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‘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.
