During a new chat with Dee Snider on the Twisted Sister frontman’s Shout it Out Loudcast, Tracii Guns questioned If Jimmy Page was finished.
After arguing that Eric Clapton is an overrated guitarist compared to Jeff Beck, Guns went on to talk about another Yardbirds member:
“I always wonder if Jimmy Page has missed the boat of live performance now. But it freaks me out, man, ‘Am I never gonna see Page live?’”
Then, the guitarist praised Led Zeppelin:
“Basically, what they did was, they took the best of everything that came before them… They took really abstract, bad, heavy rock. And you can go through the whole thing with the Yardbirds. As soon as Page hit the Yardbirds. And he grew up with Jeff Beck, so he took a lot from Jeff Beck, got in this weird pop band, The Yardbirds, and then tried saying, ‘Hey, you guys kind of suck, but let’s do all this weird experimenting.’ And then out came this cake called Led Zeppelin, you know?”
Tracii’s Earlier Statements On Led Zeppelin’s Influence On Him
Guns has been a fan of Led Zeppelin from a very early age. In a 2019 interview with Rock Scene, the musician recalled sitting in the back of his mother’s boyfriend’s car as a young boy and hearing Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’ for the first time:
“It was overwhelming audio fear. I remember thinking, I have to recreate that noise right now!”
On their way to the airport, Tracii saw Page on the cover of Creem magazine in his dragon suit. His mom explained that Page was the guitarist making the music he liked:
“I saw that picture, and I’d never seen anything like it in my life. The imagery, the sound, it completely captivated me when I was five-and-a-half years old. From that point on it was all about, ‘Mom, play me something like that!’ ‘Led Zeppelin II’ was all I ever listened to until I was seven years old. The theremin coming in on the ‘Whole Lotta Love’ solo, that riff, the way Jimmy used reverb…everything had plate reverb on it.”
Guns also previously included Page in his list of top five rock guitarists. He also named other musicians like Chuck Berry, Link Wray, Jimi Hendrix, and Eddie Van Halen.
You can listen to the whole podcast below.