Led Zeppelin, page 6
Jimmy’s main passion became sound. “He was always into new noises,” Williams explains. After Jimmy heard Chet Atkins’s “Trombone,” which depended on the guitar’s tremolo arm (or whammy bar) to bend the strings for dramatic effect, he had to have one. The same with a foot pedal. “I remember when a record came out and had the first fuzz-box sound,” Williams says. “We were sitting in Jimmy’s front room, and he said, ‘What the fuck is making that sound? Maybe they used an elastic band to vibrate against the frets.’ He tried it but couldn’t keep the strings in tune.” Link Wray’s “Rumble” also presented challenges. Jimmy heard that Wray had put pinholes in his amp’s speaker to create distortion. For days he debated whether to try to duplicate the sound but decided, “I’m not bloody risking that.” It wasn’t worth ruining his amp.
He did, however, manage to get his hands on one of the first stereophonic record players in town. It was a Capitol system that came with a demo Jimmy put on to entertain and amaze his friends. The recording was of a man calling a dog. Out of one speaker, the man shouted, “Fido! Fido! C’mon, Fido.” The response came from another speaker across the room: “Woof! Woof!” And Fido would track his woofing right across the room.
Creating sounds, Jimmy discovered, was almost as intriguing as playing the guitar. Layering sound was akin to an artist applying paint on top of paint until something entirely new appeared on the canvas. “He was also into overdubbing,” says Colin Golding, who played bass for a band called the Presidents and for an early incarnation of the Rolling Stones. “Nobody else was doing it. And frankly, we all thought he was mad.” But by using effects, Jimmy realized music wasn’t confined; in fact, the possibilities were limitless when it came to tampering with sound.
The seeds of production had been planted in Jimmy Page, and there was an early bloom. Sometime in 1961, Jimmy and Rod Wyatt pooled their resources to record a three-hour session with Chris Farlowe and the Thunderbirds at the primitive R.G. Jones Studios in Morden, Surrey. In an afternoon, with Jimmy directing traffic, they laid down enough work to fill a ten-inch EP that flaunted a broad range of taste and versatility: a respectfully mannered version of Carl Perkins’s “Matchbox,” with Farlowe scatting over the solo; a hard-charging “Money,” the Barrett Strong classic; two instrumentals by his favorite guitarist, Bobby Taylor, including a standout entitled “Fish This Week”; and a Les McCann number whose solo Jimmy wanted to nick.
Jimmy was ecstatic with the result. He played it and played it until the vinyl was practically scratched away, performing a critical postmortem of his work. In the end, he concluded he’d done yeoman’s work. The sound he’d teased out, the overall texture, was intuitive and spare. The instruments were clearly distinguishable and separated out distinctly from the vocals. And the mix—well, it wasn’t muddy. Not at all a bad first effort sitting in the producer’s chair.
It was exhilarating, but the pace was punishing. Between his appearances with Neil Christian & the Crusaders and Royston Ellis and the volume of pick-up engagements, the workload began adding up. There were too many late nights, too many close calls. “All the traveling to one-nighter gigs made me ill,” he recalled. “I used to get sick in the van.” Small wonder, when you considered the wretched conditions. “We lived out of the back of a van, out of cafes,” Neil Christian acknowledged. Jimmy’s recollection was every bit as grim. “I remember we were driving to a Liverpool club once and the van broke down and we had to hitchhike. . . . We didn’t really have any money, so we ended up sleeping in this little room in the club, in the middle of the desk chairs and the fucking first aid cabinet, and it was really cold.” To stay wired, Jimmy embraced the jazz musicians’ habit of chewing the tab of Benzedrine inside Vicks nasal inhalers for an added jolt of energy, but it wasn’t enough to sustain him.
He was a slightly built, undernourished guy. He wasn’t well. “I kept getting glandular fever,” he said, using an obsolete term for infectious mononucleosis, which produced fevers, swollen glands, and bouts of persistent fatigue. For weeks on end, he was bedridden, still kipping in the spare, cell-like bedroom at his parents’ house. Because of Neil Christian’s commitments, because the show had to go on, Jimmy was often replaced in the Crusaders by Albert Lee, a seminal British guitarist, and occasionally by session player Joe Moretti or Tony Harvey from Vince Taylor & the Playboys.
But it wasn’t only the illness that wore Jimmy down. He was bored—bored with playing the same set of songs the same way to the same kind of kids. “The numbers we were doing were really out of character for the audiences that were coming to hear us play,” he said. The club scene, moreover, had taken a turn for the worse. “It was just disheartening to go up to, say, Rushton or somewhere like that and find ten people having a punch-up. In the end, it just didn’t appear to be going anywhere, so I jacked it in.”
He needed a break, a change of scenery. He needed to rethink the direction that the music was taking him. Art college seemed like a good refuge.
[2]
Art college was a waystation of sorts for a whole host of young, working-class kids who hadn’t found their niche in the traditional British educational system—those who were cut out for neither university nor the drudgery of a blue-collar apprenticeship. Art college provided some space, some breathing room, as well as an exemption from the draft. It was a creative place for these outliers, where they were inspired to look at things in new ways, to nurture unconventional interests—and to express themselves. You could dress and act how you liked, you could smoke, you could drink. As future Yardbirds sideman Chris Dreja pointed out, “You didn’t have to do a lot of art, but it encouraged you to do a lot of thinking.” Art school attracted “hip, young anti-establishment types” who were on the cutting edge of the bohemian scene. John Spicer puts it simply: “It was cool being at art school.”
Almost every community had its version. Jimmy enrolled at one close to his home, Sutton Art College. It was relatively easy to get in, nothing more involved than filling out some forms and paying class fees. You didn’t have to prove your bona fides or submit a portfolio. The ability to draw came in handy, although Jimmy claimed he was “a terrible draftsman,” but he’d always enjoyed painting. Most art college students took what was known as a foundation course, which meant a year studying still life, figure drawing, lettering, etching, sculpture, architecture, and other forms of art, but Sutton was purely art. “It had a very relaxed atmosphere,” says Colin Golding, who played guitar with Jimmy. “And during the time you were at art school, somebody would invariably start a band.”
Art college was an incubator for rock ’n roll. “There were loads of people playing guitar there,” said Keith Richards, a student at Sidcup Art College in London’s borough of Bexley. “It was kind of a guitar workshop,” a melting pot of technique and influences. There were devotees of the blues, of folk music, of traditional and modern jazz—and, increasingly, of rock ’n roll.
It’s mind-boggling to contemplate the front line of guitar wizards who came out of art colleges in the early 1960s. Eric Clapton studied design at Kingston School of Art in Knight’s Park, Pete Townshend majored in graphic design at Ealing Art College, Jeff Beck went to the Wimbledon School of Art, John Lennon whiled away his time at the Liverpool College of Art. Ronnie Wood and Phil May played in art school bands. And the experience wasn’t limited to guitarists. Michael Des Barres recalls visiting his friend, drummer Mitch Mitchell, who attended the same drama school as Steve Marriott when all three went out one night to see a Black left-handed guitar player from the States debut at the Marquee.
One of the luxuries of art college was its lax regulations. No one took attendance; you came and went as you pleased. If you didn’t turn up one morning, there was no fallout, which gave Jimmy Page the freedom to engage in outside musical pursuits. For a while, he joined forces with Cyril Davies in a pickup blues band that played, unrehearsed, during intervals at the Marquee Club on Thursday nights. He also came out of retirement to rejoin Neil Christian & the Crusaders on a session at EMI for their first single, “The Road to Love.” In a recollection, Jimmy said, “We didn’t play on the tracks. Session musicians did.” But, in fact, while producer Norrie Paramor wiped off the Crusaders’ bass and drum tracks in favor of professional players, he left Jimmy’s guitar intact.
Jimmy’s most important pursuit during art school turned out to be life-changing.
In 1962, he recalled, “Glyn [Johns] introduced me to the session world.” Johns, another Epsom eighteen-year-old who would go on to become one of his era’s most prolific producers of rock ’n roll, was employed as a tape operator at IBC, an independent recording studio in London. They had met years earlier at St. Martin’s Parish Church youth club, during a talent night at which Jimmy played guitar. Now Johns manned the board for the studio, which produced everything from small orchestras to Julian Bream guitar concertos to the latest Petula Clark single to the music for the TV show Wagon Train. “I was about to do a session for Tony Meehan and Jet Harris, both of whom had left the Shadows,” Johns recalls, “and asked Jimmy to play guitar on it.”
Session work—this was the break Jimmy had been looking for. It was a lift into the big time for a budding musician, the key to a “sort of impenetrable brotherhood,” as Jimmy referred to it. Session players worked steadily, the hours weren’t ridiculous, and the money was outstanding. Pay was a standard £7.50 a session, and the top players often worked two or three sessions a day. It was a bloody bonanza if you played your cards right.
The gig, however, wasn’t a shoo-in. As studio musicians went, Jimmy was young and untested, an obvious risk; most practitioners had paid plenty of dues. Glyn Johns, however, put his neck on the line. “[He] kept telling me that Jimmy Page was a great kid,” Tony Meehan recalled. “Glyn said he had the magic and should be given a chance. So, I decided to give him a try.”
The Jimmy Page story could have ended right here. The session, as Jimmy envisioned it, didn’t go as he’d expected. At the outset, Meehan walked among the players, distributing precise arrangements that he’d written out for the session. Little did he know, Jimmy couldn’t read music. The way it seemed to him, “they stuck a row of dots in front of me, which looked like crows on telegraph wires.” It might as well have been Greek. Once things got under way, the problem was obvious. “I knew right away that he was faking it,” Meehan said.
Meehan could have—should have—shown Jimmy the door. Instead, he switched him from lead to rhythm guitar, a duty that only required chording. The result was a single called “Diamonds” that shot to the top of the British charts.
Despite the sight-reading snafu, Jimmy remained undaunted. Session work made perfect sense as an avenue to pursue. He resolved to learn how to read music but had to back off temporarily from accepting more work. “Jimmy rang me and said the art school had found out he was earning money, and he was going to lose his grant,” Johns recalled, “so he wasn’t going to do any more sessions.”
In the meantime, Jimmy continued to paint and practice the guitar at home. The painting was more of an amusement than a commitment. “Jimmy wasn’t any kind of an artist,” Dave Williams says. “He was just doing little bits of things, like drawing circles.” But the guitar was no joke; it was given the highest priority.
There were plenty of musicians attending Sutton Art College, but none who stood up to Jimmy’s level of play. Fortunately, word of his virtuosity reached an older student, Annetta Beck. She checked Jimmy out and immediately gave an account to her younger brother, who attended Wimbledon School of Art. “She kept telling me, ‘You got to meet this weird, thin guy playing a weird-shaped guitar like yours,’ ” he recalled. That was all Jeff Beck had to hear. He and his sister hopped on a bus to Epsom, found their way to Miles Road, and knocked on the Pages’ door.
One can only imagine Jimmy’s reaction to finding Jeff Beck on his doorstep. Jeff was a rangy kid with long, unkempt hair and a guitar that was anything but impressive—a homemade number that was barely functional. It was an odd situation. They paced around for a while, scoping each other out. Who do you listen to? What do you play? The sacred names were uttered: Burton, Moore, Gallup. Jimmy asked Jeff if he knew the solo to “My Babe,” a supreme test, and . . . good lord, could that boy play! He knocked out a version that gave James Burton a run for his money. Jimmy, for his part, played “Not Fade Away” with all of Buddy’s shading. The love match was sealed.
Jeff lived in Wallington, about five minutes from Epsom, which enabled him to hang out at Jimmy’s every chance he got. “We would play Ricky Nelson songs like ‘My Babe’ and ‘It’s Late’ . . . and just [do] a lot of jamming,” he recalled. They were like-minded in their approach and degree of dedication. Both boys played at levels years beyond their contemporaries. The jams were like master classes in guitar, but their focus was deeper, more wide-ranging. Invariably, after working out an arrangement, they’d put the song on tape, concocting their own makeshift audio effects. “[Jimmy] used to stick the mic under a cushion on the couch. I used to bash it, and it would make the best bass drum sound you ever heard, said Jeff.”
Like Jimmy, Jeff played in a cover band—his was called the Deltones—whose set list bored him. For the most part, the Deltones performed the pop hits of the day, songs by Johnny Tillotson and Fabian, even “The Twist,” a horrible number that drove Jeff nuts. It was beneath him, not at all where he was headed. The same went for the Roosters, who offered him a gig replacing Brian Jones on guitar.* Instead, he joined the Tridents, who were more his scene. “They were playing flat-out R&B, like Jimmy Reed stuff,” he said, “and we supercharged it all up and made it really rocky.”
The blues had become the thinking guitarist’s music of choice. Jimmy Page played it almost exclusively now, refining his touch in subtle ways in his gigs with Cyril Davies at the Marquee. In early 1963, after one of those Thursday-night intervals, Jimmy was approached by Mike Leander, a young record producer, to play on a session for a group called Carter-Lewis and the Southerners. The “band” was nothing more than two songwriters from Birmingham, John Shakespeare and Ken Lewis. “We’d had some modest success getting our material to performers,” Shakespeare recalls, “but felt our chances improved if we sung them ourselves.” That meant relying on session players to supplement their inadequacies. The date was scheduled at Decca Studios in West Hempstead, one of London’s vaunted facilities. Jimmy couldn’t resist.
The result—a single entitled “Your Mama’s Out of Town”—isn’t as important as the chain reaction it inspired. Jimmy’s contribution to the session, and the modest effort for which he was paid handsomely, convinced him that he was cut out for this kind of work. He felt comfortable in the studio; he could play anything they threw at him. He had taught himself how to read music. The fact that he provided exactly what the producer called for, no questions asked, no fuss, no ego interjected, sealed his reputation as an able-bodied session man. Word traveled quickly along the music-business grapevine. Almost immediately, Jimmy’s phone started ringing.
Session musicians were a distinguished group. In Britain, the early sixties functioned as a sort of purgatory between the fading late-fifties rock ’n roll explosion and the revolution that loomed on the horizon. Pop music had taken on a slick, overproduced character that seemed drained of raw energy. Still, the deluge of records being made and the emergence of young, independent record producers demanded an assembly line of musicians able to churn out surefire hits targeted for mainstream audiences. Instead of self-contained stylists like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, and Jerry Lee Lewis, producers took the lead. They built records around covers of American hits or songs written to order and paired them with singers able to put them across. An entirely new roster of such artists emerged: Frank Ifield, Dave Berry, Petula Clark, Billy Fury, the Bachelors, Mark Wynter, Helen Shapiro, even a teenager from the Midlands named Robert Plant. The session players whose music fortified the records became as important as these artists.
Session crews—the traditional old studio hands—didn’t always fit the bill. For years, they were mostly a mash-up of musicians moonlighting from symphony orchestras and old jazz or swing-band cats who were classically trained. The only things the two factions had in common were that they could sight-read arrangements—and they detested rock ’n roll. “The old guard used to sit there reading books until it was time to play,” says Dave Berry, one of the emerging teen stars. “They didn’t relate to the performers at all.” The music of the day, however, demanded young blood. Slowly but surely, pop producers began hiring a select group of sidemen with rock ’n roll chops to augment the old hacks and to add some juice. The young Turks—some referred to themselves as “hooligans”—constituted a small, very exclusive fraternity: Jim Sullivan on guitar, John Baldwin (later known as John Paul Jones) on bass, and either Bobby Graham or Clem Cattini on drums.
Now, often two guitars were needed, which is where Jimmy Page came in. “I was mainly called into sessions as insurance,” he acknowledged. Jim Sullivan, a Paul Bunyanesque ex-sideman for Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent, handled the more exacting lead work. “He had a wonderful fingerpicking style,” recalls John Shakespeare, “very nuanced, very precise.” Jimmy, who was still learning to read music, brought a rock ’n roll sensibility and was more or less confined to rhythm at the outset. “They had a synchronicity,” Dave Berry says. They became colleagues, inseparable, known as Big Jim and Little Jim, booked together on sessions more often than not. “I was more jazz influenced,” Sullivan said. “I specialized in country rock—Chet Atkins, Merle Travis, James Burton. . . . Jim had gone along the same way, but was more blues influenced.” It was clear they complemented each other’s styles.
