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‘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.
