Led Zeppelin, page 5
In fact, he was no longer Jimmy Page but . . . Nelson Storm. For some unknown reason, the band decided that stage names were more conducive to the rock ’n roll image. Nelson Storm, the alias Jimmy picked out for himself, jibed with the drummer, Jimmy “Tornado” Rook, and played off John Spicer’s nom de guerre, Doc Swift. But no matter what they called themselves, Red E. Lewis & the Red Caps were a run-of-the-mill cover band, like so many others working the circuit as the 1950s were drawing to a close.
As history confirms, the chemistry in rock ’n roll bands is an unsteady compound, and Red E. Lewis & the Red Caps were no exception. As their popularity grew, as their ambitions swelled, there were rumblings from within that Red, whose real name was Billy Stubbs, had the wrong look to be a pop star. He was a rugged bloke, swarthy, with a couple of teeth missing in his smile, and about six years older than his baby-faced sidemen. He could sing, but that was no longer enough. He wasn’t what the tastemakers considered “presentable.” Chris Tidmarsh, the ringleader of the coup, determined they had taken things as far as they could go with Billy out front. The same went for their middling drummer. It was time to make personnel changes.
They found their new singer in the 2i’s coffee bar, a character who called himself Smoky Dean, one of his many aliases. Smoky was the anti–Red E. Lewis: a good-looking guy with slicked-back blond hair and a buff physique, who stood six feet tall and spoke with a bogus American accent. “The girls loved him,” John Spicer recalls. With Dean straddling the mic, the Red Caps re-formed as the Dean Aces, and for a while all was well. But Smoky Dean had developed other distinctive rock ’n roll idiosyncrasies. He smoked pot and popped pills, which made him unreliable.
“We can’t keep going on with Smoky,” Tidmarsh explained after a gig at which Smoky was a no-show. It wasn’t the first time he’d left them in the lurch, and everyone knew it wouldn’t be the last. Jimmy agreed with Chris; it was time for a change. “Why don’t you start singing?” he suggested.
That came out of the blue. Nobody knew that Chris Tidmarsh could sing. He’d only ever handled their booking and travel arrangements. He was an impressive guy, a very smooth operator—presentable—but singing had never been in the cards. Still, he knew all the band’s songs and stage routines. At a rehearsal, he seized the opportunity.
Tidmarsh, it turned out, was smashing, even stylish. The guy had pipes—a lighter voice than Red or Smoky, but nevertheless capable of delivering the band’s songs with flair. It seemed a natural fit to work him into the act. But his name—Tidmarsh—had no poetry, no pizzazz. Everyone agreed it had to go. So Chris Tidmarsh became Neil Christian, and the Red Caps/Dean Aces became the Crusaders. Neil Christian & the Crusaders—it had a nice ring to it.
A new name needed a new look. To that end, the band members tromped into the Islington branch of Burton’s, an off-the-rack men’s store, and got measured for spiffy black shirts and trousers, with matching black-and-white two-toned shoes. And Jimmy got a new guitar—a much-longed-for sunburst Fender Stratocaster, subsidized by the band, that finally allowed him to play with panache. Tidmarsh—make that Neil Christian—demanded more than his predecessors in the way of stagecraft; he was a pro and a showman, so he initiated fancy dance routines. From now on during songs, the band would perform the crossover box step—coordinating left legs in front of right, right legs in front of left, while swinging the guitars around at the same time. Jimmy remembers twisting like a contortionist, “arc[ing] over backwards until my head touched the stage.” The antics were a crowd-pleaser from the start. And on “One Night,” the Elvis Presley song, the pattern was even more elaborate. “We used to build up to a big crescendo,” John Spicer recalled. “Jimmy would start his guitar solo in the middle of the song. The drummer would add a heavy beat. It’d be thumping and really loud at the end, and we’d all be on the floor, lying on our backs, with Neil Christian slamming his fist on the bloody piano.” He was a dynamo onstage. All this time, Neil Christian had been gestating inside Chris Tidmarsh, just waiting for the chance to hatch and bust out. He was “a smart lad, immaculately dressed” and handsome, albeit with a fatal flaw: intense stage fright. For all his self-assurance, his poise and polish, the guy just couldn’t face a crowd. He spent long stretches before each show in the bathroom violently throwing up.
Puking aside, Neil Christian & the Crusaders grew in demand on the booming London club circuit. There were churches and dance halls in Barnett, Rumford, and Hatfield, as well as the Contemporary Club in Epsom; all drew a faithful flock of kids across the whole social spectrum who came to dance and unwind. The band was tight, they swung. Their act was practically a carbon copy of Johnny Kidd & the Pirates, whose classic “Shakin’ All Over” is that rare commodity—a truly great pre-Beatles British rock ’n roll record. The Pirates were a huge influence on the Crusaders, so much so that Jimmy took the bus to Southfields in South London, where the Pirates’ guitarist Mick Green lived, to jam with him and learn his unique rhythmic approach to solos. Jimmy resolved to play exactly like the pros. “We did every cover version you could think of,” Christian recalled. “[Gene] Vincent, Johnny Burnette, a lot of rhythm and blues. Jimmy loved [Jerry Lee] Lewis and [Chuck] Berry. He could play all that stuff as though you were listening to the record.”
Jimmy Page was becoming a local legend in his own right. He got a solo spot in the act to ramp up his rep and a shout-out by Neil on staples like “Rumble” and “Sleep Walk.” “Everywhere we played, people always came up to talk to Jim,” says John Spicer. “Boys especially made a beeline for the Stratocaster. It was still such a novelty in England. And Jim could make that guitar practically speak.” It captivated him for about six months before he was ready to graduate to something more sophisticated. One night, while the Crusaders were playing a multiband gig in Kingston, not far from Epsom, they got wind that Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran were appearing across town at the Odeon Theatre.
“We managed to arrange our appearance so that we could get out for an hour and a half and go see their show,” Spicer recalls. “Eddie came out with the orange Gretsch,” the Signature hollowbody, with parallel bracing and double-bound f-holes. “It just bowled us over, Jimmy especially.” It was beautiful machine, all right, opulent and shiny like a Cadillac, with a fat, throbbing twang. Cochran wore it belt-high, not on his hip in the usual gunslinger-style. Jimmy, half-delirious, wolf-whistled at it, as one might at a beautiful woman. “I’ve got to have one of those,” he announced, and in a week or two, he did.
The Grazioso, the Strat, the Gretsch—it didn’t matter what guitar Jimmy played, he handled the instrument intuitively, as though it were a part of his everyday tool kit. You’d hear about eight-year-old prodigies performing Rachmaninoff’s Concerto no. 3 in D Minor note-perfect, like the maestro. That was Jimmy Page with the guitar. By the time he was sixteen, he had progressed to the point where he could play the most complicated riffs by ear, not only with proficiency but with finesse. According to Spicer, “Jim was never without a guitar in his hands. He practiced relentlessly, easily several hours every day.” When someone asked him specifically how long he worked at it, he said, “Oh, probably six hours a day. When I was at school, probably eight.”
After he mastered the James Burton, Ike Turner, and Cliff Gallup playbooks, Jimmy became sidetracked by the explosive barrelhouse gumbo pumped out by Jerry Lee Lewis. “Jerry Lee was his great love in life, his number-one man,” Dave Williams recalls. “Jim had all the guitar solos on those Sun records down pat.” As a treat, Williams scored them a pair of scarce tickets to see the Killer on one of his UK tour appearances at Fairfield Hall in Croydon. Unfortunately, the day before the show, Williams came down with glandular fever. His girlfriend, Anna, went in his place.
“We had seats in the front row of the balcony,” she remembers. “Jim got so excited when Jerry Lee came on. He was standing up on his seat cheering and leaning dangerously over the balcony rail. I hung onto the back of his shirt so that he didn’t fall over into the stalls.”
Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent—these were the major exponents, the gurus who inflamed Jimmy Page’s aspirations in the years when the music first surfaced. Their hard-driving, untamable sorcery functioned as the secret handshake, Satan’s grip, that enabled him to carve out a unique niche for himself and adopt rakish codes of behavior that were novel among Britain’s postwar teens. Fifties rock ’n roll was liberating; it aroused and provoked. But as the decade receded, Jerry Lee was blackballed, Elvis had enlisted, Chuck was in jail, Buddy and Eddie were dead, and Gene was broken. The music began to lose its edge to a wave of bobby-soxers and pretty-boy crooners whose records were acceptable to TV audiences and jukeboxes in family-style diners. Danny and the Juniors could insist all they wanted that rock and roll was here to stay, but for Jimmy Page it was too late.
He had come down with a case of the blues.
Chapter Two
GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS
[1]
Singin’ the blues was no common or easy undertaking in Epsom in 1960. It was next to impossible to lay hands on the records that opened up this new world of music. You had to mine for them, much like a prospector, separating the few nuggets from piles of sludge.
Jimmy Page and Dave Williams had few eureka moments. The two friends spent Saturday afternoons at the back of Rodgers’, an appliance shop on the High Street adjacent to the clock tower, sifting through stacks of indistinguishable 45s. The names on the labels had no real meaning for them, but as prospectors the boys weren’t completely clueless. There were singers you could smell out by name. They learned to eliminate what they referred to as the Bobbys—Bobby Rydell, Bobby Vee, Bobby Darin, the Bobettes. Nothing exciting or important, they decided, could come from such names. The same with the Fours—the Four Aces, the Four Preps, the Four Lads, the Four Freshmen. Those were obvious crooners, teenage pretty boys. No, Jimmy and Dave were searching for something with teeth, with true grit. Occasionally, a conspicuous candidate would jump out of the pack. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins! Now, there was a name that had promise. When they flipped that record over and read the title—“I Put a Spell on You”—they had to have it. Bo Diddley—they’d take a chance on him, too. But it was just as easy to make a mistake and wind up with a Texas Tyler record that turned out to be country-western. You’d win some, you’d lose some.
To cut their losses, the boys sweet-talked the young woman behind the counter—a pink-haired bombshell named June Cutler—into letting them have a look at the record companies’ release sheets so they could scan through the names and underline those they thought might deliver the goods. “Walk Don’t Run” . . . “Rumble” . . . “VooDoo, VooDoo”—all sounded like they’d pay off. Decca, in particular, owned a subsidiary, London Records, that licensed releases from American independent labels like Chess, Imperial, Atlantic, Dot, Sun, Sue, and Specialty, all of which had fabulous rhythm-and-blues rosters. The boys actually convinced June Cutler to order loads of these titles, without any commitment to buy them. What’s more, she let them preview the records in the store’s listening booth. That’s how they came across “What’d I Say,” Ray Charles’s 1959 masterpiece that Jimmy delivered to Neil Christian so quickly he practically left skid marks on the floor. And they relented by buying a normally taboo Bobby—Bobby Parker’s “Watch Your Step,” a transcendent R&B single, which Jimmy adored for its ferocious opening riff and the raw, blistering funk groove it created. In fact, as many have pointed out, Led Zeppelin’s “Moby Dick” is actually “Watch Your Step” slowed down a few beats.
Jimmy heard the call loud and clear. “There was this great blues thing going on,” he noted, “city blues, Chess style music.” Rhythm and blues. It was something, he said, that “I was really getting into at the time.” R&B was irresistible, exotic, radically different from what he’d been listening to up to now. It had a funky boogie beat, a rich gospel vocal style, and was sexy as hell. Dave Williams supplied him with plenty to listen to, the way a drug dealer might groom an addict. Williams “was a purist,” Jimmy realized, an avid blues collector, whose library ran the gamut from B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Elmore James, and Howlin’ Wolf to more obscure practitioners like Eddie Taylor, Little Milton, and Jesse Hill. This authentic American blues provided a gritty alternative to the teenage jukebox hits that had been in rotation for the last few years. British kids were getting tired of hearing local bands all play the same set of cover songs over and over and over. The new trend was for bands to make their reputations by finding a tune that no one else was doing and springing it on unsuspecting ears.
Neil Christian & the Crusaders were slow to convert to the new routine. They continued to mine the hits while working in a number of R&B standards, like “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Train Kept a-Rollin’,” and “Who Do You Love,” but nothing more innovative than that. Even so, the band’s popularity continued to grow. Neil Christian was a charismatic performer and the band was tight, and promoters doubled down on booking them.
The schedule in 1960 became untenable for sixteen-year-old Jimmy. The demands of school and performing were brutal, the energy required unsustainable. Ruxley Lane in Ewell, where he attended classes, was a secondary modern school, thus not a feeder into the university system. College had never been in the cards anyway. Jimmy had a pretty good idea his future lay in music. He was already making a pretty good living. At the age of sixteen, “after passing five G.C.E. ‘O’ level exams”—General Certificate of Education, Ordinary Level—and not taking the academic A levels later, he said, “I left school and went straight into Neil Christian & the Crusaders.”
Once Jimmy turned pro, the band could go full tilt. Gigs were plentiful; they could barely keep up the pace. In 1960, it seemed every borough in England had either a town hall or a church assembly where kids danced to live music for as little as three or four shillings. In addition, several club circuits run by promoters had sprung up, which kept the Crusaders more than gainfully employed. The demand was so great, they often played two gigs a night that were nowhere near in proximity. That meant working up a powerful sweat onstage for an hour or two, then jumping into a vehicle and driving fifty or sixty miles at breakneck speeds on dark, twisty back roads to make the next gig in time. These turned into round-the-clock operations. “For instance,” John Spicer recalls, “on a Saturday night, we regularly played an out-of-town gig, then made tracks back to London to play what was called an all-nighter at La Discotheque at two a.m. on the Sunday morning.”
There was no letup. In between gigs, the Crusaders moonlighted, whether it was serving as the backing band for pop star Eden Kane on his tour of the provinces or opening for Cliff Richard & the Shadows at the Edmonton Regal. No decent-paying job was scorned. They even took a date playing Holloway Prison, a women’s correctional facility in a suburb of London, which “was a good show, if you overlooked the obscenities the girls called out—things they’d like to do if they got their hands on us.”
“We acquired a good reputation,” Jimmy said in retrospect, “but touring was very primitive.”
A rickety Ford van quickly became impractical and was replaced by an old London ambulance, a big beast of a vehicle. The band stripped the insides and installed three rows of seats from city bus castoffs, behind which a mountain of gear was piled. At a certain point, as their fortunes grew, they even employed a driver, Don Stewart. A self-styled ladies’ man, Don’s job description extended to procuring girls from the audience whom Neil Christian had picked out for himself and Jimmy and escorting them backstage after the gig.
You never knew where the next new experience would come from. In late 1960, following a gig at the Harrodian, a social club for the employees of Harrods in the basement of the company’s warehouse, the Crusaders were introduced to a young, bearded poet named Royston Ellis, who recited some pseudo-Beat verse he called “rocketry” to guitar accompaniment provided by Jimmy. This was something completely new and interesting. Jimmy recognized the syncopated dynamic between spoken verse and music and was eager to explore the interaction further with Ellis.
“We knew that American jazz musicians had been backing poets during their readings,” Jimmy explained. “Jack Kerouac was using piano to accompany his readings. Lawrence Ferlinghetti teamed with Stan Getz to bring poetry and jazz together.” Why not poetry and rock ’n roll?
Thus began an alliance between the two men, who performed together, along with a bongo player, at a series of informal and staged events throughout 1961, on the Crusaders’ days off. Jimmy composed original moody music to accompany leaden elegies like “Body Parts,” “vaguely provocative verse about nipples, thighs, and pubic hair” found in Ellis’s anthology, Jiving to Gyp. University students and denizens of coffee bars gobbled the stuff up. It was radical. It broke rules, pushed the two art forms into new territory, much in the way rap would forty years later. Ellis and Jimmy even previewed their act at tony venues such as Cambridge University’s Heretics Society in March 1961 and later that summer at the Mermaid Theatre in London.
For a year and a half, Jimmy Page, only seventeen, was living the life. Not only were his nights filled with music, but the days as well. Practicing was always at the forefront of his agenda, especially to further his education with the blues. Even when friends visited, he’d have a guitar in his hands, unconsciously fingering along the frets as though he were reading Braille. To sharpen his ear, he bought a tape recorder with two one-and-three-quarter-inch reels that weighed a ton and convinced Dave Williams to smuggle it into the blues shows he haunted. Williams brought back bootlegs to order of a Jimmy Reed gig and a special appearance Muddy Waters and Hubert Sumlin made with a local band. “Jimmy would study those tapes and copy all the nuances,” Williams recalls. “When he burrowed deeper into the technical details, his mum bought him a four-track recorder, so he’d put his own guitar bit to songs and get a drum sound on a cardboard box.”
