The musician Jack White said never needed to work again

Even before he started The Stripes, he was already a student of the world’s greatest blues guitarists. The rest of the world was still immersed in the grunge world or had moved on to nu-metal and pop-punk, but having someone replicating the sounds of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters on White’s first few records was like hearing a relic of a bygone era.

No one really knew what to make of it at the time, but White was no mere blue purist making his way to the big leagues. Every rock band that had come before had inspired him to form The White Stripes, but none left him with the same impression as Led Zeppelin. Because while he was the blues troublemaker of the 2000s, Jimmy Page was doing the same thing in the late 1960s and putting his own twist on it.

Regardless of how much Zeppelin evolved over the years, fragments of the blues always found their way into their sound, whether it was working on their epics like ‘When the Levee Breaks’ or producing their later material like ‘Achilles Last Stand’. But if Page helped set White’s mind on fire, John Paul Jones was the man who took things to the next level.

For all of the album’s great songs and Robert Plant’s strong performances, White felt that Jónsi had secured his legacy before the band even ended, saying, “He is very important to Led Zeppelin and is underrated. Only the opening bassline of ‘Dazed and Confused’ ensured that he would never have to work again.” But what Jones did was always for fun rather than necessity.

Whether he was working with Led Zeppelin or arranging for other acts, Jones was always testing what could be done in the pop format. Sometimes that meant bringing in massive string sections, and other times he was creating the most aggressive basslines anyone has ever heard and literally no one noticed behind Page’s solo.

And while it may be a bit predictable that the same guy who wrote the line ‘Dazed and Confused’ in ‘Seven Nation Army’, it’s a riff like ‘Black Dog’ that always keeps people on their toes. This song has a lot of swagger right from the start, but it’s actually one of the most deceptively difficult songs for anyone to get right, to the extent that each member of the band struggled to stay on their feet when they first started working on it.

But that blend of complexity and flavor made Jones one of hard rock’s local talents half the time. He may not have been the most vocal member of the band by any means, but if anyone bothered to look to the other side of the stage, there was a 90% chance they would see something crazy happening on a four-string.

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