Jimmy Page: The Definitive Biography

One day, when they were leaving Liberty, Page and Dexter found themselves strolling down Kingly Street, which ran off the west end of the store. There they discovered an art gallery called 26 Kingly Street, with extraordinary lighting, sheets of Perspex and glittery screens. London’s first psychedelic gallery, 26 Kingly Street was run by Keith Albarn (whose son Damon is the singer in Blur). ‘We’d just discovered acid,’ said Dexter. ‘I tripped in Jimmy’s house but never tripped with him – I sought refuge with him a few times. I went to a Yardbirds rehearsal when I’d dropped acid. And he looked after me.’

Contrary to Billy Harrison’s dismissal of Page, Dexter insists that his friend was highly regarded on the London music scene, not simply for his musical accomplishments but as an empathetic human being. ‘He was a lovely chap. One of the boys. You’d see him at record launches, and the odd club – though he didn’t go to the Speakeasy as much as many others – and stuff like that. When I was running the Implosion shows Jimmy would come along. Ian Knight, my cohort on those events, went from Middle Earth to becoming the Yardbirds’ staging and lighting guy, and went on to have the same job with Led Zeppelin. We hung out at some of those crazy happenings, like the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream at Alexandra Palace.’

Page had moved up from Epsom and was living in a flat off Holland Road in west London, a thoroughfare that ran from Shepherd’s Bush to Kensington High Street; it was an area in which it seemed every single one of its myriad bedsits contained a hippie hash-dealer. In 1966 Dexter was invited to Deià in Majorca, home to a bohemian community, by Lady June, an artist and éminence grise of the psychedelic scene. In Deià he encountered an especially louche breed of Portobello Road-style hippie chick, some of whom relocated back to London, becoming habitués of Blaises, a nightclub in South Kensington: ‘Jimmy and one of these dodgy birds used to get really stoned and play Buffalo Springfield again and again and again. “This is the direction I want to go in,” he would say. “I want to have a band that does magical things.”’

The folk scene, to which Page was always drawn, remained a prominent feature of Swinging London. ‘I used to go to Les Cousins,’ Dexter said of London’s dominant folk venue. ‘I was best friends with Beverley and John Martyn. Nick Drake only felt comfortable at their flat in Hampstead.’

Dexter was always impressed with Page’s phenomenal knowledge of art: ‘He was a collector. Of everything. He’s kept every piece of clothing he’s had since he was a child. His mother was incredibly neat and tidy. And so is he.’

Dexter also became friends with another woman who would have a significant impact on Page: a French model called Charlotte Martin. She was 20 when they first met, Dexter 19. ‘I first clapped eyes on her in a place called Westaway and Westaway, a fantastic shop near the British Museum that sold Scottish knitwear. All the young birds would gather there or at the Scotch House. She was a fabulous model who did it all: magazine level, and then once people saw how gorgeous she was she was employed all over the place. She did all the modelling with the Fool, for their collection. She was great friends with them because they all hung out at Eric’s place in the Pheasantry.’ ‘Eric’, of course, was Eric Clapton, and he and Charlotte Martin were an item.

By now Page had effectively dropped out of art college. Even though he would later acquire a considerable reputation for financial canniness, it is somewhat cheap to suggest that it was only his considerable earnings from session playing that continued to attract him to the craft. In fact, for him the art of recording, and coming to as full an understanding of it as possible, appears to have held far more attraction than treading the rock ’n’ roll boards. And in the most select quarters his skills were being further recognised. In August 1965 came the press announcement about the formation of Immediate Records, an independent label that was the pet project of Andrew Loog Oldham, Rolling Stones manager and wunderkind of UK pop, and his business partner Tony Calder. ‘Immediate will operate in the same way as any good, small independent label in America,’ said Oldham. ‘We will be bringing in new producers, while our main hope lies with the pop session guitarist turned producer Jimmy Page and my two friends, Stones Mick and Keith.’

Page had first worked with Andrew Loog Oldham in 1964, on one of Oldham’s versions of the Stones’ songs, performed by the Andrew Oldham Orchestra, part of his endeavour to become the UK’s Phil Spector. That session was at Kingsway Studios in Holborn, London; the producer was John ‘Paul Jones’ Baldwin.

Page then went on the road with Marianne Faithfull, who that summer had hit the Top 10 with her first release, ‘As Tears Go By’, written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and on which Page had played.

Page had been recommended to Oldham by Charlie Katz, who booked musicians for his sessions. ‘He said to me one day, “There’s this young lad, Jimmy, we are trying him out. Why don’t you give him a go? He doesn’t read but Big Jim Sullivan will take him under his wing.” And so Jimmy started playing on my sessions,’ said Loog Oldham. ‘One of the first was Marianne Faithfull’s “As Tears Go By”. He was a bright spark. It was nice having him on the floor … All smiles and not much talk.’

Soon Page found himself playing on the Rolling Stones’ ‘Heart of Stone’, though it was a version that would not be released until the Stones’ Metamorphosis album, in 1975.

‘Jimmy was like a wisp,’ said Loog Oldham. ‘I don’t really know what kind of a person he was, because the great ones keep it hidden and metamorphose on us, so that the room works.’

Andrew Loog Oldham decided to take their relationship up a level, hiring Page as Immediate’s producer and A&R man. ‘In those days if you got on with people you tried to work with them. It seemed logical and Jimmy liked the idea … I thought he was very good. What he went on to do kind of proves it, doesn’t it?’

As for sessions with the Rolling Stones, Loog Oldham recalled: ‘He played on some of the demos Mick, Keith and I did that ended up on the album released in 1975 called Metamorphosis. The Stones did not play on that. I think he was on a Bobby Jameson single that Keith and I wrote and produced … I only considered people the way they considered themselves. Jimmy was a player, an occasional writer at that time with me and with Jackie DeShannon. I never considered him as a solo artist and I don’t think he did either.’

Page worked on a trio of demos for the Stones themselves: ‘Blue Turns to Grey’, ‘Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind’ and the aforementioned ‘Heart of Stone’. Although the version of ‘Blue Turns to Grey’ on which Page played was never released, a later edition of the song was included on the Stones’ 1965 US album December’s Children (And Everybody’s), and Cliff Richard’s cover of the song was a number 15 hit in 1966. ‘Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind’ and ‘Heart of Stone’ were included on Metamorphosis, the first song being covered by Vashti Bunyan for an unsuccessful release on Immediate.

What had specifically drawn Page to the Immediate production gig was the chance to work with his old mucker Eric Clapton, now with John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, who had formed an arrangement with the label.

In June 1965 John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers went into Pye Studios at Great Cumberland Place in London’s West End. Page was at the production helm for what would turn out to be a landmark session in the history of contemporary music.

‘I’m Your Witchdoctor’ and ‘Telephone Blues’ were the tunes involved. They featured John Mayall on keyboards, Hughie Flint on drums, John McVie on bass and Eric Clapton on guitar – the John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers line-up that had recorded the celebrated Beano-cover album. ‘When “Witchdoctor” came to be overdubbed, Eric had this idea to put this feedback wail over the top,’ said Page. ‘I was with him in the studio as he set this up, then I got back into the control room and told the engineer to record the overdub. About two thirds of the way through he pulled the faders down and said: “This guitarist is impossible to record.” I guess his technical ethics were compromised by the signal that was putting the meters into the red. I suggested that he got on with his job and leave that decision to me! Eric’s solo on “Telephone Blues” was just superb.’

It was Page who intuited how Clapton’s solos could be enhanced by pouring reverb onto them, bringing out the flames in his playing, characterised by Clapton’s overdriven one-note sustain.

But – as Page noted – Clapton’s plangent, lyrical playing on ‘Telephone Blues’, the B-side, is perhaps even more distinguished, the first time that he gets to really stretch out with a beautiful, mature stream of notes. You are struck by the clarity of the separation – and simultaneous harmony – of the instruments. Clearly Page had learned much from his countless hours in recording studios, learning to appreciate how the very best rock ’n’ roll records were assiduously constructed, put together piece by piece.

Tellingly, for his first go in the control seat for Immediate, the subject matter of the single’s title track alluded to the kind of dark material with which Page would later be associated, perhaps even tarnished by. The opening couplet ran:

‘I’m your witchdoctor, got the evil eye

Got the power of the devil, I’m the conjurer guy.’

On one hand this was no more than the stock imagery that peppered blues music; yet, in the bigger picture, it holds an interesting subtext. It was as though Page was toying with – giving a test run to, really – the entire mysterious and dark philosophy that would form the aura of Led Zeppelin.

‘The significance of this session cannot be emphasised enough, for it represented the birth of the modern guitar sound. And while Clapton did the playing, it was Page who made it possible for his work to be captured properly on tape,’ wrote Brad Tolinski.

That year Page also worked with the distinguished American composer Burt Bacharach on his album Hit Maker! Burt Bacharach Plays the Burt Bacharach Hits. ‘Page respected Bacharach’s meticulous approach to rehearsing and recording,’ wrote George Case in Jimmy Page: Magus, Musician, Man. Again, it was part of Page’s learning curve. ‘Bacharach, in turn, admired the young Briton’s politeness and polish.’

As part of his deal with Immediate, Page played guitar with Nico, a German actress, model and singer based in France whom Andrew Loog Oldham had met in London, where she was soaking up the scene. Loog Oldham and Page co-wrote a song for her, ‘The Last Mile’, and Page arranged, conducted, produced and played on the tune. It was relegated to the role of B-side, however, to the Gordon Lightfoot number ‘I’m Not Saying’ – again, Page played guitar on this track.

‘Brian Jones brought Nico to my attention,’ said Loog Oldham, ‘and Jimmy and I wrote a song, which we recorded with her as a B-side. It might have been better than the A-side. It should have been the A-side, because that was fucking awful. It really was stiff as Britain. Then he went on the road with Marianne Faithfull. We were all impressed by this new wave of women who were coming in.’

Page’s friendship with Eric Clapton continued to blossom, and soon Slowhand, as Clapton ironically became nicknamed, would often be accompanied by his beautiful French girlfriend, Charlotte ‘Charly’ Martin, who was friends with Jeff Dexter. Clapton met her in the Speakeasy nightclub in the summer of 1966, while he was forming his next group, Cream.

Problems with Immediate Records, however, almost created a rupture in the camaraderie between the two guitarists. Without informing Clapton, the label released some tunes that he had recorded onto Page’s Simon tape recorder when Clapton had stayed at his house – which led to Clapton mistrusting Page for a time. Yet this suspicion was misplaced. ‘I argued that they couldn’t put them out, because they were just variations of blues structures, and in the end we dubbed some other instruments over some of them and they came out, with liner notes attributed to me … though I didn’t have anything to do with writing them. I didn’t get a penny out of it, anyway,’ Page said, revealing what was for him generally a key subtext to any endeavour. (The musicians who overdubbed these instruments onto Clapton’s basic tracks were Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts and Mick Jagger, on harmonica.)

Born in 1939 in west London, Simon Napier-Bell was the son of a documentary filmmaker. After attempting to become a jazz musician in the United States, he drifted into music supervision for movies in Canada; eventually he returned to London, where he continued in the same line of work, including on the 1965 screwball comedy What’s New Pussycat? He expanded into the production of records and demos, and he would use popular London studios such as Advision on Bond Street and Cine-Tele Sounds Studios, popularly known as CTS, in Kensington Gardens Square, the top film-music studio in London. He would employ session musicians recommended by Dick Katz, who booked all the top players in London.

Highly intelligent and witty, Napier-Bell became something of an archetypal character of Swinging London, a gay man who was known for driving around in an imported Ford Thunderbird, a cigar clenched between his teeth. His best friend was Vicki Wickham, the producer of Ready Steady Go!, the hip pop music show broadcast every Friday night on ITV. Almost as a jape, he and Wickham co-wrote the English lyrics for the Italian ballad ‘Io Che Non Vivo (Senza Te)’, which had been featured at the 1965 San Remo Festival; their friend Dusty Springfield sang at the event and had been moved to tears by the song’s music and melody. Knocking up their set of English lyrics to match the music in an hour so that they could head out to a London nightclub, Wickham and Napier-Bell gave the tune its title, ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’. Recorded by Dusty Springfield, the song was a number one hit in the UK and number four in the United States; in subsequent years it would be a hit again many times over, across the globe, with even Elvis Presley doing a version of it in 1970.

By the time Napier-Bell wrote the ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’ lyrics, he was manager of the Yardbirds, having replaced Giorgio Gomelsky. That the talented and fascinating Gomelsky had been fired was perhaps not surprising; later he declared, ‘I should never have been a manager: I need someone to manage me.’ Though there were no suggestions of impropriety, the Yardbirds had dismissed him because of his inability to turn a profit for the group. All the same, Gomelsky had been an inspirational figure for the Yardbirds, under whose auspices they had become a hit recording act. During their first US tour in 1965 he had even secured a recording session at Sun Studio in Memphis with Sam Phillips, who had mentored Elvis Presley early in his career. The tune they recorded? The Tiny Bradshaw 1951 jump-blues classic ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’’, reworked in a rockabilly style by the Johnny Burnette Trio in 1956, and included on the Yardbirds’ US album release Having a Rave Up. ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’’ was a song that would replay significantly in the Yardbirds’ career.

‘Some time around the end of 1965 or the beginning of 1966,’ recalled Napier-Bell, ‘Paul Samwell-Smith, who played bass with the Yardbirds, called me. His girlfriend, later his wife, was Vicki Wickham’s secretary. I went to a gig the Yardbirds played in Paris. I quickly realised that a manager’s job was to keep the group together.’

Behind Napier-Bell’s management of the Yardbirds lay a continuous awkward subtext: ‘The Yardbirds were blokes in a pub talking about football. I was gay and couldn’t really enter into that world.’

During his time working in recording studios Napier-Bell had always employed session musicians. ‘You never think session players aren’t playing well: they know they are in the top league, the best in the world. They can play next to the guys in LA who would play with Sinatra.’

Napier-Bell’s first choice for guitarist was ‘always Big Jim Sullivan’. Even though, he says, ‘these guys were all infuriating. They’d put you through it. Big Jim Sullivan would always have a paperback book with him that he would read as you did a take: it would be balanced on his music stand. He would even read it halfway through the take until it came to his moment – he would be doing it to show off.’

If an additional guitarist was required, it would invariably be Page. ‘He and Big Jim would work out their parts between them. I talked to Jimmy Page enough to know he was a real session player. I knew he was a brilliant technician and admired by others. We’d also use John Paul Jones, who did all the arrangements for Herman’s Hermits. But I never really liked Jimmy Page. He had a sneer about him. At school the people who bullied me had this terrible, frightening sneer and Jimmy Page reminded me of those people. People who sneer have usually had unhappy childhoods.’

On 16 and 17 May 1966, at IBC Studios in London’s West End, Jeff Beck and Page were involved in what in retrospect can be seen as one of the very first super-sessions.

The tune was ‘Beck’s Bolero’. Maurice Ravel’s Boléro, which was first performed in 1928 at the Paris Opera, provided the basis for ‘Beck’s Bolero’; the Russian ballet dancer Ida Rubinstein had commissioned Ravel to write the work, an undulating, insistently repetitive piece based around the Spanish music and dance known as bolero.

By 1965, largely influenced by the tastes of the likes of Paul McCartney, always an assiduous culture vulture, assorted classical composers had become fashionable among fans of what formerly would have been known as ‘pop’. These composers included Bach, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Gershwin, Debussy and Ravel, whose Boléro was relatively well known in 1966. The song’s structure is considerably amended in such a way that it could be interpreted as the first blow of the hard-rock sound that Led Zeppelin would very soon develop.

‘Beck’s Bolero’ employed a formidable cast: Beck on lead guitar, Page on acoustic, revered session pianist Nicky Hopkins, the Who’s Keith Moon on drums and John Paul Jones on bass. The Who’s John Entwistle, Moon’s bass-playing rhythm partner, had originally agreed to do the session, but when he failed to turn up John Paul Jones was called in.

‘I heard rumours that Jimmy was talking with Keith Moon about joining his supergroup,’ said Napier-Bell. ‘I don’t think the name Led Zeppelin was in the air at that time, though it may have been mentioned between them. Cream was being formed at the same time. Whether that had much influence on Beck, Page and Moon, I don’t know. The Who’s managers, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, were in the same building as Clapton’s manager, Robert Stigwood. So when he was putting Cream together, they would have known all about it, as I did too. Keith Moon would have heard from Kit and Chris as to what was going on too. From my point of view, I was thinking only of keeping Jeff in the group [the Yardbirds]. Jimmy, I think, was thinking of a new group, which would be a blend of all their talents.’

‘I always try to do things wholeheartedly or not at all,’ said Beck, offering a slight rewrite of history, ‘so I tried to imagine what my ideal band would be. We had the right producer, Keith Moon on drums, Jimmy on guitar and John Paul Jones on bass. You could feel the excitement in the studio, even though we didn’t know what we were going to play. I thought, “This is it! What a line-up!” But afterwards nothing really happened because Moony couldn’t leave the Who. He arrived at the studio in disguise so no one would know he was playing with another band.’

‘Jim Page and I arranged a session with Keith Moon in secret, just to see what would happen,’ said Beck. ‘But we had to have something to play in the studio because Keith only had a limited time – he could only give us like three hours before his roadies would start looking for him. I went over to Jim’s house a few days before the session and he was strumming away on this 12-string Fender electric that had a really big sound. It was the sound of that Fender 12-string that really inspired the melody. And I don’t care what he says, I invented that melody. He hit these Amaj7 chords and the Em7 chords, and I just started playing over the top of it … He was playing the bolero rhythm and I played the melody on top of it, but then I said: “Jim, you’ve got to break away from the bolero beat – you can’t go on like that for ever!” So we stopped it dead in the middle of the song – like the Yardbirds would do on “For Your Love” – then we stuck that riff into the middle. And I went home and worked out the other bit [the uptempo section].’

‘Even though he said he wrote it, I wrote it,’ said Page, presenting an argument that would become somewhat familiar.

‘Moon did this amazing fill around the kit, and a U47 mic just left its stand and went flying across the room; he just cracked it one,’ said John Paul Jones.

‘I remember Jimmy at the studio yelling at us and calling us fucking hooligans,’ said Beck. ‘Everyone had prior commitments. That session that day, it was one day that really started my head turning – we were almost doing it.’

That band, claimed Beck, was the original Led Zeppelin – ‘not called “Led Zeppelin”, but that was still the earliest embryo of the band’.

‘It was going to be me and Beck on guitars, Moon on drums, maybe Nicky Hopkins on piano. The only one from the session who wasn’t going to be in it was Jonesy, who played bass,’ said Page. ‘It would have been the first of all those bands, sort of like Cream and everything. Instead, it didn’t happen – apart from the “Bolero”. That’s the closest it got … The idea sort of fell apart. We just said, “Let’s forget about the whole thing, quick.” Instead of being more positive about it and looking for another singer, we just let it slip by. Then the Who began a tour, the Yardbirds began a tour, and that was it.’

In fact, there had been some efforts by Page and Beck to find an appropriate vocalist to transmogrify the ‘Beck’s Bolero’ studio line-up into a working outfit, as Page told Guitar World’s Steve Rosen: ‘Well, it was going to be either Steve Marriott from the Small Faces or Steve Winwood.’ Marriott was managed by Don Arden, the self-styled ‘Al Capone of pop’. ‘In the end, the reply came back from his office: “How would you like to have a group with no fingers, boys?” Or words to that effect.’ Sufficiently warned off, the pair never even approached the Spencer Davis Group’s Steve Winwood.

There was even controversy over the ‘Beck’s Bolero’ production credit. Mickie Most claimed it, part of a contractual issue between him and Beck, his managerial client. Simon Napier-Bell would insist it was his, and Jimmy Page claimed that he had done the record’s production, staying behind in the studio long after Napier-Bell had gone home.

‘The track was done and then the producer just disappeared,’ Page told Steve Rosen in September 1977. ‘He was never seen again: he simply didn’t come back. Napier-Bell, he just sort of left me and Jeff to it. Jeff was playing and I was in the box [studio]. And even though he says he wrote it, I’m playing the electric 12-string on it. Beck’s doing the slide bits, and I’m basically playing around the chords.’

Simon Napier-Bell has a different point of view. ‘Jimmy Page was being demeaning when we were making the record: he was sneering. Later, when Beck and Page were discussing how the mix should be, I went away to leave them to it. The purpose of a producer is so that the record ends up as it should. That’s why I went away – to leave them to it. As for Mickie Most, my agreement with him over the management of the Yardbirds was that all product reverted to him. I just said, “What the hell, I don’t need it.” I didn’t really – but that track became a rock milestone.’

When Pete Townshend discovered that Keith Moon had played on the session, he was furious. He began to refer to Beck and Page as ‘flashy little guitarists of very little brain’. Page’s response? ‘Townshend got into feedback because he couldn’t play single notes.’ Townshend later commented: ‘The thing is, when Keith did “Beck’s Bolero”, that wasn’t just a session, it was a political move. It was at a point when the group was very close to breaking up. Keith was very paranoid and going through a heavy pills thing. He wanted to make the group plead for him because he’d joined Beck.’