Jimmy Page Describes the ‘Total Nightmare’ of Rehearsing Other Singers
After Led Zeppelin's 2007 reunion concert, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and Jason Bonham began auditioning singers for a new project. In a new video interview, which you can watch above, Page talks about why the trio decided to keep moving forward and why it all eventually broke down.
"On the run-up to the O2 concert," Page told Metal XS, "the only music that we played was music of Led Zeppelin, the past catalog stuff. That's all we played on the way towards shaping up the set list for that. We'd done only one concert -- this is Jason, myself and John Paul Jones -- and played really, really well together. So it made sense to see what we could do using that same sort of energy with new material, because we hadn't played any new material at all on the way through."
The problems started when they began looking for a new singer after Robert Plant said he didn't want to be involved. Given what Page calls the "currency of Led Zeppelin," many people were "throwing singers at [us]. From my point of view, the most important thing is to concentrate on your strengths, not your weaknesses. Well, the weakness is [that] none of us sing. But we could play, so let's concentrate on getting the music together, shaping up these songs and moods so we've got a collection of them, and then we'll see what we're gonna do, whether we have the singers. And then we're just throwing singers and compromising here and there. It actually became a total nightmare."
Last year, Myles Kennedy said that he was one of the singers who rehearsed with the group. "I don’t know if they knew what it was going to be," he said. "They just wanted to play, they wanted to jam, they wanted to put a project of some sort together. They weren’t sure what it was, but it was never going to be Led Zeppelin with a new singer, I mean, obviously.”
Steven Tyler also revealed that he was involved, but declined because he was committed to his other group. “[I]t came time for [Jimmy] to say, ‘You want to write a record with me?’ [and] I went, ‘No.’ I’m in Aerosmith. He’s in the biggest band in the world and I’m in a band like that. I have such an allegiance to my band, and I love it so much.”
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