John Paul Jones has played bass on many classic tunes with and without Led Zeppelin, but few of his contributions are more exceptional than The Lemon Song.
It’s a masterpiece of bass improvisation, heavily inspired by Motown legend James Jamerson; never more so than the bit that begins around the three-minute mark.
That’s when the song breaks down and Jimmy Page and Robert Plant step back to let Jones stretch out into a blistering, two-minute middle section where he outlines complex blues scale variations with total fluidity.
Of course, like most of Led Zeppelin’s early material, The Lemon Song is not the most original of songs; in fact they had to pay compensation to a music publisher who sued them for “borrowing” much of it from Howlin’ Wolf.
Wolf’s 1964 blues tune Killing Floor (written by Willie Dixon) provides so much of the Zeppelin song that the band had to pay an out-of-court settlement and give Chester Burnett a co-credit.
It also borrows lyrics and references from several other classic blues tracks, including Ma Rainey’s formative Black Eye Blues from 1928 (“You take my money, give it to another man”). Blues archivists may also spot references in Plant’s phrasing to Albert King’s 1967 recording Cross Cut Saw.
More obviously, there is the 1937 song Traveling Riverside Blues by Robert Johnson (“Squeeze my lemon ’til the juice run down my leg”), though Johnson probably “borrowed” the metaphor from the even earlier She Squeezed My Lemon by Arthur McKay.
Led Zeppelin used to perform Howlin’ Wolf’s live in their early days, with Plant introducing it under its original title, and an early UK pressing of Led Zep II even listed it as Killing Floor and credited it to Chester Burnett.
John Paul Jones began performing at the age of 14 in his father’s dance band and started his own group a year later.
By 16 he was professionally playing bass at sessions for a diverse roster of artistss including The Rolling Stones and The Yardbirds, The Supremes and The Everly Brothers, Dusty Springfield and Lulu, Cat Stevens and Donovan.
Having played bass on Mellow Yellow and Sunshine Superman, it was while working on a string arrangement for Sunshine Superman that he met the session guitarist, a young man of similar age called Jimmy Page.
“During a break, he asked me if I could use a bass player in the new group I was forming,” Page later recalled. “He had proper music training, and he had quite brilliant ideas. I jumped at the chance of getting him.”
When Zeppelin disbanded in 1980, Jones began to produce and arrange albums for other artists: among his many credits is the poignant string arrangement for Everybody Hurts by R.E.M.