Aging & Wisdom Quote by Ronnie Montrose

Influence, in Montrose's telling, isn’t a polite nod to a playlist staple; it’s an aftershock from being in the room when rock was rewriting its own rules. The “original Yardbirds with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page” is a deliberately stacked image: two future guitar-myth archetypes sharing a stage in a band already famous for turning the blues into electricity. By naming both Beck and Page, Montrose isn’t just praising skill. He’s pinpointing a fork in the genre’s DNA, where virtuosity stops being decoration and becomes the engine.

The Fillmore matters as much as the lineup. Calling it “the old Fillmore” evokes a specific San Francisco ecology: louder amps, longer songs, and an audience trained to treat concerts like collective experiments. Montrose’s phrasing is casual (“I would say,” “pretty powerful”), but that understatement is part of the credibility. Musicians rarely describe formative moments as destiny; they describe them as something that hit them so hard they had to build a response.

Subtext: he’s staking a lineage claim. Montrose’s own work helped codify hard rock’s punchy, riff-forward economy, and this memory functions like provenance. He isn’t saying he copied the Yardbirds; he’s saying he witnessed a standard of risk, volume, and guitar conversation that made safety impossible afterward. The intent is both humble and strategic: to frame his sound not as isolated talent, but as the product of a live, communal transmission where history moved through speakers.