Jimmy Page

• 1. Introduction

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  Jimmy Page was thirteen when a television host asked what he planned to do with his life. His answer had nothing to do with music. The year was 1957, and the programme was All Your Own, a talent show on BBC1 hosted by Huw Wheldon. Page had come on with a skiffle quartet. When Wheldon asked what he wanted to do after school, the boy replied: "I want to do biological research to find a cure for cancer, if it isn't discovered by then." James Patrick Page had been born in the West London suburb of Heston on the 9th of January 1944. He did not cure anything. He became a guitarist whose playing influenced a host of other guitarists. How does a schoolboy practising in a suburban house turn into a player that others copy? Where did his sound actually come from? And what pulled him, as a teenager, toward the occult?

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• 2. A Self-Taught Boy

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  In 1952 the Page family moved to Feltham, and soon afterward to Miles Road in Epsom, Surrey. A Spanish guitar was already in the house, and nobody could say who had left it there. His father was a personnel manager at a plastic-coatings plant. His mother, who was of Irish descent, worked as a doctor's secretary. Page started playing at twelve. After a few lessons in nearby Kingston he mostly taught himself, learning from records because he was bored.

  A boy a few years older, Rod Wyatt, showed him his first chords. Wyatt and another boy, Pete Calvert, practised at Page's house. On some days Page played for six or seven hours. He carried the guitar to Ewell County Secondary School every day, and it was confiscated and handed back after class.

  Elvis Presley's "Baby Let's Play House" is the record Page names as the spark that made him want to play. He also admired the rockabilly guitarists Scotty Moore and James Burton, who both played on Presley recordings. Years later he reprised Moore's part in the live "Whole Lotta Love" heard in The Song Remains the Same.

  A Höfner President acoustic, bought with money saved from a summer milk round, was his first serious instrument. It had a pick-up so it could be amplified. His first solid-bodied electric was a second-hand 1959 Futurama Grazioso. A Fender Telecaster replaced it, a model he had seen Buddy Holly playing and had tried at an electronics exhibition at Earls Court in London.

  His ears ranged wide, from skiffle and acoustic folk to the blues of Elmore James, B.B. King, Otis Rush, Buddy Guy, Freddie King and Hubert Sumlin. In his words: "Basically, that was the start: a mixture between rock and blues."

  At fourteen, billed as James Page, he played Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis numbers in a group called Malcolm Austin and Whirlwinds. It was short-lived. Page then found a drummer for another band he played in with Wyatt, David Williams and Calvert, and he named them The Paramounts. They played gigs around Epsom and once supported a group that later became Johnny Kidd & the Pirates.

  At fifteen, the earliest age allowed, Page left school with four GCE O levels. He had been interviewed for a job as a laboratory assistant. A major row with the Deputy Head, Miss Nicholson, who was scathing about his musical ambitions, helped settle the question.

  Steady bandmates were hard to find. From 1960 to 1961 he backed recitals by the Beat poet Royston Ellis at the Mermaid Theatre, and he played with Red E. Lewis's backing band, the Redcaps. Then singer Neil Christian, who had watched a fifteen-year-old Page in a local hall, hired him for the Crusaders after guitarist Bobby Oats left. Page toured with Christian for about two years and played on several of his records, including the 1962 single "The Road to Love".

  Life on the road wore him down. "Every two months I had glandular fever," he said in 1975. He stopped touring, enrolled at Sutton Art College in Surrey and turned to painting. For eighteen months he lived on ten dollars a week while he rebuilt his strength, and he kept playing the whole time.

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• 3. Session Man

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  At the Marquee Club in London, the art student Page took the stage with Cyril Davies' All Stars and Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated. He also played alongside fellow guitarists Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton. One night John Gibb of Brian Howard & the Silhouettes spotted him and asked him to help record singles for the Columbia Graphophone Company, including "The Worrying Kind".

  Mike Leander of Decca Records then offered him regular studio work. His first session for the label was "Diamonds", by Jet Harris and Tony Meehan, which reached Number 1 on the singles chart in early 1963. After brief stints with Carter-Lewis and the Southerners, Mike Hurst and the Method, and Mickey Finn and the Blue Men, he went full-time in the studio.

  To avoid confusion with another noted session guitarist, Big Jim Sullivan, Page was credited as 'Lil' Jim Pea'. He was often booked as insurance, when an artist wanted a replacement or a second guitarist. As he put it: "Anyone needing a guitarist either went to Big Jim Sullivan or myself." He was candid about his limits, too. Early on, he said, producers told him to play what he wanted, because he could not read music.

  Record producer Shel Talmy favoured him, and that opened doors to the Who and the Kinks. Page is credited with acoustic twelve-string guitar on two tracks of the Kinks' debut album, "I'm a Lover Not a Fighter" and "I've Been Driving on Bald Mountain". He played rhythm guitar on sessions for the Who's first single, "I Can't Explain". Pete Townshend was reluctant to let Page's part stay on the final recording. Page also played lead on the B-side, "Bald Headed Woman".

  The list of 1964 and 1965 sessions runs long. It includes Marianne Faithfull's "As Tears Go By", the Nashville Teens' "Tobacco Road", Van Morrison and Them's "Baby, Please Don't Go", Shirley Bassey's "Goldfinger" and Petula Clark's "Downtown". In 1964 he contributed guitar to the incidental music of the Beatles film A Hard Day's Night. Later he played on five tracks of Joe Cocker's debut album, With a Little Help from My Friends.

  In 1965 the Rolling Stones' manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, hired Page as house producer and A&R man for the new Immediate Records label. That job brought him tracks by John Mayall, Nico and Chris Farlowe. He also produced one of Dana Gillespie's early singles, "Thank You Boy".

  Because of the pace, Page often cannot say exactly what he played on. "I was doing three sessions a day, fifteen sessions a week," he explained in a radio interview. Sometimes the job was a group, sometimes film music, sometimes a folk session.

  What ended it was a change in taste. The growing influence of Stax Records brought more brass and orchestral arrangements into pop, at the expense of guitars. Page said he finally quit when the calls started coming in to play on Muzak.

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• 4. Yardbirds Apprenticeship

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  In late 1964, the Yardbirds approached Page to replace Eric Clapton, and he said no out of loyalty to his friend. When Clapton quit in February 1965, Page was formally offered the spot. He worried about his health on tour and did not want to give up his lucrative studio career. So he suggested Jeff Beck instead.

  On the 16th of May 1966, Page, Beck, drummer Keith Moon, bass player John Paul Jones and keyboardist Nicky Hopkins recorded "Beck's Bolero" at IBC Studios in London. The session gave Page an idea for a supergroup with Beck, the Who's John Entwistle on bass and Moon on drums. No good vocalist could be found, and contractual problems blocked the plan. During those talks Entwistle remarked that the project would go over like a lead balloon, and Moon suggested the name "Lead Zeppelin" for the first time.

  Within weeks, Page was at a Yardbirds concert in Oxford. Backstage, Paul Samwell-Smith announced he was leaving, and Page offered to take his place. Page remembered it as destiny, since he had quit session work only a week before. He began on electric bass. Once Chris Dreja moved to bass, Page switched to twin lead guitar beside Beck.

  The pairing promised more than it delivered. Constant touring and a lack of commercial success bred conflict, and the line-up released only one single, "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago". After Beck left, the Yardbirds carried on as a quartet. They recorded one album with Page on lead, Little Games. Reviews were indifferent, and it peaked at number 80 on the Billboard 200.

  On stage, though, the band was heavier and more experimental than its polished studio sound. Those concerts previewed what Page would later perfect, most notably in performances of "Dazed and Confused".

  In 1968, Keith Relf and Jim McCarty departed. Page rebuilt the group to fulfil unfinished tour dates in Scandinavia, recruiting vocalist Robert Plant and drummer John Bonham. John Paul Jones, who had played on "Beck's Bolero", contacted him and asked to join. On that tour they appeared as the New Yardbirds. Page kept Moon and Entwistle's old joke as the name for his new band. Manager Peter Grant respelled it as "Led Zeppelin" so that nobody would say "Leed Zeppelin".

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• 5. Sound Architect

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  From the start, Page said, he had a specific plan for Led Zeppelin. He wanted a marriage of blues, hard rock and acoustic music, topped with heavy choruses. "Lots of light and shade in the music," he said. The results were enormous. Estimates of the band's worldwide album sales run beyond 200 million, and some put them near 300 million. With 111.5 million RIAA-certified units, they are the second-best-selling band in the United States. All nine studio albums reached the top 10 of the Billboard chart, and six hit number one.

  Page built much of that material alone with a tape recorder. He would expand an idea, replay it, and keep what he called the shining bits. Then he laced those pieces together into the sequence of a song.

  His years in London studios taught him how recordings were made and how not to make them. In the late 1960s most British producers put microphones right in front of amplifiers and drums. Page thought the drum sounds of the day "sounded like cardboard boxes". He preferred 1950s methods, and Sun Studio was a favourite. He took the old engineers' maxim, "distance equals depth", literally. He placed an extra microphone as much as twenty feet from the amplifier and recorded the balance between the two. That made him one of the first British producers to capture a band's ambient sound.

  For "Whole Lotta Love" and "You Shook Me" he used reverse echo, which he says he invented in 1967 while recording the single "Ten Little Indians". The tape was flipped, the echo laid onto a spare track, and the tape flipped back, so the echo arrived before the note.

  Page also changed engineers on purpose, from Glyn Johns on the first album to Eddie Kramer on Led Zeppelin II and then Andy Johns from Led Zeppelin III onward. His reason: "I consciously kept changing engineers because I didn't want people to think that they were responsible for our sound. I wanted people to know it was me." John Paul Jones agreed that the backwards echo and distance-miking were inspired. He noted that Page used a small amplifier, well miked, rather than walls of equipment.

  The instruments mattered too. A 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard, sold to Page by Joe Walsh for $500, became his main guitar from the second album onward. A 1959 Fender Telecaster, a gift from Jeff Beck, was repainted by Page with a psychedelic dragon. It carried the first album and the "Stairway to Heaven" solo. For "Kashmir" he played a Danelectro 3021 tuned to DADGAD. For live "Stairway to Heaven" he used a 1971 Gibson EDS-1275 double-neck.

  Some sounds came from beyond the guitar. Page played a cello bow across the strings, an idea he credits to session musician David McCallum, Sr. He used a scaled-down theremin called the Sonic Wave on "Whole Lotta Love" and "No Quarter". In The Song Remains the Same, he is shown playing a hurdy-gurdy.

  One guitar vanished. A 1960 black Gibson Les Paul Custom with a Bigsby tremolo was stolen in 1970. Page ran an advertisement asking for it back, but it was not recovered until 2015-2016.

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• 6. Magick and Sigils

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  At fifteen, Page picked up Aleister Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice. His reaction was immediate: "Yes, that's it. My thing: I've found it." The interest never left him.

  It surfaced in Led Zeppelin's fourth album, whose jacket carries four symbols, one for each member. Page's own, known as "Zoso", comes from the 1557 grimoire Ars Magica Arteficii by Gerolamo Cardano, where it appears as a sigil made of zodiac signs. After the album's release he often had it embroidered on his clothes, and it appeared on his amplifiers. His "Dragon Suit" carried the signs for Capricorn, Scorpio and Cancer, which are his Sun, Ascendant and Moon signs.

  Inside the same album cover is a painting attributed to Barrington Colby, influenced by the Rider/Waite tarot card called The Hermit. Very little is known about Colby, and rumours persist that Page painted it. In the fantasy sequence of The Song Remains the Same, Page transforms into that hermit figure.

  In the early 1970s Page opened an occult bookshop and publishing house, The Equinox Booksellers and Publishers, named for Crowley's magazine. The interior mixed Egyptian and Art Deco motifs, with Crowley's birth chart on a wall. His reason was plain: no London shop had a good occult collection, and he was annoyed at not finding the books he wanted. The company published a facsimile of Crowley's 1904 edition of The Goetia and Isabel Hickey's Astrology, A Cosmic Science. Then the lease expired and was not renewed.

  Page also owned Boleskine House, the former residence of Crowley. Parts of his fantasy sequence in The Song Remains the Same were filmed at night on the mountainside directly behind it. In 1978 he called Crowley a misunderstood genius whose central theme was the liberation of the person. He added that he was not urging anyone to follow Crowley's system.

  His collaboration with a fellow Crowley admirer, the underground director Kenneth Anger, ended badly. Page was commissioned to score the film Lucifer Rising and produced 23 minutes of music. The film ran 28 minutes, and Anger felt that fell short. Anger claimed Page took three years and delivered only "droning", and he called Page a "dabbler" in the occult. Page countered that he had met his obligations and had even lent Anger his own film editing equipment. He released the music on vinyl in 2012 as Lucifer Rising and Other Sound Tracks.

  Despite the collecting, Page never described himself as a Thelemite and was never initiated into Ordo Templi Orientis. The bookshop and Boleskine House were both eventually sold.

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• 7. Excess and Silence

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  In a 2003 interview with Guitar World, Page was blunt about the 1970s: "for me drugs were an integral part of the whole thing, right from the beginning, right to the end." After the band's 1973 North American tour he told Nick Kent that everyone went over the top a few times, and he did not remember much of it.

  According to tour manager Richard Cole, Page began using heroin in 1975. Cole says they took it during sessions for the album Presence, and that Page admitted shortly afterward he was addicted. By the 1977 North American tour, the habit was hampering his playing, and he had lost a noticeable amount of weight. He grew so inward and isolated that his dynamic with Robert Plant changed.

  The damage reached the studio. During the 1978 sessions for In Through the Out Door, long absences by Page left John Paul Jones with more influence on the album. In 1988 Page took offence when a Musician magazine interviewer mentioned heroin. "Do I look as if I'm a smack addict?" he replied. Asked by Q in 2003 whether he regretted it, he said no, because when he needed to be focused, he was. He pointed out that Presence and In Through the Out Door were each recorded in just three weeks.

  Page reportedly overcame the habit in the early 1980s. He was arrested for cocaine possession in both 1982 and 1984. The first brought a 12-month conditional discharge. The second, though a repeat offence usually carried a jail sentence, ended in a fine.

  The larger blow came in 1980, when John Bonham died at Page's home. The band broke up. For some time Page refused to touch a guitar, grieving for his friend. He returned to a stage in March 1981, at a Jeff Beck show at the Hammersmith Odeon.

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• 8. The Long Encore

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  Later in 1981, Page joined Yes bassist Chris Squire and drummer Alan White in a supergroup called XYZ, short for ex-Yes, ex-Zeppelin. They rehearsed several times, but the project was shelved. Some of the material resurfaced in the Firm's "Fortune Hunter" and in the Yes songs "Mind Drive" and "Can You Imagine?".

  In 1982 he recorded the Death Wish II soundtrack with director Michael Winner at his studio, The Sol in Cookham. The 1983 ARMS charity concerts, honouring Small Faces bassist Ronnie Lane, who suffered from multiple sclerosis, followed. At the Royal Albert Hall, Page played Death Wish II material with Steve Winwood on vocals. Every show ended with a jam on "Layla" that reunited him with Beck and Clapton.

  With singer Paul Rodgers he formed the Firm. Their 1985 debut, with "Radioactive" and "Satisfaction Guaranteed", peaked at number 17 on the Billboard pop albums chart and went gold in the US. Mean Business followed in 1986. At the 1985 Live Aid concert, Page played with Plant and Jones, with Phil Collins and Tony Thompson sharing the drums. The band judged it sub-standard, and Page blamed a poorly tuned Les Paul. In 1988 he released his solo album Outrider.

  The 1990s brought two partnerships. In 1993 he made an album with Whitesnake's David Coverdale. In 1994 he reunited with Robert Plant for MTV's Unplugged series. The 90-minute special, called Unledded, premiered to the highest ratings in MTV's history. Their studio album Walking into Clarksdale followed in 1998, with the Grammy Award-winning songs "Most High" and "Please Read the Letter". That year he also played on Puff Daddy's "Come with Me", which heavily samples "Kashmir". In 1999 he toured with the Black Crowes, and the pair released the double live album Live at the Greek in 2000.

  Page was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2005 for his Brazilian charity work. The Action for Brazil's Children Trust, founded in 1998 by his wife Jimena Gomez-Paratcha, was part of it.

  On the 10th of December 2007, the surviving members of Led Zeppelin, with Jason Bonham on drums, played a charity concert at the O2 Arena in London. Guinness World Records says 20 million online requests were made for tickets, a record for any single concert. The performance was released as the 2012 concert film Celebration Day. It earned a 2013 Grammy for Best Rock Album. At the closing ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics, on the 24th of August, Page and Leona Lewis performed "Whole Lotta Love". That same year, the documentary It Might Get Loud, which Page co-produced, followed him, The Edge and Jack White. Its premiere came on the 5th of September at the Toronto International Film Festival.

  The verdicts are consistent. Rolling Stone called him "the pontiff of power riffing" and ranked him number three in its 2015 list of the 100 greatest guitarists. Gibson placed him second in 2010. Guitarists influenced by him range from Eddie Van Halen to Slash and Steve Vai. Queen's Brian May told Guitarist in 2004: "I don't think anyone has epitomised riff writing better than Jimmy Page". Stevie Nicks said she would put a band around them tomorrow if he would play with her.

  A full Led Zeppelin reunion never followed. In 2014 Page said he was "fed up" with Plant's refusal to play. Plant replied that the chances were "zero" but offered to write with Page, only unplugged. In September 2024 the Academy of Achievement honoured Page at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., for more than five decades of making music and for his philanthropy.

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