Hendrix took it one way, and Led Zeppelin took it another, playing it live many times before using it as the base for The Lemon Song on Led Zeppelin II. Albert King covered his song Killing Floor before Jimi Hendrix got hold of it. He brought some of that powerful physicality into his music. Howlin’ Wolf, a figure much admired by this new wave, was himself a huge man, 6’6” tall and close to 300lbs. “No-one had any idea what might happen next week, let alone next year”. “It was like the wild west,” one executive reflected. Record companies and music publishers had no concept of the revenue that such bands might generate. People were making albums that they thought might last for six months, not four decades. The London scene was fevered and organic. Ian Anderson’s Jethro Tull merged acoustic folk with blues riffs. The Earth blues band would soon turn some chords from Gustav Holst’s Mars into a song called Black Sabbath. Jimi Hendrix had electrified London with his attempts to combine what he called “earth” (blues and jazz) with “space” (psychedelia). Jeff Beck had just made a record called Truth that referenced George Gershwin and Willie Dixon. Eric Clapton had been tutored by John Mayall for his gig in the Bluesbreakers and he took what he’d learned into Cream, the first supergroup. He wasn’t the only young musician in London with a head full of other people’s records. Jimmy Page once said: “I’ve often thought that in the same way that the Stones tried to be the sons of Chuck Berry, we tried to be the sons of Howlin’ Wolf”. The blues songs that they played and recorded in their early years became the foundation for an entire genre of music in reusing them and spinning them in new and unheard directions, Zeppelin were extending a tradition that had begun with blues and folk music itself. And yet they repaid the debt by turning what they took into something more than the sum of its parts, something lasting. From their very first gig, Led Zeppelin took what they wanted from the existing canon of music.
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