By the time Led Zeppelin dropped in 1969, Jimmy Page wasn’t some wide-eyed guitar hopeful—he was already a seasoned force in British rock. A teenage prodigy playing the Marquee Club, Page had racked up hundreds of studio credits with The Who, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, and even snuck onto the A Hard Day’s Night soundtrack. But session work lost its thrill, and after turning them down twice, he finally accepted the third offer to join The Yardbirds.
Replacing Jeff Beck—who had stepped in after Eric Clapton—Page entered a band in transition. Though their 1967 album Little Games fell flat, their live sets were explosive: fuzz pedals, noise loops, and a psychedelic edge that turned each performance into a sonic assault. It was on tour in America that Page stumbled into one of the most controversial songs of his career.
In August 1967, during a show at New York’s Village Theater, Yardbirds drummer Jim McCarty caught the set of folk-rock singer Jake Holmes. One track stood out: a dark, slithering piece called “Dazed and Confused.” The band bought Holmes’ album the next day, and Page quickly began reworking the tune for the Yardbirds’ stage show—adding crushing guitar stabs and eerie effects, but keeping the haunting bass descent that anchored Holmes’ original. Though the Yardbirds never recorded it in the studio, it became a staple of their live shows right up to their 1968 breakup.
When Led Zeppelin formed, “Dazed and Confused” was one of the first songs resurrected. It appeared on their 1969 debut with Page listed as the sole composer. Zeppelin performed it more than 400 times. It became a cornerstone of their live sets, a classic of hard rock. But Jake Holmes? He was left completely out of the picture—no credit, no royalties, no mention.
Holmes reached out in the early 1980s asking for recognition. Zeppelin’s response? Silence.
Finally, in 2010—four decades after the fact—Holmes filed a copyright lawsuit against Page, citing his original 1967 registration. The case was quietly settled out of court in 2012, but no official credit was ever added. It seemed like the saga had ended… until it didn’t.
With the release of Becoming Led Zeppelin, a 2024 documentary about the band’s origins, Holmes launched a new lawsuit. His legal team claimed the film falsely attributed authorship of the song to Page and had ignored repeated cease-and-desist demands. As the lawsuit stated: “By falsely claiming that the Holmes composition is the Page composition, Page and others have willfully infringed the Holmes composition.”
Once again, “Dazed and Confused” lives up to its name—not just as a murky, powerful song, but as a legal headache that refuses to die. While the full legal outcome remains to be seen, one fact is inescapable: Jake Holmes wrote the skeleton of a song that helped define Led Zeppelin—and he’s spent decades fighting just to be remembered.
