Led Zeppelin Band Members — See the Iconic Rockers Then and Now
The legendary group’s surviving members keep rockin’ and rollin’ on to new musical endeavors.
Anyone who missed out on experiencing the excitement of catching Led Zeppelin in concert during the group’s heyday now has their chance (sort of): On April 7, Speedy’s Films released 50-plus minutes of concert footage on YouTube from the rock gods. It’s the longest 8mm clip of the Led Zeppelin band members ever, filmed at a Montreal show on Feb. 6, 1975.
Right out of the gates, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and John Bonham — Led Zeppelin band members — were a force of nature, storming onto the music scene with their self-titled debut album in 1969.
Their chemistry was undeniable, and everyone — including the Led Zeppelin band members themselves — knew it. The same year the above clip was recorded, Plant gave an interview to a British TV show, and was asked if he or any other members were interested in doing solo projects.
“I don’t think that I could possibly do [one] without playing with the other guys,” Plant responded. “Part of my charisma is reliant on the other three, and the same with everybody else. We really get off on playing together; that’s the whole secret. I couldn’t really go away and play with anybody else ’coz if I wanted to play, who else would I need for a drummer but Bonzo? And the same with Jimmy and Jonesy… It wouldn’t be right.”
MUST-READ: Best Led Zeppelin Songs: 14 Top Tracks, Ranked!
Of course, Bonham’s tragic death in 1980 led to them wrapping their joint venture up and heading off in different directions, but what they accomplished as a band still makes the surviving members proud.
“[Our music] approaches so many different styles and moods and it’s very passionate,” Page told The Morning Call about their unique sound and approach. “And it’s also very gentle. And it’s very hard. And it’s extremely dynamic. If anybody wants to be playing the guitar, the harmonica, the drums, the bass, the keyboards — well, it’s all there. And it’s organic music where everyone is playing together. I think it’s a great legacy to have produced, to be honest.”
And even after being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Led Zeppelin band members are still championing their legacy in their own ways to this day. Below, a look at what they’ve been up to as they’ve carried on throughout their careers.
MUST-READ: Rolling Stones Band Members: Then and Now
Robert Plant: Led Zeppelin band members
The band’s magnetic frontman grew up in England listening to artists such as Elvis Presley and Muddy Waters while singing in bands of his own during his teens. He left home at 16 and was working a construction job when he founded Band of Joy, a group that would also include John Bonham, a childhood friend.
After that outfit split, he landed in Obs-Tweedl, which is when he was introduced to Jimmy Page, who was putting together a new band that would go on to become Led Zeppelin.
After Led Zeppelin’s years together, Plant went on to release several solo albums, including 1982’s Pictures at Eleven, 1983’s The Principle of Moments, and 1985’s Shaken ’n’ Stirred, as well as The Honeydrippers: Volume One project in 1984, which also featured Page.
Plant’s now longstanding collaborative partnership with country-bluegrass star Alison Krauss began in 2007. Their country-blues-folk album Raising Sand, produced by T. Bone Burnett, was a smash, winning five Grammys. The duo’s Raise the Roof would follow in 2021.
Plant even revived his Band of Joy project for a 2010 tour, and his Band of Joy album that same year led to him receiving two Grammy nominations, including for best Solo Rock Vocal Performance for “Silver Rider.”
Other collaborations and projects would follow, including seven years with the Sensational Space Shifters. And in 2019, Plant formed a new music group called Saving Grace, though their first official release didn’t drop until four years later. Also in 2023, he performed “Stairway to Heaven” for the first time solo, at an October charity concert for cancer awareness.
Though he’s recently noted to Rolling Stone that his songwriting has somewhat stalled of late (“I can’t find words. This is a very difficult time to try and wax lyrical out there,” he said), he also noted that he “can’t just sit back” and not tour and perform.
To that end, Plant, now 75, appeared onstage with Roger Daltrey in March 2024 to sing The Who’s “Baba O’Riley.” He’s also currently touring with Saving Grace and has announced future dates with them in July and October.
Starting in June, he’ll be out on the road with Alison Krauss in support of their latest release, and the duo will also be joining Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Music Festival through June and July 2024 as well.
Jimmy Page
Inspired by Elvis Presley and British folksinger Lonnie Donegan, Jimmy Page took up the guitar around the age of 8. B.B. King and other blues artists would help inspire him even further, and he soon grew to master the instrument and start playing in his own bands during his early teens.
“The guitar made an intervention into my life, that’s the way I see it,” he’s told Esquire. “And then I became totally obsessed—the guitar just became another limb, like it was grafted on.” He toured with Neil Christian and the Crusaders after he graduated, but he then detoured to Sutton Art College, where he studied painting and design. He’d still hit the local music scene, though, and jam with the likes of Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck.
Before long, he was an in-demand studio session guitarist, which put most everything else in his life on the back burner. His work can be found on the earliest albums from such future legends as The Kinks and The Who, as well as Marianne Faithfull and Petula Clark, and he soon began producing other artists.
He was still playing his own music as well, and he joined Beck in The Yardbirds when a spot opened for him. When his time with that band was over, he assembled the future Led Zeppelin, the band he’d play and tour with until John Bonham’s tragic 1980 death officially closed that chapter.
Page would go on to team up again with Robert Plant, however, for 1984’s The Honeydrippers project, and in 1994, the two old bandmates were a ratings powerhouse when they reunited as Page and Plant for an episode of MTV’s Unplugged, playing material from their No Quarter album and following that success with a world tour.
They struck gold again in 1998 with Walking Into Clarksdale, which earned them a Best Hard Rock Performance Grammy for the song “Most High.”
Through the years, Page has also served as film composer for 1982’s Death Wish II, 1984’s Scream for Help, 1998’s Godzilla, and 2022’s The Adam Project, among other titles. And at 2008’s Olympic games in Beijing, he made an appearance to play “Whole Lotta Love,” with Leona Lewis on vocals.
“I’d be very sincere if I said that doing [that] was phenomenal,” he told Uncut. “She’s really plucky, she’s superb, and she sang…brilliantly. It was so cool the way she approached it.… It was a Led Zeppelin number but it took on another persona. I was proud to be able to play that riff for the handover.”
In 2022, he and his partner since 2014, poet Scarlett Sabet, performed their collaborative spoken-word piece, Catalyst, at the Library of Congress.
Most recently, in late 2023, he appeared at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremonies in Brooklyn to play Link Wray’s “Rumble” upon that guitarist’s induction.
And in February 2024, Page, who is 80 and has three children from previous relationships, announced a multi-year partnership with Gibson to release a new line of replica guitars. He’s also hinted over the past couple of years that more music projects might be on the way. “There’s various things I’m working towards. It’s not just one thing, it’s multiple things,” he’s told Classic Rock, though he’s kept tight-lipped about any further details.
John Paul Jones: Led Zeppelin band members
A musician from a very young age, John Paul Jones was playing piano at 6 and, at 14, he was an organist who performed in his father’s dance band.
By 1962, he was playing professionally in a variety of groups while gearing up to become a musical director and arranger for others, including The Rolling Stones. At 18, he released his solo single, 1964’s Baja, featuring a 10-piece orchestra and a choir. “My main hobby,” he told a local paper at the time, “is buying records. Anything by Dionne Warwick, Sarah Vaughan or Tony Bennett is great by me.”
More arranging and collaborative work followed, including for the likes of Herman’s Hermits, Donovan, Lulu, Jeff Beck, Cat Stevens, Dusty Springfield, and Rod Stewart, among many more artists, and it wasn’t long before he’d met and started playing with Jimmy Page, with whom he’d go on to form Led Zeppelin in 1968.
After the band split following John Bonham’s death, Jones spent some time teaching electronic composition to college students. In 1984, he appeared in the film Give My Regards to Broad Street, featuring Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, and in 1986, he was a producer on Ben E. King’s Save the Last Dance for Me album. More producing work would follow, including for artists such as Brian Eno and R.E.M., among many others.
Jones’ first solo album, Zooma, came in 1999, along with a world tour, followed by The Thunderthief in 2001 and a tour with King Crimson. In 2009, he’d create a supergroup with Dave Grohl and Josh Homme called Them Crooked Vultures, and that lineup’s “New Fang” won a Grammy in 2011 for Best Hard Rock Performance. Jones later reunited with them in 2022 to play a few tributes to Grohl’s Foo Fighters bandmate Taylor Hawkins, who passed away earlier that year.
The musician has also toured with the Dave Rawlings Machine (with Gillian Welch) and released the album Cloud to the Ground with a project called Minibus Pimps in 2014. More recently, Jones, now 78, played a set of Led Zeppelin songs (including “Your Time Is Gonna Come,” “Going to California,” and “Ramble On”) at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, on March 22, 2024.
He not only played bass during the unique set, but lap steel guitar and a huge pipe organ as well! A few days after, he also performed at the festival with the Sons of Chipotle, his new musical collaboration with Anssi Karttunen.
Jones is reportedly working on a bunch of new projects, including finishing the orchestration for his own opera, The Ghost Sonata, and composing a commissioned song cycle for mezzo-soprano Dame Sarah Connolly. He and his wife Maureen have been married since 1967 and the couple has three daughters.
John Bonham
The musician who’d later be known as Bonzo started playing drums around age 5. Though he was largely self-taught, that didn’t prevent him from helping to revolutionize the rock genre, influencing countless future generations and being named by Rolling Stone as the Greatest Drummer of All Time.
“I spent years in my bedroom – literally fu—ing years – listening to Bonham’s drums and trying to emulate his swing or his behind-the-beat swagger or his speed or power,” Dave Grohl has said of his hero.
Bonham was a childhood friend of Robert Plant’s, and the two had played together in another outfit called Band of Joy before he joined Plant and company in Led Zeppelin in 1968. His revolutionary drumming skills — and his lengthy, mind-blowing solos on “Moby Dick,” for example — pushed the band, as well as rock ’n’ roll, to new heights.
As Drummer World notes, “His legendary right foot (on his bass pedal) and lightning-fast triplets were his instant trademark.”
While rehearsing for one of the band’s upcoming tours, Bonham started drinking very early in the morning and he continued to drink throughout the day, reportedly downing 40-plus shots of alcohol. Later that night at Jimmy Page’s home, he fell asleep. Even though someone turned him on his side, he vomited, choked, and died on Sept. 25, 1980, at the age of 32. He left behind his wife, Pat Phillips, daughter Zoë, and son Jason.
“We wish it to be known that the loss of our dear friend and the deep respect we have for his family, together with the sense of undivided harmony felt by ourselves and our manager, have led us to decide that we could not continue as we were,” Plant, Page, and Jones said in a joint statement, which was released in December 1980 to explain their decision to split up rather than replace their cherished bandmate.
In 2012, Jason Bonham would join Heart onstage to play drums during their phenomenal performance of “Stairway to Heaven” at the Kennedy Center Honors. “It was definitely a surprise at that event,” Jason told Radio Forrest of how his father’s bandmates reacted to seeing him there. “That’s why you see their reaction. It was, like, ‘You! What are you doing…?’ I was hiding out.… It was very special.” Jason had also filled in for his dad when Led Zeppelin reunited in 2007 for the Ahmet Ertegun tribute concert in London.
