Discussing underrated musicians in modern music can’t avoid a musician like John Paul Jones. Once you learned about Led Zeppelin as a kid who was just getting into rock music, it felt like all the focus went to Jimmy Page, John Bonham, and Robert Plant. However, it would take years for you to really understand how incredibly important, talented, and insanely skilled Jones is.
Far from just a bassist who plucks root notes in a rock band, John Paul Jones helped create elaborate musical sagas. His musicianship went even further from Led Zeppelin, as he was often called in to write arrangements for other big names in the genre.
“I like doing arrangements because they’re quick and they’re usually a lot of fun,” the bassist and multi-instrumentalist said in an interview from 2000 with Steven P. Wheeler. “People will seek me out because they like the arrangements I’ve done before, so they’ll send me the tracks and leave me to do what I do.”
“The most direction I’ll get is maybe something like, ‘We’d like the strings to come in halfway through the song.’ That’s the most instruction I tend to get.”
While having very few instructions to go from might seem like an incredible challenge, some people thrive when you give them enough room to do what they want. With these subtle directions, John Paul Jones created arrangements for “Everybody Hurts,” one of R.E.M.’s biggest songs and arguably one of rock music’s most popular pieces. He explained:
“It’s like when I did the arrangements for R.E.M.’s ‘Automatic for the People,’ Michael Stipe wrote me this really nice handwritten letter saying, ‘We really like what you do’ and he wrote down little things like ‘can the strings come in halfway through ‘Everybody Hurts” or on other songs maybe something like ‘please watch out for the guitar line that we would like to keep,’ so just little things like that. And that was it.”
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