Traveling the world was a constant thing, rich with experiences. But all of it was relative to being able to play live onstage and really stretch out.
You get a chance like that maybe once in your lifetime, and you are lucky to sustain it over that period of time. It doesn't mean to say that whatever I do in the future has no substance to it - I may present some new material I've got, and there are definitely new angles of doing it - but I'm not looking to recreate another Led Zeppelin.
I've played guitar in so many different styles, and I want to revisit them all.
The only way to have time is to shut down and then do what you want to do.
I would say New York, Chicago, Memphis, and Los Angeles were my favorites.
I really love playing live - it's such a gas.
The fourth album encapsulated some remarkable music that was really groundbreaking. We were able to have something like 'When the Levee Breaks,' which, sonically, was very menacing. But then you had the flip side: something like 'Going to California,' which is really intimate.
How many guitars do I have? I don't know. I don't know! But I think the answer to it is, more than I can play at any one point in time. Even though I do have double necks, so I can try and play more than at one time!
There's such a currency to Led Zeppelin, or the members of Led Zeppelin. If I put it to you this way, on the run-up to the O2 concert, the only music that we played was music of Led Zeppelin - the past catalog stuff; that's what we played on the way towards shaping up the set list for that. But we played really, really well.
'Communication Breakdown' - it was punchy and direct, with a real attitude that was different to other bands going around.
I wasn't a very good draughtsman.
The whole thing about 'The Rover' is the whole swagger of it, the whole guitar attitude swagger. I'm afraid I've got to say it, but it's the sort of thing that is so apparent when you hear 'Rumble' by Link Wray - it's just total attitude, isn't it?
If I pick up a guitar, I don't practise scales. I never have. I come up with something I haven't done before, new approaches to chord sequences, riffs, rhythms, so it becomes composition. It's not like the music I'm doing is just a single thread.
I'm involved in all things musical. It's all consuming, even if it doesn't necessarily manifest as a record or a concert.
The benchmark of quality I go for is pretty high.
My guitar playing touches so many different areas of the form, but the important thing is what it represents across the form.
The thing about Led Zeppelin was that it was always four musicians at the top of their game, but they could play like a band.
I've never mastered the guitar. Either I was playing it, or it was playing me; it depends how you look at it. As a kid, the only things I had to do was go to school, do my homework, and play guitar.
I always felt if we were going in to do an album, there should already be a lot of structure already made up so we could get on with that and see what else happened.
In the 1960s and into the '70s, everyone in their own way was trying to open up the musical horizon. There shouldn't be a wall that you're going toward and bouncing off.
