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Jimmy Page: The Definitive Biography
Chris Salewicz
Founder of one of the most influential and successful rock bands of all time, legendary Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page has nevertheless remained an enigma. In this definitive and comprehensive biography of his life so far, Chris Salewicz draws on his own interviews with Page and those closest around him to unravel the man behind the mystery.Having sold over 300 million copies worldwide, Led Zeppelin was the biggest band of the ’70s and has been loved by the legions ever since. From his own conversations with Jimmy, the rest of Led Zeppelin, old girlfriends, tour managers and session musicians to name but a few, Salewicz reveals the many trials and tribulations which transformed the middle class boy from the Surrey suburbs into one of rock’s most enigmatic frontmen.Detailed, thrilling and expertly researched, Salewicz discovers a man who was prepared to die for his art; who justified heroin use so he could harness its narcotic focus whilst making albums, and who overcame numerous death threats during this time. A warrior magician, Salewicz delves into the many skeletons and eccentricities in Page’s closet, contextualising him against a background of London gangsters, deaths, and power struggles which Page has continued to rail against to this day, even within his own band.As entertaining as it is insightful, and from a writer who experienced first-hand the Led Zeppelin furore, this promises to be as close to a Jimmy Page autobiography as fans can get.



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Copyright (#u9f42648e-3e1c-5cb0-9932-1087e0f7fd79)
HarperCollinsPublishers
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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
FIRST EDITION
© Chris Salewicz 2018
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Cover photograph © Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns/Getty Images
Extract from I’m With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie by Pamela Des Barres published by Omnibus Press © Panela Des Barres
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
Chris Salewicz asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008149291
Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008149307
Version: 2018-06-21

Dedication (#u9f42648e-3e1c-5cb0-9932-1087e0f7fd79)
For Alex and Cole

Contents
Cover (#ud76057b8-0314-5b94-9fa2-d11804311f62)
Title Page (#ucb0379db-d644-53a7-a074-a5b13c8e27bb)
Copyright (#udf05ea9a-26ab-57fc-bc43-cb6c10ceb966)
Dedication (#u8d5e81fa-305d-5cd2-932f-0d0ee7b76562)
Preface (#u055defcc-b8d5-582b-9590-e174468a461b)
Introduction (#ud2578b28-4167-5033-8253-53ed5faa6f00)
1 SPANISH GUITAR IN SURREY (#u0bb596da-93f8-5186-93b3-ca81bca15d54)
2 FROM NELSON STORM TO SESSION PLAYER (#u590d91a5-b3cd-502a-ac9d-6f869e2c6720)
3 SHE JUST SATISFIES (#ua2137d07-172c-5aba-9434-646bcccde7ac)
4 BECK’S BOLERO (#ube463ace-27cf-59f4-a4b0-c9629423e606)
5 BLOW-UPS (#u4fe2abfd-326a-5819-84c3-6e5ad85acbee)
6 ‘YOU’RE GOING TO KILL ME FOR A THOUSAND DOLLARS?’ (#u59fbe45b-fef9-578d-9c6a-b0ae06c63c19)
7 ‘LIKE A LEAD ZEPPELIN’ (#litres_trial_promo)
8 AMERICAN ADVANCES (#litres_trial_promo)
9 ‘WHOLE LOTTA LOVE’ (#litres_trial_promo)
10 LED ZEPPELIN II (#litres_trial_promo)
11 ‘DO WHAT THOU WILT’ (#litres_trial_promo)
12 THE BEAST 666 (#litres_trial_promo)
13 ALL THAT GLITTERS (#litres_trial_promo)
14 THE LEGEND OF ZOSO (#litres_trial_promo)
15 CITY OF ANGELS (#litres_trial_promo)
16 THE KING AND JIMMY PAGE (#litres_trial_promo)
17 COCAINE NIGHTS AND HAUNTED HOUSES (#litres_trial_promo)
18 AN ACCIDENT IN EXILE (#litres_trial_promo)
19 THE KENNETH ANGER CURSE (#litres_trial_promo)
20 FACE TO FACE (#litres_trial_promo)
21 THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT (#litres_trial_promo)
22 BONZO’S LAST STAND (#litres_trial_promo)
23 THE HERMIT (#litres_trial_promo)
24 MIDDLE-AGED GUITAR GOD (#litres_trial_promo)
25 THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE (#litres_trial_promo)
26 PHOENIX RISING (#litres_trial_promo)
Picture Section (#litres_trial_promo)
Sources (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Index of Searchable Terms (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Preface (#u9f42648e-3e1c-5cb0-9932-1087e0f7fd79)
One chilly February evening in 1975, Jimmy Page journeyed in a black Cadillac limousine to David Bowie’s rented house on 20th Street in Manhattan. The Led Zeppelin leader and Bowie had known each other since the mid-sixties, Page having played on several of Bowie’s early records.
The pair were also linked through Lori Mattix, Page’s Los Angeles-based underage lover and a cause of considerable concern in the Zeppelin camp, thanks to the criminal complications this could create for the Biggest Band in the World. What few knew was that Bowie had taken Mattix’s virginity when she was just 14.
With the superstar pair having been reintroduced by Mick Jagger, Bowie had invited Page over to his place for an evening’s entertainment largely comprising lines of cocaine and glasses of red wine, along with Ava Cherry, Bowie’s girlfriend.
Mired in his Cracked Actor phase, Bowie was known to be living on milk and cocaine, and on the edge of madness. He had been inspired to devour the writings of Aleister Crowley, whose philosophy he had first dabbled in during the late 1960s: Bowie believed that Page’s deep knowledge of Crowley had enhanced the guitarist’s aura until it was rock hard and ringing with power.
But despite being intrigued, Bowie was extremely wary of Page. Conversation was somewhat stiff, although there was brief talk about Page’s progress, or lack of it, on the soundtrack to filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s occult masterpiece Lucifer Rising. Attempting to inquire how Page had developed his extreme aura, Bowie found his questions were never answered: Page would simply smile mysteriously.
‘It seemed that he did believe he had the power to control the universe,’ wrote Tony Zanetta, the head of Bowie’s management organisation MainMan, in his book Stardust. Besides, Page was only too aware that Bowie was picking his brain, endeavouring to crack a magician’s tricks.
At one point Bowie disappeared out of the room, and Page accidentally spilled red wine on a satin cushion. When the singer returned, Page tried to blame Ava Cherry, who wasn’t in the room.
His guest’s inscrutable behaviour had already rankled Bowie, and now he knew that Page was lying. ‘I’d like you to leave,’ he said.
Page’s response was simply to smile at Bowie. The window was open, and Bowie pointed at it, snapping his words out furiously: ‘Why don’t you leave by the window?’
Page remained sitting there, maintaining his enigmatic rictus smile, gazing through Bowie. Finally, the Led Zeppelin leader stood up silently, stepped towards the front door and left, shutting the door forcefully behind him.
Bowie was terrified. Immediately afterwards he ordered that the house be exorcised. A sensitive soul whose perceptions were addled by drugs, Bowie believed ‘it had become overrun with satanic demons whom Crowley’s disciples had summoned straight from hell’.
When he later ran into Page at a party, Bowie straightaway fled the event.

Introduction (#u9f42648e-3e1c-5cb0-9932-1087e0f7fd79)
John Bindon, Led Zeppelin’s security guard, had stagehand Jim Matzorkis pinned to the floor of a backstage trailer at Oakland Coliseum. Bindon, a sometime actor and London gangland heavy who had reputedly once bitten off a man’s testicles and would stab another man to death the following year, was viciously pummelling Matzorkis with his fists and feet. But it was only when Bindon started trying to gouge out the stagehand’s eyes that Matzorkis fully appreciated the danger he was in.
For much of this day of Saturday 23 July 1977 the possibility of such a grim outcome had been building. Many of Zeppelin and their crew seemed in a state of permanent rage, as if they had surrendered control to the large quantities of drugs consumed during the course of a 51-date tour that had begun on 1 April.
Later, Jimmy Page would be obliged to deny to me that what happened that day was karmic recompense for his flirtations with the occult. ‘I don’t think we were doing anything … evil,’ he said, two years later.
It was especially ironic that what happened at Oakland Coliseum that day, which would utterly transform the fortunes and career trajectory of Led Zeppelin, should be on the turf of Bill Graham, whose Fillmore West had been a temple of popularity for the Yardbirds, Page’s previous group, and, along with Graham’s New York showcase the Fillmore East, the scene of early break-out triumphs for Led Zeppelin. Although the confluence of the interests of Bill Graham and Peter Grant, Led Zeppelin’s manager, had proved mutually advantageous in the past, it was always a disaster waiting to happen. Graham was the most powerful music promoter in the United States; Grant had reinvented the relationship between managers and promoters in the United States, often through heavy-handed behaviour. And as much as Grant terrified people, Graham also possessed a fierce temper.
The previous evening, Graham, who was promoting Day on the Green, as this event was billed, for an audience of 65,000, had been summoned to Led Zeppelin’s hotel, the San Francisco Hilton, to honour a sudden demand for a $25,000 cash advance against their fee for the shows. Entering their suite, Graham noticed a cowboy-hat-wearing local dealer of hard drugs; in a flash he realised what the money was needed for.
Arriving only 20 minutes before the start of the gig, Page was so evidently befuddled from his drug consumption, by that stage largely heroin, that Graham could only watch as the Led Zeppelin leader set off for the stage in entirely the wrong direction; he was rescued by an aide who stopped him and despatched him on the correct course. Midway through the set Bindon crawled out onto the stage on his hands and knees and licked Page’s boots.
As the wheezing, out-of-shape man-mountain that was Peter Grant lumbered up to the stage, Jim Downey, a member of the stage crew, commiserated with him about the excessively steep climb. For this presumption Bindon, who was accompanying Grant, punched Downey with such force that he slammed him into a concrete pillar and knocked him out.
‘What happened? The fuck did I do?’ wondered the victim as he came to. Downey was clearly unaware of an extraordinary management edict – egregiously pathetic in its arrogance – on what would become the final Led Zeppelin American tour: no one was permitted to speak to any member of the act, or to Grant, unless they were first spoken to. (Flying on the group’s plane, journalist Steven Rosen had been made fully aware of this. He was startled when the normally benign bass player, John Paul Jones, had verbally assaulted him, demanding all of his interview tapes – a response to an apparently unfavourable comparison of Zeppelin to the Jeff Beck Group that Rosen had made years previously. This incident was indicative of the prevailing mood on the tour.)
‘What I didn’t like about Led Zeppelin was that they came with force,’ Graham wrote later. ‘I had heard stories from other cities about how they had muscled promoters to get better deals. How they had shaken them down for money … I had heard about the ugliness of their security.’
But far worse was to come. Midway through Led Zeppelin’s show, during Page’s acoustic set, Matzorkis noticed a young boy removing wooden plaques from the doors of the dressing-room trailers: plaques that had the names of the artists on them, and which would be required for the repeat show the following day. Also on the bill, as support acts, were Judas Priest and Rick Derringer. Matzorkis told the kid to put them back. The kid was insistent that he would be taking them. So Matzorkis took them from him – allegedly cuffing him round the back of the head, although Matzorkis has always denied this – and wandered over to the storage trailer to lock them away. Unbeknown to Matzorkis, the boy was Warren Grant, the 11-year-old son of Peter Grant.
A few minutes later Matzorkis was still in the storage trailer when John Bonham, Led Zeppelin’s drummer – surplus to requirements during Page’s acoustic set – called to him from the bottom of the short flight of steps outside it. Peter Grant was with him.
‘You don’t talk to my kid that way,’ Grant said, as Matzorkis stood in the trailer’s doorway. The burly Bonham, an effigy of muscle and blubbery booze-fat, simply stood there, as though he was Grant’s security wingman. Then Grant escalated matters, like the barrack-room lawyer and bully he could be: ‘You don’t talk to my kid that way. Nobody does. I can have your job.’ Grant continued in this vein, accusing Matzorkis of ‘roughing this kid up. I heard you hit this child.’
Stepping up the stairs, Bonham then kicked Matzorkis between the legs, sending the stagehand flying back into the trailer. Bonham followed him in, while a pair of bodyguards endeavoured to restrain the drummer, shouting at Matzorkis to get out of there. He did, through a rear door.
When he learned of the incident, Graham went to find Grant in his trailer. For 20 minutes Graham put up a spirited defence of Matzorkis, yet Grant refused to budge from his thinking: ‘Your man put his hands on my people. On my son. How could you let this happen? How could you hire these people? I’m very disappointed in you.’
‘Let me speak to this man,’ Grant repeatedly demanded. When Grant finally insisted that all he wanted was to meet again with ‘the man’ who had caused these problems to ‘make my peace with him’, Graham somewhat reluctantly agreed to the manager’s request.
Walking over to find Matzorkis in another trailer, Graham observed that Grant was now flanked by a pair of other men; one of them was Bindon.
When Graham introduced Grant to Matzorkis, Led Zeppelin’s manager seized the stagehand, yanked him towards him and smashed him full in the face with a ring-covered fist, knocking him back into his seat. When Graham lunged at Grant, one of the security men picked up the promoter, threw him down the steps and shut the door of the trailer, standing guard in front of it.
Inside the trailer Bindon held Matzorkis from behind, while Grant started to work him over, punching him ceaselessly in the face, knocking out a tooth and kicking him in the balls.
Somehow, Matzorkis, who was screaming for help, broke free of Bindon. He managed to manoeuvre himself to the rear of the trailer, but this was when Bindon leapt upon him and went for his eyes. Fuelled by adrenaline, Matzorkis finally twisted away and got to the door.
Despite the security man guarding it, Matzorkis managed to get out of the trailer and run off across the backstage area.
Meanwhile, tour manager Richard Cole, armed with a chunk of metal pipe, had been attempting to enter the trailer. Bob Barsotti, who with his brother served as Bill Graham’s creative director, had prevented him, so he then turned on him. Realising that Cole was demented from the drugs he had seen him consuming during the day, Barsotti ran off, leading him on a merry dance down into the car park, where Cole ran out of steam.
By now several of Graham’s security men had gone to retrieve their ‘pieces’ from where they were stashed in their cars’ boots, but a seasoned member of the backstage crew reminded all concerned that the next day there would be another Led Zeppelin show: if the group did not play, 65,000 fans might very well riot. Yet the Graham crew consensus was that somehow the next day they would ‘deal’ with Zeppelin and their team. The promoter agreed with this thinking. He also made an offer: if they couldn’t ‘do’ Led Zeppelin and their cohorts the next day, then he would personally fly 25 of his men to New Orleans, the next date on the tour, and they could mete out revenge there.
At Graham’s home that evening, where the promoter had taken Matzorkis for protection following his release from hospital, he received a call from Led Zeppelin’s US lawyer: he demanded that Matzorkis sign an indemnity waiver, giving Led Zeppelin protection against being sued over what he referred to as a ‘minor altercation’. Unless this was received, Led Zeppelin ‘would find it difficult to play’ the next day.
Graham agreed to sign; his own lawyer told him that as he was acting under duress, it would not be legally binding. Besides, Graham had a plan. Knowing that Led Zeppelin would be staying in San Francisco for a further night following the Sunday show in Oakland, he had arranged with the local district attorney to arrest those culpable on the Monday morning.
At the Sunday concert the loathing of Graham’s entire crew towards Led Zeppelin was palpable: they glowered at the band and anyone connected with them. Page played most of the show seated, and he and Jones both looked bored. Robert Plant, however, sang very well indeed, dropping occasional words of commiseration in the direction of Graham; bootlegs indicate that it was a far better show than the previous day, partly because Led Zeppelin appeared drug-free. Still, it was a tense affair, and many in the audience were drunk and rowdy. Rumours were running round that a murder had been committed the previous day.
The next day, Bonham, Grant, Bindon and Cole were arrested at the San Francisco Hilton and taken, hands cuffed behind their backs, across the bay to Oakland to be booked, where they were held in a cell for three hours. There was a very real chance that if the case went to a criminal court, all involved would be deported and never be able to work again in the United States, a serious financial worry.
Bonham was charged with a single count of battery, as was Grant; Cole and Bindon were each charged with two counts of battery. The news of their arrest and the incident at Oakland Coliseum made the news all around the world. When they were eventually released they were bailed at $250 on each charge.
As the arrests at the hotel were taking place, Jones was exiting the Hilton through a rear door. He climbed into a camper van with his family and drove out of San Francisco towards Oregon and Washington state, on a planned holiday before Led Zeppelin’s next date, in New Orleans, at the city’s Louisiana Superdome. He was set to rejoin the band there on 30 July, in time for the show that night.
‘As far as I was concerned, every one of those guys in the band was absolutely 100 per cent accountable for that shit. Because they allowed it to go on,’ said Bob Barsotti. ‘And we weren’t the only ones it happened to. We were just the last ones. We were the only ones who stood up and said something. When we started looking into it, there were incidents like that all across the country on that tour. Trashed hotel rooms. Trashed restaurants. Literally like twenty-thousand dollars’ worth of damages at some restaurant in Pennsylvania. Really outrageous stuff. Like where they physically abused waiters and people in the restaurant, and then just bought them off.’
‘They would do things after the show,’ said Peter Barsotti. ‘The traditional “go get chicks out of the audience for the band”. I remember standing by the ramp and seeing these guys get girls to come over. It was like no other feeling I’d ever experienced. It was like these girls were going to be sacrificed. I wanted to go out and grab these girls and say, “Don’t do it, honey. Don’t do it.” I’m as hardcore as the next guy. But I was afraid for these girls.’
If it could be possible, worse was to come. Arriving on 26 July at the Royal Orleans Hotel in New Orleans, Plant received a phone call from his wife in England: she told her husband that Karac, their five-year-old son, was seriously ill and had been taken to hospital.
Then came another call from her. Karac had died.
A devastated Plant flew back to England. All remaining dates on that eleventh Led Zeppelin tour of the United States were cancelled.
At the funeral of Karac, Plant was joined by Bonham and Cole. But there was no Page, who had flown instead to Cairo, where he was ensconced by the pyramids in the luxurious Mena House Hotel. Jones, for his part, had simply resumed his family holiday. And Grant had also remained in the US. Plant would not forget this.
On 26 July Graham received a call from the Zeppelin manager. ‘I hope you’re happy,’ Grant muttered down the line.
‘What are you talking about?’ Graham asked.
‘Thanks to you, Robert Plant’s kid died today.’
That one absurd assessment by Grant captured everything that had gone wrong with Jimmy Page’s Led Zeppelin project.
Just considering the death of Karac Plant sets off an inescapable collision of images of those nude blond children crawling up the boulders on the Houses of the Holy sleeve, and of the child being held aloft, as though for sacrifice. You can’t help but feel that this might have crossed the mind of the bereft Robert Plant on his wretched plane ride home.
The Oakland incident, and the death of his singer’s son, marked an extraordinary, certainly hubristic fall for Jimmy Page, who since the beginning of Led Zeppelin in 1968 had become the greatest archetype of a globally successful rock star that Britain has ever seen.
‘Jimmy Page grew up in the hypocrisy of the United Kingdom in the 1950s and found three chords that saved him,’ said his friend Michael Des Barres. ‘As Led Zeppelin developed, heroin was obviously the fuel of that mad coach ride through the countryside. And inevitable.’
The mystery of Led Zeppelin had been established almost entirely through the endless enigma that is Page; later, as the apprentice matured, Plant would offer a separate sort of leadership within the group. In tandem with their extraordinarily lyrical atmospherics, Zeppelin’s complex beats were the dominant soundtrack for popular culture for nigh on a decade. But the music was only one part of it; without Page’s extremely pure comprehension of the intangibles of rock ’n’ roll – the perfect manner in which to exit a limousine, for example – Led Zeppelin would not have been granted their place in the pantheon of rock ’n’ roll gods.
From the very start – those first publicity pictures with his fluttering eyelashes and choirboy’s face – Page displayed a slightly smirking look of utter confidence and haughty control, with a hidden promise of something sinister cloaked beneath it. There is that very early photograph of the four Led Zeppelin musicians in 1968 clustered around the bonnet of a Jaguar Mk 2 3.8, which had a reputation as a bank robber’s car. Page is encased in a then fashionable double-breasted overcoat, its collar pulled rakishly up; he stares at the camera from between those curtains of crimped black hair, smouldering with self-assurance and poise. It is an image maintained in the first official promotional shot of the band, issued by Atlantic Records: the utter Capricorn control of Page leaning over the other three members – his string-pulling hands resting on the shoulders of the two Midlands neophytes, drummer John Bonham and Plant, who resembles a frightened faun caught in the headlights.
Their look – especially that of Page – is like that of Charles I’s cavaliers, perhaps especially of Lord John Stuart and His Brother, Lord Bernard Stuart, Anthony van Dyck’s 1638 painting of two teenagers who would be killed in the English Civil War.
Half an inch under six foot tall, permanently clad in sensuous velvet and sexy ruffled shirts, his jawline frequently dusted with five o’clock shadow, and always with that aura of androgynous otherness, Page looked to many women – and plenty of men too – like dirty sex on a stick. This image was as integral to his art as the 20-minute guitar solos with which he would blast his audience’s eardrums – the violin bow he would employ when performing ‘Dazed and Confused’ clearly doubled as a wizard’s wand to manipulate concertgoers.
And it only gets better: this romantic dandy lives in a castle with a moat. Jimmy Page does very bad drugs seemingly forever and – unlike Keith Richards, a mere also-ran in the greatest ever UK rock star stakes – never gets busted … at least until Zeppelin is over. Moreover, he is held responsible for an entire genre of music – heavy metal! – with which his group is only tangentially involved, his true focus being a blending of UK and US folk traditions with a garage band sense of hard rock.
In his renowned isolation he is like a rock ’n’ roll version of Howard Hughes. But in many ways, the very idea of Jimmy Page is as much a construct as any of David Bowie’s personae. And – lest we take this too seriously – it is worth considering that when his own persona is deconstructed, Page is sometimes little more than a high-art version of Screaming Lord Sutch, the plumber rock ’n’ roll showman on whose attractively kitsch shock-rock records he played session guitar.
‘Everyone I worked with in the 1960s thought that rock ’n’ roll was really an aspect of showbiz,’ said Dave Ambrose, who played bass in Shotgun Express (with Rod Stewart) and the Brian Auger Trinity, who supported Led Zeppelin in San Francisco in April 1969. Later, as an A&R man, Ambrose signed the Sex Pistols, Duran Duran and the Pet Shop Boys, among others.
Many of Page’s expenditures – the palatial residences, the vintage cars he was unable to drive (he never passed his test), the enormous collection of rare guitars – seemed designed to garner respect and support among the world’s wealthy and influential, to make people aware of him, to elevate his extraordinarily inscrutable profile, and to establish himself as one of the principal men about whichever town he found himself in.
But at the same time, here was a rebel cocking a snook at the Establishment, having what he knew he wasn’t meant to have. With Led Zeppelin there always was that sense of being resolutely ‘underground’, a card played with perfect panache by the band for most of their career: hardly ever on television, with no singles released in their homeland, Zeppelin existed from the very beginning as their own outsider identity. In a sense the damning review of their first album by John Mendelsohn in Rolling Stone, a magazine Page came to loathe, was perfect for them; it set in motion the ‘us against them’ agenda from which Led Zeppelin’s success soared.
By 1977, the year their myth savagely unravelled, they would come to be seen as the embodiment of behemoth rock, all that the new punk movement stood against, but when Led Zeppelin started out in 1968 their anti-Establishment stance was about as punk as it could be.
‘The big question today is, Why hasn’t he done new music?’ said Michael Des Barres. ‘Well, why does he have to? Jimmy Page is his own art piece, a performance artist, and he’s busy curating his legacy. There is nobody else whose roadie was Aleister Crowley. And it worked. Led Zeppelin were not a band; they were a cult.
‘Led Zeppelin brought together all those kids who otherwise would just hang around parking lots in two-bit American cities, kids for whom the obvious decadence of the Rolling Stones didn’t really connect. Instead, Led Zeppelin were their cult; they became a focus for and brought together all those disaffected, lost souls who would take the fantasy world of the group and its subject matter and project onto it their own interpretation of what they were.’
The world was ready for just such a package. Around the time the Rolling Stones were writing 1968’s ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had dabbled in a friendship with the Californian film director and occultist Kenneth Anger, but – as though proof that in such areas they were distinctly lightweight – fled his company the next year after the debacle of Altamont. Instead it was Led Zeppelin, driven by Page’s assiduous academic interest in altered states and realities, that provided the soundtrack to the building public interest in the occult. In 1972 TIME magazine ran a cover story bearing the strapline ‘Satan Returns’. Colin Wilson’s mammoth groundbreaking study simply titled The Occult had been published in 1971. More populist was the Man, Myth and Magic partwork series, which commenced in 1970, providing highly readable accounts of a secret world that was exciting to the newly stoned with their now-opened third eyes. As was the manner of partworks, Man, Myth and Magic was extensively plugged in television adverts, featuring an image of a demonic figure, painted by Austin Osman Spare. Spare had been close to Aleister Crowley and was sometimes described as ‘Britain’s greatest unknown artist’; Page would become the world’s leading collector of Spare’s work.
By then there was something frightening about the very notion of Led Zeppelin. After I interviewed Page in 1979 in a relatively forthright manner for the NME, a senior editorial member asked me if I wasn’t nervous of any potential repercussions. When I told casual acquaintances I was writing this book, I was met with similar responses: ‘Jimmy Page? Black magic?’
For some years – a decade or so – this was the prevailing view of Page. But of course time is a healer, so it should be no great surprise that by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, and in his own seventh and eighth decades, Page had redeemed himself to become the most loved and revered of all classic rock stars.
This redemption was fitting, given that this is the man who almost singlehandedly established the notion of the guitar hero as part of contemporary culture. ‘What about Eric Clapton?’ you may ask. No: Clapton was too diverse in the paths he trod. It was the singularity of Page’s work with his vehicle Led Zeppelin, underpinned by his extraordinarily startling and sinisterly attractive appearance, that awarded him the guitar hero crown. Guitar hero? Guitar god, more like.
His is an extraordinary story that has taken him to the very darkest of areas – but always driven by the search for his art. You might not approve of the methods employed to unleash and liberate his creativity, and you can’t avoid the impression that Page was vain, arrogant, fanatical and power-hungry, and indulged in a scandalous private life – much, of course, to the adoration of his fans. Yet many of the accusations against him were probably fabricated or at least exaggerated by his numerous enemies – though many of these, in the timbre of the times, were no more than cosmic spivs.
Certainly, Page was a man of his age – ambitious, worldly and pleasure-loving – but the demonic caricature of evil is mostly an elaborate myth. Not that he didn’t gladly play it himself, of course. By mentioning in a very matter-of-fact manner how the congregation of the original church at Boleskine House, a home of Crowley, had burned to death, Page was positioning himself as being metaphysically hard, a cosmically tough motherfucker with complex connections to ghoulish gangs of strange spirits. It was, of course, a good way to attract impressionable women, a variant on those college student ‘astrologers’ who would take girls back to their rooms to read their charts and then shag them.
For a time Page was fascinated with – to give it its full title – the Isis-Urania Temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a late-19th-century group of occultists whose members had included the Irish poet W. B. Yeats and Crowley, who – unsurprisingly – considered his poetry superior to that of Yeats and had a bitter falling out with the Irishman.
‘Much of the Golden Dawn magic,’ wrote Gary Lachman in his biography of Crowley, ‘as well as Crowley’s, has to do with what is called the “assumption of the god form”, when the magician imagines he has become the particular god he wants to invoke by visualising his form enveloping his own.’ Except you might feel that the ‘particular god’ Page wished to invoke was none other than himself: Jimmy Page, rock god.
And this stance was carried through to every aspect of his existence, including his appearances on stage.
‘On the surface,’ writes the American cultural commentator Erik Davis, ‘Page’s live performances present typical rockist values of spontaneity, virtuosity and sweaty abandon. But Page adds a novel element to the figure of the guitar hero, an element … of mystery. So even as Page bares his cock rock before tens of thousands of fans, the Zoso doodle emblazoned on his clothes, he reminds us that he knows something that we don’t. There is a gap between the hero whose performance we consume and the sage behind the curtain, who remains concealed, literally occult. This mystique makes Page far creepier than Ozzy Osbourne, who is hiding nothing, except maybe his debt to The Munsters.’
A balanced appreciation of Page’s character reveals traits both admirable and detestable, but claims of his ethical failings have sometimes overshadowed an appreciation of his keen creative mind. Besides, his flamboyantly dissolute lifestyle was hardly different from that of many other rock stars of his age – such as David Bowie, or Mick Jagger, or Rod Stewart.
But Page had a longstanding relationship with the art of destruction, and had been preparing for a career of hotel-wrecking since early in his life. At the rear of the secondary school he went to, on Epsom’s Danetree Road, there was a bomb shelter left over from the war. Although efforts to destroy it had been made on several occasions by his fellow pupils, it was a 14-year-old Jimmy Page who finally succeeded.
In what seems less an example of urban terrorism and more like a yarn from one of Richmal Crompton’s Just William stories, an older boy had combined sodium sulphate, weed killer and icing sugar to make several miniature bombs. A couple of these had exploded in the school grounds, with the blame always attributed to the rough kids from the neighbouring council estate.
But then this arms race escalated. Another boy constructed a pipe bomb and placed it inside the bomb shelter. Once lit, however, the fuse on the bomb burned interminably slowly. After some 20 minutes without much progress, one of boys offered a solution: he had a fuse taken from a Jetex, a motor for model aircraft that was popular at the time, which they put in the pipe bomb.
‘But nobody dared light it,’ remembered Page’s friend Rod Wyatt. ‘So Jimmy said, “I’ll do it.” So he goes in the entrance of the shelter, and then he comes running out. As he runs out it goes off: P-F-O-O-F! B-R-A-MMM! And the whole corner, which was thick concrete, flies up in the air, bricks following it. And Jimmy is running out, laughing his head off into the playground.
‘Reflecting on this, I thought, “Was that a sign of the times? That he was going to be part of the loudest rock ’n’ roll band ever?” This gentlemanly young guitar player says, “I’ll light the jet engine. I don’t mind.” It fits Led Zeppelin perfectly.’

1
SPANISH GUITAR IN SURREY (#u9f42648e-3e1c-5cb0-9932-1087e0f7fd79)
Born at 4 a.m. on 9 January 1944 in Heston, Middlesex, on the far fringes of London’s western suburbs, James Patrick Page was the son of an industrial personnel manager, also called James, and Patricia, a doctor’s secretary. The future superstar musician’s name was a combination of both of his parents’, who had been married at Epsom Register Office on 22 April 1941.
According to the mythology of his rock-star legend, Jimmy Page was ‘born on a full moon’, with all the occult, mystical weight that that phrase carries. Yet this is not precisely true. He was in fact born 31 hours before the full moon of 10 January 1944. While the baby boy and his mother might have felt the powerful energy of the rising Cancer full moon as he was born, the earth’s only natural satellite was not yet at its peak. In time Page would become a student of astrology; he would learn that in his astrological chart his moon was in moody Cancer, his sun sign was determinedly ambitious Capricorn, and he had Scorpio rising, with its suggestion of powerful sexuality and interest in arcane areas of life.
To an extent this only child – until he started school at the age of five he hardly knew any other children – was always self-educated, manifesting a strong sense of self-fulfilment, even destiny – though there is often something fixed and inflexible about the self-taught. ‘That early isolation probably had a lot to do with the way I turned out,’ he said later. ‘Isolation doesn’t bother me at all. It gives me a sense of security.’
Heston, his birthplace, has a distinct sense of J. G. Ballard-like suburban anonymity, the net curtains firmly drawn on all manner of potential darkness. Heston lies on the direct flight-path into Heathrow Airport, less than three miles away, and today is a place blighted by the ever-present roaring reverse thrust of descending jet airliners. It was the beginnings of this noise pollution that led the Page family to move first to nearby Feltham, a distance of some four miles, where unfortunately the noise from aeroplanes was even more acute, and then the ten miles or so to the south-east, to 34 Miles Road in Epsom, Surrey, in 1952. (In 1965 Page would, with Eric Clapton, record a song entitled ‘Miles Road’.)
Eight-year-old Jimmy Page was enrolled at Epsom County Pound Lane Primary School, and at the age of eleven he moved on to Ewell County Secondary School, on Danetree Road in adjacent West Ewell. His headmaster, Len Bradbury, who took over in 1958 when Page was in year three, had played football for Manchester United, and Bradbury’s arrival at the school was only a few months after his former team had been decimated in the Munich air disaster. (Many years later Bradbury would be a guest of honour at Manchester United’s ground, with pictures of him taken with the team’s captain, Roy Keane, and Ryan Giggs.) Page was in the proximity of celebrity – and he could see that such individuals were sort of ordinary people.
At 34 Miles Road, Page discovered a Spanish guitar that had been left behind, presumably by the previous occupiers. Had it ever been played? Perhaps not. In the 1950s a Spanish guitar as an objet d’art in the home was considered a sign of sophistication. ‘Nobody seemed to know why it was there,’ he told the Sunday Times. ‘It was sitting around our living room for weeks and weeks. I wasn’t interested. Then I heard a couple of records that really turned me on, the main one being Elvis’s “Baby Let’s Play House”, and I wanted to play it. I wanted to know what it was all about. This other guy at school showed me a few chords and I just went on from there.’
‘This other guy’ was called Rod Wyatt. Although fascinated by the Spanish guitar, Page all the same had been flummoxed by how to play the instrument. During a lunch break at secondary school, he came across Wyatt, who was in a class a couple of years above him. The owner of an acoustic guitar of his own, Wyatt was running through a version of ‘Rock Island Line’, a chart hit by the revered Lonnie Donegan, when he met Page. In response to the younger boy’s query, Wyatt instructed him to bring his Spanish acoustic to school and he would show him how to tune the instrument. From then on the pair became firm friends.
‘My mate Pete Calvert and I were always at Jimmy’s house bashing out our guitars for a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon,’ said Wyatt. ‘Sometimes I’d go round to Jimmy’s and his mum would say, “No, he’s practising.” When he suddenly realised he had it, he spent a lot of time practising. Sometimes six or seven hours a day. He told me he needed to improve his technique. And he eventually became the all-round perfect guitarist. Practice is what it’s all about.’
What had really turned Page on in Elvis Presley’s rockabilly song ‘Baby Let’s Play House’, released in the UK six days before Christmas 1955, was the guitar playing of Scotty Moore, who served as Presley’s guitarist from 1954 to 1958. On 5 July 1954 Moore had, with bassist Bill Black and Elvis himself, mutated the original arrangement of ‘That’s All Right’ by bluesman Arthur Crudup into a version that combined blues and country music, creating one of the foundations of rock ’n’ roll.
‘Scotty Moore had been a major inspiration in my early transitory days from acoustic to electric guitar. His character guitar playing on those early Elvis Sun recordings, and later at RCA, was monumental. It was during the fifties that these types of song-shaping guitar parts helped me see the importance of the electric guitar approach to music,’ said Page.
On ‘Baby Let’s Play House’ Moore played a burnished rockabilly rhythm. Page’s love of the tune would not leave him, even after almost 20 years: about nine minutes into the live version of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ in the Led Zeppelin film The Song Remains the Same he breaks into a close simulacrum of Moore’s licks. But that was a long way in the future: for now the 12-year-old Page assiduously studied and copied Moore’s parts. There could hardly be a purer, more perfect example of this brand new musical form, an ideal introduction to what his life would become. Every day he would take his guitar to school on Danetree Road.
‘When I grew up there weren’t many other guitarists,’ he told America’s National Public Radio in 2003. ‘There was one other guitarist in my school who actually showed me the first chords that I learned and I went on from there. I was bored so I taught myself the guitar from listening to records. So obviously it was a very personal thing.’
But he also had a seemingly separate life as a choirboy. Each Sunday, wearing the appropriate surplice and cassock, he would sing hymns at Epsom’s St Barnabas Anglican Church. The first image in his 2010 photographic autobiography is of him in this mode – clearly he is being ironic. As so often in the life of Jimmy Page, cold realism lay behind the impetus for his choirboy stints.
‘In those days it was difficult to access rock ’n’ roll music,’ he said to the Sunday Times in 2010, ‘because after all the riots happened in the cinemas, when people heard “Rock Around the Clock” in the film Blackboard Jungle, the authorities tried to lock it all down. So you needed to tune in to the radio or go to places where you could hear it. It just so happened that in youth clubs they would play records and you’d get to hear Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and Ricky Nelson – but you had to either go to church or be a member of the choir to go to the youth club.’
Page had many of the characteristics of the only child, burying himself in books and, almost the ultimate cliché, collecting overseas postage stamps. But more and more since discovering that Spanish guitar at Miles Road, he immersed himself in becoming adept on the instrument. ‘The choirmaster at St Barnabas remembered that I used to take my guitar to choir practice,’ he said, ‘and ask if I could tune it up to the organ.’
In Epsom there is a prominent motorcar showroom named Page Motors. It has often been claimed, even by myself, that this business is owned by members of Page’s family. But this is not the case at all. His relatives on his father’s side came from Grimsbury in Northamptonshire, and his paternal grandfather had been a nurseryman, tending to plants. (An irony that would not be lost on Page, who later had a Plant of his own to deal with, of course.) On his father’s side there was Irish blood.
At 122 Miles Road, at the far end of the street from the Page family home at number 34, lived a boy of similar age to Page called David Williams. According to Williams, Miles Road, which lay to the west of Epsom, was distinctly the wrong side of the high street. To the east lay the plush property in which affluent commuters to London were ensconced. The Page house backed onto the railway line that transported these people to the capital, less than 20 miles away, and was identical to the Williams home, having a downstairs living room and dining room and a pair of bedrooms upstairs. Downstairs, beyond the kitchen, was an outside toilet. Although most of these houses, including the Pages’, later had this feature adapted into a full bathroom, there is no getting away from the fact that these were distinctly basic homes.
Page’s father worked in nearby Chessington, a personnel manager at a plastic-coating factory, and his mother was the secretary at a local doctor’s practice. Despite the impeccable ‘BBC English’ – as such received pronunciation was known at the time – with which rock star Jimmy Page would express himself, his background was no more than lower middle-class, almost jumped-up working-class.
Another good friend, Peter Neal, lived on Miles Road. Page, Peter Neal and David Williams would hang out at each other’s houses. Gradually Page’s home – without any brothers or sisters to get in the way – became a focal point. He also had the advantage of enjoying both parents – although Wyatt mentions some growing tension between his mother and father. When Williams was just 13, his own mother had died: ‘I am certain that Jim’s mother was the initial driving force behind his musical progression. She was a petite, dark-haired woman with a strong personality, a glint in her eye and wicked sense of humour. She liked to tease me in a good-natured way, but let me hang out endlessly in their front room with Jim. I think she must have known my mother and, given the new circumstances I found myself in, I guess she felt sorry for me. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, I can now appreciate her kindness and tolerance, for I must have been a fairly constant presence in her house.’
After hearing Chuck Berry, the black poet of rock ’n’ roll sensibility, on American Forces Network radio broadcasting fuzzily from Germany in 1956, Williams acquired a UK EP that gathered together the songs ‘Maybellene’, ‘Thirty Days (To Come Back Home)’, ‘Wee Wee Hours’ and ‘Together (We Will Always Be)’. He and Page played it incessantly, the latter being especially taken with ‘Maybellene’ and its tale of amorous automobile class struggle, and with ‘Thirty Days’.
From the equipment Page quickly began to amass, it seems that this only child was a little spoilt – or, at least, certainly lucky. He was the first of his friends to acquire a reel-to-reel tape recorder, which he soon replaced with a newer model, selling the older one to Williams so he could then pass on the tapes of songs he would diligently record off the radio.
Discerning in their taste, certainly to their own minds, these boys truly cared for only a handful of artists: Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis – the eccentric and wild Jerry Lee, with his 13-year-old bride, being Page’s especial preference. Eddie Cochran would soon emerge to join this pantheon.
They would visit and revisit their local cinemas to watch such films as The Girl Can’t Help It, a minor triumph in 1956 that featured Little Richard, Fats Domino, Eddie Cochran, Julie London and the Platters. Also released that year was the more pedestrian Rock, Rock, Rock!, which had a highlight performance of ‘You Can’t Catch Me’ by Chuck Berry, his patent-leather pompadour and sneering grin permanently lending him the appearance of one of those black pimps whose look Elvis Presley had tried so hard to emulate. One Saturday afternoon in 1960 Page and Williams would hitchhike 50 miles to Bognor Regis to catch Berry performing a solitary tune in the classic film Jazz on a Summer’s Day.
In the record department of Rogers, an electrical goods shop on Epsom High Street, the three boys ingratiated themselves with the girl behind the counter. This ally would provide them with glimpses of record-company schedules of forthcoming releases. The boys would search out the most interesting names. ‘Frankie Avalon and Bobby Rydell were clearly to be overlooked in favour of the likes of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins or Big “T” Tyler,’ recalled Williams. ‘Also, song titles could often be a good indication of something a little stronger. The dreaded “A White Sport Coat (and a Pink Carnation)” was hardly going to evoke the sort of enthusiasm and anticipation we would have for titles such as “Rumble”, “I Put a Spell on You” or “Voodoo Voodoo”, was it?’
Soon appreciating the limitations of his Spanish acoustic instrument, Page worked for some weeks during the school summer holidays on a milk round, until he had saved up enough money to buy a Höfner President acoustic guitar. ‘It was a hollow-bodied acoustic model with a simple pickup,’ said Williams, ‘but when he attached it to a very small amplifier, it made something like the sound we all admired. I can recall that Saturday morning when I was summoned to his house to first feast eyes on it. Jim was like the cat with the cream. Pete and I were allowed a strum, but by now we realised that any aspirations we might have had in that direction were going to be dwarfed by Jim’s talent, desire and progress.’
After Page had acquired his Höfner President, his parents paid for lessons from a guitar tutor. But the teenager, anxious to play the hits of the day, found himself mired in learning to sight-read; soon he abandoned the lessons, preferring to attempt to learn to play by ear. Later he would appreciate that his impatience had been an error, finally picking up the skill of reading music in the mid-1960s.
‘Rock Island Line’, the tune that Wyatt had been playing when Page approached him, was a Top 10 hit in 1956 for Lonnie Donegan on both sides of the Atlantic – in the UK alone the record sold over a million copies. The song was an interpretation of the great bluesman Leadbelly’s own version, and it became the flagship for skiffle music.
Skiffle, a peculiarly British grassroots companion movement to rock ’n’ roll that required no expensive equipment, was played on guitars but also on homemade and ‘found’ instruments. Donegan, a member of Ken Colyer’s Jazzmen, would play with a guitar, washboard and tea-chest bass during intervals at Colyer’s traditional jazz sets. In 1957 the BBC launched its first ‘youth’ programme, Six-Five Special, with a skiffle title song. The craze swept Britain at an astonishing rate: it was estimated that in the UK there was a minimum of 30,000 youngsters – maybe almost twice that – playing the musical form. Across the country groups were created: John Lennon’s Quarrymen were a skiffle group that would lead to the formation of the Beatles.
In accord with this spirit of the age, Page formed such a skiffle group, which his parents permitted to rehearse in their home. Really, this ‘group’ was little more than a set of likeminded friends, sharing their small amounts of knowledge about this new upstart form. Yet they seemed bestowed with a measure of blessing: in 1957, with Page just 13 years old, the James Page Skiffle Group, following an initial audition, won a spot on an early Sunday evening children’s BBC television show, All Your Own, hosted by Huw Wheldon, a 41-year-old rising star (11 years later Wheldon would become director of BBC television). The slot in which they were to be featured was one hinged around ‘unusual hobbies’. How did they get this television slot? By chance, runs part of their appearance’s myth: the show was looking for a skiffle act, and someone working on it was from Epsom and had heard of Page’s band. But there is also a suggestion that Page’s ever-supportive mother wrote a letter to the programme, suggesting her son’s group.
Unfortunately, the membership of the James Page Skiffle Group has largely been lost in time. For the television appearance, a boy named David Hassall, or perhaps Housego, was involved. Not only did his family own a car, but his father possessed a full set of drums, which David endeavoured to play.
On a day during the school holidays when the show was to be recorded, Page and Williams caught a train up to London to the BBC studio. Page’s mother had phoned William’s father to ask if his son would accompany him to the recording. ‘The electric guitar itself was already heavy enough for him to carry, but the amplifier was like a little lead box and he clearly could not carry both.’
At around 4 p.m. Huw Wheldon appeared, fresh from a boozy media lunch, and asked: ‘Where are these fucking kids then?’
His hair Brylcreemed into a rock ’n’ roller’s quiff and his shirt collar crisply fitted in the crew-neck of his sweater, Page – his Höfner President guitar almost bigger than himself – led his musical cohorts through a pair of songs, ‘Mama Don’t Want to Skiffle Anymore’ and ‘In Them Old Cottonfields Back Home’. (Page had also prepared an adaptation of Bill Doggett’s ‘Honky Tonk’, but he was – rightly – doubtful he would get to play it, as he felt certain they would need him to sing.) After the performance, he was interviewed by Wheldon, and, with an irony now all too evident, Page declared to the avuncular presenter that his intention was to make his career in the field of ‘biological research’, modestly declaring himself not sufficiently intelligent to become a doctor. His ‘biological research’ remark certainly was not glib; Page wanted, he told Wheldon, to find a cure for ‘cancer, if it isn’t discovered by then’. Clearly this was a serious, thoughtful young man.
You can only imagine the confidence that this TV appearance must have engendered in the boy who had just become a teenager: in 1957 no one knew anyone who had appeared on the magical new medium of television.
Having been watched by an audience of hundreds of thousands at the age of 13, why not carry on as he had begun? Success might not have been instant, but within four years Jimmy Page would become a professional musician.
In the meantime, BBC television had finally begun to give limited exposure to rock ’n’ roll, and Buddy Holly appeared on its solitary television channel. ‘When he was killed in a plane crash in 1959,’ said David Williams, ‘I recall that Pete, Jim and I put on black ties and went to the local paper shop to buy all the newspapers that carried photos and obituaries of one of our heroes.’
In his woodwork class Page carved a reasonable simulacrum of a Fender Jazz Bass, modelling it on the instrument used by Jerry Lee Lewis’s bassist in the film Disc Jockey Jamboree. ‘It sounded good enough,’ said Williams.
‘To say Jim was dedicated would be an understatement. I hardly ever saw him when he wasn’t strapped to his guitar trying to figure out some new licks.’ Williams noted that Page’s principal inspiration was no longer Elvis Presley or the anguished Gene Vincent, but the ostensibly more wholesome Ricky Nelson. This should not be a surprise: Nelson’s upbeat rockabilly tunes featured the acclaimed James Burton on guitar, as much an inspiration to Page as Scotty Moore. Ten years later Burton would be leader of Elvis Presley’s TCB band, playing with the King until Elvis’s death in 1977.
‘Those old Nelson records might seem pretty tame now, but back then the guitar solos (including the ones played by Joe Maphis) were cutting-edge stuff and greatly impressed my pal,’ said Williams. ‘I remember that he struggled for a long time with the instrumental break of “It’s Late”, but eventually someone showed him the fingerings he was after and he happily moved on.’
Now Page set about forming a group that played more than skiffle. He found a boy who played rhythm guitar – though with little of the feel of rock ’n’ roll – in nearby Banstead, and then he found a pianist.
Although lacking either a drummer or a name, the trio were, after a number of practice sessions, deemed sufficiently ready by Page to play their first show at the Comrades Club, a drinking establishment for war veterans in Epsom town centre.
The gig was not a colossal success. In fact, Williams said it was ‘a complete shambles’. Certainly, it didn’t help that the three musicians lacked a drummer to propel the tempo; later in his career Page would ensure he played with the very best drummer he could find.
‘As rock ’n’ roll progressed,’ said Wyatt, ‘Jimmy and I added pickups to our guitars; we were going electric. Pete Calvert, a left-handed guitarist and friend of Jimmy’s and mine, had a small early Watkins amplifier and I had a Selmer. Jimmy had a bigger Selmer, a sign of what was to come? All three of us were always around each other’s houses banging rock ’n’ roll. Tommy Steele was making headlines as Britain’s first rock ’n’ roller, and although that was cool we preferred the grittier sound of the American artists such as Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps and, of course, Elvis. And for Jimmy and me, the sound made by Gene Vincent’s lead guitarist, Cliff Gallup: that was the style and guitar sound we loved the best in those days.’
Page knew something had to change. At an electronics trade fair at London’s Earls Court Exhibition Centre, he watched a young schoolboy called Laurie London stand up to sing on one of the stands. (Soon London would be at the top of the charts, in both the UK and USA, with his interpretation of the gospel song ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands’.) Page noticed that the guitarist in London’s backing group was playing a Fender Telecaster, the solid-body guitar he truly coveted that he had seen Buddy Holly playing on television. After the performance, Page spoke with London’s guitarist, took the Telecaster in his hands and played ‘Go Go Go (Down The Line)’, a Roy Orbison tune covered by Ricky Nelson, with Page’s idol James Burton on the guitar parts.
Fender Telecasters, made in the United States, were extremely pricey. Far more affordable, and on sale in London’s musical-instrument shops, was the Futurama Grazioso, a Fender copy replete with tremolo arm, manufactured in Czechoslovakia. Page acquired a second-hand version of this instrument.
Concert venues across the United Kingdom were responding to the new youth market for rock ’n’ roll. By 1958 Epsom’s Ebbisham Hall, little more than a church-hall-type building, had been renamed the ‘Contemporary Club’ for the rock ’n’ roll events it put on each Friday night.
But with another group with whom he briefly played, Page would not even get as far as the Contemporary Club. At around the age of 14, Page briefly became a member of a fledgling local act called Malcolm Austin and the Whirlwinds. On lead vocals was the aforementioned Austin. Tony Busson played bass; Stuart Cockett was on rhythm guitar; there was a drummer named Tom whose surname has evaporated with time; and ‘James Page’, as he was billed, played lead guitar. It was Wyatt who had introduced the various musicians to each other. In 1958 Malcolm Austin and the Whirlwinds played at Busson’s school Christmas concert, a set largely consisting of covers of Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis tunes; they played no more than another couple of dates.
Busson, who was two years older than the group’s guitarist, said that ‘James’ Page was ‘very trendy: Italian jackets and Italian shoes – very pointed. Very cool in his tight jeans and trousers, but very baby-faced. We would go round to his house with our acoustic guitars and listen to his 45s and albums. His mum was always very receptive. She’d give us soft drinks. All we really talked about were guitars and pop music. When I first met Jimmy he only had a semi-acoustic Höfner. Then he got a solid electric, a Futurama Grazioso. He was a great fan of Gene Vincent and the Bluecaps, and also of Scotty Moore. I think he liked anything that was a bit complicated and a bit different.’
The guitarist’s home, remembered Busson, was ‘very lower middle-class.’ But Page struck him as ‘very arty: I thought if he didn’t have a career as a musician he’d be an artist. He left school at 15. I thought he would make it. But I also wondered, “How are you going to support yourself in the interim?”’ Soon Busson would receive an answer.
For Epsom also had larger venues in which more prestigious acts would perform. Wyatt recalled the buzz when a genuine professional rock ’n’ roll show came to Epsom – creating an atmosphere like that of a circus or fair arriving in town. The concert was held at the local swimming baths. ‘Top of the bill,’ said Wyatt, ‘was a singer, one Danny Storm, whose claim to fame was being Cliff Richard’s double. He was a dead ringer. The second headliner was the Buddy Britten Trio. Buddy was a Buddy Holly lookalike. Both Jimmy and I went along to the show, which was very exciting at the time. Halfway through, the compère announced an open-mike talent show; Jimmy and I entered. We both got to play a guitar. I did “Mean Woman Blues” and Jimmy did an instrumental, either “Peter Gunn” or “Guitar Boogie Shuffle”.’
Undaunted by the experience of his show at the Comrades Club, Page had persevered and found a drummer and come up with a name: the Paramounts. And at the end of the summer of 1959 he had a show booked for the Paramounts at the Contemporary Club, supporting Red E. Lewis and the Redcaps, a London group modelled largely on the act, antics and material of Gene Vincent and His Bluecaps.
Although the Paramounts even had a vocalist of sorts, their material that night largely consisted – in the manner of the time – of an instrumental set; Page’s strident guitar playing on Johnny and the Hurricanes’ recent hit ‘Red River Rock’ was notable, impressing Red E. Lewis. Lewis informed his group’s manager, one Chris Tidmarsh, of this guitarist’s prowess: at the end of the Red E. Lewis and the Red Caps’ set, Page came out onstage, borrowed the solid-body guitar of Red Caps guitarist Bobby Oats and played a few guitar parts, including some Chuck Berry solos.
From the rear of the hall Page was watched by his parents. Did they believe he would grow out of this silly interest? He told me: ‘No. Actually they were very encouraging. They may not have understood a lot of what I was doing, but nevertheless they had enough confidence that I knew what I was doing: that I wasn’t just a nut or something …’
Also watching the Paramounts that night, from nearer the stage than his parents, was Sally Anne Upwood, Page’s girlfriend at school, a relationship that lasted for a couple of years. Older than her boyfriend, Sally Anne was in Wyatt’s class and able to observe Page’s musical development.
Jimmy Page and the Paramounts played further shows at the Contemporary Club; they supported such acts as the Freddie Heath Combo, who would later be known as Johnny Kidd & the Pirates, one of the greatest English rock ’n’ roll groups. And when Bobby Oats left Red E. Lewis and the Redcaps at Easter 1959, Chris Tidmarsh invited 15-year-old Page to audition, above a pub in Shoreditch, East London. He got the gig, at £20 a week.
Clearly Page’s life was expanding – philosophically, as well as musically. ‘My interest in the occult started when I was about 15,’ he told me in 1977. At this time in his life, when still at school, he read Aleister Crowley’s Magick in Theory and Practice, a lengthy treatise on Crowley’s system of Western occult practice; not an easy book to first comprehend, and a clear indication of the full extent of Page’s precocious intelligence. The book struck into his core, and he said to himself, ‘Yes, that’s it. My thing: I’ve found it.’ From that age he was on his course.

2
FROM NELSON STORM TO SESSION PLAYER (#u9f42648e-3e1c-5cb0-9932-1087e0f7fd79)
At first Jimmy Page could only play with Red E. Lewis and the Redcaps at weekends; he was, after all, still at school.
In fact, at first his father had nixed the idea of his playing with the group. Chris Tidmarsh had needed to come down to 34 Miles Road to see him; it was only when he explained that almost all of the Redcaps’ dates were at the weekend and would hardly interfere with his son’s schooling that Jimmy’s dad agreed. ‘Oh, okay then,’ said the elder James Page.
Yet soon Page had a major contretemps with Miss Nicholson, the deputy headmistress. When he informed her that he intended to be a pop star when he left school, this martinet was utterly dismissive of him. The minimum school-leaving age was 15 at the time, so he walked out of the school with his four GCE O levels and never looked back.
‘Jimmy’s playing was constantly evolving,’ recalled Rod Wyatt. ‘After he left school he could play lead and pick like Chet Atkins; he was a real prodigy. We still jammed at each other’s houses, but not so frequently. The thing about Jimmy was that, unlike most guitarists of those early days, he could play many styles and genres of music.’
Chris Farlowe and the Thunderbirds were an emerging act on the R&B circuit in 1960. Page had first seen Farlowe perform three years before, at the British Skiffle Group Championship at Tottenham Royal in north London.
Farlowe’s throaty soul vocals fronted the outfit, but it was his guitarist Bobby Taylor who Page would assiduously study. ‘He would sit there and watch Bobby playing. Then he’d come backstage and say, “Oh man, what a great guitar player you are.” So Bobby influenced him a great deal,’ Farlowe told writer Chris Welch. ‘Jimmy was very keen to meet him as he thought he was the coolest guitarist he’d ever seen. Bobby Taylor was a very handsome bloke and always dressed in black … Jimmy used to come to our gigs at places like the Flamingo. Then one day he walked up to us at some hall in Epsom, where he lived, and said, “I’d like to finance an album of you and the band.”’
Clearly the 16-year-old Page, who was the same age as Farlowe, had a lucid eye on his future, as he had saved the money, aware that this creative investment would eventually repay him handsomely. And he also declared that he would be the producer of this album, a pronouncement of almost shocking confidence and self-possession from one so young.
The album was recorded at R. G. Jones Studios in Morden, Surrey. Page, observed Farlowe, seemed thoroughly au fait with the workings of a recording studio: ‘He knew what to do and just plugged the guitar directly into the system without using any amplifiers. He didn’t play any guitar himself. He didn’t want to, not with Bobby Taylor playing in the studio.’
The songs included a powerhouse version of Carl Perkins’s ‘Matchbox’ and a hard rendition of Barrett Strong’s ‘Money’, driven by a thundering Bo Diddley beat. But the LP would not be released until 2017, on Page’s own label.
Not content with working his way to becoming the greatest rock guitarist, Page’s intuition had clearly told him to study the art of record production too. Did he have a glimmer that he would bring all this together in the not-too-distant future?
In 1960 Red E. Lewis and the Red Caps were introduced to the beat poet Royston Ellis, who was looking for musicians to back him at a series of readings.
Ellis was born in 1941, three years before Jimmy Page, in Pinner, north-west London, an outer suburb, like Heston in far west London, where Page first lived. Leaving school at 16, he was determined to become a writer, and at the age of 18 he had his first book published, Jiving to Gyp, a collection of his poetry. Ellis was immediately taken with rock ’n’ roll; he would supplement his meagre earnings from poetry by writing biographies of the likes of Cliff Richard and the Shadows and James Dean. In 1961 he published his account of UK pop music, The Big Beat Scene.
Ellis referred to his live events, mixing beat music and poetry, as ‘Rocketry’. At first he had been supported by Cliff Richards’s backing group, the Drifters, who, upon changing their name to the Shadows to avoid confusion with the American R&B vocal group, almost immediately had a number one hit with ‘Apache’ and could no longer fulfil this function for the poet.
Determinedly bisexual and looking for someone to pick up, in 1960 Ellis had encountered George Harrison in the Jacaranda coffee bar in Liverpool. Although Harrison managed to avoid the poet’s advances, the Beetles – as they were then known – ended up backing his poetry reading in the city. Ellis always claimed it was he who suggested they substitute the second ‘e’ in their name for an ‘a’. Lennon later said he saw Ellis as ‘the converging point of rock ’n’ roll and literature’; the song ‘Paperback Writer’ was said to have been inspired by him.
Through Red E. Lewis and the Redcaps, Ellis had learned of the stimulant effects of chewing the Benzedrine-covered cardboard strip inside a Vick’s inhaler, useful for the increasing array of late-night shows the group needed to play in far-flung parts of Britain. The poet turned the Beatles on to this, staying up talking to them until nine o’clock the next morning.
When it came to his backing music, Ellis decided he did not require the entire musical combo of Red E. Lewis and the Red Caps. Instead he settled on only one musician: Jimmy Page.
Between late 1960 and July 1961 Page played several stints backing Ellis. One of the most significant dates they played was a television broadcast, on ITV’s Southern Television, recorded in Southampton with Julian Pettifer. Ellis would later claim that he had secured Page his first TV appearance, though this was manifestly not the case.
Page was still playing his second-hand Futurama Grazioso; soon it would be replaced with a genuine Fender Telecaster. On 4 March 1961 he and Ellis played together at Cambridge University, at the Heretics Society. And on 23 July 1961, having played in assorted coffee bars and small halls, the pair were faced with a bigger challenge. Twenty-year-old Ellis, accompanied by seventeen-year-old Page, was part of the Mermaid Festival at the newly opened experimental Mermaid Theatre, by London’s Blackfriars Bridge. Such illustrious names as Louis MacNeice, Ralph Richardson, Flora Robson and William Empson were also giving readings at the festival.
‘Jimmy Page was very dedicated to my poetry, understood it, and we worked well together, producing a dramatic presentation that was well received both on TV and stage,’ said Ellis.
‘Jimmy composed his own music to back my poems – usually ones from Jiving to Gyp, although I might have been performing the one with the line “Easy, easy, break me in easy” from my subsequent book Rave. The Mermaid show was the peak – and possibly the final one – of our stage performances.’
‘Royston had a particularly powerful impact on me,’ said the musician of the poet’s work. ‘It was nothing like I had ever read before and it conjured the essence and energy of its time. He had the same spirit and openness that the beat poets in America had.
‘When I was offered the chance to back Royston I jumped at the opportunity, particularly when we appeared at the Mermaid Theatre in London in 1961. It was truly remarkable how we were breaking new ground with each reading.
‘We knew that American jazz musicians had been backing poets during their readings. Jack Kerouac was using piano to accompany his readings, Lawrence Ferlinghetti teamed with Stan Getz to bring poetry and jazz together.’
These arty events with Royston Ellis were, however, rare and unusual for Page. More commonly he simply toured incessantly with Red E. Lewis and the Redcaps – and then Neil Christian and the Crusaders.
Red E. Lewis and the Redcaps’ manager Chris Tidmarsh had decided that he would become the group’s singer, renaming himself Neil Christian. In accordance with his own change of identity, Tidmarsh/Christian gave the group the moniker the Crusaders, and Page became ‘Nelson Storm’. Rhythm guitarist John Spicer was henceforth known as ‘Jumbo’, while drummer Jim Evans was given the sobriquet of ‘Tornado’.
Playing the same circuit, with Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, was a guitarist who had also grown up in Heston. His name was Ritchie Blackmore, and he had a bright future as a founding member of Deep Purple and celebrated guitar hero in his own right.
‘I met Jimmy Page in 1962. I was 16, 17,’ he recalled of their first meeting, at a time when ‘Nelson Storm’ had acquired a new instrument. ‘We played with Neil Christian and the Crusaders. Jimmy Page was playing his Gretsch guitar. I knew he was going to be somebody then. Not only was he a good guitar player, he had that star quality. There was something about him. He was very poised and confident. So I thought, “He’s going to go somewhere, that guy – he knows what he’s doing.” But he was way ahead of most guitar players. He knew he was good too. He was the type of guy, who … he wasn’t arrogant, but he was very comfortable within himself.’
After two years of life on the road, Page came down several times with glandular fever, a lingering virus that was a consequence of exhaustion and a bad diet – and possibly too regular an ingestion of the Vick’s Benzedrine strip. In October 1962, when he was only 18, ‘Nelson Storm’ quit the Neil Christian outfit.
Almost immediately he enrolled at Sutton Art College in Surrey to study painting, a love almost as great as the guitar. Needless to say, Page’s love of music was undimmed, and he had extremely broad taste, eagerly lapping up classical music, both old and new, especially the groundbreaking work of Krzysztof Penderecki, the Polish composer whose 1960 work Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima conveyed the devastation wrought on 6 August 1945 on the Japanese city. Page’s study of Penderecki’s work would be reflected much later in his use of the violin bow on his guitar.
‘I was travelling around all the time in a bus,’ he told Cameron Crowe in Rolling Stone in 1975. ‘I did that for two years after I left school, to the point where I was starting to get really good bread. But I was getting ill. So I went back to art college. And that was a total change in direction … As dedicated as I was to playing the guitar, I knew doing it that way was doing me in forever. Every two months I had glandular fever. So for the next eighteen months I was living on ten dollars a week and getting my strength up. But I was still playing.’
Only days after Jimmy Page left Neil Christian and the Crusaders he experienced something of an epiphany. For the very first time a package tour of American blues artists was scheduled to play in the United Kingdom. Following concerts in Germany, Switzerland, Austria and France, the American Folk Blues Festival had a date scheduled on 22 October 1962 at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, with both afternoon and evening performances. On the bill were Memphis Slim, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Helen Humes, Shakey Jake Harris, T-Bone Walker and John Lee Hooker.
Page arranged to go with his friend David Williams, but opted to catch the train and meet him in Manchester rather than travel together by road. By now he seemed to have registered that one of the causes of his ill health had been squeezing into an uncomfortable van to travel those long distances across Britain with the Crusaders.
David Williams travelled with a trio of companions he had met at Alexis Korner’s Ealing Jazz Club, in reality no more than a room in a basement off Ealing Broadway in West London. Fellow aficionados of this music, these companions had recently formed a group. Its name? The Rolling Stones. These new friends were called Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones.
Although the first set of the American Folk Blues Festival rather failed to fire, perhaps an expression of the wet Manchester afternoon that it was, the evening house more than lived up to their expectations. Especially when John Lee Hooker closed the show with a brief, three-song set, accompanied only by his guitar. ‘It may have been a damp and grey Manchester outside, but we thought we were sweltering down on the Delta,’ said Williams. Hooker had been preceded by T-Bone Walker, the ‘absolute personification of cool’, according to Williams. ‘He performed his famous “Stormy Monday” on his light-coloured Gibson. His playing seemed effortless, and his set just got better and better as he dropped the guitar between his legs and then swung it up behind his head for a solo. I did not look at Jim, Keith or any of the others while this was all going on, but I can tell you that afterwards they were full of praise and mightily impressed.’
Page, Jagger, Richards, Jones and Williams then drove back to London through the night, Jones nervous about the rate of knots at which they were travelling. In 1962 the M1, Britain’s only motorway, extended no further from London than to the outskirts of Birmingham, a hundred miles north of the capital. ‘Eventually we made it to the motorway and came across an all-night service station. Again, for most of us this was a real novelty. However, Jim was a seasoned night-traveller by now and he clearly enjoyed talking me through the delights of the fry-up menu. After a feed we resumed our journey, and it was still dark when we reached the outskirts of London.’
Early on in his time at Sutton Art College, Page encountered a fellow student called Annetta Beck. Annetta had a younger brother called Jeff, who had recently quit his own course at Wimbledon Art College for a job spray-painting cars. Hot-rod-type motors would become an obsession for Beck.
In a 1985 radio interview on California’s KMET, Beck told host Cynthia Foxx: ‘My older sister, as I remember it, came home raving about this guy who played electric guitar. I mean she was always the first to say, “Shut that racket up! Stop playing that horrible noise!” And then when she went to art school the whole thing changed. The recognition of somebody else doing the same thing must have changed her mind. She comes home screaming back into the house saying, “I know a guy who does what you do.” And I was really interested because I thought I was the only mad person around. But she told me where this guy lived and said that it was okay to go around and visit. And to see someone else with these strange-looking electric guitars was great. And I went in there, into Jimmy’s front room … and he got his little acoustic guitar out and started playing away – it was great. He sang Buddy Holly songs. From then on we were just really close. His mum bought him a tape recorder and we used to make home recordings together. I think he sold them for a great sum of money to Immediate Records.’
Beck and Page began to spend afternoons and evenings at Page’s parents’ home, playing together and bouncing ideas off each other. Page would be playing a Gretsch Country Gentleman, running through songs like Ricky Nelson’s ‘My Babe’ and ‘It’s Late’, inspired by Nelson’s guitarist James Burton – ‘so great’, according to Beck. They would play back and listen to their jams on Page’s two-track tape recorder. The microphone would be smothered under one of the sofa’s cushions when they played. ‘I used to bash it, and it would make the best bass drum sound you ever heard!’ said Beck.
But this extra-curricular musical experimentation was not necessarily in opposition to what Page was doing on his art course at Sutton Art College: rather, these two aspects of himself complemented each other. Many years later, when asking Page about his career with Led Zeppelin, Brad Tolinski suggested that ‘the idea of having a grand vision and sticking to it is more characteristic of the fine arts than of rock music: did your having attended art school influence your thinking?’
‘No doubt about it,’ Page replied. ‘One thing I discovered was that most of the abstract painters that I admired were also very good technical draftsmen. Each had spent long periods of time being an apprentice and learning the fundamentals of classical composition and painting before they went off to do their own thing.
‘This made an impact on me because I could see I was running on a parallel path with my music. Playing in my early bands, working as a studio musician, producing and going to art school was, in retrospect, my apprenticeship. I was learning and creating a solid foundation of ideas, but I wasn’t really playing music. Then I joined the Yardbirds, and suddenly – bang! – all that I had learned began to fall into place, and I was off and ready to do something interesting. I had a voracious appetite for this new feeling of confidence.’
Despite starting his studies at Sutton, Page would, from time to time, step in during evening sessions with Cyril Davies’s and Alexis Korner’s R&B All-Stars at the Marquee Club and other London venues, such as Richmond’s Crawdaddy Club or at nearby Eel Pie Island. Soon he was offered a permanent gig as the guitarist with the R&B All-Stars, but he turned it down, worried that his illness might recur.
There was another guitar player on the scene at the time, a callow youth nicknamed Plimsolls, on account of his footwear. Although at first Plimsolls could hardly play at all, he was known to have a reasonably moneyed background that enabled him to own a new Kay guitar. He had another sobriquet, Eric the Mod, a reflection of his stylish dress sense, and he would shortly enjoy greater success when, rather like his idol Robert Johnson, he seemed to suddenly master his instrument, and he reverted to his full name: Eric Clapton.
Page recalled that one night after he had sat in with the R&B All-Stars, ‘Eric came up and said he’d seen some of the sets we’d done and told me, “You play like Matt Murphy,” Memphis Slim’s guitarist, and I said I really liked Matt Murphy and actually he was one of the ones that I’d followed quite heavily.’
Eric Clapton was not the only one to note Page’s expertise. Soon came an approach from John Gibb of the Silhouettes, a group from Mitcham, on the furthest extremes of south London. Gibb asked Page to help record some singles for EMI, starting off with a tune called ‘The Worryin’ Kind’.
The Silhouettes would later occasionally feature Page’s new friend Jeff Beck on guitar. What has always been a fascinating psychogeographical truth is that Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, Britain’s greatest and most creative rock guitarists of the 1960s, grew up within a radius of about 12 miles of each other.
Having witnessed Page’s guitar skills with the R&B All-Stars at the Marquee Club, Mike Leander, a young arranger and producer, pulled him into a studio for a stint as rhythm guitarist in late 1962. Page was moonlighting from art school – something that would become a pattern.
Leander had been alerted to go and check out Page by Glyn Johns, another Epsom boy, a couple of years older than Page who had watched him play years before and was now a tape operator. Of that first meeting, years before, Johns said: ‘One evening we had a talent night. I remember a boy in his early teens no one had seen before, who sat with his legs swinging over the front edge of the stage and played an acoustic guitar. He was pretty good, he may have even won, but I don’t think anyone in the hall that night had any idea that he was to become such an innovative force in modern music.’
‘I was really surprised,’ Page told Beat Instrumental magazine in 1965 about Leander asking him to play. ‘Before that I thought session work was a “closed shop”.
‘Mike was an independent producer then. And he wanted me to play on “Your Momma’s Out of Town” by the Carter-Lewis group. The record was released and I believe it helped him considerably in joining Decca full time.’
Soon Mike Leander had another, more prestigious session gig for Page. This studio date was with Shadows expatriates Jet Harris, a bass player, and drummer Tony Meehan. The resulting tune, ‘Diamonds’, was a number one smash, the first of a run of hits for the duo. Later, Harris and Meehan hired one John Baldwin to accompany their act on the road. Already there were glimmers of some kind of destiny at work; soon John Baldwin would metamorphose into John Paul Jones, so renamed for a solo single by Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham; Baldwin’s new moniker was derived from the film John Paul Jones, a popular 1959 movie about the famed US naval commander.
Even though Harris and Meehan had departed the Shadows, it was a huge honour for the 18-year-old Page to play with the alumni of the group that, prior to the Beatles, was the biggest in the UK, largely due to the skill and charisma of Hank Marvin, their bespectacled guitarist.
‘When did I first discover Hank Marvin? When I was about 14, because in those days it was really skiffle for young kids who wanted to learn three chords and have a good time,’ Page told John Sugar on BBC Radio 4 in 2011. ‘But going past that, more into the world of the American rockabilly and rock ’n’ roll was starting to seduce us all as kids. Then you had Cliff Richard and the Drifters [as the Shadows were first known] at that time, putting forward a really, really damned good rendition of it, but it still had that sort of grit identity to it.
‘So really it was a question of seeing Hank playing with Cliff as a kid, looking at Hank on the television. He was good, but he came alive with the Shadows. I mean it was such a really, really good band and Hank was such a stylist … I mean, he was so cool. He was and still is. He had this image … He was such a fluent player … In those early years, all of us – Jeff Beck, myself, Eric Clapton – we all played things like “Apache”, “Man of Mystery”, “F.B.I.”, those sort of [Shadows] hits …
‘Hank managed to come up with this unique sound, and that sound is just so recognisable. He inspired so many guitarists in those days as kids, kids who had no idea they may even be rock stars themselves one day.’
Playing guitar with Jet Harris and Tony Meehan on live dates, along with John Baldwin, was one John McLaughlin, who had given Page some guitar lessons when McLaughlin was working in a guitar shop. ‘I would say he was the best jazz guitarist in England then, in the traditional mode of Johnny Smith and Tal Farlow,’ said Page. ‘He certainly taught me a lot about chord progressions and things like that. He was so fluent and so far ahead, way out there, and I learned a hell of a lot.’
The ‘Diamonds’ session kick-started a new career for Page, one in which he would play up to ten sessions a week, although he was still officially at Sutton Art College. For the next three and a half years, again while officially still a student, he became one of the UK’s top two guitar session players: the other was Big Jim Sullivan, and for a time the boy from Epsom, where he continued to live at his parents’ house, became known as ‘Little Jim’. Working with all manner of artists and styles, he honed his guitar playing during this period. In his early sessions he largely used a black Les Paul Custom he had played with Neil Christian. Known as ‘the fretless wonder’, and with a trio of pickups, it gave Page great tonal flexibility. When required, he also used a 1937 Cromwell archtop acoustic guitar and a Burns amplifier, or from time to time a Fender Telecaster.
In June 1963 Page was interviewed on Channel Television, ITV’s smallest franchise, broadcasting only to the 60,000 inhabitants of the Channel Islands. With his hair immaculately swept back, Page certainly looked the rocking part, yet his accent and precise, formal speech constructions suggested someone from a rather more middle-class background than his actually was. Noted for the duty-free alcohol and tobacco on offer in this UK tax haven, Jersey and Guernsey enjoyed a certain hip cachet as a holiday location: was that why Page was there?
The interview was filmed on an outdoor quayside. The first question was the set-up:
What is a session guitarist?
‘A guitarist who’s brought in to make records, not necessarily doing one-night stands, hoping they’ll get into the hit parade – only getting an ordinary fee.’
He doesn’t work for any particular singer all the time?
‘Not necessarily.’
I gather there are only a few young session guitarists like yourself: why is that?
‘Well, it seems to be quite a closed shop. The Musicians’ Union have their own chaps in and they don’t really like to get the young people in because the old boys need the work.’
So how did you become a session guitarist?
‘I don’t know. Perhaps it was because I had the feel for it.’
How long have you been playing the guitar?
‘Four years.’
Have you always been a session guitarist?
‘No, no. For the last 18 months.’
Do you play for a regular group yourself?
‘Yes: Neil Christian and the Crusaders.’ [By now Page was no longer playing with them.]
And what sort of things do you do with this group?
‘Well, we do one-night stands all over England.’
What are the big names that you have backed on disc?
‘Jet Harris and Tony Meehan, Eden Kane, Duffy Power.’
What is it like working with some of the really big names of show business?
‘Disappointing.’
Why is that?
‘Well, they don’t come up to how you expect them to be. Rather disappointing on the whole, I would say.’
That’s probably bad news for some record fans. What is your professional ambition? Do you want to be a guitarist all the time? Do you want to make your own records?
‘No, not necessarily. I’m very interested in art. I think I’d like to become an accomplished artist.’
Rather than a guitarist?
‘Yes, possibly.’
Is this a means to an end for you? Are you hoping to earn enough money through your guitar playing?
‘Yes. Yes. I’m hoping to finance my art by the guitar.’
The quality of the acts Page worked with built steadily. Carter-Lewis and the Southerners’ ‘Your Momma’s Out of Town’ was an early example. ‘He was a fast player, he knew his rock ’n’ roll and he added to that,’ said John Carter. ‘He was also quiet and a bit of an intellectual.’
John Carter and Ken Lewis were essentially songwriters, with a sub-career as backing singers: the first hit they wrote was ‘Will I What?’, the number eighteen follow-up to Mike Sarne’s 1962 novelty number one hit ‘Come Outside’. They had been persuaded to form Carter-Lewis and the Southerners to promote their material. As a session musician Page played guitar on ‘That’s What I Want’, a Carter-Lewis song that became a Top 40 hit in 1964 for the Marauders, a group from Stoke-on-Trent. Then Page briefly became an actual member of the group. Viv Prince, later drummer with the Pretty Things, played with the group while Page was with them, along with Big Jim Sullivan and drummer Bobby Graham. By 1964 Carter-Lewis and the Southerners would become the Ivy League and then magically transform into the Flower Pot Men, who in 1967 hit the UK number four slot with ‘Let’s Go to San Francisco’.
Page also played on records as diverse as ‘Walk Tall’ by Val Doonican, a kind of Irish Perry Como, and – on 6 November 1964 – with another Irish singer, Them vocalist Van Morrison, on the Belfast group’s ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go’, its B-side ‘Gloria’, and follow-up single ‘Here Comes the Night’.
The twin pillars of Them were Van Morrison and guitarist Billy Harrison. ‘We were brought over,’ said Harrison, ‘in the middle of 1964 and stuck in Decca’s West Hampstead studio to see what we had. We did “Baby, Please Don’t Go”, “Gloria” and “Don’t Stop Crying Now”, which was released as the first single and died a death.’
The sessions were produced by Bert Berns, a streetwise New Yorker who had become a songwriter and record producer of some significance; a crucial figure at Atlantic Records – he revived the career of the Drifters and brought Solomon Burke to the label – he would later run Atlantic’s BANG label, kickstarting the solo careers of Van Morrison and Neil Diamond. At first, influenced by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the white songwriting team from Los Angeles who via their cartoon-like wit transformed the subject matter of rhythm and blues, Bert Berns had been a composer of considerable success, subtly lacing his tunes with hypnotic Latin influences, especially mambo. Installed in New York’s famous Brill Building, the endlessly and effortlessly enthusiastic Berns co-wrote the Isley Brothers’ ‘Twist and Shout’, Solomon Burke’s ‘Everybody Needs Somebody to Love’, The Exciters’ ‘Tell Him’, Them’s ‘Here Comes the Night’ and the McCoys’ ‘Hang On Sloopy’, among many others. (As befitted the sometimes sleazy, occasionally Mob-affiliated world of New York popular music, Bert Berns, who everyone found a fabulous human being, attractive and glamorous to those with a fondness for boho chic, was allegedly ‘connected’, and possibly even a ‘made man’. From his rarefied perspective he would have given Page interesting instruction about the US music business. At their first sessions Led Zeppelin recorded a song about him, ‘Baby Come On Home’, subtitled ‘Tribute to Bert Berns’, an exceptionally beautiful soul tune of precisely the type Berns would have produced for Atlantic, which was not released until 1993. In Page’s guitar playing on this 1968 recording you can hear his love for Bert Berns.)
It was Bert Berns’s writing of the song ‘Twist and Shout’ that had first brought him to London. Covered by the Beatles, with John Lennon’s extraordinary, searing performance taking the song to a show-stopping further level, ‘Twist and Shout’ closed Please Please Me, the Liverpool group’s first album, the number one LP in the UK for 30 weeks in 1963. Although the Beatles meant nothing in America at that time, Berns’s first royalty cheque for his song on the album was for $90,000. In October 1963 he came over to London to see what was going on, producing a handful of no-hoper acts.
Already working in the British capital was Shel Talmy. A Los Angeleno who had worked with Capitol Records, he had been hired as staff producer by Dick Rowe, the Decca head of A&R – the man who famously turned down the Beatles but redeemed himself somewhat by signing the Rolling Stones. Rowe now decided that Bert Berns might fit as producer with the Belfast act he had signed named Them.
‘Twist and Shout’ had been covered yet again, by Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, who turned it into a Top 10 UK hit for Decca Records. It was something of a revenge release, as the act had been signed by Dick Rowe in preference to the Beatles – Brian Poole and the Tremeloes were, after all, from Essex, which was far more geographically convenient for a Londoner like Rowe than Liverpool.
In London, where he and Talmy were the only American producers working, Bert Berns had secured work through Decca Records, taking on ‘Little Jimmy’ Page as his principal session guitarist, recognising his talent and befriending him. ‘With the new breed of British producers such as Mickie Most or Andrew Loog Oldham trying as hard as they could to make records that sounded American,’ wrote Berns’s biographer Joel Selvin, ‘Berns was the first American producer trying to make records that sounded British.’
The sessions with Them for Decca proved as much, the resulting recorded songs utterly unique in the resounding clarity of their sound. ‘Bert Berns was inveigled into producing the session,’ said Billy Harrison. ‘And he brought in Jimmy Page, and Bobby Graham on drums. There was much grumbling, mostly from me, because I felt we could play without these guys. Jimmy Page played the same riff as the bass, chugging along. I played the lead: I wrote the riff.
‘Bert Berns had arguments with us about the sound. I thought we were playing it okay: if someone brought in session men you took it as a bit of a sleight. I was very volatile in those days.
‘There were various rows. Jimmy Page didn’t really seem to want to talk to anybody. Just a stuck-up prick who thought he was better than the rest of the world. Sat there in silence. No conversation out of the guy. No response.’
Possibly Billy Harrison was misinterpreting the shyness that other musicians felt characterised the quiet Jimmy Page. And he may have been projecting his personal prejudices. ‘He seemed above everybody, above these Paddies. That was the days when guest houses would have a sign up: “No salesmen, no coloured, no Irish”. Page had that sort of sneering attitude, as though he was looking down on everybody. He’s a fabulous technician, but there’s nothing wrong with a bit of friendliness.’
‘Their lead vocalist, Van Morrison, was really hostile as he didn’t want session men on his recordings,’ said drummer Bobby Graham. ‘I remember the MD, Arthur Greenslade, telling him that we were only there to help. He calmed down but he didn’t like it.’
‘Whatever Morrison’s reservations, they worked well together, and Graham’s frenzied drumming at the end of “Gloria” is one of rock’s great moments,’ wrote Spencer Leigh in his Independent obituary of Graham.
And the opening guitar riff on ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ is one of the defining moments of popular music in the sixties. This was all Billy Harrison’s own work. ‘What annoyed me later,’ he said, ‘was that you would start to see how it was being said that Jimmy Page had played a blinding solo on “Baby Please Don’t Go”. I got narked about that: he never said he did it, but he never denied it.’
‘For a long time,’ said Jackie McAuley, who joined Them the next year, ‘Jimmy Page got credit for Billy Harrison’s guitar part. But he’s owned up about it.’
Bert Berns also pulled Page in for ‘Shout’, a cover of the Isley Brothers’ classic that was the debut hit for Glasgow’s Lulu & The Luvvers. And he had him add his guitar parts to her version of ‘Here Comes the Night’, a majestic version that was released prior to Them’s effort, but spent only one week in the UK charts.
Shel Talmy, a former classmate of Phil Spector at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles, also loved Page’s playing, and the guitarist was equally taken with him: a studio innovator, Shel Talmy would play with separation and recording levels, techniques that Page would assiduously study.
Soon after he had arrived in London and started working for Decca, Talmy came across the guitarist: ‘Somebody mentioned that they’d heard this 17-year-old kid who was really terrific, and I went and checked him out and I used him. We got along great and he was fabulous. I thought, “This kid is really gonna go somewhere,” and I only regret that he didn’t call me when he formed Led Zeppelin. It’s a shame! I would like to have done that.
‘He got it. I mean, he was original. At that time in London there were very few really current musicians: a lot of good musicians, but kind of mired slightly in the past. There were, like, one or two good rhythm sections and that was it. I originally started using Big Jim Sullivan, who was the only other one, and then I found Jimmy, who I thought was even better because he was more with it. He was doing what I thought should be done and certainly what was being done in the States, so it was a no-brainer.’
Fitting Page together with drummer Bobby Graham, and from time to time John Baldwin on bass, the producer had a team that was highly resourceful and fast. Talmy has described Graham as ‘the greatest drummer the UK has ever produced’. While playing with Joe Brown and the Bruvvers, Graham had been approached by Brian Epstein at a gig at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton, in June 1962. Would he care to replace Pete Best in the Beatles? Epstein asked him. Graham turned down the offer, leaving the way clear for Ringo Starr.
Graham first met Page when the guitarist was playing with Neil Christian and the Crusaders; they had supported Joe Brown at a show in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. ‘I was so impressed. We became very good friends, and when I became a producer I always used Jimmy. We started a publishing company called Jimbo Music, for stuff we wrote. Jimmy wasn’t one of the most way-out and weirdest characters I ever met: he was very quiet, very shy. Jimmy had a slightly dirtier sound than Big Jim Sullivan – they used to alternate a lot. Unless the arranger wanted a certain thing they’d fight it out amongst themselves.’
Neither Page nor Bobby could sight-read music – though the guitarist would learn how to do so over the next couple of years. ‘I had to rely on what felt right,’ said Graham, who estimated that he played on 15,000 tunes in the course of his career. ‘I was loud. My trick was, if the singer took a breath, fill in. I was one of the first of the new generation coming in. Jim Sullivan was already in. Jimmy Page – same thing, couldn’t read a note but had a great feel.’
Playing sessions paid good money, £9 a time when the average working man earned little more than that a week. And, as befitted the rules of the Musicians’ Union, there would be three sessions a day: 10 a.m. until 1 p.m.; 2 till 5; and 7 until 10 p.m. During each session the musicians were expected to finish four songs, and afterwards they would be handed small brown envelopes containing their fees in cash. If you worked all three sessions, you’d come away with almost £30 for a day’s work. At the end of each evening, Page, Big Jim Sullivan and Graham would adjourn to such fashionable boîtes of the day as the Cromwellian and Annie’s Room.
‘The weirdest thing I ever did with Jimmy was Gonks Go Beat,’ reflected Graham. ‘Charlie Katz had booked us into Decca number three studio, the cathedral where they did all the classical recordings. I wasn’t supposed to be at that session – it was the only time at the wrong place. My part looked like a map of the London Underground. Jimmy came over and said, “I think we’re in the wrong place. I can’t read my part.” The musical director said, “Are you ready, gentlemen?” and there was complete silence. He looked vaguely in my direction, and I thought he was talking to somebody behind me. He said, “Bob, you’re in at the start,” and I struggled. Finally he put the baton down and came over and ran it through with me. During the session I looked across and Jimmy was thundering away. At the end of the session I said, “You looked all right, Jim.” He said, “I turned my amp off.”’
With Shel Talmy, the trio of the two Jims and Bobby worked with a seemingly endless list of aspirant acts and tunes, such as the Lancastrians’ ‘We’ll Sing in the Sunshine’, Wayne Gibson’s ‘See You Later Alligator’ and the First Gear’s ‘Leave My Kitten Alone’, a cover of a Little Willie John tune and the B-side of ‘A Certain Girl’. ‘Leave My Kitten Alone’ was deemed ‘Page’s most outstanding solo prior to “Whole Lotta Love”’ by US rock critic Greg Shaw.
On 15 January 1965, again for Talmy, Page worked with 17-year-old David Jones, the leader of the Manish Boys, on ‘I Pity the Fool’, a cover of the Bobby Bland tune, backed with ‘Take My Tip’. So as not to be mistaken for Davy Jones of the Monkees, David Jones would soon change his name to David Bowie. (In 1964 Page had been a ‘member’ of Jones/Bowie’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men, a clear publicity gimmick that succeeded in getting Jones on television news. And Page had already played with a pair of earlier David Bowie line-ups, Davy Jones’ Locker and Davy Jones and the Lower Third, both with Shel Talmy producing. And he worked on David Bowie’s first, eponymous album, for Deram Records, produced by Mike Vernon.)
‘That “I Pity the Fool” session was phenomenal,’ said Wayne Bardell, then working in Francis, Day and Hunter, a record shop on London’s Charing Cross Road, but soon to become a successful manager. ‘I was at the session at IBC as a guest of the not-yet Bowie, with Shel Talmy producing, Glyn Johns the engineer and Jimmy Page on guitar.’
‘Well, it’s definitely not going to be a hit,’ Page said, correctly, of the tune that day – it sold no more than 500 copies. But during the Manish Boys’ sessions he gave David Jones a guitar riff that the young singer didn’t yet know how to use: as David Bowie he fitted this riff into two separate songs, first on 1970’s ‘The Supermen’ on his The Man Who Sold the World album, and again on ‘Dead Man Walking’ in 1997. ‘When I was a baby,’ said David Bowie later, ‘I did a rock session with one of the bands, one of the millions of bands that I had in the sixties – it was the Manish Boys, that’s what it was – and the session guitar player doing the solo was this young kid who’d just come out of art school and was already a top session man, Jimmy Page.’
And ‘this young kid’ had every right to be very excited about the part he played on ‘I Pity the Fool’, which, despite his misgivings, was a sensationally great record that should have been a hit; this was thanks in no small part to Jimmy Page adding searing, hard-rock guitar, like something Mick Green could have provided for the Pirates.
‘I Pity the Fool’ might have flopped, but Talmy produced breakthrough singles from a pair of acts that would become two of the biggest UK groups of the 1960s: ‘You Really Got Me’, the Kinks’ third 45, and the Who’s ‘I Can’t Explain’. Page played rhythm guitar on a version of the latter track.
‘Because Shel wasn’t sure I could play a solo, he asked his favourite session guitarist, Jimmy Page, to sit in,’ wrote Pete Townshend in his autobiography. ‘And because our band had rehearsed the song with backing vocals in Beach Boys style, but not very skilfully, Shel arranged for three male session singers, the Ivy League, to chirp away in our place. Shel Talmy got a good sound, tight and commercial, and although there was no guitar feedback, I was willing to compromise to get a hit.’
In Guitar Masters: Intimate Portraits by Alan DiPerna, Townshend referred to Page as ‘a friend of mine’. The guitarists certainly had something in common: a fling with Anya Butler, the beautiful – and older – assistant to Who co-manager Chris Stamp. Townshend was initially puzzled by Page’s presence at the session: ‘I said to Jimmy, “Well, what are you doing here?” He said, “I’m here to give some weight to the rhythm guitar. I’m going to do the guitar on the overdubs.” And I said, “Oh, great.” And he said, “What are you going to play?” “A Rick 12,” I told him. And he said, “I’ll play a …” Whatever it was. It was all very friendly. It was all very convivial.’
And on ‘Bald Headed Woman’, the B-side of ‘I Can’t Explain’, it was Page who played the fuzzbox licks. On the liner notes to the Who’s Two’s Missing compilation album, Who bassist John Entwistle said: ‘The fuzz guitar droning throughout is played by Jimmy Page. The reason being, he owned the only fuzzbox in the country at that time.’
Entwistle was not exactly correct. Gibson guitars had put a fuzz-tone pedal into production in 1962, giving it the brand name of ‘Maestro Fuzz-Tone FZ-1’. Although in limited supply, the devices, imported from the US, could be found from time to time in London’s more select musical equipment stores, and it was from one of these that Page had acquired his gadget.
Like many technological developments, the origins of the fuzzbox and the dirty edge it added to a guitar’s sound – which Page would employ to his maximum advantage and could be heard to its defining fullest when played by Keith Richards on the Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’ – were accidental. In 1951 Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats – actually Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm – had hit the number one slot in the US rhythm and blues chart with ‘Rocket 88’. A distinctive feature of ‘Rocket 88’ was the growling sound of Willie Kizart’s guitar. On his way from Clarksdale, Mississippi, to Sam Phillips’s Sun Studio in Memphis in 1951 to record the tune, Kizart’s amplifier had fallen from his car while a tyre was being replaced. Endeavouring to repair the resulting damage to the speaker cone, the guitarist stuffed it with paper: the marginally distorted sound that resulted became a feature of the ‘Rocket 88’ single, which is often cited as one of the first rock ’n’ roll records. From then on, guitarists sought out the means to deliver a similar grimy sound, the likes of Link Wray – who would poke holes in his loudspeaker – and Buddy Guy consciously damaging their amps to replicate such a tone. And in 1961 the great country singer Marty Robbins’s ‘Don’t Worry’ single hit number three in the US national charts, largely courtesy of his guitarist Grady Martin’s muttering instrument being played through a faulty amplifier. Martin soon put out his own single, ‘The Fuzz’, thus bestowing the malfunction with a semi-official term.
In Los Angeles a radio-station technician developed an electronic device to create such an effect for producer Lee Hazelwood, who employed it on Sanford Clark’s ‘Go On Home’ 45 in 1960. And in the same city, super session player Orville ‘Red’ Rhodes, who would become a member of the celebrated Wrecking Crew and was also an electronics whizz, developed a similar device, which was utilised by fellow Wrecking Crew guitarist Billy Strange on Ann Margret’s ‘I Just Don’t Understand’. In turn this led to Strange employing Rhodes’s invention with the instrumental surf band the Ventures, a kind of US version of the Shadows, on their late-1962 release ‘The 2,000 Pound Bee’. It was this tune especially that had come to the attention of Page; anxious to replicate its juddering sound, he had purchased his own Maestro Fuzz-Tone.
Yet it was not entirely to his satisfaction. Luckily, he already knew someone who could assist him with this. Roger Mayer was a friend from the Epsom music scene. By 1964 he was working for the Admiralty Research Laboratory in Teddington, in the Acoustical Analysis section, having developed into something of an electronics boffin. And their friendship persisted: Page and Mayer would visit each other’s homes to listen to American records. ‘Jimmy came to me,’ said Mayer, ‘when he got hold of the Maestro Fuzz and said, “It’s good but it doesn’t have enough sustain … it’s a bit staccato.” I said, “Well, I’m sure we can improve on that.” That conversation spurred me to design my first fuzzbox.’
‘I suggested that Roger should try to make something that would improve upon the distortion heard on “The 2,000 Pound Bee” by the Ventures,’ said Page. ‘He went away and came up with the first real good fuzzbox … the first thing that really generated this wonderful sustain.’
Running off a 6-volt battery, Mayer’s fuzzbox was constructed within a custom-made casing, which contained controls for gain and biasing along with a switch that would modify the tonal output. ‘Right from square one,’ said Mayer, ‘Pagey and I wanted something that sustained a lot, but then didn’t start jittering as it went away. One of the things that became very, very apparent early on was that you didn’t want nasty artefacts. It’s very easy to design a fuzzbox – anybody can do it – but to make one sound nice and retain articulation in notes, now that’s something else.’
Page’s part in the Kinks’ career is more cloudy. Although it has often been claimed that he played the iconic solo on ‘You Really Got Me’, this is not the case. ‘Jimmy did play rhythm on the first Kinks LP, and certainly did not play lead on “You Really Got Me”, which preceded the LP by several weeks, or anything else for that matter. I only brought him in to play rhythm because at the time Ray wanted to concentrate on his singing,’ said Shel Talmy. In fact, Page had already played acoustic 12-string guitar on ‘I’ve Been Driving on Bald Mountain’ and ‘I’m a Lover Not a Fighter’, on the Kinks’ eponymously titled debut album. (In 1965 Page played the solo on an instrumental version of ‘You Really Got Me’; almost identical to Dave Davies’s original guitar part, it was included on an instrumental album by the Larry Page Orchestra entitled Kinky Music.)
‘My presence at their sessions was to enable Ray Davies to wander around and virtually maintain control of everything, without having to be down in the studio all the time,’ said Page later. ‘Ray was producing those songs as much as Shel Talmy was … more so, actually, because Ray was directing them and everything. At one point, there were even three guitars playing the same riff.’
‘I’ll tell you something about Jimmy Page,’ Ray Davies told Creem magazine. ‘Jimmy Page thinks he was the first person in the world to ever put a B string where a G string should be. And for me, that’s his only claim to fame. Other than that, I think he’s an asshole … Jimmy Page and a lot of other people subsequently came to our sessions when we became hot, and I think he played rhythm 12-string on “I’m a Lover Not a Fighter”, and he played tambourine on “Long Tall Shorty”.’
In fact, Page did not ‘put a B string where a G string should be’. He told Melody Maker that he would substitute the B string with a top E. Rather than the conventional E string he would swap it for a banjo octave string, either tuned to G or A: ‘You’ll get a raving, authentic blues sound that you hear on most pop records with that string-bending sound.’
‘I didn’t really do that much on the Kinks records,’ Page later admitted. ‘I know I managed to get a couple of riffs in on their album, but I can’t really remember. I know that Ray didn’t really approve of my presence. The Kinks just didn’t want me around when they were recording. It was Shel Talmy’s idea. One aspect of being in the studio while potential hits were being made was the press – too many writers were making a big fuss about the use of session men. Obviously I wasn’t saying anything to the press but it just leaked out … and that sort of thing often led to considerable bad feeling.’
For most of these sessions Page employed a Gibson Les Paul Custom, with the frets filed down ‘to produce a very smooth playing action … it just sounded so pure and fantastic,’ he told John Tobler and Stuart Grundy for BBC’s Radio 1.
Despite the griping of Ray Davies and Billy Harrison, Page played on a number of records that were significant cornerstones of mid-sixties British pop – outright classics, some of them. These included Shirley Bassey’s theme song for Goldfinger, the third James Bond film, on which he played with Big Jim Sullivan and Vic Flick, another renowned UK session guitarist – the tune was a Top 10 US hit. Then there was Tom Jones’s ‘It’s Not Unusual’, number one in the UK and Top Ten in the US; Petula Clark’s ‘Downtown’, a US number one; Kathy Kirby’s ‘Secret Love’; Marianne Faithfull’s ‘As Tears Go By’; P. J. Proby’s ‘Hold Me’; the Merseys’ ‘Sorrow’, covered by David Bowie on his Pin Ups album; the Nashville Teens’ ‘Tobacco Road’; Brian Poole and the Tremeloes’ ‘Candy Man’; Twinkle’s ‘Terry’, a motorcycle-death record in the tradition of the Shangri-Las’ ‘Leader of the Pack’ that was number four in the UK charts at Christmas 1964 and banned by the BBC for being in ‘poor taste’; ‘Baby What’s Wrong’ and its B-side ‘Be a Sect Maniac’, the first single from the Downliners Sect, a wild R&B outfit who made the Pretty Things seem like Cliff Richard.
As it had been with Bert Berns, much of Page’s session work was for the Decca label, at their studios in Broadhurst Gardens, West Hampstead, a plain, nondescript building, built like an office block.
He worked extensively with Dave Berry, a Decca solo star from Sheffield whose first hit had been a cover of his namesake Chuck Berry’s ‘Memphis Tennessee’. He was one of British rock ’n’ roll’s first anti-heroes, a true original. ‘I noticed how strippers used to tease the audience in Hamburg,’ he said of his time playing the circuit in the German port. So almost an entire Dave Berry set might consist of him singing his songs from behind the stage curtain, with only his microphone and hand tantalisingly visible.
When Elvis Presley covered Arthur Crudup’s ‘My Baby Left Me’, Scotty Moore’s guitar licks had proved such an inspiration for the teenage Jimmy Page. Now Page took the lead guitar part himself on Dave Berry’s sensational version of the song, with – as was customary – Big Jim Sullivan on rhythm.
Berry’s ‘My Baby Left Me’ only grazed the Top 40, but his sultry ‘The Crying Game’ was a Top 5 tune when it was released in July 1964. However, this time it was Big Jim Sullivan who took the lead part, with Page providing rhythm; on drums, as per usual, was Bobby Graham. There was a picture in the music press, recalled Berry, of Page standing next to him, along with the engineer Glyn Johns, listening to a playback of ‘The Crying Game’. ‘Many of the session musicians would have left as soon as they had done their part,’ said Berry. ‘But Jimmy Page, being a proper player, would listen to his own part. He would sometimes want to do it again. Mind you, at the time Jimmy was in Carter-Lewis and the Southerners: by 5 p.m. he’d be gone to do a gig.’
The specific session players he used, said Berry, ‘were really into it. I must have done a quarter of my career with Decca with that line-up: 25 to 30 songs. Mike Smith would call me with the studio booked. But if Big Jim and Jimmy Page were not available we’d cancel it and wait.’ There were at least four tracks on which Page played harmonica: ‘C.C. Rider’, for example, and Buster Brown’s ‘Fannie Mae’, which relies on a harmonica riff. Meanwhile, Page played both lead guitar and the harmonica part on ‘Don’t Gimme No Lip Child’, the B-side of ‘The Crying Game’.
Was Page, who was only 20 years old, anxious to impose his personality in the studio? Not at all, said Berry: ‘He was very quiet. The true professional players don’t have any edge to them anyway. The bigger the artist, the less edge they have to them. These two guitarists were really great players. And they didn’t stick to how this stuff was written out. Big Jim would be improvising his solo. You could hear him doing a vocal counter-melody. We’d say, “Leave that in, it’s real.” You could work with these guys and suggest things. In 2010, when I met him again, Jimmy seemed exactly the same – a normal and quiet person. I was very proud of my output: it had a vast range. So when Jimmy Page was in the biggest band in the world I was very proud of my association with them. When I’d meet up with him I’d feel very proud, like a child.’
On 27 March 1964 Page played heavy fuzz-tone guitar on Carter and Lewis’s ‘Skinny Minnie’.
By now this was becoming customary practice for the guitarist. Again, in early 1964, on a session for Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, Page augmented his guitar with his Gibson Maestro Fuzz-Tone on a single that was released in October that year, ‘Dracula’s Daughter’, and its B-side ‘Come Back Baby’, a studio date engineered by the legendary Joe Meek in his tiny Holloway Road set-up. (David Sutch, as his name was registered at birth, was an eccentric English rocker who appeared onstage in a coffin, sometimes dressed as Jack the Ripper – also the title of an earlier Decca single on which Page played – and based his act on the American Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, who had written and recorded ‘I Put a Spell on You’. Sutch’s Savages proved a fertile training ground, employing – among many others – guitarists Jeff Beck and Ritchie Blackmore and drummer Carlo Little, who had played briefly with the Rolling Stones prior to Charlie Watts. In 1963 Sutch stood as a candidate in a UK by-election, representing the Monster Raving Loony Party, the beginning of a career as a perennially unsuccessful Parliamentary candidate. Later, in 1964, Sutch founded Radio Sutch, a pirate broadcaster based in a wartime fort near the Thames estuary. Before the decade was out, Lord Sutch would reappear in the life of Jimmy Page.)
In September 1964 Decca Records paid for the dynamic, soulful American singer Brenda Lee, who was signed to the label, to come to London to record at Broadhurst Gardens. ‘She said to me, “I’ve come here to make a record with the British sound.” She felt she wouldn’t get the same sound in Nashville because they’re only just catching up on the British beat group sound of about six months ago,’ said producer Mickie Most to Rolling Stone magazine.
The tune chosen to acquaint Little Miss Dynamite with the zeitgeist was ‘Is It True’, another song written by Page’s musical allies John Carter and Ken Lewis. The guitarist used an early wah-wah pedal on the record, which hit the same number 17 spot on both sides of the Atlantic.
By now Pete Calvert, Page and Rod Wyatt’s guitar-playing buddy from Epsom, had rented a London flat, 4 Neate House in Pimlico. Page would drop in and sometimes stay over if he had an early gig the next day. Soon Chris Dreja of the Yardbirds moved in to one of the rooms.
A desire to improve upon and expand his natural abilities seemed second nature to Page. Having bought a sitar almost as soon as he learned of the instrument’s existence, he became one of its earliest exponents in the UK. ‘Let’s put it this way,’ he said. ‘I had a sitar before George Harrison. I wouldn’t say I played it as well as he did, though. I think George used it well … I actually went to see a Ravi Shankar concert one time, and to show you how far back this was, there were no young people in the audience at all – just a lot of older people from the Indian embassy. This girl I knew was a friend of his and she took me to see him after the concert. She introduced him to me and I explained that I had a sitar, but did not know how to tune it. He was very nice to me and wrote down the tunings on a piece of paper.’ On 7 May 1966 Melody Maker, the weekly British music paper that considered itself intellectually superior to the rest of the pop press, ran an article entitled ‘How About a Tune on the Old Sitar?’, with much of its information taken from Page.
This questing side of him surfaced again in his efforts to improve his abilities on the acoustic guitar. ‘Most great guitarists are either great on electric or great on acoustic,’ said Alan Callan, who first met Page in 1968 and in 1975 became UK vice president of Swan Song Records, Led Zeppelin’s label. ‘But Jim is equally great on both, because he is always faithful to the nature of the instrument. He told me that, quite early on, he’d gone to a session and the producer had said, “Can you do it on acoustic rather than electric?” And he said he came out of that session thinking he hadn’t nailed it, so he went home and practised acoustic for two months.’
The first half of the 1960s was a boom period for UK folk music, with several emerging virtuosos, revered by young men learning the guitar or – in Page’s case – always eager to improve. John Renbourn, Davey Graham – who incorporated Eastern scales into his guitar playing – and Bert Jansch were the holy triumvirate of these players; Page was especially turned on by Jansch, who introduced him to ‘the alternate guitar tunings and finger-style techniques he made his own in future Zeppelin classics such as “Black Mountain Side” and “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp”,’ according to Brad Tolinski in his book Light and Shade.
‘He was, without a doubt, the one who crystallised so many things,’ Page said. ‘As much as Hendrix had done on the electric, I really think he’s done on the acoustic.’ Al Stewart, a folk guitarist and singer, and, like Jansch, a Glaswegian, explained to Page that Jansch’s guitar was tuned to D-A-G-G-A-D – open tuning, as it was known. Page started to employ this himself.

3
SHE JUST SATISFIES (#ulink_6c1dc1d0-7973-5a9b-9140-50246c76bce4)
While much of Jimmy Page’s work consisted of bread-and-butter pop sessions, from time to time he would be offered the opportunity to indulge his creative side. On the morning of 28 January 1965, for example, half a dozen of Britain’s most accomplished musicians met at IBC Recording Studios at 35 Portland Place in London for the morning session slot. Page was on guitar, Brian Auger on organ, Rick Brown played the bass and Mickey Waller was the drummer, with Joe Harriott and Alan Skidmore on saxophones. They were assembled to record an album with the American blues legend Sonny Boy Williamson. ‘We started at 10 a.m. and it was all done by 1 p.m.,’ recalled Waller. ‘Also, it was done completely live: there were no overdubs. We all sat in a circle and played.’ After Williamson grew progressively more drunk, his skewed sense of timing made the session increasingly difficult.
Page later recalled: ‘Sonny Boy was living in [Yardbirds’ manager] Giorgio Gomelsky’s flat. Somebody told me once that they went to the house and they heard Sonny Boy plucking a live chicken. I don’t know how true that was. That didn’t happen when I was there. Sonny Boy and I rehearsed these numbers in the manager’s flat, and by the time we got into the studio a couple of days later Sonny Boy had forgotten all of the arrangements. It was cool. Good music comes out of that.’ (During Sonny Boy Williamson’s time in Britain, the bluesman performed at Birmingham Town Hall: there, a 16-year-old Robert Plant, stunned almost breathless from watching his performance, didn’t permit his awe to prevent him from sneaking backstage and stealing one of the blues master’s harmonicas – revenge, apparently, for the legendarily acerbic Williamson having told Plant to ‘fuck off’ when the teenager attempted to greet him while standing side by side at a urinal.)
When the Sonny Boy Williamson album session took place, Page had just become involved with another American – one who was blonde and female. Jackie DeShannon, hailing from Kentucky, was a beautiful singer-songwriter and a musical prodigy from an early age. By the time she was 11 she had her own radio show. In her early teens she had become a recording artist, at first singing country music. Her records ‘Buddy’ and ‘Trouble’ came to the attention of the great American early rocker Eddie Cochran. With Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly, Cochran was a rock ’n’ roll singer-songwriter; by a measure of synchronicity he was also a hero of Page – Led Zeppelin would sometimes feature covers of some of Cochran’s greatest songs: ‘C’mon Everybody’, ‘Summertime Blues’, ‘Nervous Breakdown’ (which effectively was what ‘Communication Breakdown’ was) and ‘Somethin’ Else’. ‘You know, you look like a California girl,’ Eddie said to her. ‘I think that you should be in California if you want to have a great career.’
DeShannon moved to Los Angeles, where Cochran was based, and he teamed her up with singer-songwriter Sharon Sheeley, his girlfriend, who wrote ‘Poor Little Fool’ for Ricky Nelson. The two girls started to write songs together, resulting in ‘Dum Dum’, a hit for Brenda Lee, and ‘I Love Anastasia’, which scored for the Fleetwoods. (Along with Gene Vincent, Sharon Sheeley was injured in the car crash in England that took Eddie Cochran’s life on 17 April 1960.)
At the age of 15 DeShannon became a girlfriend of Elvis Presley, which became part of her myth; she also had a relationship with Ricky Nelson. Although she failed to have big chart hits of her own in the United States, her version of Sonny Bono and Jack Nitzsche’s ‘Needles and Pins’ was a number one record in Canada before the Searchers covered it in the UK, where it also topped the charts. The Searchers soon covered DeShannon’s own song ‘When You Walk in the Room’, releasing it in September 1964, when it reached number three in the UK charts. In August and September of 1964 she was also one of the support acts on the Beatles’ first tour of the USA – her backing musicians on those dates included a young Ry Cooder.
Sniffing the cultural wind, as Shel Talmy, Bert Berns and Brenda Lee had done, Jackie DeShannon arrived in the UK to record at the EMI Studios on Abbey Road at the end of 1964. ‘I was very used to working with people like Glen Campbell and James Burton and Tommy Tedesco – all these great, great guitar players,’ she recalled. ‘So when I was there I said, “Who’s an amazing acoustic guitar player that I can have on my sessions?” and they all said that Jimmy Page was the guy, because he had played on a lot of different hit records at the time and was one of the guys on the “A list” of studio musicians to call.
‘So I said, “Great, let’s have him,” and they said, “Well, you can’t get him here because he’s in art school.” I said, “What?” He showed up … with paint on his jeans and he was the youngest player in the room. I went over to him to play a few of my piddling chords, and when he played them back to me I was almost knocked out of the room. Even then, he was spectacular. I knew right then that he was an amazing talent, so he played on a song of mine called “Don’t Turn Your Back on Me” and we did some writing together.’
There was, however, an attraction beyond his guitar-playing skills and Jackie DeShannon’s own musical abilities. ‘We got together afterwards,’ Page said in an interview in 1977 when he revealed how she enticed him with a very attractive proposition: ‘She said, “I’ve got a copy of Bob Dylan’s new album if you’d like to hear it,” and I said, “Would I like to hear it?”’
For most of 1965 Page and Jackie DeShannon were an item, and this almost-eminent American songwriter took him under her wing; together they wrote the song ‘Dream Boy’, a rocking single, like Ronnie Spector handling a surf tune. At the time Marianne Faithfull felt that Page was ‘rather dull’. She saw his relationship with DeShannon as his way of ‘undulling himself’. Tony Calder, her manager and close associate of Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, recalled that ‘One night I couldn’t get into our hotel room because Jimmy and Jackie DeShannon were in there shagging, so I yelled, “When you’ve finished could you write a song for Marianne?”’
The result was Marianne Faithfull’s second hit, ‘Come and Stay with Me’, which reached number four. ‘In My Time of Sorrow’, an album track for Marianne, also emerged from this partnership.
‘We wrote a few songs together, and they ended up getting done by Marianne, P. J. Proby and Esther Phillips or one of those coloured artists … I started receiving royalty statements, which was very unusual for the time, seeing the names of different people who’d covered your songs,’ said Page.
But how must it have felt for Page to be having sex with someone who had been to bed with two of his idols, Elvis Presley and Ricky Nelson? No doubt it considerably boosted his sense of himself and who he could be, given his increasing belief in psychic connections and the powerful, allegedly transcendent energies of Aleister Crowley’s ‘sex magick’.
Page was always financially astute. Early in 1965 he had set up his own publishing company, and soon, urged on creatively and emotionally by Jackie DeShannon, he was making his first solo record. ‘She Just Satisfies’ was a Kinks-style rocker, released on the Fontana label, on which he sang; its B-side was another Page–DeShannon tune, ‘Keep Moving’. Hearing it now, ‘She Just Satisfies’ sounds like it could have been a likely chart contender.
‘“She Just Satisfies” and “Keep Moving” were a joke,’ Page later said, dismissing the record with an element of false modesty. ‘Should anyone hear them now and have a good laugh, the only justification I can offer is that I played all the instruments myself except the drums.’
In his 1965 interview with Beat Instrumental magazine, Page was asked about the possibility of a follow-up to ‘She Just Satisfies’. He rejected the notion saying, ‘If the public didn’t like my first record, I shouldn’t think they’ll want another.’
In March 1965 DeShannon took Page on his first trip to the United States, first to New York and then to Los Angeles. For the guitarist, who later admitted his first impressions of the USA came from the glamour of Chuck Berry’s witty, lyrically descriptive songs, life was suddenly opened up almost unimaginably.
In New York, Page crashed in the spare room of Bert Berns’s sumptuous Manhattan penthouse apartment, with the producer, who was in town, and his Great Dane and pair of Siamese cats. While Page was in the Big Apple, the ever-dynamic Berns produced Barbara Lewis’s ‘Stop That Girl’, a song written by Page and DeShannon; this mid-tempo heartbreak ballad was included on the Michigan soul songstress’s Baby, I’m Yours LP, released on Atlantic that year. Through Berns, Page met Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, the head honchos of Atlantic Records; it was a connection that would prove exceptionally valuable. Berns also ‘took him to an Atlantic session, where he strummed along uncredited because of the union and immigration’.
Then Page flew to the West Coast. With its warm whisper of fecund possibility, Los Angeles in the mid-1960s seemed like a mythical setting. Almost all knowledge of the city was informed by its portrayal in movies, with Hollywood almost like the Holy Grail. With many of its inhabitants drawn from across the globe by the hope of stardom, LA housed some of the most beautiful individuals, of either sex, that any urban conurbation could boast.
The perfect weather of Los Angeles, its motorised modernity, gorgeous landscapes and fascination with alternative, free-thinking lifestyles – since the 1920s the city had been known for its practitioners of the more arcane, esoteric arts – made for an attractive package.
But its air of affluence could be illusory. In August 1965, when the foreign press went looking for the riots in the south Los Angeles district of Watts, many newshounds famously drove straight through the neighbourhood. Searching for a ‘black ghetto’, they were unable to believe that this place, with its palm trees and neat bungalows, could be the scene of murderous urban discontent.
The Watts riots were in stark contrast to the received wisdom about Los Angeles and southern California in general. But they were also a metaphor for the darkness that lay at its heart, always ready to erupt, like the city’s ever-present threat of earthquake.
It was already apparent that Page had a nose for the zeitgeist, and here he was ahead of the times: for shortly Los Angeles would become the world’s popular-music capital. ‘I first came here in 1965 when I was a studio musician,’ he told the Los Angeles Times in 2014. ‘Bert Berns brought me out. He invited me to stay at his place. I met Jackie DeShannon, I saw the Byrds play at Ciro’s [the Byrds debuted at Ciro’s on 26 March 1965], which I think is now the Comedy Store. It was a magical time to be here. It was really happening.’
One morning he walked into the coffee shop at the Hyatt House on Sunset Boulevard. Seated there, having his breakfast, was Kim Fowley, a veteran of the Hollywood music scene who had been involved with the Hollywood Argyles, B. Bumble and the Stingers, and the Rivingtons; in London, where he had met Page, Fowley had worked with P. J. Proby. ‘In he comes, Mister boyish, dressed in crushed velvet. He spotted me, and came and sat down. He told me he’d just had the most insane, disturbing experience.
‘A well-known singer-songwriter of the time, a pretty blonde, had asked him over to her house. When he got there, she’d detained him. He said she’d used restraints. I asked if he meant handcuffs and he said yes, but also whips – for three days and nights. He said it was scary but also fun. They say there’s always an incident that triggers later behaviour. I contend that this was it for Jimmy Page. Because being in control – that became his deal.’
After a few months this early example of a rock ’n’ roll couple went their separate ways. ‘He wanted to split from the music world because he was getting disillusioned,’ said Jackie DeShannon. ‘Jimmy wanted to go to Cornwall or the Channel Islands and sell pottery. He couldn’t stand the business, the strain, and I couldn’t stand his dream of quietness, so we split, but I guess he’s changed a lot since then.’
The song ‘Tangerine’ on Led Zeppelin III is said to have been inspired by Jackie DeShannon.
In May 1965 Bert Berns was back in London, producing tracks for Them’s first album, this time at Regent Sounds Studio on Denmark Street. Clearly uninfluenced by the protests of Billy Harrison, Berns again brought in Jimmy Page, who provided a ‘vibrato flourish’ on an interpretation of the Josh White folk song ‘I Gave My Love a Diamond’.
Prior to the arrival in October 1962 of the Beatles with ‘Love Me Do’, their first Parlophone single, and their subsequent phenomenon, not just as performers but supreme songwriters, British pop music was dominated by material that traditional ‘Tin Pan Alley’ publishers touted to acts. Despite the Liverpool quartet’s success, which led to so many emergent acts writing their own material, by 1965 the Beatles had by no means overthrown this system. The Yardbirds, a group largely from the extremes of south-west London, were an act that demonstrated the severe disparity between their singles, chosen by such a method, and the material in the five-piece group’s live sets – essentially another version of the harmonica-wailing, thunderously paced and mutated rhythm ’n’ blues sound that the Rolling Stones and Pretty Things and other lesser UK groups like the Downliners Sect were somewhat histrionically howling.
The Yardbirds had formed after Chris Dreja, Anthony ‘Top’ Topham and Eric Clapton met at Surbiton Art College. ‘It was through Top Topham’s father,’ said Chris Dreja, ‘who had this amazing collection of 78s from America [that was] not available to anybody. It was black blues music, and that was the initial turn-on, of course. Discovering that music was like the genie coming out of the bottle, really. We had really rather kitsch pop music with no free fall and very little emotion back in the depressing post-war fifties and sixties.
‘And poor old Anthony Topham gets left out, doesn’t he? He was quite pivotal, actually. The band was made up of two halves originally. One half was Top and me at art college, and Clapton was in the same art stream. In Surbiton, Surrey, of all places.
‘At that stage Top Topham was perhaps as agile and skilled a guitar player as Eric Clapton. He was only 16, however, and his career with the Yardbirds was stymied when his parents insisted that he must remain in full-time education.
‘Topham is still a great guitar player. He went on to play for Chicken Shack. Out of all us he was actually the most talented artist around. Clapton and I were all into music, but he got dropped at Kingston Art School because his attentions were elsewhere. But Top’s parents, when we were getting wages from it, grounded him, unfortunately, and that is when we got Clapton. He was really the only professional player we knew out there who had any background in the music we were doing.’
Keith Relf, the group’s singer, knew Eric Clapton better than the pair of students who were at college with him, so he went and ‘tracked him down’, as Dreja remembered. Clapton had already moved on to Kingston College of Art, but had been dismissed after his first year; it was considered by his instructors that he was focused on music and not on art.
By the end of 1964 the Yardbirds had a blossoming reputation and were considered one of the coolest UK acts, clearly on the cusp of breaking out from being a cult attraction, not least because of their by now revered guitarist. The Yardbirds – who otherwise consisted of flaxen-haired vocalist Keith Relf, second guitarist Chris Dreja, bass player Paul Samwell-Smith and drummer Jim McCarty – were managed by Giorgio Gomelsky, who had had the Rolling Stones stolen from him by Andrew Loog Oldham and Eric Easton.
The song that would pull the Yardbirds up to full pop stardom was ‘For Your Love’. One of the first two tunes written by Manchester’s Graham Gouldman, later of 10cc, ‘For Your Love’ had been intended for his group the Mockingbirds, until they turned it down, as did Herman’s Hermits, who in Harvey Lisberg had the same management as Gouldman. Undaunted by this negative response, Lisberg, who was very impressed by ‘For Your Love’, then offered it to the Beatles when they played a season of Christmas shows at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1964. Unsurprisingly, the Fab Four, who had their own abundant source of material, displayed no interest. But supporting the Beatles on these Hammersmith shows were the Yardbirds, and they recognised its chart potential and recorded it.
A good call: the single, released in March 1965, was a big hit. Yet ‘For Your Love’ was at considerable odds with the rest of the band’s previous material. The Yardbirds had already put out a pair of what might be considered more characteristic tunes: ‘I Wish You Would’, a version of the 1955 Billy Boy Arnold Chicago blues tune; and ‘Good Morning, School Girl’, an adaptation of the 1937 Sonny Boy Williamson song, often titled ‘Good Morning Little Schoolgirl’ – a title that in later years would have guaranteed zero radio airtime. On the live version of ‘Good Morning, School Girl’, on the Yardbirds’ first live album, Five Live Yardbirds, the vocal duties on the song were taken by bass player Paul Samwell-Smith and Eric Clapton rather than singer Keith Relf.
He might have been underestimated in his days at the Ealing Jazz Club, but by now Clapton was showing that he was very much his own man, utterly singular in his purist vision of the kind of music he should be playing: he was determined that the next Yardbirds single should be an Otis Redding cover. His stance, and clear supreme abilities on the guitar, were beginning to transform him into a hero for his fans. And in March 1965 the Melody Maker headline told the story: Clapton Quits Yardbirds – ‘too commercial’.
‘I thought it was a bit silly, really,’ said Clapton of ‘For Your Love’. ‘I thought it would be good for a group like Hedgehoppers Anonymous. It didn’t make any sense in terms of what we were supposed to be playing. I thought, “This is the thin end of the wedge.”’
In the story that accompanied the Melody Maker headline, Keith Relf gave his version of what had taken place. ‘It’s very sad because we are all friends. There is no bad feeling at all, but Eric did not get on well with the business. He does not like commercialisation. He loves the blues so much I suppose he does not like it being played badly by a white shower like us! Eric did not like our new record “For Your Love”. He should have been featured but did not want to sing or anything, and he only did a boogie bit in the middle. His leaving is bound to be a blow to the group’s image at first because Eric was very popular.’
Chris Dreja put the problem more succinctly: ‘We had this massive record and we had no lead guitar player.’
Within two weeks Clapton had joined John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. After a couple of months graffiti began to appear around London: ‘Clapton is God’. John Mayall, a bohemian Mancunian who rivalled Alexis Korner as the godfather of the UK blues scene, had already offered Page the job with the Bluesbreakers, but he had turned it down, clearing the way for Clapton.
Page was clearly in demand. The Yardbirds and their manager Giorgio Gomelsky, at the suggestion of Eric Clapton himself, first approached Page to be the guitarist’s replacement.
‘It was thought,’ remembered Jim McCarty, ‘that maybe we could get Jimmy Page because Jimmy was the hottest session player, and Giorgio knew Jimmy. He asked Jimmy if he’d join the band but at that time Jimmy was so busy playing sessions that he wasn’t into joining a live band. He said why don’t you try one of my understudies, a guy called Jeff Beck. So we went down to see Jeff and asked him to join the band.’
Page’s friend Jeff Beck was playing with the Tridents, a rocking blues group he had joined in August 1964, never missing their weekly residence at Eel Pie Island, which would draw up to 1,500 people. Beck accepted the offer.
Page was still shadowed by the ill health that had dogged him during his time with Neil Christian and the Crusaders, and was also aware of the large amounts of money he continued to earn as a session player. But his main reason for turning down the offer, he said, was because of his growing friendship with Clapton. ‘If I hadn’t known Eric, or hadn’t liked him, I might have joined. As it was, I didn’t want any part of it. I liked Eric quite a bit and I didn’t want him to think I’d gone behind his back.’
(This was not the only act of generosity that Page displayed towards his friend Jeff Beck. When, in 1962, he announced he would be leaving Neil Christian and the Crusaders, Page had suggested Beck as a replacement for himself.)
Jeff Beck played his first show with the Yardbirds on Friday 5 March 1965 at Fairfield Halls in Croydon, south London, only two days after Eric Clapton quit the group. They were second on the bill to the Moody Blues, flying high for the first time with their hit ‘Go Now’.
Beck was so grateful that Page had recommended him as Clapton’s replacement that he went round to Page’s parents’ house in Epsom and presented his friend with his 1959 Fender Telecaster. ‘A beautiful gesture,’ said Page later. But Beck’s gratitude was realistic: although distinguished in his blues guitar band the Tridents, it was not until he joined the Yardbirds, whom he enriched with his fuzz-soaked solos, that he found the vessel for his upward flight into the guitar stratosphere. In fact, he soon borrowed a quite specific vehicle from Page: his Roger Mayer fuzzbox, on which Beck worked out the Eastern-flavoured riff for ‘Heart Full of Soul’, the first Yardbirds’ single he was involved in. ‘I still remember the time Jeff came over to my house when he was in the Yardbirds and played me “Shapes of Things”. It was just so good – so out there and ahead of its time. And I seem to have the same reaction whenever I hear anything he does,’ recalled Page.
‘The great thing about Jeff,’ said Chris Dreja, ‘is that his roots were also the blues and rock ’n’ roll, but he was also much wider in his musical tastes. And he had a mind and a talent that wanted to go much further than playing rock ’n’ roll and blues riffs, which was perfect for us because we were about to enter a phase of all sorts of experimentation. In retrospect we put Jeff under a lot of pressure. We would work on stuff and then bring Jeff in. Like, for example, the sitar sound he got on “Heart Full of Soul”. We brought in a sitar player … but it sounded thin and weedy. We said to Jeff, “Can you do it?” And he came in and created this incredible sound. Jeff Beck became a prototype of late-sixties psychedelia. He got chords from Stax and Motown records. The locked-up sound in the band gave it that sound.’

4
BECK’S BOLERO (#ulink_bd21aeda-7993-5da6-854d-cf770d2fa099)
It was in ‘the latter years of the first half of the 1960s’ that Jeff Dexter first encountered Jimmy Page. Dexter was a Mod scenemaker, the DJ at Tiles who, as a 15-year-old, famously demonstrated the Twist on BBC television; he had hung around the 2i’s Coffee Bar in London’s Old Compton Street, the seed-ground of British rock ’n’ roll, where Cliff Richard, among others, had been discovered, and would be instrumental in founding the Middle Earth venue, out of which sprang UK underground rock. ‘Jimmy was running around town at that time. But we really became friends about 1965 or 66. We both had an eye for a nice suit and a nice shirt.’
Page and Dexter would meet up in Soho to rummage through the wares of the area’s assorted rag-trade specialists, sometimes seeking cloth for jackets and trousers, more often looking for potential shirt fabric. An especial temple of suitably exotic material was found at Liberty, the Tudor-fronted department store on Great Marlborough Street. Armed with their cloth, they would then make their way to Star Shirtmakers on Wardour Street, two doors from the Whisky A Go Go. Star Shirtmakers was run by a Hungarian husband-and-wife tailoring team; they would knock up the fabric into shirts styled precisely as their customers desired, for – even then – the ludicrously cheap price of 11 shillings, the equivalent of 55 pence. (After the Beatles had been to their tailor, Dougie Millings, Dexter took them to nearby Star Shirtmakers, beginning a flood of celebrity shoppers at the place.)
One day, when they were leaving Liberty, Page and Dexter found themselves strolling down Kingly Street, which ran off the west end of the store. There they discovered an art gallery called 26 Kingly Street, with extraordinary lighting, sheets of Perspex and glittery screens. London’s first psychedelic gallery, 26 Kingly Street was run by Keith Albarn (whose son Damon is the singer in Blur). ‘We’d just discovered acid,’ said Dexter. ‘I tripped in Jimmy’s house but never tripped with him – I sought refuge with him a few times. I went to a Yardbirds rehearsal when I’d dropped acid. And he looked after me.’
Contrary to Billy Harrison’s dismissal of Page, Dexter insists that his friend was highly regarded on the London music scene, not simply for his musical accomplishments but as an empathetic human being. ‘He was a lovely chap. One of the boys. You’d see him at record launches, and the odd club – though he didn’t go to the Speakeasy as much as many others – and stuff like that. When I was running the Implosion shows Jimmy would come along. Ian Knight, my cohort on those events, went from Middle Earth to becoming the Yardbirds’ staging and lighting guy, and went on to have the same job with Led Zeppelin. We hung out at some of those crazy happenings, like the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream at Alexandra Palace.’
Page had moved up from Epsom and was living in a flat off Holland Road in west London, a thoroughfare that ran from Shepherd’s Bush to Kensington High Street; it was an area in which it seemed every single one of its myriad bedsits contained a hippie hash-dealer. In 1966 Dexter was invited to Deià in Majorca, home to a bohemian community, by Lady June, an artist and éminencegrise of the psychedelic scene. In Deià he encountered an especially louche breed of Portobello Road-style hippie chick, some of whom relocated back to London, becoming habitués of Blaises, a nightclub in South Kensington: ‘Jimmy and one of these dodgy birds used to get really stoned and play Buffalo Springfield again and again and again. “This is the direction I want to go in,” he would say. “I want to have a band that does magical things.”’
The folk scene, to which Page was always drawn, remained a prominent feature of Swinging London. ‘I used to go to Les Cousins,’ Dexter said of London’s dominant folk venue. ‘I was best friends with Beverley and John Martyn. Nick Drake only felt comfortable at their flat in Hampstead.’
Dexter was always impressed with Page’s phenomenal knowledge of art: ‘He was a collector. Of everything. He’s kept every piece of clothing he’s had since he was a child. His mother was incredibly neat and tidy. And so is he.’
Dexter also became friends with another woman who would have a significant impact on Page: a French model called Charlotte Martin. She was 20 when they first met, Dexter 19. ‘I first clapped eyes on her in a place called Westaway and Westaway, a fantastic shop near the British Museum that sold Scottish knitwear. All the young birds would gather there or at the Scotch House. She was a fabulous model who did it all: magazine level, and then once people saw how gorgeous she was she was employed all over the place. She did all the modelling with the Fool, for their collection. She was great friends with them because they all hung out at Eric’s place in the Pheasantry.’ ‘Eric’, of course, was Eric Clapton, and he and Charlotte Martin were an item.
By now Page had effectively dropped out of art college. Even though he would later acquire a considerable reputation for financial canniness, it is somewhat cheap to suggest that it was only his considerable earnings from session playing that continued to attract him to the craft. In fact, for him the art of recording, and coming to as full an understanding of it as possible, appears to have held far more attraction than treading the rock ’n’ roll boards. And in the most select quarters his skills were being further recognised. In August 1965 came the press announcement about the formation of Immediate Records, an independent label that was the pet project of Andrew Loog Oldham, Rolling Stones manager and wunderkind of UK pop, and his business partner Tony Calder. ‘Immediate will operate in the same way as any good, small independent label in America,’ said Oldham. ‘We will be bringing in new producers, while our main hope lies with the pop session guitarist turned producer Jimmy Page and my two friends, Stones Mick and Keith.’
Page had first worked with Andrew Loog Oldham in 1964, on one of Oldham’s versions of the Stones’ songs, performed by the Andrew Oldham Orchestra, part of his endeavour to become the UK’s Phil Spector. That session was at Kingsway Studios in Holborn, London; the producer was John ‘Paul Jones’ Baldwin.
Page then went on the road with Marianne Faithfull, who that summer had hit the Top 10 with her first release, ‘As Tears Go By’, written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and on which Page had played.
Page had been recommended to Oldham by Charlie Katz, who booked musicians for his sessions. ‘He said to me one day, “There’s this young lad, Jimmy, we are trying him out. Why don’t you give him a go? He doesn’t read but Big Jim Sullivan will take him under his wing.” And so Jimmy started playing on my sessions,’ said Loog Oldham. ‘One of the first was Marianne Faithfull’s “As Tears Go By”. He was a bright spark. It was nice having him on the floor … All smiles and not much talk.’
Soon Page found himself playing on the Rolling Stones’ ‘Heart of Stone’, though it was a version that would not be released until the Stones’ Metamorphosis album, in 1975.
‘Jimmy was like a wisp,’ said Loog Oldham. ‘I don’t really know what kind of a person he was, because the great ones keep it hidden and metamorphose on us, so that the room works.’
Andrew Loog Oldham decided to take their relationship up a level, hiring Page as Immediate’s producer and A&R man. ‘In those days if you got on with people you tried to work with them. It seemed logical and Jimmy liked the idea … I thought he was very good. What he went on to do kind of proves it, doesn’t it?’
As for sessions with the Rolling Stones, Loog Oldham recalled: ‘He played on some of the demos Mick, Keith and I did that ended up on the album released in 1975 called Metamorphosis. The Stones did not play on that. I think he was on a Bobby Jameson single that Keith and I wrote and produced … I only considered people the way they considered themselves. Jimmy was a player, an occasional writer at that time with me and with Jackie DeShannon. I never considered him as a solo artist and I don’t think he did either.’
Page worked on a trio of demos for the Stones themselves: ‘Blue Turns to Grey’, ‘Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind’ and the aforementioned ‘Heart of Stone’. Although the version of ‘Blue Turns to Grey’ on which Page played was never released, a later edition of the song was included on the Stones’ 1965 US album December’s Children (And Everybody’s), and Cliff Richard’s cover of the song was a number 15 hit in 1966. ‘Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind’ and ‘Heart of Stone’ were included on Metamorphosis, the first song being covered by Vashti Bunyan for an unsuccessful release on Immediate.
What had specifically drawn Page to the Immediate production gig was the chance to work with his old mucker Eric Clapton, now with John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, who had formed an arrangement with the label.
In June 1965 John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers went into Pye Studios at Great Cumberland Place in London’s West End. Page was at the production helm for what would turn out to be a landmark session in the history of contemporary music.
‘I’m Your Witchdoctor’ and ‘Telephone Blues’ were the tunes involved. They featured John Mayall on keyboards, Hughie Flint on drums, John McVie on bass and Eric Clapton on guitar – the John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers line-up that had recorded the celebrated Beano-cover album. ‘When “Witchdoctor” came to be overdubbed, Eric had this idea to put this feedback wail over the top,’ said Page. ‘I was with him in the studio as he set this up, then I got back into the control room and told the engineer to record the overdub. About two thirds of the way through he pulled the faders down and said: “This guitarist is impossible to record.” I guess his technical ethics were compromised by the signal that was putting the meters into the red. I suggested that he got on with his job and leave that decision to me! Eric’s solo on “Telephone Blues” was just superb.’
It was Page who intuited how Clapton’s solos could be enhanced by pouring reverb onto them, bringing out the flames in his playing, characterised by Clapton’s overdriven one-note sustain.
But – as Page noted – Clapton’s plangent, lyrical playing on ‘Telephone Blues’, the B-side, is perhaps even more distinguished, the first time that he gets to really stretch out with a beautiful, mature stream of notes. You are struck by the clarity of the separation – and simultaneous harmony – of the instruments. Clearly Page had learned much from his countless hours in recording studios, learning to appreciate how the very best rock ’n’ roll records were assiduously constructed, put together piece by piece.
Tellingly, for his first go in the control seat for Immediate, the subject matter of the single’s title track alluded to the kind of dark material with which Page would later be associated, perhaps even tarnished by. The opening couplet ran:
‘I’m your witchdoctor, got the evil eye
Got the power of the devil, I’m the conjurer guy.’
On one hand this was no more than the stock imagery that peppered blues music; yet, in the bigger picture, it holds an interesting subtext. It was as though Page was toying with – giving a test run to, really – the entire mysterious and dark philosophy that would form the aura of Led Zeppelin.
‘The significance of this session cannot be emphasised enough, for it represented the birth of the modern guitar sound. And while Clapton did the playing, it was Page who made it possible for his work to be captured properly on tape,’ wrote Brad Tolinski.
That year Page also worked with the distinguished American composer Burt Bacharach on his album Hit Maker! Burt Bacharach Plays the Burt Bacharach Hits. ‘Page respected Bacharach’s meticulous approach to rehearsing and recording,’ wrote George Case in Jimmy Page: Magus, Musician, Man. Again, it was part of Page’s learning curve. ‘Bacharach, in turn, admired the young Briton’s politeness and polish.’
As part of his deal with Immediate, Page played guitar with Nico, a German actress, model and singer based in France whom Andrew Loog Oldham had met in London, where she was soaking up the scene. Loog Oldham and Page co-wrote a song for her, ‘The Last Mile’, and Page arranged, conducted, produced and played on the tune. It was relegated to the role of B-side, however, to the Gordon Lightfoot number ‘I’m Not Saying’ – again, Page played guitar on this track.
‘Brian Jones brought Nico to my attention,’ said Loog Oldham, ‘and Jimmy and I wrote a song, which we recorded with her as a B-side. It might have been better than the A-side. It should have been the A-side, because that was fucking awful. It really was stiff as Britain. Then he went on the road with Marianne Faithfull. We were all impressed by this new wave of women who were coming in.’
Page’s friendship with Eric Clapton continued to blossom, and soon Slowhand, as Clapton ironically became nicknamed, would often be accompanied by his beautiful French girlfriend, Charlotte ‘Charly’ Martin, who was friends with Jeff Dexter. Clapton met her in the Speakeasy nightclub in the summer of 1966, while he was forming his next group, Cream.
Problems with Immediate Records, however, almost created a rupture in the camaraderie between the two guitarists. Without informing Clapton, the label released some tunes that he had recorded onto Page’s Simon tape recorder when Clapton had stayed at his house – which led to Clapton mistrusting Page for a time. Yet this suspicion was misplaced. ‘I argued that they couldn’t put them out, because they were just variations of blues structures, and in the end we dubbed some other instruments over some of them and they came out, with liner notes attributed to me … though I didn’t have anything to do with writing them. I didn’t get a penny out of it, anyway,’ Page said, revealing what was for him generally a key subtext to any endeavour. (The musicians who overdubbed these instruments onto Clapton’s basic tracks were Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts and Mick Jagger, on harmonica.)
Born in 1939 in west London, Simon Napier-Bell was the son of a documentary filmmaker. After attempting to become a jazz musician in the United States, he drifted into music supervision for movies in Canada; eventually he returned to London, where he continued in the same line of work, including on the 1965 screwball comedy What’s New Pussycat? He expanded into the production of records and demos, and he would use popular London studios such as Advision on Bond Street and Cine-Tele Sounds Studios, popularly known as CTS, in Kensington Gardens Square, the top film-music studio in London. He would employ session musicians recommended by Dick Katz, who booked all the top players in London.
Highly intelligent and witty, Napier-Bell became something of an archetypal character of Swinging London, a gay man who was known for driving around in an imported Ford Thunderbird, a cigar clenched between his teeth. His best friend was Vicki Wickham, the producer of Ready Steady Go!, the hip pop music show broadcast every Friday night on ITV. Almost as a jape, he and Wickham co-wrote the English lyrics for the Italian ballad ‘Io Che Non Vivo (Senza Te)’, which had been featured at the 1965 San Remo Festival; their friend Dusty Springfield sang at the event and had been moved to tears by the song’s music and melody. Knocking up their set of English lyrics to match the music in an hour so that they could head out to a London nightclub, Wickham and Napier-Bell gave the tune its title, ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’. Recorded by Dusty Springfield, the song was a number one hit in the UK and number four in the United States; in subsequent years it would be a hit again many times over, across the globe, with even Elvis Presley doing a version of it in 1970.
By the time Napier-Bell wrote the ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’ lyrics, he was manager of the Yardbirds, having replaced Giorgio Gomelsky. That the talented and fascinating Gomelsky had been fired was perhaps not surprising; later he declared, ‘I should never have been a manager: I need someone to manage me.’ Though there were no suggestions of impropriety, the Yardbirds had dismissed him because of his inability to turn a profit for the group. All the same, Gomelsky had been an inspirational figure for the Yardbirds, under whose auspices they had become a hit recording act. During their first US tour in 1965 he had even secured a recording session at Sun Studio in Memphis with Sam Phillips, who had mentored Elvis Presley early in his career. The tune they recorded? The Tiny Bradshaw 1951 jump-blues classic ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’’, reworked in a rockabilly style by the Johnny Burnette Trio in 1956, and included on the Yardbirds’ US album release Having a Rave Up. ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’’ was a song that would replay significantly in the Yardbirds’ career.
‘Some time around the end of 1965 or the beginning of 1966,’ recalled Napier-Bell, ‘Paul Samwell-Smith, who played bass with the Yardbirds, called me. His girlfriend, later his wife, was Vicki Wickham’s secretary. I went to a gig the Yardbirds played in Paris. I quickly realised that a manager’s job was to keep the group together.’
Behind Napier-Bell’s management of the Yardbirds lay a continuous awkward subtext: ‘The Yardbirds were blokes in a pub talking about football. I was gay and couldn’t really enter into that world.’
During his time working in recording studios Napier-Bell had always employed session musicians. ‘You never think session players aren’t playing well: they know they are in the top league, the best in the world. They can play next to the guys in LA who would play with Sinatra.’
Napier-Bell’s first choice for guitarist was ‘always Big Jim Sullivan’. Even though, he says, ‘these guys were all infuriating. They’d put you through it. Big Jim Sullivan would always have a paperback book with him that he would read as you did a take: it would be balanced on his music stand. He would even read it halfway through the take until it came to his moment – he would be doing it to show off.’
If an additional guitarist was required, it would invariably be Page. ‘He and Big Jim would work out their parts between them. I talked to Jimmy Page enough to know he was a real session player. I knew he was a brilliant technician and admired by others. We’d also use John Paul Jones, who did all the arrangements for Herman’s Hermits. But I never really liked Jimmy Page. He had a sneer about him. At school the people who bullied me had this terrible, frightening sneer and Jimmy Page reminded me of those people. People who sneer have usually had unhappy childhoods.’
On 16 and 17 May 1966, at IBC Studios in London’s West End, Jeff Beck and Page were involved in what in retrospect can be seen as one of the very first super-sessions.
The tune was ‘Beck’s Bolero’. Maurice Ravel’s Boléro, which was first performed in 1928 at the Paris Opera, provided the basis for ‘Beck’s Bolero’; the Russian ballet dancer Ida Rubinstein had commissioned Ravel to write the work, an undulating, insistently repetitive piece based around the Spanish music and dance known as bolero.
By 1965, largely influenced by the tastes of the likes of Paul McCartney, always an assiduous culture vulture, assorted classical composers had become fashionable among fans of what formerly would have been known as ‘pop’. These composers included Bach, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Gershwin, Debussy and Ravel, whose Boléro was relatively well known in 1966. The song’s structure is considerably amended in such a way that it could be interpreted as the first blow of the hard-rock sound that Led Zeppelin would very soon develop.
‘Beck’s Bolero’ employed a formidable cast: Beck on lead guitar, Page on acoustic, revered session pianist Nicky Hopkins, the Who’s Keith Moon on drums and John Paul Jones on bass. The Who’s John Entwistle, Moon’s bass-playing rhythm partner, had originally agreed to do the session, but when he failed to turn up John Paul Jones was called in.
‘I heard rumours that Jimmy was talking with Keith Moon about joining his supergroup,’ said Napier-Bell. ‘I don’t think the name Led Zeppelin was in the air at that time, though it may have been mentioned between them. Cream was being formed at the same time. Whether that had much influence on Beck, Page and Moon, I don’t know. The Who’s managers, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, were in the same building as Clapton’s manager, Robert Stigwood. So when he was putting Cream together, they would have known all about it, as I did too. Keith Moon would have heard from Kit and Chris as to what was going on too. From my point of view, I was thinking only of keeping Jeff in the group [the Yardbirds]. Jimmy, I think, was thinking of a new group, which would be a blend of all their talents.’
‘I always try to do things wholeheartedly or not at all,’ said Beck, offering a slight rewrite of history, ‘so I tried to imagine what my ideal band would be. We had the right producer, Keith Moon on drums, Jimmy on guitar and John Paul Jones on bass. You could feel the excitement in the studio, even though we didn’t know what we were going to play. I thought, “This is it! What a line-up!” But afterwards nothing really happened because Moony couldn’t leave the Who. He arrived at the studio in disguise so no one would know he was playing with another band.’
‘Jim Page and I arranged a session with Keith Moon in secret, just to see what would happen,’ said Beck. ‘But we had to have something to play in the studio because Keith only had a limited time – he could only give us like three hours before his roadies would start looking for him. I went over to Jim’s house a few days before the session and he was strumming away on this 12-string Fender electric that had a really big sound. It was the sound of that Fender 12-string that really inspired the melody. And I don’t care what he says, I invented that melody. He hit these Amaj7 chords and the Em7 chords, and I just started playing over the top of it … He was playing the bolero rhythm and I played the melody on top of it, but then I said: “Jim, you’ve got to break away from the bolero beat – you can’t go on like that for ever!” So we stopped it dead in the middle of the song – like the Yardbirds would do on “For Your Love” – then we stuck that riff into the middle. And I went home and worked out the other bit [the uptempo section].’
‘Even though he said he wrote it, I wrote it,’ said Page, presenting an argument that would become somewhat familiar.
‘Moon did this amazing fill around the kit, and a U47 mic just left its stand and went flying across the room; he just cracked it one,’ said John Paul Jones.
‘I remember Jimmy at the studio yelling at us and calling us fucking hooligans,’ said Beck. ‘Everyone had prior commitments. That session that day, it was one day that really started my head turning – we were almost doing it.’
That band, claimed Beck, was the original Led Zeppelin – ‘not called “Led Zeppelin”, but that was still the earliest embryo of the band’.
‘It was going to be me and Beck on guitars, Moon on drums, maybe Nicky Hopkins on piano. The only one from the session who wasn’t going to be in it was Jonesy, who played bass,’ said Page. ‘It would have been the first of all those bands, sort of like Cream and everything. Instead, it didn’t happen – apart from the “Bolero”. That’s the closest it got … The idea sort of fell apart. We just said, “Let’s forget about the whole thing, quick.” Instead of being more positive about it and looking for another singer, we just let it slip by. Then the Who began a tour, the Yardbirds began a tour, and that was it.’
In fact, there had been some efforts by Page and Beck to find an appropriate vocalist to transmogrify the ‘Beck’s Bolero’ studio line-up into a working outfit, as Page told Guitar World’s Steve Rosen: ‘Well, it was going to be either Steve Marriott from the Small Faces or Steve Winwood.’ Marriott was managed by Don Arden, the self-styled ‘Al Capone of pop’. ‘In the end, the reply came back from his office: “How would you like to have a group with no fingers, boys?” Or words to that effect.’ Sufficiently warned off, the pair never even approached the Spencer Davis Group’s Steve Winwood.
There was even controversy over the ‘Beck’s Bolero’ production credit. Mickie Most claimed it, part of a contractual issue between him and Beck, his managerial client. Simon Napier-Bell would insist it was his, and Jimmy Page claimed that he had done the record’s production, staying behind in the studio long after Napier-Bell had gone home.
‘The track was done and then the producer just disappeared,’ Page told Steve Rosen in September 1977. ‘He was never seen again: he simply didn’t come back. Napier-Bell, he just sort of left me and Jeff to it. Jeff was playing and I was in the box [studio]. And even though he says he wrote it, I’m playing the electric 12-string on it. Beck’s doing the slide bits, and I’m basically playing around the chords.’
Simon Napier-Bell has a different point of view. ‘Jimmy Page was being demeaning when we were making the record: he was sneering. Later, when Beck and Page were discussing how the mix should be, I went away to leave them to it. The purpose of a producer is so that the record ends up as it should. That’s why I went away – to leave them to it. As for Mickie Most, my agreement with him over the management of the Yardbirds was that all product reverted to him. I just said, “What the hell, I don’t need it.” I didn’t really – but that track became a rock milestone.’
When Pete Townshend discovered that Keith Moon had played on the session, he was furious. He began to refer to Beck and Page as ‘flashy little guitarists of very little brain’. Page’s response? ‘Townshend got into feedback because he couldn’t play single notes.’ Townshend later commented: ‘The thing is, when Keith did “Beck’s Bolero”, that wasn’t just a session, it was a political move. It was at a point when the group was very close to breaking up. Keith was very paranoid and going through a heavy pills thing. He wanted to make the group plead for him because he’d joined Beck.’
Later, it was claimed that Moon had declared that if the studio line-up became an actual band, it would go down ‘like a lead balloon’. According to Peter Grant, Entwistle then added, ‘like a lead zeppelin’. (Entwistle was always adamant that he came up with the Lead Zeppelin name all on his own; and also that he had the idea of a flaming Zeppelin as an album cover.)
When writing his Keith Moon biography Dear Boy, Tony Fletcher interviewed Jeff Beck about the ‘Beck’s Bolero’ session. Fletcher asked Beck if Moon had been using him to pressure the Who for his own ends. Beck replied that that wasn’t the case at all: the subtext to the ‘Beck’s Bolero’ session was the relationship between Jimmy Page and himself: ‘No, it was something to do with Jimmy and me. I had done sessions for Jimmy. He used to get me to do all the shit he didn’t want to do. He used to get me to pick him up in my car and pay for the petrol, and I’d find out he was on the session anyway. When he heard what I was doing on the sessions … he started taking an interest in my style, and then we went from there. And then the Yardbirds got in the way – I can’t remember the sequence of events. I remember thinking, “Why can’t I have what I want instead of what I’ve got?” That’s always the way. To have someone who’s so musically aware and talented as Jim alongside me was something I could really do with. But that wasn’t to be until later on in the Yardbirds. Meanwhile, I’m watching the Who going from strength to strength with a fantastic powerful drummer and knowing that that was what I really needed to get myself going. So it was a guiding light in one sense and fragmented what I already had. I was never content being in the Yardbirds, and I left Jim to paddle his canoe in the Yardbirds.’
The Yardbirds’ rhythm-guitar player Chris Dreja was yet another denizen of the Surrey Deep South from which Page, Clapton and Beck hailed. Brought up in Surbiton, where he continued to live, he would from time to time run into Page while the guitarist was studying at Sutton Art College. On more than one occasion he came across him in nearby Tolworth, outside the tropical-fish shop: Page was a tropical-fish enthusiast. ‘Hello, Chris, I’ve just bought a nice thermometer for my fish,’ he once greeted him.
On 18 June 1966 Page travelled up to Oxford in the passenger seat of Jeff Beck’s maroon Ford Zephyr Six to watch his friend play with Chris Dreja and the other Yardbirds at the May Ball at Queen’s College. They were on the same bill as seasoned Manchester hitmakers the Hollies. Not that that ‘seasoned hitmaker’ rubric couldn’t also have been applied to the Yardbirds. Since Beck had joined the band it seemed like they were never out of the UK charts – and increasingly the US hit lists were also welcoming the group’s 45s: ‘Heart Full of Soul’, ‘Evil Hearted You’, ‘Shapes of Things’ and ‘Over Under Sideways Down’ had all been hit singles. Meanwhile, their critically acclaimed Yardbirds album – more generally known as Roger the Engineer – was about to be released in the middle of July 1966.
Although events such as the May Ball paid well, they were formal, black-tie occasions, in the main quite uptight and, as defined in the new underground vocabulary, extremely ‘straight’. Becoming increasingly drunk as the evening progressed, Keith Relf, the Yardbirds’ singer, took exception to this prevalent social posture, and he began to harangue and berate his audience of bright young things. It was a stance that Page, notwithstanding his fondness for tropical fish, always a rebel and in tune with the more esoteric minutiae of pop culture, admired greatly: he thought Relf put on ‘a magnificent rock ’n’ roll performance’. Paul Samwell-Smith, the Yardbirds’ bass player, was so appalled by Relf’s stance, however, that as soon as their show was over he quit.
With further dates coming up, the Yardbirds were concerned about how they could play them without a bass player. On the spot, Page volunteered his services. ‘They had a show at the Marquee Club, and Paul was not coming back. So I foolishly said, “Yeah, I’ll play bass.” Jim McCarty says I was so desperate to get out of the studio that I’d have played drums.’
For some time Page had harboured doubts about whether he could continue working as a session player. ‘My session work was invaluable. At one point I was playing at least three sessions a day, six days a week. And I rarely ever knew in advance what I was going to be playing. But I learned things even on my worst sessions – and believe me, I played on some horrendous things. I finally called it quits after I started getting calls to do Muzak. I decided I couldn’t live that life any more; it was getting too silly.’
‘I remember the May Ball,’ said Beck. ‘Jimmy Page actually came to that gig. He came to see the band and I told him things were not running very smoothly. There were these hello-yah Princess Di types around. Trays with drinks with sticks. And as soon as we started Keith fell over back into Jim’s drums. After, I said, “Oh sorry, Jim, I suppose you’re not interested in joining the band?” He said it was the best thing ever when Keith fell back into the drums. It wasn’t going to put him off that easily.’
And so, slightly oddly, Jimmy Page joined the Yardbirds. That Marquee show took place three days later, on 21 June. How was Page’s performance? Terrible, according to Beck. ‘Absolute disaster. He couldn’t play the bass for toffee. He was running all over the neck. Four fat strings instead of six thin ones.’
Whatever. As soon as Page became a part of the group, he changed his look entirely: he presented himself as a highly stylised, very chic rock star, someone of ineffable good taste and class. And very quickly, with his characteristic diligence, he became adept on the bass guitar.
Before Page formally joined the Yardbirds, he went round to Simon Napier-Bell’s flat in Bressenden Place, near Buckingham Palace, for a meeting with the group and their manager. ‘When he arrived,’ said Napier-Bell, ‘he had an enormous swollen lip. Nobody knew who’d done it. He said some people had stopped him in the street and hit him. I remember thinking that if you’re Jimmy Page that could happen to you because of your sneering. Jimmy’s superciliousness was hard to take. When Jimmy Page looked as nice as he does, maybe he thought he could get away with it.
‘He came into the group. I said, “We don’t really get on.” “You’re my manager: I want to see the contract,” he said. I said, “You won’t. I’ll take my percentage off four-fifths of the money, and I won’t manage you.” Because I knew he would want to pull a stunt and say the contract was terrible.
‘I always thought Jimmy Page was partially gay. He didn’t have a great childhood: because he was such a cunt, you knew he didn’t have a great childhood. And later he got into transvestism. Which meant he thought he was straight.
‘I said to Jeff Beck, “Jimmy Page is coming in to the Yardbirds and you will leave.” He said, “No, I won’t.”’
Although ‘Jeffman’ had been proprietorially spray-painted onto the rear of the Telecaster Beck had gifted him, Page customised the instrument, giving it a psychedelic colour-wash, adding a silver plate to catch stage lighting and reflect it back at the audience, a simple but extraordinarily effective trick. For some time this Telecaster became identified with Page.
Yet before he could graduate to playing this guitar with the Yardbirds, Page remained the group’s bass player. It must have been a baptism of fire: vocalist Keith Relf, an asthmatic, would drink all day, the singer’s inner turmoil perhaps exacerbated by the fact that, oddly, the Yardbirds’ tour manager was his own father. Between the Marquee show and the end of July, the Yardbirds played 24 dates, all over the UK. For Page it must have been like getting back on the gruelling road with Neil Christian and the Crusaders. There was a show with the Small Faces in Paris on 27 June, and a set of dates in Scotland early in July; at one of these Beck and Page were spat at for wearing the German Iron Cross. Couldn’t these former art students have explained that they were simply indulging in a spot of street-level conceptual art? (Or perhaps it was an indication of chronic immaturity? A decade later comparable attempts at shock would be made by the likes of punk stars Sid Vicious and Siouxsie Sioux, similarly employing Nazi regalia. As with the Yardbirds’ efforts, wouldn’t you consider this to be comparable to naughty ten-year-olds drawing such images on their school exercise books?)
Although he had his flat off Holland Road in west London, Page was still frequently staying at his parents’ house in Epsom. But in the mid-sixties his parents separated and then divorced. This brought great pain to their son. Moreover, shockingly, his father had been living a double life: he had created a separate family with another woman. This would have been devastating news. ‘You would never trust anyone again, especially intimate people,’ commented Nanette Greenblatt, a renowned London life coach. ‘In any relationship you were in, you would be worrying, “This is okay for now, but how will it turn out?” Accordingly, you would want to control people. There would be a strong distrust of male figures. And Aleister Crowley would fit in nicely as an unreliable father figure.’
The kind of trauma to which Page and his mother were subjected by this egregious information about his father must have been almost overwhelming. But, just as a new birth is said to bring good luck, so a figurative death in the shape of divorce can sometimes offer the opportunity for a phoenix-like rise to escape the grief of the event. Something like that happened to Page. Some constraints fell away, to expose a desire for the ultimate promulgation of who he could be, and how far he could take it. You can have this fantasy image of yourself, which, if you work hard enough at it, is what you become. In other words, find your true will: who you are meant to be in this existence and what you are here for – the meaning of Crowley’s ‘Do what thou wilt’, appropriated almost predictably from a freemasonry text. Once upon a time, ‘Jimmy Page’ was a construct in Page’s own mind. But because he meant it, and, more importantly, needed it, it became him, and he it. With some assistance from his beliefs, of course.

5
BLOW-UPS (#ulink_900e2b81-18eb-519a-8416-def067a761c5)
Jimmy Page finally moved away from his childhood home. First, he took the flat off Holland Road in Kensington. But part of the mood of the age was the need to connect communally with the essence of the earth, a need that would later be expressed by the likes of the Band, who creatively isolated themselves in Woodstock in upstate New York, and the English group Traffic, fronted by Page’s friend Steve Winwood, who wanted to ‘get it together’ in a cottage in rural Berkshire.
And it was to that same verdant county of Berkshire that Page now moved. Kenneth Grahame, author of the children’s classic The Wind in the Willows, had retired to Pangbourne, situated on the River Pang four miles west of Reading, in later life, and now Page made the village his home, buying a former boathouse on the river, water frequently being close to the homes he would purchase, solace for his Scorpio rising. Later, he would develop a reputation for being to some extent a recluse; it was here that such an existence was first nurtured, one he found creatively beneficial. ‘I really enjoyed that bachelor existence – working and creating music, and going out on my boat at night on my own; switching off the engine and just coasting in the twilight. I liked all that,’ he told the Sunday Times. His tank of tropical fish survived the journey from west London, although his long absences away on the road eventually obliged him to give up this hobby.
And anyway, Page was almost straightaway off on the road again. This time it was to the United States.
That same month, June 1966, someone else demonstrated an intriguing element of experimental good taste – unsurprisingly, given that the record was produced by Shel Talmy, Page’s longtime studio champion, a master of innovation. ‘Making Time’, the stunning, sneering tune in question, was released by a Hertfordshire group called the Creation; Eddie Phillips, the guitarist, would at times play his instrument with a violin bow. It has long been alleged that Page took note of this and copied the effect. ‘Eddie Phillips deserves to be up there as one of the great rock ’n’ roll guitarists of our time, and he’s hardly ever mentioned,’ said Talmy. ‘He was one of the most innovative guitarists I’ve ever run across. Jimmy Page stole the bowing bit of the guitar from Eddie. Eddie was phenomenal.’
However, Page claims another source for the inspiration. At the Burt Bacharach session he played on, David McCallum, Sr., another session player, who played violin with both the London Philharmonic and Royal Philharmonic orchestras and was father of the co-star of the hit television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E., asked the guitarist if he had tried to bow his instrument as though it were a violin. Page borrowed the violinist’s bow – a wand finding its own wizard – and had a go, in front of McCallum. ‘Whatever squeaks I made sort of intrigued me. I didn’t really start developing the technique for quite some time later, but he was the guy who turned me on to the idea.’
The summer months of 1966 were a pivotal time for much of ‘Swinging London’, as Time magazine had dubbed the city. In May, at the NME Poll Winners’ Concert at Wembley’s Empire Pool, the Beatles played what would prove to be their last ever live show in Britain. However, as far as viewers of the televised broadcast of the NME poll were concerned, the Yardbirds closed the concert. Acting on a perverse whim, Andrew Loog Oldham decided that the Rolling Stones’ segment should not be broadcast. When Beatles manager Brian Epstein learned of this, he also demanded – for anxious reasons of ‘cool’ status – that the Beatles be kept off the TV, thereby depriving viewers of the Beatles’ last scheduled live performance in the UK.
Only a few weeks after Page joined the Yardbirds came the debut performance of an act that would seismically shift the entire music scene. On 29 July 1966 Cream – which Clapton had formed with drummer Ginger Baker and bassist and vocalist Jack Bruce – performed their first ever stage show, at Manchester’s Twisted Wheel, a venue more accustomed to hosting pill-popping Mod all-nighters, itself an indicator of changing times. Within a year Cream would be touring the United States to enormous acclaim, and, in a new twist, long-haired and stoned American audiences would reverently sit cross-legged on ballroom floors as Clapton tore through epic, frequently self-indulgent, guitar solos.
The day after the first Cream gig, on 30 July 1966, England won the football World Cup for the first time, on home soil, and national confidence surged. And by the end of the year another power trio, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, were ferociously tearing up and down the UK’s venues and charts, with their first hit ‘Hey Joe’ and sensational live performances.
Following that Wembley NME date, the Rolling Stones were on something of a hiatus. Anita Pallenberg, Brian Jones’s girlfriend, had bought a flat at 1 Courtfield Road, behind Gloucester Road tube station, and the Rolling Stone had moved in with her. Like several women in this rarefied bohemian milieu, Anita had about her an intriguing high-priestess aspect; she was attracted to the occult and was rarely without a bag containing rolling papers, tarot cards and occasionally the odd bone. Christopher Gibbs, a fashionable Chelsea art and antiques dealer, had insisted to Anita that she must buy the property, which only had one room and a set of stairs leading to a minstrel’s gallery that formed a bedroom of sorts.
Page had been friendly with the Rolling Stones, especially Brian Jones, since he first saw them at Ealing Jazz Club four years earlier. Now, in those first months with the Yardbirds, he was an occasional visitor to the Courtfield Road flat, along with Keith Richards and Tara Browne, the Guinness heir who would be dead by the end of the year, crashing his Lotus Elan after leaving the flat, his death celebrated in the Beatles’ ‘A Day in the Life’. It was at 1 Courtfield Road that Jones and Pallenberg began to regularly ingest LSD, soon introducing Richards to its glimpses of another reality. It is unlikely that Page, who developed a fondness for psychedelic drugs and was no longer confined by the rigidity of session work’s time constraints, did not also enter this arcane coterie.
Through Robert Fraser, a Mayfair art dealer and major player in the Swinging London scene, the trio of Jones, Pallenberg and Richards became friends with the revered independent filmmaker and occultist Kenneth Anger, a disciple of Aleister Crowley. Anger’s very beautiful short movies, marinaded in metaphysical matters, were like visual poems. Anger’s use of pop music to tell the story in his films would prove to be hugely influential. Martin Scorsese would replicate it in his breakthrough film Mean Streets, and Anger used Bobby Vinton’s ‘Blue Velvet’ in his 1963 movie Scorpio Rising, 23 years before David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet. Anger considered Pallenberg to be ‘a witch’ – in turn she claimed that everything she knew about witchcraft had been learned from the filmmaker – and Brian Jones too, and that ‘the occult unit within the Stones was Keith and Anita and Brian’. Keith had been turned on to such matters by Anita, and the pair would soon become lovers. A principal consequence of such out-on-the-edge thinking was the writing and recording of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, a song that – as Altamont would suggest – may not have been without its consequences. Page was yet to meet Kenneth Anger. But when he finally did, some years later, it began a relationship also not without penalties.
At the beginning of August 1966 the Yardbirds went into IBC Studios to record a new single, with Simon Napier-Bell at the production helm. Although ‘Happenings Ten Years Time Ago’, as the song was titled, came from the germ of an idea that Page and Keith Relf had come up with, the composing credits for the song would be attributed to all five group members. ‘Happenings Ten Years Time Ago’ would be the most psychedelic of all the Yardbirds’ singles. Like a pointer to the future there were dual lead guitars on the record, Page and Jeff Beck, and so Page once more brought in his friend John Paul Jones to play bass. Beck, who had been suffering from ill health, added his own guitar parts later, along with a piece of spoken-word absurdism based on his experiences in a sexual health clinic. Aside from this whimsy, the lyrics themselves had considerable poignancy, relating to experiences of déjà vu or even of past-life existences – appropriately complex subject matter as the pop-based first half of the 1960s gave way to the rockier second half.
‘It was a compressed pop-art explosion, with a ferocious staccato guitar figure, a massive descending riff and rolling instrumental break and LSD-inspired lyrics that questioned the construction of reality and the nature of time,’ wrote Jon Savage in 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded. But by some it was seen as wilfully clever clogs. Penny Valentine, Disc and Music Echo’s reliable record reviewer, was extremely dismissive: ‘I have had enough of this sort of excuse for music. It is not clever, it is not entertaining, it is not informative. It is boring and pretentious. I am tired of people like the Yardbirds thinking this sort of thing is clever when people like the Spoonful and Beach Boys are putting real thought into their music. And if I hear the word psychedelic mentioned again I will go nuts.’
In fact, in the UK ‘Happenings Ten Years Time Ago’ only stuttered to the edge of the Top 30. As far as Britain was concerned, the Yardbirds were – in the jargon of the time – on their way out.
On 5 August 1966 Page played bass with the Yardbirds in the eighth-floor Auditorium of Dayton’s Department Store in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a regular gig venue. Although he had visited the United States twice before, this was the very first American show that he ever performed. This, the Yardbirds’ third US tour, had been scheduled to kick off a week earlier, but Beck was bedridden with tonsillitis, which was why he had not been present at the initial ‘Happenings Ten Years Time Ago’ session. At Dayton’s Department Store there were two concerts, one at 1 p.m., the other at 4. ‘The surroundings felt quite surreal,’ Page remarked on his website many years later. For the show he was clad in a purple jumpsuit.
‘Shapes of Things’ had been a US hit when it was released in February that year, reaching the number 11 slot; it was followed by ‘Over Under Sideways Down’, out in June and two months later still in the US charts, where it would peak at number 10, the group’s biggest-ever American hit. The Roger the Engineer album had been released in July in the USA as Over Under Sideways Down, and that esteemed LP would get to number 52, not bad for a group starting its career in the USA.
The tour trundled through the Midwest – Chicago, Detroit, dates in Indiana – and down into Texas and assorted Bible Belt areas, playing the same sort of state fairs that had so irritated the Rolling Stones on their early US tours – unaware perhaps that these sort of shows were where Elvis Presley first honed his live act. Jeff Beck had not fully recovered from his illness, and would frequently take out his ire on the inadequate amplifiers at the venues. ‘If he didn’t get his sound right, he’d just kick the amps offstage,’ recalled drummer Jim McCarty.
Not that the shows weren’t without a modicum of glamour. Due to a national airline strike, Simon Napier-Bell had been obliged to charter a small private plane. After Beck had smashed his own Marshall amp, he insisted that he would not carry on without an identical replacement. According to Napier-Bell, Page used the dilemma to undermine him: ‘“Simon is our manager,” he said, “so it is on him to find a replacement.” There were hardly any Marshall amps at all in the USA at that time – probably no more than 20 – so when I finally tracked one down we had to send the plane to pick it up, which cost an absolute fortune, far more than the amp cost. But that kept Jeff Beck happy, and allowed Jimmy Page to feel he’d got one over on me.’
On 23 August 1966 the Yardbirds played Santa Catalina Island, a resort 22 miles from Los Angeles in the Pacific Ocean. The group arrived on a boat from Long Beach filled with competition winners from radio station KFWB, and one of these fans noticed that Beck seemed in a ‘difficult’ mood. He had been in this ‘mood’ for the entire tour: his tonsillitis had never fully gone away and now seemed to be on the offensive once again.
For Simon Napier-Bell, however, this show at the island’s Casino Ballroom was the best he had ever seen by the group. Beck played a solo, he said, that seemed to last for ever. During it he interplayed with Page’s thundering bass guitar, and their sonic concoction drifted off into the soundscapes of what already was becoming known – and dreaded by Penny Valentine – as ‘psychedelia’.
By the time the Yardbirds returned to Long Beach, it was clear that Beck was not in good shape. Although he retired for the night to the arms of Mary Hughes, his Los Angeles girlfriend, he was so sick the next day that that night’s show, at Monterey County Fairgrounds, was cancelled.
Beck’s health was bad enough for him to have to drop out of the rest of the tour, a cause of considerable controversy within the group, but a decision of huge significance for Page. For the remaining 12 dates, beginning on 25 August at San Francisco’s Carousel Ballroom, Chris Dreja switched from rhythm guitar to bass, and Page, wearing the newly fashionable wide-flared trousers, took over as lead guitarist. ‘It was really nerve-wracking,’ he said, ‘because this was the height of the Yardbirds’ concert reputation and I wasn’t exactly ready to roar off on lead guitar. But it went all right, and after that night we stayed that way. When Jeff recovered, it was two lead guitars from then on.’
During the tour Page would hear his own guitar work on the radio, on a single from a recent session he had played in London produced by Mickie Most. Now ‘Sunshine Superman’ by Donovan, an innovative and definitive sound of the summer of 1966 that heralded a golden period and shift of style for the former folk singer, was rising up and up the US charts, reaching the number one slot for a week. Although not released in the UK until December that year, it would almost emulate its US chart position, reaching number two.
Jimmy Page and Donovan Leitch were like-minded musical souls, each with their own interest in metaphysics. Playing on ‘Sunshine Superman’ with Page was – yet again – John Paul Jones on bass. At those same sessions Page played the haunting guitar on Donovan’s equally memorable ‘Season of the Witch’, which was on the Sunshine Superman album. Built around a D ninth chord shown to Donovan by master guitarist John Renbourn, ‘Season of the Witch’ was ideal for extended versions and would be frequently employed as soundcheck material by Led Zeppelin.
Back in the UK, Jeff Beck’s health returned, and he drove over to Page’s Pangbourne home, its interior design already beginning to reflect the prevailing rock-star rococo style. The two guitarists worked out a stage routine that would allow each to play lead guitar, intertwining with one other and mutually strengthening their playing and that of the group. Among the songs they developed was a version of Freddie King’s ‘Goin’ Down’ – though this was never recorded.
They needed to work fast. On 23 September the Yardbirds again hit the road, supporting the Rolling Stones and the Ike and Tina Turner Revue on a 12-date tour of the UK, two shows a night, ending on 9 October 1966.
The tour kicked off at London’s Royal Albert Hall, where the Yardbirds allegedly blew the Rolling Stones off the stage. Yet the review they received from the NME, especially for Jeff Beck, was extremely sniffy; it irritated him that he was described as ‘a guitar gymnast’. Simon Napier-Bell utterly disagreed with such an assessment: ‘They were really fantastic. What Jeff and Jimmy were doing was playing Jeff Beck’s solos, but in harmony. It was astonishing to hear, and to watch.’
Difficulties soon arose, however. According to Chris Welch in Led Zeppelin: The Book: ‘One problem was that Jeff couldn’t handle the competition and would try to blow Jimmy off the stage. Page was always on the ball, but Jeff’s returning fire in guitar exchanges would be unpredictable and relied on volume when accuracy failed.’ Napier-Bell was in agreement in an interview he did with Jim Green in the October 1981 edition of Trouser Press: ‘Jimmy deliberately upstaged Jeff, Jeff got moody and walked out towards the end, fortunately we finished it.’
Quickly forgiven, Beck was admitted back into the Yardbirds fold. This was a necessity, as they were about to join the winter leg of Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars – a regular feature of the American popular music calendar organised by the legendary DJ. But before that there was another avenue to explore.
An exaggerated, dramatised version of the high-end hippiedom found at Anita Pallenberg and Brian Jones’s home was expressed in the party scene in the classic – yet occasionally extremely pretentious – metaphysical thriller Blow-Up, which Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni started filming in London in April 1966. (The scene was actually shot in Christopher Gibbs’s Cheyne Walk house.) In the film a fashion photographer, played by David Hemmings and clearly based on enfant terrible David Bailey, thinks he has witnessed a murder.
After completing the London shoot in June, Antonioni decided that to fully represent the capital’s glamorous, swinging spirit he should shoot a sequence in a rock ’n’ roll club. In September he returned to London and booked a meeting with Kit Lambert, manager of the Who. The day before the meeting, Lambert had lunch with Napier-Bell at the Beachcomber restaurant in London’s Mayfair Hotel; the two men were close friends and Lambert wanted to pick Napier-Bell’s brain about how to approach Antonioni. Napier-Bell decided to set him up to the advantage of his own group: ‘I told him to ask for £10,000 and insist that the Who had final edit on their sequence. Antonioni kicked him out after about a minute.
‘Then I went to see Antonioni: “We don’t want money. This is art. Of course I don’t want to edit it.”’ (In fact the Yardbirds received £3,000 for their part in Blow-Up: car-freak Jeff Beck immediately spent his share on a second-hand Corvette Stingray.)
Napier-Bell had scored. The Yardbirds’ Blow-Up sequence was filmed at Elstree Studios in Borehamwood, north of London, doubling for Windsor’s hip Ricky-Tick Club, in the week beginning 6 October 1966. The band played ‘Stroll On’, as it was called in the film’s credits, the lyrics having been rewritten the previous night by Keith Relf for copyright reasons – in other words, so he could snatch the credit. But it was better known by fans who had experienced the song when rivetingly performed by the Johnny Burnette Trio as ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’’ – the same song that the Yardbirds had recorded at Sun Studio in Memphis the previous year. (Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Smokestack Lighting’, a Yardbirds live favourite, had been first choice, but the idea was shelved when Antonioni decided it lacked the relentless pace he needed for the scene.)
‘Train Kept A-Rollin’ would be the very first number that Led Zeppelin would play in their initial rehearsal; in Blow-Up the Yardbirds essay an angry, explosive version of the song before a consciously static audience, which includes a young Michael Palin and a dancing, silver-coated Janet Street-Porter. Page stands stage-right to Beck’s stage-left and, rather in the manner of the Kinks’ Dave Davies, his hair is parted in the centre, his mutton-chop sideburns kissing his jawline and peeking out beneath the twin tonsorial curtains waterfalling from his head. He wears an open black jacket, a trio of badges balanced symmetrically on each lapel. In the sequence Beck freaks out over a malfunctioning amp, smashing his guitar to splintered pieces in a manner that only Pete Townshend would actually do in reality. Upon learning of his role, Beck had recoiled: would he have to destroy his new Gibson Les Paul? No fuckin’ way!
A bunch of cheap Höfner replica guitars were brought in. ‘Jeff Beck had to be coaxed into smashing the guitar. And then he did it half a dozen times,’ recalled Napier-Bell. It is only after the guitar has been destroyed that the audience breaks out into a feverish response.
Smashing the guitar wasn’t the only problem Beck had on the film, however. ‘Antonioni was a pompous oaf. I didn’t like him at all,’ he said. ‘The film was a bit of a joke. Crap. I thought, “Oh, that’s the end of us.” Because I saw the premiere in LA. But people loved it. It kept us going.’
This scene from Blow-Up appears to be the only filmed record of Page and Beck playing together in the Yardbirds. Though he is only briefly glimpsed in this scene, and Beck’s thuggish fury unquestionably steals their joint screen time, Page’s almost girlishly pretty looks – which crease momentarily into a smile – contrast powerfully with Beck’s pugnacious posture, like that of a yob awaiting his borstal sentence. You can see why, for the brief time they played together, the pair proved such a potent force in the Yardbirds.
Along with the Yardbirds on the Dick Clark Caravan of Stars tour were bill-toppers Gary Lewis & the Playboys, whose singer was the son of comedian Jerry Lewis. The group – safe in a Herman’s Hermits/Gerry and the Pacemakers kind of way – had seven successive US Top 10 singles. Then there were ‘Wooly Bully’ hitmakers Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs; the Distant Cousins; Bobby Hebb, high in the US charts that summer with his sophisticated, sexy ‘Sunny’; and early sixties vocal star Brian Hyland, purveyor of puppy-love pop. Soon, as album rock became the principal market force, several of those acts would see their careers nosedive forever.
The tour wound through the south, the Midwest and East Coast before winding up in Huntington, West Virginia, on 27 November. ‘Thirty-three dates, I think, and of those twenty-five were doubles, two shows in one night,’ said Page. ‘You’d think a double would be played in the same town, but it wasn’t – it was two different towns. The show was in two halves. When the first half finished, and there was an interval … the performers would get on the coach driving to the next venue, while the second half carried on. Then, they in turn carried on to the next place, where the others had by then finished. It was the worst tour I’d ever been on, as far as fatigue is concerned. We didn’t know where we were or what we were doing.’
Travelling conditions were abysmal, the artists being driven 600 miles or so a day in a pair of converted Greyhound buses to play four songs each at every show. ‘The other acts had little or nothing in common with us,’ said Jim McCarty. ‘Sam the Sham and his Pharoahs, Brian Hyland. I mean, they were just so different, though Sam the Sham had his moments. Anyway, when they let us off the bus, we’d go onstage and they’d shout, “Turn the guitars down!” Jimmy was getting through it because he was a professional. Chris and I stood up to it because we were creating humour from all sorts. Keith was drinking his way along. But Jeff …’
Jeff Beck was becoming a specialist in crossing the United States in a bad mood: ‘The bus was supposed to have air-conditioning, but didn’t seem to. And all the American groups on the bus played their guitars non-stop, and were always singing. Could you imagine? Cooped up on a stuffy bus with everyone around you singing Beatles songs in an American accent?’
His technique honed on the set of Blow-Up, Beck cut a destructive swathe through the tour’s initial dates: amps thrown out of windows, instruments smashed. ‘Jeff Beck had to be coaxed into smashing his guitar for the Blow-Up scene,’ said Napier-Bell. ‘And then he fell in love with doing it and with smashing his amp. I’m sure Jimmy Page was counting the nights, because then Jeff Beck left.’
The frustration within the group began to mount, and, as Beck would admit in hindsight: ‘I was quite messed up. At 21 I was really on my last legs. I just couldn’t handle it.’
‘One time in the dressing room,’ recalled Page, ‘Beck had his guitar up over his head, about to bring it down on Keith Relf, but instead smashed it to the floor. Relf looked at him with total astonishment, and Beck said, “Why did you make me do that?”’
In the middle of the tour, in Harlington, Texas, Beck caught a taxi to the airport and flew to Los Angeles – where, of course, Mary Hughes awaited him. Beck’s explanation for his departure? A return of his chronic tonsillitis. He was going to have treatment and would soon return, he said.
The day after Beck disappeared, Napier-Bell was obliged to appear on a local television show to announce that the next Yardbirds concert had to be cancelled. Showing that they were perfectly adaptable under stress, Relf and Page scoured the area for a joke shop. When Napier-Bell took a lengthy pull on the cigar his pair of charges had presented to him, he had to jump back as it exploded in his mouth – in the middle of the live television broadcast. At the time there was a term for such behaviour among UK groups: looning. Page’s part in this moment clearly showed that he was not above indulging in this, although, given the complicated relationship he had with his manager, was there a subconscious maliciousness in the very notion of this deed?
Once again, Page took over as the sole lead guitarist. ‘Jimmy was always a real pro,’ said Chris Dreja, ‘whereas Jeff was a man of emotion. I think Jeff always found it harder than Jimmy because he was prone to playing according to how he felt, whereas Jimmy’s idea was always, “We’re professional entertainers.”’
‘I didn’t like my territory being encroached upon, and I wanted to be it, to do all the guitar playing,’ admitted Beck. ‘And when it got to the point when I was exhausted, we then embarked on a six-week Dick Clark tour. Six hours in that thing was enough for me. To be faced with those kind of travel problems and emotional tear-ups, and you’d get to the end and play a toilet gig with music you didn’t feel comfortable with, was a recipe for disaster. Things just got on top of me and I cracked up, basically. I wanted to do something other than travelling … So it’s not important whether I was kicked out or I left – it just happened.’
After a period of reflection in Los Angeles, Beck attempted to return to the Yardbirds. He realised that he had essentially been suffering from a minor nervous breakdown. But when word got back to the Yardbirds that their AWOL guitarist had been seen enjoying himself in LA nightclubs, they voted Beck out of the group.
‘That was the point at which I gave up on trying to manage the Yardbirds,’ said Napier-Bell. ‘I thought it was too difficult and the only person I really liked in the group – apart from Chris Dreja, who is a nice guy, a good person – was Jeff Beck. So I kept the management of Jeff Beck. I found Jimmy very difficult to deal with. Always narky.’
Page, however, felt it was unsurprising he was considered awkward: ‘Bloody right. We did four weeks with the Rolling Stones and then an American tour and all we got was £112 each!’
One aspect of Page that Napier-Bell had observed was the guitarist’s tendency to be tucked away in a corner reading yet another esoteric volume by Aleister Crowley. ‘People would ask him about it, and he would reply something along the lines of, “Oh, you wouldn’t understand it. You’re not intelligent enough.”’

6
‘YOU’RE GOING TO KILL ME FOR A THOUSAND DOLLARS?’ (#ulink_427f5869-bc19-5db0-aafc-06d0522c584b)
If Aleister Crowley performed a role as a kind of absent metaphysical father figure to Jimmy Page, the fastidiously loyal Peter Grant would prove to be a very physical manifestation of one.
Born into considerable poverty on 5 April 1935 in London’s South Norwood, Peter James Grant was the illegitimate son of a secretary. He never met his father, who was rumoured to have left his mother because she was Jewish – even though she was employed as a typist for the Church of England Pensions Board.
Soon Grant and his mother moved to a tiny terraced house in down-at-heel Battersea, on the edge of the Thames. During the Second World War his school was evacuated, and he was sent to Godalming in Surrey, where he was educated at posh public school Charterhouse. Bullied by resentful incumbents, he developed an abiding loathing of the upper classes that would remain with him all his life. Emotionally distraught at being torn from his mother and home, meagre though it was, Grant began to put on the excessive weight that would characterise him.
‘This boy will never make anything of his life,’ read the final report by the headmaster of the south London school where Grant finished his education.
The first few weeks of Peter Grant’s working life were spent labouring in a sheet-metal factory. At six feet, five inches tall and on his way to being just as wide, he certainly had the physique for physical work, but he quickly changed course, first becoming a messenger delivering photographs on Fleet Street for the Reuters news agency, and then a stagehand at the Croydon Empire Theatre.
After National Service in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, where he attained the rank of corporal, he became doorman – bouncer, really – at the 2i’s Coffee Bar on Old Compton Street, the birthplace of British rock ’n’ roll and the venue from which sprang Cliff Richard, Tommy Steele and Adam Faith, among others. It was during this time that he met Mickie Most, who had recently returned to London after finding success as a pop star in his wife’s native South Africa.
Through connections he made with Most, Grant was swept up into the newly popular world of televised professional wrestling, appearing as both Count Massimo and Count Bruno Alassio of Milan. From this springboard Grant secured bit parts in a number of films – among them A Night to Remember, The Guns of Navarone and the epic Cleopatra – and television shows – The Saint, Dixon of Dock Green and The Benny Hill Show, among others.
Grant pulled together his 2i’s connections, bought a minibus and started a business transporting rock ’n’ roll musicians to their gigs. He started off with the Shadows, before he was approached by Don Arden, who gave Grant the task of road-managing American acts he brought over for tours – the Everly Brothers, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, Gene Vincent and Brian Hyland – a role he performed with alacrity, personally ensuring the artists were paid every penny owed, in cash.
Arden had a very nasty reputation: he was rumoured to have held Steve Marriott, of the Small Faces, out of a third-floor office window by his ankles when the diminutive singer requested an accurate accounting of his earnings. Grant learned from such behaviour. ‘When he was with Led Zeppelin he was a batterer of people,’ said Napier-Bell. ‘Although that was probably because of the drugs. When he had cleaned up he became a very nice person.’
But that was all yet to come. Grant also acted as road manager for the Animals and the New Vaudeville Band, and began sharing an office with Mickie Most at 155 Oxford Street, on the border of then sleazy Soho in London. When Most took over the management of the Yardbirds from Napier-Bell, Grant became their de facto manager and Most’s partner in RAK Management.
‘They needed someone like Peter Grant,’ said Napier-Bell. ‘He wouldn’t stand for Jimmy Page’s sneering.’
The group was losing traction in the UK, but in America they still carried considerable cachet. Grant travelled with the band on the road in the US, and, for the first time, they returned to England with money in their pockets. ‘He was a great manager for the time,’ said Chris Dreja. ‘He was hands-on, nuts and bolts. He travelled with the band. He made sure they didn’t get screwed. He loved his artists. He changed the music scene. He was responsible, especially with Zeppelin, of course, because they had such a huge audience, for changing the percentage points around between the record companies and the artists and the promoters. He was just a fantastic manager.’
On a date in a snowbound northern American state, the bad weather caused the Yardbirds to arrive late, almost missing their call time. Furious at being so put out, the pair of Mafia promoters refused to pay the group’s fee, one of them pulling a gun. Peter Grant walked his considerable girth up to the man: ‘What? You’re going to kill me for a thousand dollars? I don’t think so.’ He got the Yardbirds their money.
Grant became close to Page, who, he noted, seemed in control of himself and intelligent, far more businesslike than the other Yardbirds and apparently much older than his 22 years. In this odd-couple relationship, Grant expressed his ‘utter faith’ in the young but extremely seasoned guitarist. ‘It was funny how well Jimmy and Peter got on because Jimmy was a very softly spoken, gentle guy and Peter was from a very different background and education,’ said Napier-Bell. Among other things, the pair shared an interest in antiques, and they would go shopping for them together on tour.
‘“Peter, there’s only one problem with the band,”’ Grant had been told by Napier-Bell. ‘“There’s a guy there who’s a real smart arse, a real wise guy.” I said, “Who’s that?” He said, “Jimmy Page.” I was a bit puzzled. I thought, he must know I’ve known Jimmy since 1962/63. Apart from Neil Christian, when I was in business with Mickie Most, he did all the Herman’s Hermits and Donovan. So when I met Jimmy I said, “I hear you’re a bit of troublemaker and I should get rid of you. What have you been up to?” He said, “We did a four-week tour of the UK with the Stones and an American tour and we got £112 each.” And he was the only one who had the balls or savvy to say something. By then Mickie Most was recording them. Mickie Most is a pop producer, an excellent pop producer. And there was always a bit of friction there. The way I saw the band going, the way they wanted to carry on, was against the pop thing.’
Yet Mickie Most appeared unaware of the cultural wind of change. ‘The intention,’ he said, ‘was to try and resuscitate their pop career.’
In October 1967 Most insisted that a new Yardbirds 45 was released in the United States: ‘Ten Little Indians’, a song penned by Harry Nilsson and included on his second album Pandemonium Shadow Show. A truly dreadful record, it climbed no higher in the American charts than number 96, although Page had attempted to save the song, which featured a cloying brass section, by turning this into a feature after it had been subjected to what became known as ‘reverse echo’.
That ‘Ten Little Indians’ was only released in America was a testament to how out of touch Mickie Most had become. Both Page and Grant were well aware of the emerging new underground scene in America, the more reflective, less materialistic outlook of the hippie audiences at Bill Graham’s Fillmore West auditorium in San Francisco, which became almost a temple to the Yardbirds. The soundtrack to this counter-culture was provided by the advent of FM radio and its new ‘progressive rock’ stations like San Francisco’s KSAN, New York’s WNEW and Orlando’s WORJ, which were prepared to play an entire album with no commentary from a DJ (in the UK this was mirrored to an extent by John Peel’s late-night The Perfumed Garden show on the pirate-ship Radio London).
The ‘Season of the Witch’ was upon us. There was a new generation of American music-makers with very strange, surreal and hitherto unimaginable names that suggested copious drug consumption: Strawberry Alarm Clock, Captain Beefheart, Love, the Doors, Iron Butterfly, Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Grateful Dead. They were all allied to the burgeoning ‘rock’ album audience, a development spurred by the arrival in late 1965 of the first relatively cheap stereo systems. Long-haired, free-loving, pot-smoking and acid-dropping, this new market was cemented together by the considerable schism in American society brought about by the ceaselessly expanding war in Vietnam. Crisscrossing the United States with the Yardbirds, Page and Grant witnessed the success of first Cream and then the Jimi Hendrix Experience, seeing how they fitted perfectly into this new world. It was a musical and cultural sea change.
Another of these novel new acts, the Velvet Underground, championed in New York City by the artist Andy Warhol, supported the Yardbirds on several shows in the winter of 1966, most notably a show at Michigan State Fairgrounds. Soon the Yardbirds started dropping a snatch of the Velvet Underground’s ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’, the group’s paean to heroin dealers, into the middle section of an extended version of their own tune ‘I’m a Man’. Page had heard the Velvets’ first album while touring the USA with the Yardbirds. ‘I’m pretty certain we were the first people to cover the Velvet Underground,’ he said. At one of those Manhattan parties at which Andy Warhol was ubiquitous, the artist asked the guitarist to take part in a screen test for him for a movie he had in mind.
As the sole guitarist with the now four-piece Yardbirds, Page spent much of 1967 and the first half of the next year on long, gruelling tours in far-flung places. It was relentless. There were five American tours, a UK tour, a European tour and in January 1967 an Australasian tour with Roy Orbison and the Walker Brothers, playing two shows a night. But it was not without its rewards. ‘When Jeff left and we carried on,’ he said, ‘the pure nature of the band was that they had a lot of numbers you could really stretch out on.’
Back in Britain from Australia during February 1967, Page worked with Brian Jones at IBC Studios on the soundtrack for A Degree of Murder. Directed by German New Wave filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff and starring Jones’s girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, the film was entered for competition at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival. Although both Page and Nicky Hopkins, the celebrated session pianist, played on the soundtrack, along with Small Faces drummer Kenney Jones, with Glyn Johns engineering, there was never an official release for Brian Jones’s music. ‘Brian knew what he was doing,’ said Page to Rolling Stone. ‘It was quite beautiful. Some of it was made up at the time; some of it was stuff I was augmenting with him. I was definitely playing with the violin bow. Brian had this guitar that had a volume pedal – he could get gunshots with it. There was a Mellotron there. He was moving forward with ideas.’
‘I don’t remember much about the sessions other than we got Jimmy Page to come and play some amazing guitar during the murder scene and that the German director was thrilled with the end result,’ recalled Glyn Johns.
Page still had time to play the occasional session. For the past couple of years, Johns had produced Johnny Hallyday’s records, a Gallic Elvis who was indubitably the biggest music star in France. Hallyday would often record in London, and a distinct attraction for anyone working on his sessions was that he always paid in cash. But on this occasion he decided to work in Paris, with his own band, which included Mick Jones, later of Spooky Tooth and then Foreigner. ‘I took Jimmy Page,’ recalled Johns. ‘He was nothing short of brilliant.’
On the tune ‘À Tout Casser’ Page performed one of his greatest session moments. And on ‘Psychedelic’ he employed a bluesy, Albert King-like bending riff that would resurface a couple of years later on Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’. The tune has a classic freak-out section as Hallyday repeats the word ‘psychedelic’ over and over to blasts of Jimmy Page guitar.
During this period in early 1967 Page became briefly involved with 19-year-old model Heather Taylor. A friend of New York photographer Linda Eastman, Taylor had run the fan club for Monkee Davy Jones and briefly been his girlfriend; she had also been a lover of Jimi Hendrix – ‘Foxy Lady’ was allegedly written for her – and Jeff Beck.
After Page met her at Ondine, the fashionable Manhattan nightclub, she had followed him to London. But he quickly told her they were ‘seeing too much of each other’ – after only three dates in London. Taylor was later introduced to the Who’s Roger Daltrey by her Californian friend Catherine James, who was living in London with former Moody Blue Denny Laine. Taylor would go on to marry Daltrey, while Catherine James would crop up again in Page’s future.
Fresh from his experience on the A Degree of Murder soundtrack, which was very much part of the ‘progressive’ new musical order in his eyes, Page was keen on leading the Yardbirds in a similar heavier and more experimental direction. Later in 1967, this would include the group’s rendition of a new song, sometimes known as ‘I’m Confused’, but more reliably as ‘Dazed and Confused’.
On 25 August 1967, the peak of the year’s alleged Summer of Love, the Yardbirds played two shows at the Village Theater in downtown Manhattan. They were supported by the Youngbloods and by Jake Holmes, a singer-songwriter who spun a twist on the folk tradition by working with a guitar and two bass instruments but no drums. Watching from the wings, Jim McCarty was impressed by Holmes’s song ‘Dazed and Confused’, with its descending riff, as was Page. The next day they went and bought The Above Ground Sound of Jake Holmes, his debut album, on which ‘Dazed and Confused’ was featured. Adapting the song, but only to an extent, with Keith Relf altering the lyrics, ‘Dazed and Confused’ became a stand-out performance in Yardbirds live shows for the last ten months of the group; Page’s dramatic and highly effective flourishing of a violin bow on his guitar during the performance was an undoubted highlight. ‘Dazed and Confused’ became a showcase tune on the first Led Zeppelin album.
In the UK the Yardbirds were beginning to seem increasingly irrelevant, but in the United States they remained a substantial concert attraction. Yet even there, the hits didn’t keep coming, largely because – as with ‘Ten Little Indians’, which would be released later that year in the US – their selection made almost no sense.
The Yardbirds’ Greatest Hits was released in March 1967 in America, and made number 28, their biggest-selling US album. But whereas the Yardbirds’ three biggest singles had been written by group members, from now on Mickie Most brought in – as he had done with their first hit ‘For Your Love’ – songs by established hit-making teams.
Accordingly, the choice of some of the 45s released seemed baffling. Written by Harold Spiro and Phil Wainman, ‘Little Games’ was released in March 1967 in the US and a month later in the UK. It only reached number 51 in America and didn’t even chart in the UK. As the title track of the next Yardbirds album, released in mid-July only in the United States – a mark of their dwindling UK status – the single was intended as a trailer for the LP.
There were further odd decisions. ‘Ha Ha Said the Clown’, for example, had been a Top 5 hit in the UK for Manfred Mann, but had failed to gain any chart movement whatsoever in America. Most persuaded the Yardbirds – or, more accurately, Keith Relf plus session musicians, including John Paul Jones, who arranged much of Most’s material – to record the song and release it in the States. In July 1967 ‘Ha Ha Said the Clown’, not featured on Little Games, staggered up to the number 45 slot in America. The breezy pop tune was an extraordinary choice for the Yardbirds to release, utterly inappropriate for the market they were trying to build in the States. But the B-side was another matter altogether: the explosive ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor’, written by Page and Jim McCarty, with a bass-line like a relentless train rolling, featured the first recorded instance of Page using a violin bow on his guitar.
The Little Games album – derided by Page as ‘horrible’ – did contain some interesting moments: ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor’ itself, and ‘Glimpses’, a suggestion of the way Page’s compositional mind was developing. ‘It featured the violin bow, and when it was played in concert I had tapes that played all this stuff – the Staten Island Ferry, locomotives, shock sounds – with textures from the bow. But we didn’t get a chance, with the Yardbirds, to take it far enough,’ he told Rolling Stone’s David Fricke; and ‘White Summer’, a mesmerising instrumental piece that he would perform live, both with the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin, on his 1961 Danelectro 3021 or his 1967 Vox Phantom XII 12-string guitar.
‘Goodnight Sweet Josephine’ was the Yardbirds’ last single, released in March 1968. Written by Tony Hazzard, who had also composed ‘Ha Ha Said the Clown’, it was about a man-eating groupie who lived in Clapham in south London – where Hazzard himself was based. Uncertain whether to commemorate its clear music-hall origins or celebrate its implied cultural comment, it did neither and ended up truly awful – a shockingly bad record. First recorded at the end of 1967 at Advision Studios in London, with Mickie Most producing, the Yardbirds disliked the final result so much that they insisted on doing a further version, on 6 February, at De Lane Lea Studios. It was no help, however; the single was the worst they ever released, and the group quickly asked for it to be recalled, reissuing a further version in the United States and Australasia. On the other hand, the single’s B-side ‘Think About It’ had much more going for it – a shredding solo midway through that Page would take in all its glory into Led Zeppelin’s version of ‘Dazed and Confused’. With his assiduous thoroughness, the guitarist had grabbed the production of the B-side from Mickie Most.
On 6 March 1968 Page gamely went to plug ‘Goodnight Sweet Josephine’ on the long-running BBC radio show Saturday Club – the show had been a Saturday morning feature of the Light Programme before the station was transformed into Radio 1 the previous autumn, a supposed substitute for the now-banned pirate stations. Interviewed by the ever-avuncular Brian Matthew, the self-styled ‘old mate’ of his audience, Page described the troubles around making the record in his boyish, accentless voice and concluded, ‘It’s quite a good product now.’
However, Jeff Beck’s summary was more to the point. ‘When I heard “Goodnight Sweet Josephine” I thought, Thank God I left the Yardbirds.’
Three days after that Saturday Club performance the Yardbirds were in Paris. They played at the Assas Faculte du Droit, supported by the Brian Auger Trinity, featuring Julie Driscoll, and recorded the Bouton Rouge television show, performing ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’’, ‘Dazed and Confused’ and ‘Goodnight Sweet Josephine’.
The next day, 10 March, the Yardbirds played at Paris’s legendary Olympia venue. Afterwards the group moved on to a private party thrown by Eddie Barclay, who ran the renowned Barclay Records. Among the celebrated guests was Brigitte Bardot, dressed in leather motorcycle gear. She looked ‘hot’, noted Page.
Back in London on 15 March, Page played a session for Joe Cocker, for his ‘Marjorine’ single and its B-side, ‘The New Age of the Lily’. (Later in the summer he would play on Cocker’s epochal version of Lennon and McCartney’s ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’, the song that made Cocker’s career.) The next day he was again in Paris with the Yardbirds for a show.
A week later, following a concert at Retford College in Nottinghamshire on 23 March, the Yardbirds flew to New York for the start of their American tour. The opening date, 160 miles from Manhattan, was at the Aerodrome in Schenectady in New York state, a venue with a famously tremendous sound system, the kind favoured by Page for the more complex sound he was developing on tunes like ‘Think About It’, ‘White Summer’ and ‘Dazed and Confused’. But such aural developments would not be employed for much longer with the Yardbirds, as the band knew before they even set off that this was to be their final ever tour.
Inspired by the prevailing softer sounds of the likes of – curiously – the Turtles and Simon & Garfunkel, and by LSD, Keith Relf and Jim McCarty had concluded that they no longer wanted to be part of the Yardbirds and would form a more folk-influenced outfit instead.
Two nights later, at Manhattan’s Anderson Theater, the Yardbirds played a pair of shows that Epic Records recorded for a live album, which would eventually be released in January 1971 but quickly withdrawn after Page protested that it was a cash-in on the success of Led Zeppelin. ‘We knew the American tour was going to be the last one, and all the pressure was off,’ said the guitarist. ‘We played well and had a really good time. We even managed to play consistently good venues; it was almost entirely universities and psychedelic ballrooms. The only low point was the Andersen Theater gig in New York, which was recorded for a live album. The rats at Epic had got wind of the break-up and decided to get the last drop of potential profit out of us. It was pure convenience for them, being based in New York, where we didn’t like playing anyway. It should have been done at somewhere like the Shrine in LA, or the Fillmore. The Anderson Theater was a horrible place, very cold and unfriendly, and it didn’t help that the Vanilla Fudge, currently local heroes, were playing across town at the Fillmore East. To cap it all, the Epic sound team had no idea how to record us. They were really straight and they just draped a few mikes around. It was pathetic. When they discovered the inadequacies of the recording, they dubbed on all those ridiculous bullfight cheers.’

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