Jimmy Page has always been synonymous with his beloved 1959 sunburst Gibson Les Paul, a guitar so iconic that it was exhibited at no less than the Metropolitan Museum of Art, during the museum's guitar-centric 2019 exhibition, Play It Loud: Instruments of Rock & Roll.
Now, it's no CIA-held secret that the Les Paul wasn't always Page's instrument of choice for Zeppelin. He used a Telecaster for the band's fiery, epochal debut, Led Zeppelin I and, at least for a while, was satisfied with that and his Les Paul Custom.
Enter Joe Walsh.
Then a budding guitar hero with the James Gang, Page and Walsh had known one another since the former's pre-Zeppelin days with the Yardbirds. And Walsh had a proposition for him.
“Back then, Joe brought a Les Paul Standard along to a Fillmore East gig on the first leg of [a Led Zeppelin] American tour and said, ‘You’ve got to have this guitar,’” Page said in a 2023 Instagram post. “I said, ‘Well, I don’t need it, Joe, I’ve got a Les Paul Custom.’”
Walsh's lobbying, however, eventually won Page over.
Telling the story slightly differently in a 2012 interview with Guitar World, Walsh said, “When [Led Zeppelin's] first album really took off, Jimmy was still playing the Telecasters that he played in the Yardbirds. He was looking for a Les Paul and asked if I knew of any, 'cause he couldn’t find one that he liked. And I had two.
“So I kept the one I liked the most, and I flew to New York with the other one. I laid it on him and said, ‘Try this out.’ He really liked it. So I gave him a really good deal, about 1,200 bucks. I had to hand-carry it; I flew there and everything.
“Whatever my expenses were, that’s what I charged him,” the future Eagles guitarist continued. “That guitar ended up being a significant part of Led Zeppelin’s body of work. But again, I just thought he should have a Les Paul, for godsakes!”
Page quickly put the Les Paul to use, on Zep's What is and What Should Never Be and for what this publication ranked as the greatest guitar riff of all time, Whole Lotta Love.
“I played the Les Paul on Whole Lotta Love and What Is and What Should Never Be and that decided it for me: it was definitely going to be the Les Paul from then on,” Page said in 2023. “I always wanted to make a change for each album sonically and that was my first decision for Led Zeppelin II.
“Like I had built Led Zeppelin I around the Fender Telecaster, I built the second album around the sonic texture of the Les Paul Standard. Neither Joe Walsh nor I realized at the time just what an important thing he had done by coming along with that Les Paul.”
