Led Zeppelin, page 7
“Big Jim could play anything, he was a very fluid player,” says Glyn Johns. “But he didn’t have the energy Jimmy had, or possibly the invention.”
Word got around that Jimmy had chops, and perhaps even more important: he was reliable. Time was money in the studio. If strings and brass were booked as accompaniment, ten to fifteen musicians might be on the payroll. Usually three sides were cut in a two-hour session. Producers needed to know you would show up on time and give them exactly what they were looking for. They also wanted “total spontaneity,” according to Big Jim Sullivan, “the ability to make things up on the spot.” He also recognized that there were trade-offs, personal sacrifices. “You had to be a special breed of person to do sessions, almost insensitive. Some of the producers were assholes.” There were artistic temperaments aplenty swirling about. You had to be able to placate the various parties involved without taking sides. Jimmy Page certainly had a thick enough skin. He was self-contained, able to keep an emotional distance from the distractions and flare-ups in the studio.
By mid-1963, Jimmy, now nineteen, was doing all the work he could handle, often as many as three sessions a day: from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.; 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.; and 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Drummer Bobby Graham recalled the nerve-racking revolving-door format. “The first session in the morning could be with Tommy Kinsman and his strict-tempo dance orchestra at the Philips studios, then you’d dash across to EMI and it would be a film session or P.J. Proby with a big orchestra, then dash across to Pye in the evening and it would be the Kinks.” It ran Jimmy ragged. “You never knew what you were going to do,” he lamented. “Sometimes it would be someone you were happy to see, other times it was ‘What am I doing here?’ ”
No matter what, you never complained, otherwise you’d be put “on holiday,” a euphemism for suspension, often for as long as two weeks. Money seemed to temper the bellyaches. At the end of the day, a power broker named Charlie Katz handed each session player a little brown envelope with as much as £23 in cash, a king’s ransom. If you worked five days a week, like Jimmy Page, you’d struck a rich vein.
The sessions he did were sometimes heady. Highlights included: “I Will” for Billy Fury; Petula Clark’s smash hit “Downtown”; Marianne Faithfull’s classic “As Tears Go By”; Tom Jones’s signature “It’s Not Unusual”; The Nashville Teens’ “Tobacco Road”; “The Pied Piper” by Crispian St. Peters; the Rolling Stones’ demo for “Heart of Stone”; and the theme to Goldfinger, sung inimitably by Shirley Bassey. “That was a phenomenal session,” Jimmy recalled. “She arrived, took off her coat and went straight in. [Arranger] John Barry counted us in, she sang and at the end, just collapsed on the floor.” Graham Nash, the Hollies’ extraordinary singer, recalls visiting an early Everly Brothers session in London, where he encountered “a shockingly baby-faced Jimmy Page on guitar and sixteen-year-old Elton John on piano.”
“What was stifling,” Jimmy said, “was not really knowing what you were going to be doing when you were booked for a session at a particular time. It could be anything from a group to some sort of Muzak type of thing.” One time, he pushed through the doors of Olympic Studios, oblivious as usual to whom he’d be working with. “It just happened to be Cliff [Richard] and Hank [Marvin],” he said, barely able to contain his fanboy excitement. “I wasn’t on guitar, obviously, but I played harmonica on ‘Time Drags By.’ ” Of course, there were days he pushed through those doors and came face to face with . . . Tubby Hayes, a tenor sax player. No matter who commanded the mic, you had to get up for it.
Jimmy played on hundreds of sessions between 1963 and 1967. His main assignment had been to back up vocalists, but as the British music scene began to swell with gifted groups who wrote their own material, Jimmy’s role took a new turn. Suddenly, he found himself booked for sessions with a new breed of rock ’n roll band, groups who felt proprietary about playing their own songs. “You’d be there to strengthen the weak links,” he said, “if the drummer wasn’t tight enough or the guitarist not up to scratch.”
On July 15, 1964, Glyn Johns sent Jimmy to IBC Studios for a date under the whip hand of producer Shel Talmy. Talmy was a twenty-two-year-old American with some engineering experience who had talked his way into a job at Decca Records by claiming he’d produced the Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ Safari.” “I don’t think he had any qualifications at all,” says Johns, who’d go on to work often with Talmy, “but it didn’t matter, because he had a great ear and a great sense of feel, to say nothing of extreme self-confidence. He stepped in with this line of bullshit that he was the man, and the English labels were as green as grass, so they bought it without asking questions.” Decca, which was making what Talmy calls “polite, old-fashioned rock ’n roll” records, lusted after the “American sound” and pressed him to inject a good dose of it into their acts.
“That meant making my records louder than anybody else’s,” he says. He used old valve limiter/compressors to boost dynamic range and redlined levels to create a garage-band feel. “I’d put guitar on two channels, pushing one to the point of distortion, the other just simmering under it so it would carry the tune. And I recorded drums with twelve mics, where the Brits had been using three.”
His first major breakthrough was a band called the Creation, a straight-ahead British rock ’n roll band with a hotshot guitarist, Eddie Phillips—Talmy calls him “the best unknown guitarist of all time”—who pushed the instrument into bold new places, including using a violin bow to generate extraordinary sounds. (Kenny Pickett, who was a roadie on Led Zeppelin’s first U.S. tour, briefly served as the group’s vocalist.) Following two quick European number-one hits, Talmy made an American deal for the Creation with Atlantic Records. “This preceded Cream,” Talmy says, “so the Creation would have been Atlantic’s first English white rock ’n roll band, but they self-destructed and the deal fell apart.”
His follow-up was the Kinks, with another stellar guitarist, Dave Davies. Their first single, a cover of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally,” wasn’t the breakout hit they’d hoped for. But Davies’s brother Ray had written a barn burner, “You Really Got Me,” that Talmy was convinced would change the shape of British rock ’n roll. It was raw and aggressive, with a great, arresting riff—and loud. Still, he wasn’t convinced the band had the goods to deliver it. “They weren’t studio musicians,” Talmy is quick to point out. “They were too undisciplined, too loosey-goosey, too used to playing in clubs. They could play adequately but not outstandingly. I couldn’t take a chance.” Instead, Talmy brought in a quartet of session players, including drummer Bobby Graham and Jimmy Page—“as insurance,” he says, “just to play rhythm, because Ray Davies didn’t feel he was good enough to handle it.”
Even so, Jimmy acknowledged, “Ray didn’t really approve of my presence.” The new breed of rock ’n roll musician was sensitive about image. Their lack of authority in the studio was a particular sore spot, which the sudden appearance of a session musician only exacerbated. It was like having a relief pitcher come in from the bullpen with the league’s best hitter up at the plate.
Despite the awkwardness, that same month Jimmy was called into another Shel Talmy session with a group seemingly capable of playing their own material. “Until The Who came along, no British band was doing rock ’n roll right,” Talmy says. “But at the time, I wasn’t sure how good of a rhythm player Pete Townshend was, so I brought Jimmy Page in as a backup on The Who’s first single, ‘I Can’t Explain.’ ”
To his credit, Jimmy admits, “I wasn’t really needed.” He played the barest of supporting roles on two or three sides. “Just strengthening up riffs, that’s all—two guitars doing it instead of one.”
Pete Townshend was gracious about it. But later that year, in November 1964, the mood grew downright disagreeable during a session at Decca’s studio. Jimmy had been hired to sit in with a self-contained band from Belfast called Them, a pugnacious bunch of characters. He immediately sensed his presence was unwelcome and withdrew into a shell, a condition the band misinterpreted as “a stuck-up prick who thought he was better than the rest of the world.” Jimmy understood the awkward situation and wasn’t without empathy. “It was very embarrassing,” he recalled, “because you noticed that as each number passed, another member of the band would be substituted by a session musician. . . . Talk about daggers!” According to Billy Harrison, Them’s guitarist, “There was much grumbling, mostly from me.” Harrison harvested a few blistering riffs that needed no reinforcement. Bobby Graham, who sat in on drums, remembered, “Their lead vocalist, Van Morrison, was really hostile.” Despite the palpable antagonism, the session produced three monster tracks: “Baby, Please Don’t Go,” “Gloria,” and “Don’t Stop Crying Now.”
The session’s producer, Bert Berns, an American music-business hustler who had cowritten the hits “Twist and Shout,” “Tell Him,” “Piece of My Heart,” and “Hang on Sloopy,” effectively held the session’s emotions to a simmer, perhaps even giving them a stir once or twice to raise the heat on those tracks. Whatever his intentions were, he recognized Jimmy’s flair for spicing up an arrangement and hired him on the spot to add zest to another Berns-penned song, “Here Comes the Night,” with a Scottish group, Lulu & the Luvvers.
The demand for Jimmy’s services was stronger than ever. He had proved his worth on dozens of recordings that climbed to the top of the UK charts. “There wasn’t anyone more reliable—or more creative,” Shel Talmy says. Jimmy functioned as the go-to guitarist for almost every producer who sought to capture the zeitgeist that was fast transforming the London music scene. In the few short years between 1963 and 1965, groups like the Beatles, The Who, and the Rolling Stones kicked over the traces of the once-derivative pop genre for a more authentic, original, rougher sound. The Brits were empire-building again. They were reinventing rock ’n roll. Jimmy Page had carved out a niche at its edges, angling to establish exactly where he fit into it.
[3]
There were hits—and misses.
At the close of 1964, Jimmy found himself booked at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios for a demo session with Jackie DeShannon. A bewitching twenty-two-year-old who had been singing professionally in the States since the age of thirteen, DeShannon flourished primarily as a songwriter, partnering with Eddie Cochran’s girlfriend, Sharon Sheeley, on early hits for Brenda Lee and the Fleetwoods. Her own singles—“Needles and Pins” and “When You Walk into the Room”—fared modestly but brought her to the attention of the Beatles, whom she supported on their first U.S. tour. Afterward, it was no coincidence that she wound up in London—or that the Beatles’ Liverpool mates the Searchers had smash hits covering her singles.
DeShannon, three years older than Jimmy, could accompany herself, but she was no James Burton or Glen Campbell, both of whom had backed her in the past. London hadn’t yet developed its own crack crew of eligible guitar greats. Only Jimmy Page’s name kept coming up. That was all DeShannon had to hear. “Great, let’s have him,” she demanded.
They rehearsed a number she’d written called “Don’t Turn Your Back on Me,” and the two had instant chemistry. They collaborated on writing a number of songs—the first time Jimmy Page ventured down that path—bringing instant success. “Come and Stay with Me,” which scored a top-ten hit for Marianne Faithfull, was a steamy little ballad drawn from life. In no time, the two were embarked headlong into a relationship that zigzagged between commerce and romance.
Phase one, which emphasized songwriting, contrived to launch Jimmy as an artist in his own right. That same month, February 1965, he released a single, “She Just Satisfies,” on Phillips’s Fontana label. A reworking of the Kinks’ “Revenge,” on which he’d played, it was one of those vanity projects showcasing Jimmy on every instrument except for drums. His ambition was on full display, but an ebullient harmonica flourish between verses wasn’t enough to rescue the lukewarm song and mannered delivery that never kicked into a high enough gear. Nor did the flip side, “Keep Moving,” a mostly instrumental track with some florid vocal outbursts by Jackie DeShannon that tried too hard to cram every bluesy element into the arrangement until the center fell out. Record Mirror’s review summed the disc up neatly: “Furious beat with vocal touches almost vanishing in a welter of amplified backing.” Despite the record’s disappointing response, there was talk of recording a follow-up, but Jimmy didn’t see much point in pursuing it.
Instead, he veered into phase two, which would pay lasting dividends.
Jackie convinced him to accompany her to the States, where the rock ’n roll furnaces were blasting away from coast to coast. In New York City, a preliminary stop, Jimmy kipped with Bert Berns, with whom he’d forged a friendship during the Them sessions. Berns had been a staff producer for Atlantic Records and was in the process of finalizing a deal there for his own independent label, which would be called Bang, after the parent company’s principals: Bert Berns, Ahmet Ertegun, Nesuhi Ertegun, and Gerald “Jerry” Wexler. Berns introduced Jimmy to his label partners during sessions for Barbara Lewis and the Strangeloves, a trio of Brill Building songwriters that produced the punk rave-up “I Want Candy.” Wexler, as astute a businessman as he was a producer, shrewdly filed away his introduction to Jimmy as a sideman extraordinaire whom Berns intended to use on R&B sessions.
When that didn’t pan out, Jimmy flew to Los Angeles—right back into Jackie DeShannon’s arms. Los Angeles dazzled Jimmy, as it did so many young British rock ’n rollers who had slogged through rationing and the ennui of postwar England. LA in 1965 was relentlessly sunny and laid-back, with the giddy, buoyant aura of a Beach Boys / Jan and Dean recording and gorgeous young women galore. Music was blaring from every bungalow, beach, and palm grove. “What wasn’t to love?” as the Hollies’ Graham Nash put it.
Jimmy and Jackie immediately turned on the juice, churning out a portfolio of songs that resulted in important records for P.J. Proby, Esther Phillips, and Dave Berry and album tracks for Marianne Faithfull. They even collaborated musically on “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” Jackie’s bravura version of the Burt Bacharach / Hal David anthem that shot to the top of the charts. But the output and the relationship couldn’t sustain themselves. The kind of songwriting they were doing wasn’t exciting enough for a player like Jimmy; it wasn’t where the action was, it didn’t break new ground. And relations with Jackie got too weird for his taste.
Besides, the music scene in London had begun firing on all cylinders, reshaping rock ’n roll in a way that would ultimately change the world. It was time to go home, to be part of it. It was time for Jimmy Page to get down to business.
Chapter Three
REINVENTING THE WHEEL
[1]
Nothing defined the twin poles of Britain’s music revolution quite like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. The Beatles’ records demonstrated all that pop could be, with original melodies and riveting harmonies, while the Stones worked the dark corners of the British electric blues idiom. The two extremes, like all guiding lights, attracted missionaries who steered the direction of music into new and offbeat trajectories. In 1965, a significant crossroads for rock ’n roll, there was a desperate desire for new voices, voices that took on the institutions of pop with a brash disregard for convention.
Astutely, Jimmy Page kept a foot in both camps. On the one hand, he continued his schedule of session work at a breakneck pace, sitting in with Brian Poole & the Tremeloes, First Gear, and Manish Boys, the latter a Shel Talmy production featuring a seventeen-year-old singer named David Jones, who, a few years later, would morph into David Bowie. Other session work leaned heavily on the output of producer Mickie Most.
Most began his career flogging a dated cabaret act, most successfully in South Africa, performing rock ’n roll hits he had no business covering. “He was a ridiculous figure who sang off-key,” says Shel Talmy. “But he had ears, he knew how to pick songs.” During a tour that took him through Newcastle, Most caught an act appearing at Club a’Gogo and made an impassioned pitch to produce them, a task for which he had no experience. His second effort with them, a somber four-minute single, “The House of the Rising Sun,” rocketed Most and the Animals to international fame in 1964. In a little over two years, he produced a string of number-one hits for the Animals, as well as for the Nashville Teens, Brenda Lee, and Herman’s Hermits, who clocked six million-selling singles in 1965 alone.
Jimmy Page and bass player/arranger John Paul Jones, both twenty-one, were trusted members of Most’s versatile hit-making crew, including two important sessions they did with Donovan—“Sunshine Superman” and “Mellow Yellow”—designed to transform the Scottish singer from his former guise as “a poor man’s Bob Dylan” into an eclectic hippie Pied Piper. “They made making records easy for me,” Most recalled. In return, Jimmy got an eyeful watching Mickie work the board, learning tricks of the trade, as well as what not to do in the studio.
“Mickie had no patience,” according to his wife, Chris. “His goal was to make a hit record in three hours and go home.” (Most famously he insisted a pop song need take no more than a fleet fifteen minutes to make.) “Mickie,” said Chris Dreja, “wanted the backing track at ten, lunch at twelve, overdub vocals by five, and home for dinner.” Often, he’d read the newspaper or make phone calls while tape rolled. His respect was reserved for the song—specifically mainstream commercial hits—not necessarily the artist. “All he cared about were singles, and he didn’t give a shit about albums.” He was therefore regarded as a philistine by many musicians and singers.
