John Paul Jones: the most important member of Led Zeppelin…..

If there’s ever such a thing as The Avengers in rock and roll, every member of Led Zeppelin would qualify to be among the best.

Although the term ‘supergroup’ didn’t really exist at the point of their formation, each member of the band was the cream of the crop in terms of rock and roll in the late 1960s when their thunderous debut was released.

But when looking at the pedigree of everyone in the group, who kept everything together?

Of course, there’s a case to be made that nearly every member deserves that title.

Aside from starting the group and coming up with a lot of the riffs, Jimmy Page was the brains behind everything, usually keeping the big picture in mind when writing their classics and building their trajectory to become the most significant act in the world.

Then again, any rock band is only as good as its singer, and without the voice of Robert Plant, would anyone have really cared?

Yes, they were an album act that didn’t care about singles, but having Plant out front is why we celebrate the group in such hallowed terms today more often than Jeff Beck’s instrumental work.

And there’s no greater case to be made for John Bonham delivering a powerhouse behind the drumkit, especially since the rest of the band decided to call it quits the minute he passed away.

Every member was irreplaceable, but like all great musical outfits, it’s the quiet ones that everyone has to watch out for.

When Page started work after The Yardbirds, his first call was to John Paul Jones to assemble the group.

Despite being a major part of the session music scene, Jones fit like a glove in the group, usually blending the sounds of Motown bass, unadulterated rock and roll, and a little bit of a progressive edge into every song they played.

Aside from being on bass (the one instrument many people ignore), Jones was responsible for fleshing out a lot of Page’s best ideas.

Although many of their finest songs may be credited to just Page and Plant, Jones’s knowledge of the medium is responsible for the massive arrangements done for songs like ‘Kashmir’.

Page’s riff already sounded massive, but when the strings accompany him on the breakdown, that’s where everything comes alive.

Even when he did decide to use different instruments, it was never at the expense of showboating.

His use of woodwind instruments on ‘Stairway to Heaven’ is the perfect vehicle to tell this story of a long journey, and for as much as ‘All My Love’ features some dated sounds from the synthesisers, it does a decent job at painting the picture of this over-the-top power ballad.

Bassists also need a sense of rhythm, and Jones may have been key to making sure that the group was never a complete mess when they got onstage.

Bonzo was known for laying down a groove that was slightly behind the beat, and since Page was ahead of the beat most of the time, having Jones playing right down the middle brought a sense of balance that would have otherwise fallen apart.

It’s not like Jones ever stopped afterwards. By the time Zeppelin folded in the early 1980s, he had continued to prove why he was an absolute monster in his solo career and beyond, working on everything from R.E.M’s Automatic for the People and also working with Dave Grohl later on Foo Fighters’ epic double album In Your Honour.

While it’s still widely accepted that Zeppelin was strictly Page’s band and everything else was secondary to his opinion, Jones was the one musician in the group who knew how to twist melodies just right to keep things interesting every time their songs came on the radio.

He’s not the first person people think of when talking about Led Zeppelin, but in terms of their raw sound, Zeppelin would have sounded a lot thinner had Jones been replaced by any other bassist.