I think heroes are the last people who can comment on being a hero. Naturally he's not his own hero, but I think there's a lot of false modesty there from a man who's a hero to me, but not necessarily as humble as he'd like people to believe.
to most popular music fans Page is not just a guitar hero, he is perhaps only superseded by Jimi Hendrix as the pre-eminent guitarist in the history of rock.
Hyperbole much? There are a lot of competitors for the "next in line to Jimi Hendrix" crown.
“I’ve never mastered the guitar,” he insists. “Either I was playing it or it was playing me, it depends how you look at it.
And that's a fact. Jimmy Page definitely went through periods of clearly not practising, and playing like absolute crap. I suspect he's a little embarrassed about that now.
“Everybody assumed that what was important was improvising,” says the Edge, calling from his home in LA. “But it turns out it was always about composition, about ideas and themes and stuff you actually had to write.
Couldn't be more true. In fact, even the improvising is about composition. Guitar players famous among non-guitarists for their improvising, like Django, Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, or Eric Clapton, beat out the more technically capable competition by singing whole new songs in their solos - instead of just demonstrating their proficiency. And Jimi Page could both improvise, and was a fantastic song-writer. It's clear that most of his solos are composed of set-pieces with improvisation in between or around them. Technically though, there were a lot of people who could outshine his actual playing chops. But they couldn't write songs or guitar lines like he could.
Even people who have only been playing for a short time, untrained musicians, you can recognise their character in their playing.
Very cool. Very true too.
