Jimmy Page: The Definitive Biography

In his renowned isolation he is like a rock ’n’ roll version of Howard Hughes. But in many ways, the very idea of Jimmy Page is as much a construct as any of David Bowie’s personae. And – lest we take this too seriously – it is worth considering that when his own persona is deconstructed, Page is sometimes little more than a high-art version of Screaming Lord Sutch, the plumber rock ’n’ roll showman on whose attractively kitsch shock-rock records he played session guitar.

‘Everyone I worked with in the 1960s thought that rock ’n’ roll was really an aspect of showbiz,’ said Dave Ambrose, who played bass in Shotgun Express (with Rod Stewart) and the Brian Auger Trinity, who supported Led Zeppelin in San Francisco in April 1969. Later, as an A&R man, Ambrose signed the Sex Pistols, Duran Duran and the Pet Shop Boys, among others.

Many of Page’s expenditures – the palatial residences, the vintage cars he was unable to drive (he never passed his test), the enormous collection of rare guitars – seemed designed to garner respect and support among the world’s wealthy and influential, to make people aware of him, to elevate his extraordinarily inscrutable profile, and to establish himself as one of the principal men about whichever town he found himself in.

But at the same time, here was a rebel cocking a snook at the Establishment, having what he knew he wasn’t meant to have. With Led Zeppelin there always was that sense of being resolutely ‘underground’, a card played with perfect panache by the band for most of their career: hardly ever on television, with no singles released in their homeland, Zeppelin existed from the very beginning as their own outsider identity. In a sense the damning review of their first album by John Mendelsohn in Rolling Stone, a magazine Page came to loathe, was perfect for them; it set in motion the ‘us against them’ agenda from which Led Zeppelin’s success soared.

By 1977, the year their myth savagely unravelled, they would come to be seen as the embodiment of behemoth rock, all that the new punk movement stood against, but when Led Zeppelin started out in 1968 their anti-Establishment stance was about as punk as it could be.

‘The big question today is, Why hasn’t he done new music?’ said Michael Des Barres. ‘Well, why does he have to? Jimmy Page is his own art piece, a performance artist, and he’s busy curating his legacy. There is nobody else whose roadie was Aleister Crowley. And it worked. Led Zeppelin were not a band; they were a cult.

‘Led Zeppelin brought together all those kids who otherwise would just hang around parking lots in two-bit American cities, kids for whom the obvious decadence of the Rolling Stones didn’t really connect. Instead, Led Zeppelin were their cult; they became a focus for and brought together all those disaffected, lost souls who would take the fantasy world of the group and its subject matter and project onto it their own interpretation of what they were.’

The world was ready for just such a package. Around the time the Rolling Stones were writing 1968’s ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had dabbled in a friendship with the Californian film director and occultist Kenneth Anger, but – as though proof that in such areas they were distinctly lightweight – fled his company the next year after the debacle of Altamont. Instead it was Led Zeppelin, driven by Page’s assiduous academic interest in altered states and realities, that provided the soundtrack to the building public interest in the occult. In 1972 TIME magazine ran a cover story bearing the strapline ‘Satan Returns’. Colin Wilson’s mammoth groundbreaking study simply titled The Occult had been published in 1971. More populist was the Man, Myth and Magic partwork series, which commenced in 1970, providing highly readable accounts of a secret world that was exciting to the newly stoned with their now-opened third eyes. As was the manner of partworks, Man, Myth and Magic was extensively plugged in television adverts, featuring an image of a demonic figure, painted by Austin Osman Spare. Spare had been close to Aleister Crowley and was sometimes described as ‘Britain’s greatest unknown artist’; Page would become the world’s leading collector of Spare’s work.

By then there was something frightening about the very notion of Led Zeppelin. After I interviewed Page in 1979 in a relatively forthright manner for the NME, a senior editorial member asked me if I wasn’t nervous of any potential repercussions. When I told casual acquaintances I was writing this book, I was met with similar responses: ‘Jimmy Page? Black magic?’

For some years – a decade or so – this was the prevailing view of Page. But of course time is a healer, so it should be no great surprise that by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, and in his own seventh and eighth decades, Page had redeemed himself to become the most loved and revered of all classic rock stars.

This redemption was fitting, given that this is the man who almost singlehandedly established the notion of the guitar hero as part of contemporary culture. ‘What about Eric Clapton?’ you may ask. No: Clapton was too diverse in the paths he trod. It was the singularity of Page’s work with his vehicle Led Zeppelin, underpinned by his extraordinarily startling and sinisterly attractive appearance, that awarded him the guitar hero crown. Guitar hero? Guitar god, more like.

His is an extraordinary story that has taken him to the very darkest of areas – but always driven by the search for his art. You might not approve of the methods employed to unleash and liberate his creativity, and you can’t avoid the impression that Page was vain, arrogant, fanatical and power-hungry, and indulged in a scandalous private life – much, of course, to the adoration of his fans. Yet many of the accusations against him were probably fabricated or at least exaggerated by his numerous enemies – though many of these, in the timbre of the times, were no more than cosmic spivs.

Certainly, Page was a man of his age – ambitious, worldly and pleasure-loving – but the demonic caricature of evil is mostly an elaborate myth. Not that he didn’t gladly play it himself, of course. By mentioning in a very matter-of-fact manner how the congregation of the original church at Boleskine House, a home of Crowley, had burned to death, Page was positioning himself as being metaphysically hard, a cosmically tough motherfucker with complex connections to ghoulish gangs of strange spirits. It was, of course, a good way to attract impressionable women, a variant on those college student ‘astrologers’ who would take girls back to their rooms to read their charts and then shag them.

For a time Page was fascinated with – to give it its full title – the Isis-Urania Temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a late-19th-century group of occultists whose members had included the Irish poet W. B. Yeats and Crowley, who – unsurprisingly – considered his poetry superior to that of Yeats and had a bitter falling out with the Irishman.

‘Much of the Golden Dawn magic,’ wrote Gary Lachman in his biography of Crowley, ‘as well as Crowley’s, has to do with what is called the “assumption of the god form”, when the magician imagines he has become the particular god he wants to invoke by visualising his form enveloping his own.’ Except you might feel that the ‘particular god’ Page wished to invoke was none other than himself: Jimmy Page, rock god.

And this stance was carried through to every aspect of his existence, including his appearances on stage.

‘On the surface,’ writes the American cultural commentator Erik Davis, ‘Page’s live performances present typical rockist values of spontaneity, virtuosity and sweaty abandon. But Page adds a novel element to the figure of the guitar hero, an element … of mystery. So even as Page bares his cock rock before tens of thousands of fans, the Zoso doodle emblazoned on his clothes, he reminds us that he knows something that we don’t. There is a gap between the hero whose performance we consume and the sage behind the curtain, who remains concealed, literally occult. This mystique makes Page far creepier than Ozzy Osbourne, who is hiding nothing, except maybe his debt to The Munsters.’

A balanced appreciation of Page’s character reveals traits both admirable and detestable, but claims of his ethical failings have sometimes overshadowed an appreciation of his keen creative mind. Besides, his flamboyantly dissolute lifestyle was hardly different from that of many other rock stars of his age – such as David Bowie, or Mick Jagger, or Rod Stewart.

But Page had a longstanding relationship with the art of destruction, and had been preparing for a career of hotel-wrecking since early in his life. At the rear of the secondary school he went to, on Epsom’s Danetree Road, there was a bomb shelter left over from the war. Although efforts to destroy it had been made on several occasions by his fellow pupils, it was a 14-year-old Jimmy Page who finally succeeded.

In what seems less an example of urban terrorism and more like a yarn from one of Richmal Crompton’s Just William stories, an older boy had combined sodium sulphate, weed killer and icing sugar to make several miniature bombs. A couple of these had exploded in the school grounds, with the blame always attributed to the rough kids from the neighbouring council estate.

But then this arms race escalated. Another boy constructed a pipe bomb and placed it inside the bomb shelter. Once lit, however, the fuse on the bomb burned interminably slowly. After some 20 minutes without much progress, one of boys offered a solution: he had a fuse taken from a Jetex, a motor for model aircraft that was popular at the time, which they put in the pipe bomb.

‘But nobody dared light it,’ remembered Page’s friend Rod Wyatt. ‘So Jimmy said, “I’ll do it.” So he goes in the entrance of the shelter, and then he comes running out. As he runs out it goes off: P-F-O-O-F! B-R-A-MMM! And the whole corner, which was thick concrete, flies up in the air, bricks following it. And Jimmy is running out, laughing his head off into the playground.

‘Reflecting on this, I thought, “Was that a sign of the times? That he was going to be part of the loudest rock ’n’ roll band ever?” This gentlemanly young guitar player says, “I’ll light the jet engine. I don’t mind.” It fits Led Zeppelin perfectly.’

1

SPANISH GUITAR IN SURREY

Born at 4 a.m. on 9 January 1944 in Heston, Middlesex, on the far fringes of London’s western suburbs, James Patrick Page was the son of an industrial personnel manager, also called James, and Patricia, a doctor’s secretary. The future superstar musician’s name was a combination of both of his parents’, who had been married at Epsom Register Office on 22 April 1941.

According to the mythology of his rock-star legend, Jimmy Page was ‘born on a full moon’, with all the occult, mystical weight that that phrase carries. Yet this is not precisely true. He was in fact born 31 hours before the full moon of 10 January 1944. While the baby boy and his mother might have felt the powerful energy of the rising Cancer full moon as he was born, the earth’s only natural satellite was not yet at its peak. In time Page would become a student of astrology; he would learn that in his astrological chart his moon was in moody Cancer, his sun sign was determinedly ambitious Capricorn, and he had Scorpio rising, with its suggestion of powerful sexuality and interest in arcane areas of life.

To an extent this only child – until he started school at the age of five he hardly knew any other children – was always self-educated, manifesting a strong sense of self-fulfilment, even destiny – though there is often something fixed and inflexible about the self-taught. ‘That early isolation probably had a lot to do with the way I turned out,’ he said later. ‘Isolation doesn’t bother me at all. It gives me a sense of security.’

Heston, his birthplace, has a distinct sense of J. G. Ballard-like suburban anonymity, the net curtains firmly drawn on all manner of potential darkness. Heston lies on the direct flight-path into Heathrow Airport, less than three miles away, and today is a place blighted by the ever-present roaring reverse thrust of descending jet airliners. It was the beginnings of this noise pollution that led the Page family to move first to nearby Feltham, a distance of some four miles, where unfortunately the noise from aeroplanes was even more acute, and then the ten miles or so to the south-east, to 34 Miles Road in Epsom, Surrey, in 1952. (In 1965 Page would, with Eric Clapton, record a song entitled ‘Miles Road’.)

Eight-year-old Jimmy Page was enrolled at Epsom County Pound Lane Primary School, and at the age of eleven he moved on to Ewell County Secondary School, on Danetree Road in adjacent West Ewell. His headmaster, Len Bradbury, who took over in 1958 when Page was in year three, had played football for Manchester United, and Bradbury’s arrival at the school was only a few months after his former team had been decimated in the Munich air disaster. (Many years later Bradbury would be a guest of honour at Manchester United’s ground, with pictures of him taken with the team’s captain, Roy Keane, and Ryan Giggs.) Page was in the proximity of celebrity – and he could see that such individuals were sort of ordinary people.

At 34 Miles Road, Page discovered a Spanish guitar that had been left behind, presumably by the previous occupiers. Had it ever been played? Perhaps not. In the 1950s a Spanish guitar as an objet d’art in the home was considered a sign of sophistication. ‘Nobody seemed to know why it was there,’ he told the Sunday Times. ‘It was sitting around our living room for weeks and weeks. I wasn’t interested. Then I heard a couple of records that really turned me on, the main one being Elvis’s “Baby Let’s Play House”, and I wanted to play it. I wanted to know what it was all about. This other guy at school showed me a few chords and I just went on from there.’

‘This other guy’ was called Rod Wyatt. Although fascinated by the Spanish guitar, Page all the same had been flummoxed by how to play the instrument. During a lunch break at secondary school, he came across Wyatt, who was in a class a couple of years above him. The owner of an acoustic guitar of his own, Wyatt was running through a version of ‘Rock Island Line’, a chart hit by the revered Lonnie Donegan, when he met Page. In response to the younger boy’s query, Wyatt instructed him to bring his Spanish acoustic to school and he would show him how to tune the instrument. From then on the pair became firm friends.

‘My mate Pete Calvert and I were always at Jimmy’s house bashing out our guitars for a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon,’ said Wyatt. ‘Sometimes I’d go round to Jimmy’s and his mum would say, “No, he’s practising.” When he suddenly realised he had it, he spent a lot of time practising. Sometimes six or seven hours a day. He told me he needed to improve his technique. And he eventually became the all-round perfect guitarist. Practice is what it’s all about.’

What had really turned Page on in Elvis Presley’s rockabilly song ‘Baby Let’s Play House’, released in the UK six days before Christmas 1955, was the guitar playing of Scotty Moore, who served as Presley’s guitarist from 1954 to 1958. On 5 July 1954 Moore had, with bassist Bill Black and Elvis himself, mutated the original arrangement of ‘That’s All Right’ by bluesman Arthur Crudup into a version that combined blues and country music, creating one of the foundations of rock ’n’ roll.

‘Scotty Moore had been a major inspiration in my early transitory days from acoustic to electric guitar. His character guitar playing on those early Elvis Sun recordings, and later at RCA, was monumental. It was during the fifties that these types of song-shaping guitar parts helped me see the importance of the electric guitar approach to music,’ said Page.

On ‘Baby Let’s Play House’ Moore played a burnished rockabilly rhythm. Page’s love of the tune would not leave him, even after almost 20 years: about nine minutes into the live version of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ in the Led Zeppelin film The Song Remains the Same he breaks into a close simulacrum of Moore’s licks. But that was a long way in the future: for now the 12-year-old Page assiduously studied and copied Moore’s parts. There could hardly be a purer, more perfect example of this brand new musical form, an ideal introduction to what his life would become. Every day he would take his guitar to school on Danetree Road.

‘When I grew up there weren’t many other guitarists,’ he told America’s National Public Radio in 2003. ‘There was one other guitarist in my school who actually showed me the first chords that I learned and I went on from there. I was bored so I taught myself the guitar from listening to records. So obviously it was a very personal thing.’

But he also had a seemingly separate life as a choirboy. Each Sunday, wearing the appropriate surplice and cassock, he would sing hymns at Epsom’s St Barnabas Anglican Church. The first image in his 2010 photographic autobiography is of him in this mode – clearly he is being ironic. As so often in the life of Jimmy Page, cold realism lay behind the impetus for his choirboy stints.

‘In those days it was difficult to access rock ’n’ roll music,’ he said to the Sunday Times in 2010, ‘because after all the riots happened in the cinemas, when people heard “Rock Around the Clock” in the film Blackboard Jungle, the authorities tried to lock it all down. So you needed to tune in to the radio or go to places where you could hear it. It just so happened that in youth clubs they would play records and you’d get to hear Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and Ricky Nelson – but you had to either go to church or be a member of the choir to go to the youth club.’

Page had many of the characteristics of the only child, burying himself in books and, almost the ultimate cliché, collecting overseas postage stamps. But more and more since discovering that Spanish guitar at Miles Road, he immersed himself in becoming adept on the instrument. ‘The choirmaster at St Barnabas remembered that I used to take my guitar to choir practice,’ he said, ‘and ask if I could tune it up to the organ.’

In Epsom there is a prominent motorcar showroom named Page Motors. It has often been claimed, even by myself, that this business is owned by members of Page’s family. But this is not the case at all. His relatives on his father’s side came from Grimsbury in Northamptonshire, and his paternal grandfather had been a nurseryman, tending to plants. (An irony that would not be lost on Page, who later had a Plant of his own to deal with, of course.) On his father’s side there was Irish blood.

At 122 Miles Road, at the far end of the street from the Page family home at number 34, lived a boy of similar age to Page called David Williams. According to Williams, Miles Road, which lay to the west of Epsom, was distinctly the wrong side of the high street. To the east lay the plush property in which affluent commuters to London were ensconced. The Page house backed onto the railway line that transported these people to the capital, less than 20 miles away, and was identical to the Williams home, having a downstairs living room and dining room and a pair of bedrooms upstairs. Downstairs, beyond the kitchen, was an outside toilet. Although most of these houses, including the Pages’, later had this feature adapted into a full bathroom, there is no getting away from the fact that these were distinctly basic homes.

Page’s father worked in nearby Chessington, a personnel manager at a plastic-coating factory, and his mother was the secretary at a local doctor’s practice. Despite the impeccable ‘BBC English’ – as such received pronunciation was known at the time – with which rock star Jimmy Page would express himself, his background was no more than lower middle-class, almost jumped-up working-class.

Another good friend, Peter Neal, lived on Miles Road. Page, Peter Neal and David Williams would hang out at each other’s houses. Gradually Page’s home – without any brothers or sisters to get in the way – became a focal point. He also had the advantage of enjoying both parents – although Wyatt mentions some growing tension between his mother and father. When Williams was just 13, his own mother had died: ‘I am certain that Jim’s mother was the initial driving force behind his musical progression. She was a petite, dark-haired woman with a strong personality, a glint in her eye and wicked sense of humour. She liked to tease me in a good-natured way, but let me hang out endlessly in their front room with Jim. I think she must have known my mother and, given the new circumstances I found myself in, I guess she felt sorry for me. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, I can now appreciate her kindness and tolerance, for I must have been a fairly constant presence in her house.’

After hearing Chuck Berry, the black poet of rock ’n’ roll sensibility, on American Forces Network radio broadcasting fuzzily from Germany in 1956, Williams acquired a UK EP that gathered together the songs ‘Maybellene’, ‘Thirty Days (To Come Back Home)’, ‘Wee Wee Hours’ and ‘Together (We Will Always Be)’. He and Page played it incessantly, the latter being especially taken with ‘Maybellene’ and its tale of amorous automobile class struggle, and with ‘Thirty Days’.

From the equipment Page quickly began to amass, it seems that this only child was a little spoilt – or, at least, certainly lucky. He was the first of his friends to acquire a reel-to-reel tape recorder, which he soon replaced with a newer model, selling the older one to Williams so he could then pass on the tapes of songs he would diligently record off the radio.

Discerning in their taste, certainly to their own minds, these boys truly cared for only a handful of artists: Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis – the eccentric and wild Jerry Lee, with his 13-year-old bride, being Page’s especial preference. Eddie Cochran would soon emerge to join this pantheon.

They would visit and revisit their local cinemas to watch such films as The Girl Can’t Help It, a minor triumph in 1956 that featured Little Richard, Fats Domino, Eddie Cochran, Julie London and the Platters. Also released that year was the more pedestrian Rock, Rock, Rock!, which had a highlight performance of ‘You Can’t Catch Me’ by Chuck Berry, his patent-leather pompadour and sneering grin permanently lending him the appearance of one of those black pimps whose look Elvis Presley had tried so hard to emulate. One Saturday afternoon in 1960 Page and Williams would hitchhike 50 miles to Bognor Regis to catch Berry performing a solitary tune in the classic film Jazz on a Summer’s Day.

In the record department of Rogers, an electrical goods shop on Epsom High Street, the three boys ingratiated themselves with the girl behind the counter. This ally would provide them with glimpses of record-company schedules of forthcoming releases. The boys would search out the most interesting names. ‘Frankie Avalon and Bobby Rydell were clearly to be overlooked in favour of the likes of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins or Big “T” Tyler,’ recalled Williams. ‘Also, song titles could often be a good indication of something a little stronger. The dreaded “A White Sport Coat (and a Pink Carnation)” was hardly going to evoke the sort of enthusiasm and anticipation we would have for titles such as “Rumble”, “I Put a Spell on You” or “Voodoo Voodoo”, was it?’

Soon appreciating the limitations of his Spanish acoustic instrument, Page worked for some weeks during the school summer holidays on a milk round, until he had saved up enough money to buy a Höfner President acoustic guitar. ‘It was a hollow-bodied acoustic model with a simple pickup,’ said Williams, ‘but when he attached it to a very small amplifier, it made something like the sound we all admired. I can recall that Saturday morning when I was summoned to his house to first feast eyes on it. Jim was like the cat with the cream. Pete and I were allowed a strum, but by now we realised that any aspirations we might have had in that direction were going to be dwarfed by Jim’s talent, desire and progress.’