One of the most influential British guitarists of all time, Eric Clapton was a fundamental figure in the evolution of guitar playing from the 1960s onwards. He belonged to an incredible generation of musicians who emerged in the United Kingdom during that era and changed the course of Rock and Blues music.
A few years after Clapton had already achieved fame and recognition, another artist who rose to prominence was Jimmy Page, who had also previously been a member of The Yardbirds. Throughout his career, Clapton has shared his opinion on many of his peers, including the Led Zeppelin guitarist.
What is Eric Clapton’s opinion on Jimmy Page
Eric Clapton likes Jimmy Page as a guitarist and respects his career but never was a big fan of Led Zeppelin’s music. “Though I rated Jeff Beck, and also Jimmy Page (highly), their roots were in Rockabilly, while mine were in the Blues. I loved what they did, and there was no competitiveness between us. We just played different styles,” Clapton said in his autobiography.
However, when it came to Led Zeppelin, he thought they were “unnecessarily loud”. “I don’t know about them. I’ve heard their records and I saw them play in Milwaukee, we were on the same bill. They were very loud. I thought it was unnecessarily loud. I liked some of it; I really did like some of it. But a lot of it was just too much. They overemphasized whatever point they were making, I thought,” Clapton said as noted in Zeppelin’s “The Definitive Biography” book.
As he said a few times, he believes that Jimmy Page and other artists continued what Cream started in the 1960s, showing it was possible to make a kind of heavier Blues and Rock music. “There was a band called Blue Cheer, who I think were probably the originators of Heavy Metal. Because they didn’t really have traditional roots in the Blues. They didn’t have a mission. It was just about being loud.”
He continued:
“Cream were very loud, too. We got caught up in having huge banks of Marshall amps just for the hell of it. But we had a really strong foundation in blues and jazz. Led Zeppelin took up our legacy. But then they took it somewhere else that I didn’t really have a great deal of admiration for,” Eric Clapton told Uncut in 2012.
One of the main differences between Page and Clapton was that Eric was a blues purist. So he preferred when his music remained faithful to that style. Although Led Zeppelin were a band strongly rooted in the blues, they experimented with Hard Rock, Folk, Reggae and many other styles during their career.
Eric Clapton said he unconsciously ripped off “Stairway to Heaven”
Although he wasn’t a big fan of Led Zeppelin, he was aware of their music. Especially the biggest hit “Stairway to Heaven”, from their fourth album released in 1971. Clapton said he unconsciously ripped off that song when writing “Let It Grow”, featured on his second solo album “461 Ocean Boulevard” (1974).
“When I am trying to write songs, I like to leave things as unfinished as I can, so that whoever I am going to play the song with has a chance to influence, by the way they play it, the way the song will end up.”
Eric Clapton continued:
“What I was doing in my mind, in this case. (I) was preparing small groups of ideas that I could take to Carl, Jamie, and Dick, and say, ‘Let’s work on this.’ Then, hopefully, when we actually came to play it, the song would almost finish itself. One of the songs I had started was coming along quite well. I was very proud of my inventiveness in the verse.”
“This was ‘Let It Grow,’ and it was several years before I realized that I had totally ripped off ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ the famous Zeppelin anthem, a cruel justice seeing as how I’d always been such a severe critic of theirs,” Eric Clapton said in his autobiography.
They dated the same woman
Curiously, besides both of them having been guitarists for The Yardbirds, there is another indirect connection between them. They dated the same woman, the French model Charlotte Martin. She was first involved with Clapton and later had a long relationship with Page from 1970 until the early 80s. They have a daughter called Scarlet Page.
Although Clapton frequently expressed that he did not like Zeppelin’s music, he and Jimmy Page already played and worked together, before and after Zeppelin. In 1965, Page co-produced a few John Mayall songs featuring Clapton. Curiously, the engineer at the time said Eric was “unrecordable” because of the kind of sound of his guitar. However, the future Zeppelin leader showed him how to record the guitar properly.
A few years later they were part of the album “Guitar Boogie” (1971), which was a compilation record. It also had Jeff Beck and members of the Rolling Stones.