Jimmy Page - Outrider (1988) LP

Jimmy Page was a band player before he started Led Zeppelin, and he returned to the group ranks after Zeppelin's breakup in 1980, starting the Firm with former Bad Company singer Paul Rodgers. But by the late '80s, he was ready to step out on his own.

The result was Page's first proper solo release, 1988's Outrider, which found one of rock's most respected guitarists working with a cast of characters that included former Firm bassist Tony Franklin, Zeppelin drummer John Bonham's son Jason, and vocalists John Miles and Chris Farlowe -- as well as Led Zep singer Robert Plant, who contributed vocals to one song, "The Only One."

If that description makes Outrider sound like a bit of a hodgepodge, there's good reason. Although Page was initially rumored to be recording an ambitious double-album set whose songs would be grouped according to genre, those plans had to be scaled back after he was forced to start from scratch partway through the demoing process.

"I remember looking around for some demos and sort of wondering where all my tapes were," he later explained to Brad Tolinski, author of Light and Shade: Conversations With Jimmy Page. "There was so much going on around my house and in my life at that time, I just figured they'd turn up somewhere. Well, they did turn up -- as bootlegs! Someone who was pretending to be a friend stole the tapes."

That setback put a completely different spin on the Outrider recording process -- although as Page went on to admit to Tolinski, he might not have made it a double LP anyway. "Because I was shaping Outrider as I went along, I put more work into it than any other album I've ever worked on," he claimed. "Consequently, I didn't fancy doing a double -- it would have been a masochistic task."