6 Great John Paul Jones Collaborations Outside Led Zeppelin

Some bands are built on friendship. Others, like Led Zeppelin, revolved around good old-fashioned work.

“I mean, we weren’t like a group who grew up together and made it big,” bassist John Paul Jones later told Q. “Led Zeppelin wasn’t manufactured exactly, but it was put together by Jimmy [Page]. … Even with Zeppelin, the thing is we have never socialized. As soon as we left the road, we never saw each other, which I always thought contributed to the longevity and harmony of the band. We weren’t friends.”

When Led Zeppelin parted ways in 1980, Jones’ entire existence changed.

“Being in Led Zeppelin was a bit like being captive to a great beast,” he explained. “Once it was up and running, that was it. It took over your life. As it happened, at the time that John [Bonham] died I had just moved to Devon to bring up my family, so after the split I was completely out of everything, and I must say I didn’t miss it.”

In the decades that followed, Jones kept a relatively low profile, aiming to leave the intensity of Led Zeppelin behind. But that didn’t mean he gave up on music. Over the years, he’s collaborated with a number of other artists and bands, usually without fanfare. (There was, of course, Them Crooked Vultures, a supergroup that consisted of Jones, Josh Homme and Dave Grohl.)

Here are six great John Paul Jones collaborations you should know, presented in chronological order.

1. Donovan

“John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page were very strong session guys for me,” Donovan told The Telegraph in September 2025.

In 1966, two years before Led Zeppelin was formed, Jones did the arrangement for Donovan’s song “Mellow Yellow” and played bass on it. Page also played on the album Mellow Yellow.

“I don’t want to say I created Led Zeppelin,” Donovan continued. “Let’s say John Paul Jones saw the possibilities.”

2. The Yardbirds

One year later, Jones and Page worked together even more closely. This time it was in the form of the Yardbirds‘ first album with Page, Little Games.

Jones played bass on “Goodnight Sweet Josephine” and “No Excess Baggage” and provided arrangement work on “Little Games” and “Ten Little Indians.” Yet another step closer to the band that would become Led Zeppelin.

3. The Rolling Stones

The Rolling Stones have Jones to thank for the lovely string arrangement on “She’s a Rainbow,” which appeared on their 1967 album Their Satanic Majesties Request. Jones, naturally, would later be responsible for many of the string arrangements found in various Led Zeppelin songs.

4. Paul McCartney

The only thing better than one legendary bassist is two of them. Jones played bass on “Ballroom Dancing,” a song that appeared in Paul McCartney‘s 1984 musical film Give My Regards to Broad Street and its accompanying soundtrack. (The song first appeared on McCartney’s 1982 album Tug of War, sans Jones.)

McCartney also nearly joined Them Crooked Vultures, but Jones reportedly beat him to the job. In 2009, he and Dave Grohl hung out after the Grammys.

“We went out for a bite to eat afterwards and Dave told me he was starting this band with Josh [Homme],” McCartney told the Daily Mail. “I asked him who was playing bass and he rather sheepishly told me he’d approached John. So you read it here first; Paul McCartney was nearly the bass player in Them Crooked Vultures.”

5. R.E.M.

At some point in the early ’90s, Michael Stipe of R.E.M. got a hold of Jones. “I had a handwritten note from Michael Stipe accompanying a tape of backing tracks that said ‘we like what you do, we need some strings, maybe if they came halfway through,'” Jones later recalled. “And I just wrote the parts and turned up with them in Atlanta and booked the Atlanta Symphony and we got on with it.”

Those parts became string arrangements for four songs on R.E.M.’s 1992 album Automatic for the People: “Drive,” “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite,” “Everybody Hurts” and “Nightswimming.”

6. Heart

The cool thing about Jones’ collaborative work is that other artists typically reach out to him first.

“They’re all people with a mission,” Jones said in the same interview about R.E.M. “It’s interesting music. Projects tend to come to me. I used to turn down the more commercial projects because they weren’t interesting. Anything left field or requires me having a strange involvement in it. With Heart, I got to play mandolin live onstage and work with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra.”

Jones produced Heart’s 1995 live album, The Road Home.