to use EQ in the studio if the instruments sound good. It should all be done with microphones and microphone placement.
The instruments that bleed into each other are what creates the ambience. Once you start cleaning everything up, you lose it. You lose that sort of halo that bleeding creates. Then if you eliminate the halo, you have to go back and put in some artificial reverb, which is never as good.
Playing in my early bands, working as a studio musician, producing and going to art school was, in retrospect, my apprenticeship. I was learning and creating a solid foundation of ideas, but I wasn't really playing music.
When I was still in the Yardbirds, our producer, Mickie Most, would always try to get us to record all these horrible songs. During one session, we recorded 'Ten Little Indians,' an extremely silly song that featured a truly awful brass arrangement.
I don't think drums had ever sounded so big until Led Zeppelin's first album.
There's such a currency to Led Zeppelin, or the members of Led Zeppelin. If I put it to you this way, on the run-up to the O2 concert, the only music that we played was music of Led Zeppelin - the past catalog stuff; that's what we played on the way towards shaping up the set list for that. But we played really, really well.
My guitar playing touches so many different areas of the form, but the important thing is what it represents across the form.
The Yardbirds folded in 1968, and within a handful of months, Led Zeppelin was not only a band but also a very successful one.
From meeting Robert Plant, John Bonham, and John Paul Jones, teaming up, rehearsing, playing selected gigs outside of Britain, coming back into Olympic Studios to record the first album, and then going to America, which we crack open like a nut with the debut record - all that happened, literally, within months.
Led Zeppelin isn't done yet, quite clearly, because every year since 1968 there's been new fans.
The re-releases have more than doubled the amount of Led Zeppelin work out there. I wanted it done authoritatively, 'cause I was the one writing the stuff; I was the producer and mixer. I don't think it's any more weird than writing your autobiography.
The one person who's disappeared out of the business is the A&R man. Because the listener at home becomes the A&R man. He's the one who chooses what tracks he wants on the album. And that's cool.
The Yardbirds sort of disbanded, and I was disappointed because I thought what we were doing was really good. I thought we were really onto something. I thought I was really onto something with these ideas that I had.
I played guitar all my life, all the way through the Yardbirds, but I knew that for me, this was going to be a guitar vehicle, because that's what I wanted it to be. There is no way I would play guitar like a tour de force like I did in Led Zeppelin.
In the wake of the San Francisco scene, ears were alive. It was a listening generation.
We weren't making money in the Yardbirds.
I was really competitive with myself.
I always want to do my very best, and it's frustrating to have something hold me back.
The Stones are great and always have been. Jagger's lyrics are just amazing. Right on the ball every time.
I love playing. If it was down to just that, it would be utopia. But it's not. It's airplanes, hotel rooms, limousines, and armed guards standing outside rooms. I don't get off on that part of it at all.
Led Zeppelin wasn't a corporate entity.
Led Zeppelin was an affair of the heart. Each of the members was important to the sum total of what we were.
I have one of those gravel-y voices with no range to it.
I'm pretty loyal to my guitars, you know, but then they're pretty loyal to me, too.
How many guitars do I have? I don't know. I don't know! But I think the answer to it is, more than I can play at any one point in time. Even though I do have double necks, so I can try and play more than at one time!
I can play in many sorts of categories because we've seen that with Led Zeppelin, all the acoustic stuff, and this, that and the other.
You'll find so many of the guitarists from the '60s will all say Lonnie Donegan was the influence.
That's one of the problems with the Zeppelin stuff. It sounds ridiculous on MP3. You can't hear what's there properly.
I've played guitar in so many different styles, and I want to revisit them all.
Because somebody plays guitar, why does it mean they need a singer? Because people already have this image of things? No, I'll put my music together, then think about whether I need to embellish it with a singer.
I play like I play. You hear it on 'Celebration Day.' It's pretty good for a one-night shot.
It's good to be in a position to know that I've inspired musicians, from what I've learned to lay down personally, and collectively with Led Zeppelin.
If you listen to our work, from 'Led Zeppelin I' to 'Coda,' it's just a fantastic textbook.
I'm not a guitar hero.
Led Zeppelin was a band that would change things around substantially each time it played... We were becoming tighter and tighter, to the point of telepathy.
I am very good at remembering music and am absolutely certain that I never heard 'Taurus' until 2014.
I do not recall ever seeing Spirit perform live.
I consider descending chromatic lines and arpeggiated chords basic skills learned by any student of the guitar.
Certainly, as a guitarist, I was aware of descending chromatic lines and arpeggios long before 1968.
I can understand why we got bad reviews. We went right over people's heads. One album would follow another and would have nothing to do with what we'd done before. People didn't know what was going on.