Jimmy Page Before Led Zeppelin: 20 Great Sixties Session Songs – Rolling Stone

This track is notable not just for the inclusion of Jimmy Page, but for featuring the entire lineup of Led Zeppelin before they even recorded their first album. John Paul Jones had been enlisted to arrange and play on Proby's Three Week Hero album months before he joined up with Page, Robert Plant and John Bonham to form the New Yardbirds. When the date came up for this session, rather than blow it off, he apparently decided instead to ask his new bandmates if they wouldn't mind lending a hand, a request to which they readily agreed. This wasn't exactly Page's first go-around with P.J. Proby, either: The guitarist had worked with him years before on his 1964 Top 10 hit "Hold Me."

Unlike many of the sessions that Page sat in on during his early career, this one comes the closest to approximating the sound that would come to define most of his work with Led Zeppelin. With Plant's added harmonica part, and the slow, bluesy tempo and feel, the track actually bears a striking resemblance to Zeppelin's cover of the Muddy Waters classic "You Shook Me." (It should also be pointed out that the Jim named in the song's title isn't Page, but rather Proby himself, who was born James Marcus Smith.)