Anyone who considers John Paul Jones the ‘weak link in Led Zeppelin’ hasn’t really listened to their music.
Jones was crucial to their sound. For one thing, he was a brilliant multi-instrumentalist, expert on bass and keyboards and a fine mandolinist.
His bass lines and fills are classic and memorable. His sinuous line on ‘Ramble On’ serves as the main riff for the verse, his funky and ominous fills on ‘Good Times Bad Times’ are crucial transitions from one part of the song to another, and his line on ‘Dazed and Confused’ was cited by the critic Alex Ross in a memorable essay on the history of an ostinato used by composers as diverse as Dowland and Bach. Jones himself came up with the roaring riff of ‘Black Dog’ and its shifting time signatures.
He was the sane one in the band, the one uninterested in fame and excess. On tour, he was able to disguise himself and walk the streets of foreign cities and get a feel for them, while Bonham was drinking his face off and Page was… doing whatever weird Satanic/Crowleyesque shenanigans he was up to. If I could have been any member of Zep, I would like to have been him; imagine getting to explore a different city each night and play with Led Zeppelin every day.
Of all the bass players in classic rock bands of their era, Jones (and Bonham) had the deepest grounding in funk and soul. Led Zeppelin swung, harder than any British band since the Beatles had swung.
No, anyone who thinks he was the weak link in Led Zeppelin doesn’t know what they’re talking about. If Zeppelin had a weak link at all, it was John Bonham’s alcoholism.
