Led Zeppelin, page 9
Unfortunately, the classically trained Indian musicians hired to play it couldn’t handle the timing of the dominant riff. “They could only play Indian music,” says Jim McCarty. “A rock beat completely eluded them.” Beck suggested that he give it a try instead. It didn’t matter that he’d never seen a sitar, much less played one. He didn’t need one, in fact. He came up with an entirely different plan, using his trusty Fender Esquire. “By bending the notes slightly off key, I duplicated the sound of a sitar,” he recalled. “I then got the idea to use fuzz to dirty-up the amp.” Fortunately for Beck, Jimmy Page was visiting in the studio and happened to have a fuzz box with him. One take with the gear and Beck nailed it, sending the sitar players packing.
Even with Beck now at the helm, the Yardbirds were more determined than ever to keep the blues tradition center stage. They just souped it up another few volts by prevailing upon their lead guitarist to be more innovative, outrageous. Presto: a new species called progressive blues, which Beck epitomized with such barn burners as “Steeled Blues” and “Jeff’s Boogie.” A nice balance was struck. The Yardbirds could remain faithful to their artsy heritage and still have commercially successful, blues-based pop singles. “Heart Full of Soul” soared straight to the top of the pop charts, as did its successors, “Evil-Hearted You,” “Shapes of Things,” and “Over Under Sideways Down.”
But that formula also sowed discontent.
By mid-1966, following a couple triumphant tours in the States, the Yardbirds were in disarray. Their management was in flux, money disappeared, grievances piled up. Bass player Paul Samwell-Smith was losing interest, lead singer Keith Relf’s drinking verged on self-destructive. Something had to give.
Tensions came to a head on June 18, 1966, a little over a year after Jeff Beck joined the Yardbirds. The band was booked to costar with the Hollies at Queens’ College for Cambridge University’s prestigious May Ball. It was a fancy-dress affair, quite posh, and bathed in tradition, in a setting that rubbed the musicians’ working-class sensitivities the wrong way. Keith Relf, for one, felt “uncomfortable playing to the elite of the English establishment,” and almost from the moment he arrived he began dipping into the prodigious stash of complimentary liquor laid on by the college’s catering service. Meanwhile, Jeff Beck, who drove to the gig in his snazzy Ford Zephyr Six, brought along Jimmy Page for moral support.
“It was a great crowd that night, one of those end-of-term parties, and everyone was fucked up,” recalls Graham Nash, who performed with the Hollies. Nash had arrived from London in a Rolls-Royce with Mama Cass Elliot. The two friends were feeling no pain, having fortified themselves on the trip north on rations of gin and weed. It was a high old time backstage when they arrived. Relf was stuporously drunk and looking for camaraderie. To that end, Allan Clarke, the Hollies’ lead singer, engaged him in a game of quick draw, in which the two pretend cowboys whipped their pretend guns out of pretend holsters. Alas, the fascination with this wore off quickly. Clarke then dug a broom with a thick handle out of a closet and bragged that he was expert at karate-chopping such objects. “Those broom handles were stronger than hell. They’re made out of hickory,” according to Nash, who observed the contest with a mixture of amusement and foreboding.
“Do you know about karate?” Clarke asked Relf. Keith said no, so Alan said, “All right, I’ll show you how to break things with your hands. You can break that broomstick—and that chair. Let’s have a go.”
Nash recalled, “Keith took the first swing at it and broke [all the fingers on] his fucking hand, at which point Alan decided he wasn’t going to have a go.”
By showtime, Relf was drunk, in pain, and generally pissed off at the audience. Miraculously, he managed to pull off a brilliant first set, but when the Yardbirds returned to the stage after an intermission, all bets were off. “Keith decided to have some fun,” Jim McCarty recalled, “first slurring his words and forgetting his lyrics, and then spending one entire number . . . just blowing raspberries into the microphone.” He berated the crowd, “rolling round the stage, grappling with the mic, blowing his harmonica in all the wrong places.” To keep him upright, Chris Dreja said, “we had to literally tie him to the microphone.” For extra support, someone stuffed the broken broom handle down the back of his shirt, though it didn’t keep him from falling into the drums. The punk performance could have been a blueprint for the Ramones.
Jimmy Page loved every minute of it; it was “just fantastically suitable for the occasion,” he thought. “I thought it was a great anarchistic night,” he said, “and I went back into the dressing room and said, ‘What a brilliant show.’ ” Not everyone was as giddy as Page. Paul Samwell-Smith—Sam, as he was called—was in a huff, just furious. As the poet said: too much monkey business. The embarrassing scene, for him, was the last straw. “I can’t stand this anymore,” Sam fumed while packing up. “I’m leaving the group, and if I were you, Keith, I’d do the same.” With that, he made an exit, stage left.
On the drive back home, Beck and Page discussed the fate of the Yardbirds. Beck confessed how much he enjoyed playing with the band and mourned Samwell-Smith’s imminent departure. Sam’s contribution had been enormous; he was a consummate musician, a perfectionist, devoted to the blues. But Beck also saw this as an opportunity to get Jimmy involved.
“Jeff often used to say, ‘I wish you could join and we could play together,’ and I agreed that it would be good,” Jimmy said, “but I never took it seriously, because there was this thing about five Yardbirds, and to bring in a sixth would have destroyed that. So my joining was never a real consideration.”
But now Beck sensed Page had grown bored navigating the studio treadmill, where he often played on sessions and oversaw productions with little artistic payoff. It was a grind on so many levels. Jimmy had become nothing more than a mechanic, punching the clock. “I began to feel limited,” he explained, “not being able to express myself.” He felt he was “drying up as a guitarist.” Playing with a band would allow him to get back into action, to stretch out, to show off his chops.
Beck wondered aloud how the Yardbirds would fulfill their upcoming gig at the Marquee in London. He knew Jimmy wasn’t a bass player, but what the hell—it only had four strings. In the meantime, they’d try to convince Chris Dreja to move to the bass from guitar, where he was marginal, at best, so that Jeff and Jimmy could step out to play dual leads. Wouldn’t that just be mind-blowing! Page didn’t need any more coaxing: “Yeah, I’ll play bass,” he volunteered.
The next week, on June 21, he sat in with the Yardbirds during a gig at the Marquee to determine the fit and whether he’d enjoy another go-round with a band.
“I was terrified, having to fill Samwell-Smith’s role,” Jimmy admitted, “but fortunately it went okay.”
Beck, for his part, considered the experiment an absolute calamity. “He couldn’t play the bass for toffee,” according to Jeff. “He was running all over the neck.”
“I tended to play it like a guitar,” Jimmy said. “I was just leaping around all over the place with great speed, and I had to stop doing that.”
But the music . . . Playing those songs onstage was a rejuvenating experience. It was the real thing—the blues—not those cover tunes he’d done with Neil Christian & the Crusaders. With the blues you could stretch out and find a groove that felt right. And the band really cooked. They were all above-average musicians, Keith Relf could sing his ass off, and Jeff Beck—Beck was the wild card. He turned every song into a hair-raising thrill ride that teetered just this side of disaster.
“We needed stability, someone who could keep Jeff in check, while taking us to the next stage of our development,” says Jim McCarty.
That night at the Marquee it all seemed to click. It was obvious who could help pull it all together.
It was official: Jimmy Page had joined the Yardbirds.
[3]
But stability and the Yardbirds were incompatible.
The band had never enjoyed any stretch of internal peace, and their management was another dicey matter. It seemed that Giorgio Gomelsky kept a set of books that had the Yardbirds working for scratch. Despite their hit records and steady bookings, the musicians earned nothing more than a meager weekly wage. “We never saw any money,” Jim McCarty says. Even the credit on most of their B sides was attributed to a songwriter billed only as O. Rasputin, an alias for none other than Giorgio Gomelsky. Sacking Giorgio became a foregone conclusion. His successor, however, was another story.
Simon Napier-Bell was a gadabout, a flashy man-about-town who had his fingers in as many pies as Mrs. Lovett. He was a frustrated musician, a film and music editor, an occasional journalist, and a denizen of the nightclub circuit, table-hopping at Annabel’s, the Speakeasy, and the Bag O’Nails, where he felt right at home in the lap of Swinging London. Money had never been one of Napier-Bell’s shortfalls. He lived near Buckingham Palace, in an apartment twenty-five floors above the Gorringes department store, and didn’t shrink from the finer pleasures of life. “We’d see him drive down the King’s Road in a Thunderbird convertible, smoking a fat cigar,” McCarty recalls. “That image, at the time, was attractive to us.”
Napier-Bell wasted no time renegotiating the Yardbirds’ contracts with EMI in the UK and Epic Records in America, putting cash money, at long last, into the pockets of the band. He also had a riff in his head that he hummed to Jeff Beck that became the basis for their next hit, “Over Under Sideways Down.”
At the outset, Napier-Bell wasn’t keen on adding Jimmy Page to the band. “I didn’t know much about rock musicians,” he confessed, “but I had enough instinct to know it was a crazy idea.” He cornered Jeff and expressed his concern that the idea of having two amazing lead guitar players spelled trouble. “But Beck absolutely insisted—and besides, Page would supposedly be playing bass.”
With Napier-Bell and Jimmy Page aboard, all seemed peaceful in the Yardbirds camp—at least for a month or two. Jimmy continued to play bass and achieve a degree of harmony with the band, arbitrating wherever he could. Things were always tempestuous with Jeff Beck in the mix. Jeff harbored an eternal frustration. He was temperamental, erratic. If he picked up the slightest vibe that an audience was distracted, or that the rest of the band wasn’t in sync with him, he’d walk off, just disappear. Beck acknowledged his prickly nature. “The amp would be crackling or my guitar would be out of tune or Keith Relf would be coughing or sputtering onstage,” he explained. Any little distraction might set him off. The Yardbirds sensed they had a head case on their hands. “He did have a discipline [problem] occasionally,” Jimmy allowed. “When he’s having a shining night, he is fantastic. He plays things of sheer genius—but he’s got a funny temperament at times.”
Funny—and unpredictable, nerve-racking in fact. Napier-Bell and the Yardbirds attempted to placate Beck as best they could. “To keep me quiet, they said, ‘Right, if you promise to play and do what you are told in this band, we’ll let you have some studio time . . . and have your own album,’ ” he recalled.
To that end, Jeff and Jimmy booked a session at IBC Studios for May 16, 1966, and set to work coming up with material. They got together the night before in Epsom, in the Pages’ front parlor, the scene of so many of their boyhood jams. Jimmy perched on the arm of a chair and began strumming a dramatic, Spanish-style rhythm, lush A major seventh and E minor seventh chords that gained in intensity and reverberated like an orchestra in the tiny room. “He had a twelve-string [guitar], and it sounded so full, fat and heavy,” said Beck, who began to pick out a melody line over the top. Beck interrupted him after more than a few bars of repetition. “Jim,” he said, “you’ve got to break away from the bolero beat—you can’t go on like that forever.” Bolero beat? Of course! It reminded them of Ravel’s orchestration for the legendary ballet. The way they phrased it, with real electricity, had inspired a nifty, unabashed tribute. It pulsed along mightily, picking up speed, but it never resolved. It needed something else, a moment of reckoning—a bridge, maybe, or another passage altogether—to move the piece forward, building to a crescendo.
Beck claims he went home and “worked out the other beat,” a rowdy, guitar-driven progression—he called it “the first heavy metal riff ever written—that cuts right through the bolero effect and turns the song inside out, strengthening the power of its epic groove. It created a high-energy interplay that pointed back to the opening motif, allowing the two rhythms, in stylistic contrast, to fight it out in a blistering climax.
Jimmy insists he wrote the opening and the riff. “Keith Relf had a melody on tape, and we used that as a main part of the song,” he argued. “Beck’s doing the slide bits, and I’m basically playing around the chords.” There was never any doubt in Jimmy’s mind as to the authorship. Over the years, he stuck to his claim: “Even though he said he wrote it, I wrote it.”
Whatever the case, they both agree it was “a momentous recording session.” The cast of studio musicians they assembled raised the stakes dramatically. In addition to superduo Page and Beck, session master Nicky Hopkins played piano with The Who’s wild man, Keith Moon, on drums. Moon’s bandmate, John Entwistle, was booked to play bass, but when he failed to appear, John Paul Jones was recruited at the last minute to take his place. Entwistle may have gotten a case of cold feet. Had Pete Townshend gotten wind of Moon’s and Entwistle’s participation, all hell would have broken loose. “It was at a point when the [Who] was very close to breaking up,” Townshend recalled. Even the usually headstrong Moon was nervous about crossing him. “He got out of the cab at IBC Studios in Langham Place wearing dark glasses and a Russian Cossack hat so that nobody could see him being naughty,” Beck noted. Moon insisted they had to get right to it, to play fast; he could only afford three hours on the lam before The Who’s roadies put out an APB on him.
“You could feel the excitement in the studio,” Beck recalled, “even though we didn’t know what we were going to play.”
Jimmy and Jeff ran the song down twice, after which the others jumped right in. It needed no rehearsal, no tinkering. “We didn’t deliberate, we just played it through,” Beck recalled. There was a feeling of total exhilaration. The musicians were burrowed so deep in a groove, it was almost as if they were playing without calculation. Everything clicked neatly into place. The guitars’ glissandos burst forth from the blizzard effect and slid artfully across the lines of modulation, whipped along by an overheated salvo of bass and drums—a torrential downpour of sound. “Keith upped the tempo and gave it an extra kick,” Jeff said, acknowledging the intermarriage of styles in the mix. “It’s a bit of The Who, a bit of the Yardbirds, and a bit of me”—but a completely unique alloy. They locked it down in one or two takes, then hit the sound board, adding layers of overdubs and effects.
“Beck’s Bolero,” as the piece became known, was a watershed moment for British rock ’n roll. It explored new, subversive possibilities in the form while demonstrating the technical progress being forged in the studio. The resulting track was as heavy and progressive as rock had been played. Its shifting meters, red-hot tempos, and powerful guitar riffs gave a physical tug to the music. It was disturbing—and invigorating. “Beck’s Bolero” came before the Beatles’ Revolver, before Fresh Cream, before Jimi Hendrix released “Hey Joe.” It had no precedent, nothing to measure its innovation against.
The significance wasn’t lost on Simon Napier-Bell, who babysat the “Bolero” session as its producer of record. “Cream was being formed at the same time,” he observed. Word had circulated of a so-called supergroup. Yet this gang, Napier-Bell realized, had the makings of something equally special. There was a lot of talent in that studio on May 16. Could they coalesce into a band? It had certainly crossed Jimmy Page’s and Jeff Beck’s minds. Both would have loved to work with musicians who played at their level of virtuosity. They knew Keith Moon was game. “He told me in a club that he was sick of The Who,” Beck recalled. John Entwistle was also intrigued by the prospect. With a little coaxing, he’d join in on bass.
“It was going to be me and Beck on guitars, Moon on drums, maybe Nicky Hopkins on piano,” Jimmy fantasized.
Such a band needed an equally talented singer. Entwistle sang, but not with enough star-power, so they began tossing around names. “The first choice was Stevie Winwood,” Jimmy recalled. Aside from maybe Paul McCartney, there wasn’t a singer in England with a better rock ’n roll voice, but engaging Winwood was wishful thinking. They knew he was happily stationed at keyboards in the Spencer Davis Group, for whom his brother, Muff, played bass.
“Next we thought of Steve Marriott.” This choice actually made more sense. Marriott had a similarly soulful voice as Stevie Winwood, but with a rougher edge and less restraint. He was loaded with energy and stage presence, having played the Artful Dodger in the stage production of Oliver! when it debuted in 1960 in the West End, and he rocked hard. At the moment, Marriott sang with the Small Faces, but all was not well. The Faces were under contract to Don Arden, an infamous, thuggish manager who, as Glyn Johns recalled, “was well known for threatening violence to get his own way.” Arden once dispatched two men to intimidate Johns with a sawed-off shotgun and promise to shoot him and his family if he ever bad-mouthed Arden. The Faces were likewise mistreated by Arden, who refused to pay them what he owed from gigs, so it seemed an opportune time to sound Marriott out.
