Led Zeppelin, page 8
With Mickie Most, Jimmy could do his best Clark Kent imitation, playing super-slick guitar on demand by day, then, after the sun set, donning street gear to gig with a pianist named Andy Wren and other down-and-dirty bands at the Marquee. This way, he kept himself in the game, developing solid R&B chops. He became masterful at tweaking solos he played with an array of electronics, taking the blues to another dimension.
The perfect instrument had come into Jimmy’s hands while he was touring with Neil Christian. He’d seen it hung like a trophy on the wall of a shop and decided on the spot to trade his Gretsch Chet Atkins for the gleaming black Gibson Les Paul Custom tricked out with three gold-plated humbucker pickups. It was a gorgeous piece of ax, carved out of a solid piece of mahogany, with a wide neck and ebony fingerboard that allowed him to bend strings to his heart’s content without skating off the edge. No doubt about it, the Black Beauty, as it became known, was “more responsive to the player’s touch.” The Les Paul had a punchier, almost guttural sound than the Gretsch, and with a fuzz box Jimmy was using, he could rev the Les Paul into overdrive.
A fuzz box? The idea for it had come Jimmy’s way a year earlier during a get-together in his parents’ front parlor. On a Sunday afternoon, he’d been hanging out with Jeff Beck and a pal named Roger Mayer, whom he’d met at a local youth club. They were analyzing the sounds American artists were getting out of their guitars, trying to figure out what made them so unique. Every time they encountered a particularly innovative tone, either Jimmy or Jeff would say, “I wonder if we can build something to make it sound like that.” Something that sounded like a guitarist had stuck his finger in a socket or like his amp was about to blow a fuse. Jimmy knew that Dave Davies had made a small slice in the speaker cone of his amp to pull off the distorted solo in “You Really Got Me” but figured there had to be a more practical way to achieve it.
Roger Mayer immediately perked up. Mayer was an electronics whiz. He’d left school at the age of seventeen to work for the British Admiralty, performing vibration and acoustical analyses that would enable the government to better detect the sounds of submarines. “Jimmy had a Gibson Maestro fuzz tone which the Ventures used on ‘The 2000 Pound Bee,’ but it sounded mechanical and, quite honestly, boring,” Mayer recalls. “He was unhappy with the sustain. So I took apart the Maestro and redesigned the circuit, winding it up with more gain, which increased the sustain.” With the new design, Jimmy could hold the note indefinitely or make a completely different sound. Mayer didn’t simply want to produce distortion, which caused noise in the signal. His goal was to change the sound of the guitar from a basic electric string instrument into something that was new and exciting. “Once I solved that,” Mayer says, “I produced my own version of the fuzz box, and within a matter of months everyone wanted one.”
A few years later, Mayer would partner with Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Wonder, two “far-out acoustical visionaries,” who helped him understand that the concept of sound was infinite, that there were no limits to what you could do with it. In the meantime, Mayer gave Jimmy Page a tool that enabled him to play dynamic solos using an assortment of tones and basically reinvent the wheel.
It might not have played out that way in lesser hands. The fuzz box provided a new range of interesting sounds, but it was Jimmy’s artistry, his imagination, that plied the electronics to express a larger intention. As a lead guitarist, he knew he couldn’t practice a solo. He knew he had to be in the zone where the music took him, able to let himself go, much like free-form jazz. There was only so much muscle memory in the hand; the rest, the magic, came from what was in one’s head. And Jimmy’s head was primed to explore, completely in sync with his instrument. He couldn’t really sing, so his guitar took him to places where singers go. He put everything he had into mastering technique, then gave himself over to the magic.
But magic, as conjurers know, is nothing but an illusion. Jimmy needed something more creative, more challenging—more substantial—to distract him. Session work had become too much of a grind. The sessions themselves were mechanical affairs. He played whatever was put in front of him for whoever happened to be standing in front of the mic; it required little personal investment. “The whole thing wasn’t enjoyable anymore,” he admitted. “The work was stifling.” It was a paycheck, nothing more. He felt he’d become “a hired hand, a phantom musician.” For some time, he’d considered walking away, but the incentive wasn’t strong enough. “Until the day I was booked to do a Muzak session, and then it really came down hard as to what it was all about.”
While he was mulling options, Andrew Loog Oldham came to his rescue. Oldham was a brash, flamboyant twenty-one-year-old provocateur who had snatched the management of the Rolling Stones from under the nose Giorgio Gomelsky. In 1965, Oldham launched Immediate Records, one of the first independent labels in the UK, and he dangled a staff producer’s job to Jimmy.
It was a tantalizing offer. Producing records was a hands-on job; it would give Jimmy creative control over a session, something he’d never had before. But it meant working for Oldham, which was no walk in the park. Jimmy knew Andrew from a session he had played on for Marianne Faithfull’s “As Tears Go By” and a few demos for the Stones.
“I know all the crooks,” he told an interviewer who asked about his involvement with Oldham. Oldham was known as a hotshot—crafty and opportunistic, not always on the up-and-up. On the other hand, he had a remarkable ear and had his finger on the pulse of the international music business. The new company’s manifesto boiled down to its name—immediate. There would be no dithering around, no “old farts” controlling the roster, no corporate higher-ups to convince, no budget restrictions. It was bang, bang, bang, make those records, get them out, move on. All things considered, the Immediate job was too good to pass up.
Beginning in August 1965, Jimmy produced a series of sessions, beginning with the experimental British band Les Fleurs de Lys, then Chris Farlowe (with Albert Lee on guitar), Small Faces, German chanteuse Nico, Goldie (who later materialized as Genya Ravan with Ten Wheel Drive), and perhaps his most important contribution, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, with Eric Clapton on guitar.
Jimmy already enjoyed a friendship with Eric. The two had met during one of the Marquee’s Thursday-night jams, when Jimmy sat in with Cyril Davies’s band, and they’d sporadically bumped into each other at various studios, doing session work. It isn’t a stretch to understand their mutual attraction. They were two teenagers who had grown up six miles apart, both art college refugees, both blues aficionados, both prolific, obsessive guitarists, both perfectionists. “I did four tracks altogether with Mayall and Eric,” Jimmy recalled—a single of “I’m Your Witchdoctor” backed with “Telephone Blues,” and later “Sitting on Top of the World” and “Double Crossing Time,” which appeared on a Bluesbreakers album released by Decca.
Immediate proved to be a first-rate apprenticeship. The studio work was creative but challenging—the recording equipment prehistoric by current standards. The tape consoles used either two- or three-track machines that were no more sophisticated than what Jimmy had at home. There were no screens to separate the rhythm section from the drums, so leakage was always an issue. The engineers, especially, lacked imagination.
During the Clapton sessions, the technician proved too conservative for Jimmy’s tastes. For the recording of “Witchdoctor,” Eric decided to overdub his solo, giving a savage touch of edge to the top end. Accordingly, the levels redlined as if they’d detected radioactivity in the studio, which panicked the engineer. “He’d never heard feedback before,” Jimmy recalled. “At one point he screamed out and pulled the faders down on the console.” He attempted to scrap the take, calling it unrecordable—totally unrecordable!—until Jimmy intervened. “I told him to put the faders up and let me worry about it.”
No one, not Shel Talmy, not even Phil Spector, had recorded that kind of a guitar sound before. The lavish use of reverb was daring, game-changing. The way the solo reached for the cosmos provided a stunning jolt of excitement. It took what would otherwise have been a simple musical passage and turned it into spectacle. Page and Clapton had changed the course of how a guitar sounded on record. This was no happy accident. Jimmy had synthesized his years of experience in recording studios with the experimentation he was doing at home and applied it, note by note, to the way he produced records. He laid a steady, confident hand on the controls, advancing the process with effects and electronics. It was like painting with sound. The canvas was still vast and open to possibilities; Jimmy had only scratched the surface.
[2]
Throughout 1965 and 1966, Jimmy Page drifted from his various day jobs to establish his presence on the flourishing club circuit, where new music was being made. The clubs attracted players much like him who were bumping around the scene, trying to figure out where they fit into the larger picture. On any given night, a spontaneous jam might include Nicky Hopkins, Albert Lee, Jon Lord, Peter Green, Chris Farlowe, Eric Clapton, or Keith Emerson, standout musicians who were the architects of the British rock establishment.
“I’d been going to gigs at Eel Pie [Island], I’d been going to gigs at the Marquee, and I could see it all happen,” Jimmy observed.
Still, many of the bands he encountered were too dependent on the past or derivative, merely extracting the essence of true originals like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. The Stones especially had fused a decidedly edgy, rock ’n roll sensibility to the R&B heard in the clubs, giving the blues an entirely new sound.
Two young musicians—Paul Samwell-Smith and Jim McCarty—had studied the Stones the way Botticelli studied Fra Filippo Lippi, “with awe-stricken disbelief.” The Stones managed to interpret all the blues Samwell-Smith and McCarty had been listening to in a way that gave new meaning to it. “It was exactly how we wanted to play the blues,” McCarty remembers. “It was the sound we wanted to make.”
They’d been experimenting with it in various half-assed configurations, including the Country Gentlemen and the Metropolitan Blues Quartet. At one point, they were four guitars and a drummer, with a repertoire that hewed to the tried-and-true blues classics already making the rounds. After shaking out the dead weight and reshuffling the lineup, the band that materialized consisted of Samwell-Smith and McCarty, Chris Dreja and Tony “Top” Topham on guitars, and a Brian Jones–lookalike lead singer, Keith Relf, who played a mean harmonica. During a gig at Eel Pie Island opening for the Cyril Davies All-Stars, they came up with a name. “We’re the Yardbirds!” they announced from the stage.
“In a matter of weeks, we went from being a warm-up band to being the main attraction,” said Chris Dreja. The Yardbirds inherited the Stones’ Richmond residency—now called the Crawdaddy Club—and were packing the house with their own brand of electric blues that expressed a less structured, tougher, scrappier sound. They took R&B standards like “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl,” “I Wish You Would,” and “Got Love If You Want It,” and added volume, supercharged tempos, and distortion to the arrangements. Keith Relf treated the harmonica like most bands did a lead guitar, winding out long, asthmatic solos that dueled vigorously with the rhythm section. As Jimmy Page would later note, “The colors were starting to show in the palette.”
With the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds, the cap was off the gusher, supplying a steady flow of dynamic young British electric blues bands. On any weekend night, one could make the rounds of the local clubs and hear the Pretty Things, the Animals, the Graham Bond Organisation, Brian Auger, Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, and Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames.
The Yardbirds especially changed up the blues with their signature rave-up instrumental solos. Still, something was missing from the mix. Their lead guitarist, Top Topham, was merely adequate, “a bit stiff.” “A nice kid, he really wasn’t up to it,” Jim McCarty recalls. In any case, Top’s parents laid down the law. He was too young, they said, to turn pro with a band. Replacing him was left up to Giorgio Gomelsky, the Crawdaddy Club’s manager, who looked after the Yardbirds’ management. According to Gomelsky, it was a no-brainer. “I asked Eric Clapton to join.”
Eric Clapton wasn’t merely an understudy. He was a player of impeccable taste. There were a few like him who could play unconventional, complex licks, but not with his commitment—nor his touch. The touch was gorgeous. By bending and sustaining notes—a technique he learned by listening to Freddie King records—Clapton could make the guitar sing. When he stepped into the Yardbirds, the result was magical. The band came alive in an extraordinary way.
The Yardbirds, perhaps more than any other band, exemplified the British electric blues idiom. They really dug into the R&B songbook, mining obscure nuggets like John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom,” and “Baby What’s Wrong” by Sonny Boy Williamson. They played aggressively, dynamically, by taking beloved blues standards and opening them up—“jamming in the middle,” as Clapton described it, “usually with a staccato bass line, which would get louder and louder, rising to a crescendo before coming back down again.” So versions of, say, “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl” or “I Wish You Would,” which normally ran about two and a half minutes, became six-minute scorchers in the Yardbirds’ hands.
Clapton energized the Yardbirds for eighteen months, through a brutal schedule of one-nighters and an unparalleled maiden recording-studio experience. The Yardbirds, like the Stones, were one of the first self-contained British blues bands to snag a major-label record contract. It was their breakout—and ultimately their undoing, as far as Eric Clapton was concerned. “He was obsessed with the blues,” Jimmy Page said, “with wanting to sound really authentic.” Clapton considered himself a purist. “I have to play what I believe is pure and sincere and uncorrupted music,” he said. He wasn’t interested in making clean-cut, commercial music with Top 40 hit potential, and when the Yardbirds selected the catchy “For Your Love” instead of a purer blues cover like Otis Redding’s “Your One and Only Man” for their breakout single, Clapton had had enough. The way he saw it, “I was destroying myself.” In mid-February 1965, the week before “For Your Love” was released, he jumped ship.
To replace him, the Yardbirds made a play for Jimmy Page. Jimmy knew the Yardbirds. “He used to come around regularly when we played gigs,” Jim McCarty recalls. “It was soon after that that Giorgio asked him to join the band.” In fact, Gomelsky, long fed up with Clapton’s fussy attitude, had approached Page about stepping into the band on an earlier occasion, claiming Eric was taking “a holiday” from performing. Page knew bullshit when he heard it; holiday was code for sacking. Besides, he and Clapton were friends. Eric was a frequent participant in the Sunday-afternoon jams at Jimmy’s house. “The way [Gomelsky] put it to me, it just seemed really distasteful,” Page said, “and I refused.”
This time, Jimmy’s excuse was his job at Immediate, but he offered a proxy—his good friend Jeff Beck. While the recommendation made sense, first impressions were not exactly inspiring. An audition in March 1965 almost ended before it began. “We were so taken aback by [Jeff’s] appearance,” Jim McCarty recalled. “His clothes were grease-stained, and he looked like he’d not taken them off for a week. His hair was long, lank, and greasy too.” Eric Clapton had been a fashion plate, always decked out in the latest threads; Jeff Beck looked more donkey than clotheshorse. None of it mattered, however, when they put him to the test. The band threw everything in their songbook at Beck, who handled each as if he were Superman absorbing enemy bullets. The guy was not of this world. He could play anything—anything. And not just the intricate blues arrangements but the rave-ups as well.
Beck was the antithesis of the meticulous Eric Clapton. “Musically, he was so versatile,” Jim McCarty recalled. “Jeff looked ready to blow the blues out of the water, and take every other genre with it.” Sure, he’d play the blues—but he’d twist it into knots. He’d leave his echo on during a reverent number and drive a stake through the hearts of the purists. Or he’d add fuzz to a hallowed riff. He had no respect. Echo, distortion, jarring his amp, feedback, you never knew what effect he’d come up with next. “He was a great experimenter,” said Chris Dreja. “If you wanted a sound like a police siren, Jeff would make it. . . . He was a genius at creating soundscapes.”
“We were using feedback all the time,” Beck recalled. “You had no choice, because the amplifiers would feed back anyway. It would start whistling and singing, then you found that you could probably handle it and make quite an interesting trumpeting noise with it, and with an echo, all sorts of mysteries started to happen and it would sound really bizarre.”
Dreja admits the Yardbirds took Beck for granted. They continued to compare his playing to Eric Clapton’s. “They were always talking about Eric this and Eric that,” Beck complained. Finally he just said, “Fuck Eric Clapton—you know, I’m your guitarist.”
Wasn’t that the truth! Beck took the Yardbirds to extraordinary new heights. Their blues became bluesier, their gigs more unhinged. He rocked harder, so that audiences who came to see the band became more homogenized, nonpartisan. You want to hear a rustic “I Ain’t Done Wrong” or “I’m a King Bee”? Coming right up. But you’re also going to hear a red-hot rockabilly “Train Kept a-Rollin’,” Johnny Burnette style, which Beck introduced as a Yardbirds staple.
And he had no problem embracing a killer pop song. When it came time to record the Yardbirds’ follow-up to “For Your Love,” the songwriter Graham Gouldman dredged up another sure shot. “Heart Full of Soul” was made to order. It had an unforgettable riff, an embraceable lyric, and, in what was turning out to be a Yardbirds signature, a weird-sounding instrument. In “For Your Love” it had been a harpsicord; for the new single, they added a sitar. A—what? This was before “Norwegian Wood,” before George Harrison made the sitar a household item, like the Hoover.
