Jimmy Page: The Definitive Biography

Soon after he had arrived in London and started working for Decca, Talmy came across the guitarist: ‘Somebody mentioned that they’d heard this 17-year-old kid who was really terrific, and I went and checked him out and I used him. We got along great and he was fabulous. I thought, “This kid is really gonna go somewhere,” and I only regret that he didn’t call me when he formed Led Zeppelin. It’s a shame! I would like to have done that.

‘He got it. I mean, he was original. At that time in London there were very few really current musicians: a lot of good musicians, but kind of mired slightly in the past. There were, like, one or two good rhythm sections and that was it. I originally started using Big Jim Sullivan, who was the only other one, and then I found Jimmy, who I thought was even better because he was more with it. He was doing what I thought should be done and certainly what was being done in the States, so it was a no-brainer.’

Fitting Page together with drummer Bobby Graham, and from time to time John Baldwin on bass, the producer had a team that was highly resourceful and fast. Talmy has described Graham as ‘the greatest drummer the UK has ever produced’. While playing with Joe Brown and the Bruvvers, Graham had been approached by Brian Epstein at a gig at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton, in June 1962. Would he care to replace Pete Best in the Beatles? Epstein asked him. Graham turned down the offer, leaving the way clear for Ringo Starr.

Graham first met Page when the guitarist was playing with Neil Christian and the Crusaders; they had supported Joe Brown at a show in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. ‘I was so impressed. We became very good friends, and when I became a producer I always used Jimmy. We started a publishing company called Jimbo Music, for stuff we wrote. Jimmy wasn’t one of the most way-out and weirdest characters I ever met: he was very quiet, very shy. Jimmy had a slightly dirtier sound than Big Jim Sullivan – they used to alternate a lot. Unless the arranger wanted a certain thing they’d fight it out amongst themselves.’

Neither Page nor Bobby could sight-read music – though the guitarist would learn how to do so over the next couple of years. ‘I had to rely on what felt right,’ said Graham, who estimated that he played on 15,000 tunes in the course of his career. ‘I was loud. My trick was, if the singer took a breath, fill in. I was one of the first of the new generation coming in. Jim Sullivan was already in. Jimmy Page – same thing, couldn’t read a note but had a great feel.’

Playing sessions paid good money, £9 a time when the average working man earned little more than that a week. And, as befitted the rules of the Musicians’ Union, there would be three sessions a day: 10 a.m. until 1 p.m.; 2 till 5; and 7 until 10 p.m. During each session the musicians were expected to finish four songs, and afterwards they would be handed small brown envelopes containing their fees in cash. If you worked all three sessions, you’d come away with almost £30 for a day’s work. At the end of each evening, Page, Big Jim Sullivan and Graham would adjourn to such fashionable boîtes of the day as the Cromwellian and Annie’s Room.

‘The weirdest thing I ever did with Jimmy was Gonks Go Beat,’ reflected Graham. ‘Charlie Katz had booked us into Decca number three studio, the cathedral where they did all the classical recordings. I wasn’t supposed to be at that session – it was the only time at the wrong place. My part looked like a map of the London Underground. Jimmy came over and said, “I think we’re in the wrong place. I can’t read my part.” The musical director said, “Are you ready, gentlemen?” and there was complete silence. He looked vaguely in my direction, and I thought he was talking to somebody behind me. He said, “Bob, you’re in at the start,” and I struggled. Finally he put the baton down and came over and ran it through with me. During the session I looked across and Jimmy was thundering away. At the end of the session I said, “You looked all right, Jim.” He said, “I turned my amp off.”’

With Shel Talmy, the trio of the two Jims and Bobby worked with a seemingly endless list of aspirant acts and tunes, such as the Lancastrians’ ‘We’ll Sing in the Sunshine’, Wayne Gibson’s ‘See You Later Alligator’ and the First Gear’s ‘Leave My Kitten Alone’, a cover of a Little Willie John tune and the B-side of ‘A Certain Girl’. ‘Leave My Kitten Alone’ was deemed ‘Page’s most outstanding solo prior to “Whole Lotta Love”’ by US rock critic Greg Shaw.

On 15 January 1965, again for Talmy, Page worked with 17-year-old David Jones, the leader of the Manish Boys, on ‘I Pity the Fool’, a cover of the Bobby Bland tune, backed with ‘Take My Tip’. So as not to be mistaken for Davy Jones of the Monkees, David Jones would soon change his name to David Bowie. (In 1964 Page had been a ‘member’ of Jones/Bowie’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men, a clear publicity gimmick that succeeded in getting Jones on television news. And Page had already played with a pair of earlier David Bowie line-ups, Davy Jones’ Locker and Davy Jones and the Lower Third, both with Shel Talmy producing. And he worked on David Bowie’s first, eponymous album, for Deram Records, produced by Mike Vernon.)

‘That “I Pity the Fool” session was phenomenal,’ said Wayne Bardell, then working in Francis, Day and Hunter, a record shop on London’s Charing Cross Road, but soon to become a successful manager. ‘I was at the session at IBC as a guest of the not-yet Bowie, with Shel Talmy producing, Glyn Johns the engineer and Jimmy Page on guitar.’

‘Well, it’s definitely not going to be a hit,’ Page said, correctly, of the tune that day – it sold no more than 500 copies. But during the Manish Boys’ sessions he gave David Jones a guitar riff that the young singer didn’t yet know how to use: as David Bowie he fitted this riff into two separate songs, first on 1970’s ‘The Supermen’ on his The Man Who Sold the World album, and again on ‘Dead Man Walking’ in 1997. ‘When I was a baby,’ said David Bowie later, ‘I did a rock session with one of the bands, one of the millions of bands that I had in the sixties – it was the Manish Boys, that’s what it was – and the session guitar player doing the solo was this young kid who’d just come out of art school and was already a top session man, Jimmy Page.’

And ‘this young kid’ had every right to be very excited about the part he played on ‘I Pity the Fool’, which, despite his misgivings, was a sensationally great record that should have been a hit; this was thanks in no small part to Jimmy Page adding searing, hard-rock guitar, like something Mick Green could have provided for the Pirates.

‘I Pity the Fool’ might have flopped, but Talmy produced breakthrough singles from a pair of acts that would become two of the biggest UK groups of the 1960s: ‘You Really Got Me’, the Kinks’ third 45, and the Who’s ‘I Can’t Explain’. Page played rhythm guitar on a version of the latter track.

‘Because Shel wasn’t sure I could play a solo, he asked his favourite session guitarist, Jimmy Page, to sit in,’ wrote Pete Townshend in his autobiography. ‘And because our band had rehearsed the song with backing vocals in Beach Boys style, but not very skilfully, Shel arranged for three male session singers, the Ivy League, to chirp away in our place. Shel Talmy got a good sound, tight and commercial, and although there was no guitar feedback, I was willing to compromise to get a hit.’

In Guitar Masters: Intimate Portraits by Alan DiPerna, Townshend referred to Page as ‘a friend of mine’. The guitarists certainly had something in common: a fling with Anya Butler, the beautiful – and older – assistant to Who co-manager Chris Stamp. Townshend was initially puzzled by Page’s presence at the session: ‘I said to Jimmy, “Well, what are you doing here?” He said, “I’m here to give some weight to the rhythm guitar. I’m going to do the guitar on the overdubs.” And I said, “Oh, great.” And he said, “What are you going to play?” “A Rick 12,” I told him. And he said, “I’ll play a …” Whatever it was. It was all very friendly. It was all very convivial.’

And on ‘Bald Headed Woman’, the B-side of ‘I Can’t Explain’, it was Page who played the fuzzbox licks. On the liner notes to the Who’s Two’s Missing compilation album, Who bassist John Entwistle said: ‘The fuzz guitar droning throughout is played by Jimmy Page. The reason being, he owned the only fuzzbox in the country at that time.’

Entwistle was not exactly correct. Gibson guitars had put a fuzz-tone pedal into production in 1962, giving it the brand name of ‘Maestro Fuzz-Tone FZ-1’. Although in limited supply, the devices, imported from the US, could be found from time to time in London’s more select musical equipment stores, and it was from one of these that Page had acquired his gadget.

Like many technological developments, the origins of the fuzzbox and the dirty edge it added to a guitar’s sound – which Page would employ to his maximum advantage and could be heard to its defining fullest when played by Keith Richards on the Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’ – were accidental. In 1951 Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats – actually Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm – had hit the number one slot in the US rhythm and blues chart with ‘Rocket 88’. A distinctive feature of ‘Rocket 88’ was the growling sound of Willie Kizart’s guitar. On his way from Clarksdale, Mississippi, to Sam Phillips’s Sun Studio in Memphis in 1951 to record the tune, Kizart’s amplifier had fallen from his car while a tyre was being replaced. Endeavouring to repair the resulting damage to the speaker cone, the guitarist stuffed it with paper: the marginally distorted sound that resulted became a feature of the ‘Rocket 88’ single, which is often cited as one of the first rock ’n’ roll records. From then on, guitarists sought out the means to deliver a similar grimy sound, the likes of Link Wray – who would poke holes in his loudspeaker – and Buddy Guy consciously damaging their amps to replicate such a tone. And in 1961 the great country singer Marty Robbins’s ‘Don’t Worry’ single hit number three in the US national charts, largely courtesy of his guitarist Grady Martin’s muttering instrument being played through a faulty amplifier. Martin soon put out his own single, ‘The Fuzz’, thus bestowing the malfunction with a semi-official term.

In Los Angeles a radio-station technician developed an electronic device to create such an effect for producer Lee Hazelwood, who employed it on Sanford Clark’s ‘Go On Home’ 45 in 1960. And in the same city, super session player Orville ‘Red’ Rhodes, who would become a member of the celebrated Wrecking Crew and was also an electronics whizz, developed a similar device, which was utilised by fellow Wrecking Crew guitarist Billy Strange on Ann Margret’s ‘I Just Don’t Understand’. In turn this led to Strange employing Rhodes’s invention with the instrumental surf band the Ventures, a kind of US version of the Shadows, on their late-1962 release ‘The 2,000 Pound Bee’. It was this tune especially that had come to the attention of Page; anxious to replicate its juddering sound, he had purchased his own Maestro Fuzz-Tone.

Yet it was not entirely to his satisfaction. Luckily, he already knew someone who could assist him with this. Roger Mayer was a friend from the Epsom music scene. By 1964 he was working for the Admiralty Research Laboratory in Teddington, in the Acoustical Analysis section, having developed into something of an electronics boffin. And their friendship persisted: Page and Mayer would visit each other’s homes to listen to American records. ‘Jimmy came to me,’ said Mayer, ‘when he got hold of the Maestro Fuzz and said, “It’s good but it doesn’t have enough sustain … it’s a bit staccato.” I said, “Well, I’m sure we can improve on that.” That conversation spurred me to design my first fuzzbox.’

‘I suggested that Roger should try to make something that would improve upon the distortion heard on “The 2,000 Pound Bee” by the Ventures,’ said Page. ‘He went away and came up with the first real good fuzzbox … the first thing that really generated this wonderful sustain.’

Running off a 6-volt battery, Mayer’s fuzzbox was constructed within a custom-made casing, which contained controls for gain and biasing along with a switch that would modify the tonal output. ‘Right from square one,’ said Mayer, ‘Pagey and I wanted something that sustained a lot, but then didn’t start jittering as it went away. One of the things that became very, very apparent early on was that you didn’t want nasty artefacts. It’s very easy to design a fuzzbox – anybody can do it – but to make one sound nice and retain articulation in notes, now that’s something else.’

Page’s part in the Kinks’ career is more cloudy. Although it has often been claimed that he played the iconic solo on ‘You Really Got Me’, this is not the case. ‘Jimmy did play rhythm on the first Kinks LP, and certainly did not play lead on “You Really Got Me”, which preceded the LP by several weeks, or anything else for that matter. I only brought him in to play rhythm because at the time Ray wanted to concentrate on his singing,’ said Shel Talmy. In fact, Page had already played acoustic 12-string guitar on ‘I’ve Been Driving on Bald Mountain’ and ‘I’m a Lover Not a Fighter’, on the Kinks’ eponymously titled debut album. (In 1965 Page played the solo on an instrumental version of ‘You Really Got Me’; almost identical to Dave Davies’s original guitar part, it was included on an instrumental album by the Larry Page Orchestra entitled Kinky Music.)

‘My presence at their sessions was to enable Ray Davies to wander around and virtually maintain control of everything, without having to be down in the studio all the time,’ said Page later. ‘Ray was producing those songs as much as Shel Talmy was … more so, actually, because Ray was directing them and everything. At one point, there were even three guitars playing the same riff.’

‘I’ll tell you something about Jimmy Page,’ Ray Davies told Creem magazine. ‘Jimmy Page thinks he was the first person in the world to ever put a B string where a G string should be. And for me, that’s his only claim to fame. Other than that, I think he’s an asshole … Jimmy Page and a lot of other people subsequently came to our sessions when we became hot, and I think he played rhythm 12-string on “I’m a Lover Not a Fighter”, and he played tambourine on “Long Tall Shorty”.’

In fact, Page did not ‘put a B string where a G string should be’. He told Melody Maker that he would substitute the B string with a top E. Rather than the conventional E string he would swap it for a banjo octave string, either tuned to G or A: ‘You’ll get a raving, authentic blues sound that you hear on most pop records with that string-bending sound.’

‘I didn’t really do that much on the Kinks records,’ Page later admitted. ‘I know I managed to get a couple of riffs in on their album, but I can’t really remember. I know that Ray didn’t really approve of my presence. The Kinks just didn’t want me around when they were recording. It was Shel Talmy’s idea. One aspect of being in the studio while potential hits were being made was the press – too many writers were making a big fuss about the use of session men. Obviously I wasn’t saying anything to the press but it just leaked out … and that sort of thing often led to considerable bad feeling.’

For most of these sessions Page employed a Gibson Les Paul Custom, with the frets filed down ‘to produce a very smooth playing action … it just sounded so pure and fantastic,’ he told John Tobler and Stuart Grundy for BBC’s Radio 1.

Despite the griping of Ray Davies and Billy Harrison, Page played on a number of records that were significant cornerstones of mid-sixties British pop – outright classics, some of them. These included Shirley Bassey’s theme song for Goldfinger, the third James Bond film, on which he played with Big Jim Sullivan and Vic Flick, another renowned UK session guitarist – the tune was a Top 10 US hit. Then there was Tom Jones’s ‘It’s Not Unusual’, number one in the UK and Top Ten in the US; Petula Clark’s ‘Downtown’, a US number one; Kathy Kirby’s ‘Secret Love’; Marianne Faithfull’s ‘As Tears Go By’; P. J. Proby’s ‘Hold Me’; the Merseys’ ‘Sorrow’, covered by David Bowie on his Pin Ups album; the Nashville Teens’ ‘Tobacco Road’; Brian Poole and the Tremeloes’ ‘Candy Man’; Twinkle’s ‘Terry’, a motorcycle-death record in the tradition of the Shangri-Las’ ‘Leader of the Pack’ that was number four in the UK charts at Christmas 1964 and banned by the BBC for being in ‘poor taste’; ‘Baby What’s Wrong’ and its B-side ‘Be a Sect Maniac’, the first single from the Downliners Sect, a wild R&B outfit who made the Pretty Things seem like Cliff Richard.

As it had been with Bert Berns, much of Page’s session work was for the Decca label, at their studios in Broadhurst Gardens, West Hampstead, a plain, nondescript building, built like an office block.

He worked extensively with Dave Berry, a Decca solo star from Sheffield whose first hit had been a cover of his namesake Chuck Berry’s ‘Memphis Tennessee’. He was one of British rock ’n’ roll’s first anti-heroes, a true original. ‘I noticed how strippers used to tease the audience in Hamburg,’ he said of his time playing the circuit in the German port. So almost an entire Dave Berry set might consist of him singing his songs from behind the stage curtain, with only his microphone and hand tantalisingly visible.

When Elvis Presley covered Arthur Crudup’s ‘My Baby Left Me’, Scotty Moore’s guitar licks had proved such an inspiration for the teenage Jimmy Page. Now Page took the lead guitar part himself on Dave Berry’s sensational version of the song, with – as was customary – Big Jim Sullivan on rhythm.

Berry’s ‘My Baby Left Me’ only grazed the Top 40, but his sultry ‘The Crying Game’ was a Top 5 tune when it was released in July 1964. However, this time it was Big Jim Sullivan who took the lead part, with Page providing rhythm; on drums, as per usual, was Bobby Graham. There was a picture in the music press, recalled Berry, of Page standing next to him, along with the engineer Glyn Johns, listening to a playback of ‘The Crying Game’. ‘Many of the session musicians would have left as soon as they had done their part,’ said Berry. ‘But Jimmy Page, being a proper player, would listen to his own part. He would sometimes want to do it again. Mind you, at the time Jimmy was in Carter-Lewis and the Southerners: by 5 p.m. he’d be gone to do a gig.’

The specific session players he used, said Berry, ‘were really into it. I must have done a quarter of my career with Decca with that line-up: 25 to 30 songs. Mike Smith would call me with the studio booked. But if Big Jim and Jimmy Page were not available we’d cancel it and wait.’ There were at least four tracks on which Page played harmonica: ‘C.C. Rider’, for example, and Buster Brown’s ‘Fannie Mae’, which relies on a harmonica riff. Meanwhile, Page played both lead guitar and the harmonica part on ‘Don’t Gimme No Lip Child’, the B-side of ‘The Crying Game’.

Was Page, who was only 20 years old, anxious to impose his personality in the studio? Not at all, said Berry: ‘He was very quiet. The true professional players don’t have any edge to them anyway. The bigger the artist, the less edge they have to them. These two guitarists were really great players. And they didn’t stick to how this stuff was written out. Big Jim would be improvising his solo. You could hear him doing a vocal counter-melody. We’d say, “Leave that in, it’s real.” You could work with these guys and suggest things. In 2010, when I met him again, Jimmy seemed exactly the same – a normal and quiet person. I was very proud of my output: it had a vast range. So when Jimmy Page was in the biggest band in the world I was very proud of my association with them. When I’d meet up with him I’d feel very proud, like a child.’

On 27 March 1964 Page played heavy fuzz-tone guitar on Carter and Lewis’s ‘Skinny Minnie’.

By now this was becoming customary practice for the guitarist. Again, in early 1964, on a session for Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, Page augmented his guitar with his Gibson Maestro Fuzz-Tone on a single that was released in October that year, ‘Dracula’s Daughter’, and its B-side ‘Come Back Baby’, a studio date engineered by the legendary Joe Meek in his tiny Holloway Road set-up. (David Sutch, as his name was registered at birth, was an eccentric English rocker who appeared onstage in a coffin, sometimes dressed as Jack the Ripper – also the title of an earlier Decca single on which Page played – and based his act on the American Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, who had written and recorded ‘I Put a Spell on You’. Sutch’s Savages proved a fertile training ground, employing – among many others – guitarists Jeff Beck and Ritchie Blackmore and drummer Carlo Little, who had played briefly with the Rolling Stones prior to Charlie Watts. In 1963 Sutch stood as a candidate in a UK by-election, representing the Monster Raving Loony Party, the beginning of a career as a perennially unsuccessful Parliamentary candidate. Later, in 1964, Sutch founded Radio Sutch, a pirate broadcaster based in a wartime fort near the Thames estuary. Before the decade was out, Lord Sutch would reappear in the life of Jimmy Page.)

In September 1964 Decca Records paid for the dynamic, soulful American singer Brenda Lee, who was signed to the label, to come to London to record at Broadhurst Gardens. ‘She said to me, “I’ve come here to make a record with the British sound.” She felt she wouldn’t get the same sound in Nashville because they’re only just catching up on the British beat group sound of about six months ago,’ said producer Mickie Most to Rolling Stone magazine.

The tune chosen to acquaint Little Miss Dynamite with the zeitgeist was ‘Is It True’, another song written by Page’s musical allies John Carter and Ken Lewis. The guitarist used an early wah-wah pedal on the record, which hit the same number 17 spot on both sides of the Atlantic.

By now Pete Calvert, Page and Rod Wyatt’s guitar-playing buddy from Epsom, had rented a London flat, 4 Neate House in Pimlico. Page would drop in and sometimes stay over if he had an early gig the next day. Soon Chris Dreja of the Yardbirds moved in to one of the rooms.

A desire to improve upon and expand his natural abilities seemed second nature to Page. Having bought a sitar almost as soon as he learned of the instrument’s existence, he became one of its earliest exponents in the UK. ‘Let’s put it this way,’ he said. ‘I had a sitar before George Harrison. I wouldn’t say I played it as well as he did, though. I think George used it well … I actually went to see a Ravi Shankar concert one time, and to show you how far back this was, there were no young people in the audience at all – just a lot of older people from the Indian embassy. This girl I knew was a friend of his and she took me to see him after the concert. She introduced him to me and I explained that I had a sitar, but did not know how to tune it. He was very nice to me and wrote down the tunings on a piece of paper.’ On 7 May 1966 Melody Maker, the weekly British music paper that considered itself intellectually superior to the rest of the pop press, ran an article entitled ‘How About a Tune on the Old Sitar?’, with much of its information taken from Page.

This questing side of him surfaced again in his efforts to improve his abilities on the acoustic guitar. ‘Most great guitarists are either great on electric or great on acoustic,’ said Alan Callan, who first met Page in 1968 and in 1975 became UK vice president of Swan Song Records, Led Zeppelin’s label. ‘But Jim is equally great on both, because he is always faithful to the nature of the instrument. He told me that, quite early on, he’d gone to a session and the producer had said, “Can you do it on acoustic rather than electric?” And he said he came out of that session thinking he hadn’t nailed it, so he went home and practised acoustic for two months.’

The first half of the 1960s was a boom period for UK folk music, with several emerging virtuosos, revered by young men learning the guitar or – in Page’s case – always eager to improve. John Renbourn, Davey Graham – who incorporated Eastern scales into his guitar playing – and Bert Jansch were the holy triumvirate of these players; Page was especially turned on by Jansch, who introduced him to ‘the alternate guitar tunings and finger-style techniques he made his own in future Zeppelin classics such as “Black Mountain Side” and “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp”,’ according to Brad Tolinski in his book Light and Shade.