Watch Jimmy Page Play Led Zeppelin with Paul Rodgers and an All-Star Band
Want Jimmy Page to show up at your party? Just make him the guest of honor — and invite a whole bunch of rock stars to perform a setlist stuffed with his greatest hits.
Rolling Stone reports that Page made a surprise appearance at Seattle's Experience Music Project Museum on Nov. 19, walking out on stage for the last number of a star-studded evening held to mark his acceptance of the EMP Founders Award. Although Page wasn't expected to show, the prospect of sharing the stage with a pickup band that included Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen and Paul Rodgers, Page's former the Firm bandmate — as well as Duff McKagan and Krist Novoselic — was apparently too difficult to resist.
As the report notes, the event's lineup could have been even more impressive — scheduling conflicts prevented the involvement of obvious Page acolytes like Pearl Jam's Mike McCready and Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart — and the fan-shot footage embedded here is rough enough to carry a warning for those susceptible to motion sickness. But all that aside, this was a once-in-a-lifetime event, and it's obvious that Page and his fellow players were having a ball.
That sense of fun will hopefully spill over into Page's next project, which is taking shape now that he's wrapped his work on the most recent series of Led Zeppelin reissues. With new music and the possibility of a tour on the horizon, he's said he's looking forward to taking a more experimental approach to playing guitar.
"I’m known to play in so many different styles and that’s what I am, so I just want to get there and just basically reconnect with all of these things and see what happens," he hinted in a recent interview. "Now that all of the Zeppelin stuff has come out, I have the freedom to be able to make new music, manifest new music and be seen to be playing, as opposed to just rumored to be playing."
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