After Led Zeppelin included covers of blues classics in their first two albums, he endeavored to provide more original material for Led Zeppelin III (1970). For Robert Plant, this third LP was the first to consist exclusively of tracks from the band.
Nevertheless one could see Zeps influences on III. In the final track, “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper”, Plant’s opening lines quote almost literally from Bukka White’s “Shake ‘Em on Down”. And he similarly approached the opening lines of “Since I loved you”.
On this route, Plant’s reference point (Moby Grapes “Never”) was much younger. And while “Since I loved you” became one of Zeppelin’s signature blues recordings, the quotes didn’t end there. Jimmy Page added a greeting to an old buddy (and Yardbird’s bandmate) in his guitar intro.
Jimmy Page quoted Jeff Beck in Led Zeppelin’s “Since I’ve Loved You”
1966: “The Yardbirds” pose for a portrait. LR: Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Chris Dreja, Keith Relf and Jim McCarty Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images
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After years as a top session guitarist, Page broke through the London rock scene with The Yardbirds. At the time, Jeff Beck was playing lead guitar and he got his Yardbirds seat on the recommendation of Page, a teenage friend. The two were as fat as thieves at the time (“arch buddies” was Page’s term).
Beck finally got tired of the group and left, leaving the lead guitar commercial open for Page. But for a while Beck and Page shared guitar duties at The Yardbirds. And Page was familiar with all of Beck’s recordings with the band.
With that in mind, there is no way Page’s intro to “Since Ive Been Loving You” could be seen as anything other than a tip of the hat for Beck, who opened The Yardbirds’ “New York City Blues” with it. Reef. Beck may have used a lot of distortion, but it’s the same.
From then on, “Since I Loved You” and “New York City Blues” have almost nothing in common. In Light and Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page, Zep’s guitarist enjoyed the connection. “That’s a pretty traditional way of opening a blues, isn’t it?” Page quipped.
Page up to this point called it Zeps “most unusual” and “most sophisticated” blues
After Page did without the intro, he works on his Gibson Les Paul guitar. At the end of the route, he did some of the best work of his career. This goes beyond the solo that engineer Terry Manning considered the greatest in rock history.
In Light and Shade, Page described it as an example of the magic of Led Zeppelin. “There was a lot of blues on the first album, but we would never have dared to play something as unusual or challenging as ‘Since I loved you’,” he said.
Part of the song’s effectiveness came from its departure from the blues formula. “It should slide the envelope,” Page said in Light and Shade. “We played in the spirit of the blues, but tried to take it to new dimensions that are dictated by the mass consciousness of the four players involved.” Obviously, that wasn’t coming from Moby Grape or The Yardbirds.
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