How Covering Joan Baez’s ‘Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You’ Helped Led Zeppelin Find Their Chemistry

Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Bonham, and John Paul Jones formed the band Led Zeppelin in 1968. The group disbanded in 1980 following Bonham’s death, as the musical chemistry the four members shared was irreplaceable. In a 2020 interview with Rolling Stone, Page discussed how Led Zeppelin covering Joan Baez’s “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” helped mold the band’s chemistry.

Jimmy Page’s background influenced Led Zeppelin

Before forming Led Zeppelin, Page played guitar in a band called the Yardbirds. After the Yardbirds disbanded, Page still wanted to perform.

He set out to make his own group, resulting in Plant joining as a vocalist, Jones joining as a bassist and keyboardist, and Bonham joining as the band’s drummer.

Speaking with Rolling Stone in 2020, Page began to explain how his music taste and background with the Yardbirds helped form Led Zeppelin’s sound.

“So, having played with the Yardbirds, having played on the whole underground circuit, I could work out what it was I wanted to do, when the band folded. I had quite a lot of the material already. The weirdest thing is I had ‘Tangerine’ written, but I didn’t put that [out] until the third [Led Zeppelin] album. I really did have an idea of how these albums, if we were successful with the first, how they could come out. They’d each be different from the last,” Page said.

Jimmy Page had the band cover ‘Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You’

When pressed about how “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” spurred Led Zeppelin’s chemistry, Page explained that he first discussed covering the song with Plant.

“When we got Led Zeppelin, when there was this wonderful rhythm section there, I got Robert [Plant] down to my house and we discussed the sort of stuff that I wanted to do. I played him some things. One of them being ‘Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You,’ because I’d already worked out what I wanted to do on the guitar,” Page told Rolling Stone.

He continued, “I said, ‘I know this sounds a bit abstract, but if you can sing that sort of melody, stick to that plaintive melody line Joan Baez is singing, you’ll see how it fits.’ He does it, and he’s like, ‘Yeah, this is great.’ It was just a joining of two minds. It was wonderful.”

Jimmy Page thinks the song shaped Led Zeppelin’s chemistry

Continuing his story, Page shared with Rolling Stone what happened when he, Plant, Bonham, and Jones played “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” together as a band.

“So by the time we went into the rehearsal, it really, really kicked, because now you’ve got four people all firing on all cylinders to the point where it’s one, two, three, four in, and from the very first bar is a life-changing experience for each and every one of us in that room,” Page said in the interview.

The guitarist continued, “By the time we finished playing, we’re all looking at each other and smiling because we’d never played with any other musicians to arrive at that sort of chemistry. And that chemistry continued all the way through the band.”