Friday 22 June 2018

Best Musicians I've Seen - 4.5 Jimmy Page

I've already mentioned Rolling Stone magazine's top 100 guitarists. RS is, of course, an American publication and so it is remarkable that three of the top five guitarists had their careers launched, as Wikipedia puts it, in a moderately successful British band from the sixties - the Yardbirds. While Eric Clapton had profile from his time in John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page came to prominence via a band that mixed top 10 pop songs (For Your Love, Heart Full of Soul, Evil Hearted You) with progressively more adventurous guitar breaks.

I've not seen Clapton or Beck live, though Clapton's guitar work in Cream was exceptional and the wacky guitar break in Beck's Hi Ho Silver Lining is one of my favourites in a pop song. Apparently, Beck plays entirely by ear, never learned how to read music and claimed not even to know what key he was playing in when asked by band mates. I have, however, seen Jimmy Page play twice. Page was also largely self taught, picking up a guitar that had been left behind at a house his family moved into when he was 12 and starting to experiment. He must have been a natural as by 13 he appeared in a tv talent competition. Invited to join a band he contracted glandular fever and  had to stop touring. Hanging around the Marquee club he played with Clapton and Beck and got occasional gigs as a stand in guitarist. Getting an invitation to help out at a recording session led to him becoming a regular session musician for Decca records, including playing on the Jet Harris hit Diamonds and subsequently songs as diverse as The Who's I Can't Explain (which Townshend is touchy about), the Rolling Stones Heart of Stone, Baby Please Don't Go and Gloria by Them (featuring Van Morrison) and, more prosaically, Petula Clark's Downtown. When Clapton left the Yardbirds he recommended Page, who turned down the gig because he was still wary of touring - and earning steady money from sessions, though Page has denied that was a factor*. He recommended they go for Beck instead, which they did. But eventually he tired of sessions when his label moved to making what Page called muzak. A week after Page quit sessions the Yardbirds bass player left and Page got a call to fill in.  Soon he was playing lead alongside Beck until he left also left.

By the time the Yardbirds folded in 1968, Page had made many of the contacts he needed to start his own band, Led Zeppelin. Peter Grant, Zeppelin's manager, had been the Yardbirds' US tour manager. John Paul Jones, the Zeppelin bass player, had filled in with the Yardbirds. And Page had honed his technique playing sessions and touring with the Yardbirds. He told Rolling Stone magazine "I knew instinctively what the music should be doing. It's what I learned touring with The Yardbirds." Indeed, the band he put together appeared as The New Yardbirds until a name was chosen. Famously, when told the name was to be Led Zeppelin, Annie Nightingale said something like "you won't be successful with a name like that". Six American number one selling albums followed....

I saw was lucky enough to see Page with Led Zeppelin at Manchester University in 1971. They were already a huge band but this was just before the era of stadium gigs. So it was a fairly intimate gig in what was then known as the Main Debating Hall, now called  "Academy 2". Led Zep were warming up to tour what would be the "Four Symbols" album, aka Led Zeppelin IV. As I have previously mentioned, there was less inhibition in those days about bootleg recordings and I can distinctly recall them playing Going To California and, of course, Stairway To Heaven, before they were released. But it was the songs from their first album, in particular Since I've Been Loving You and Dazed and Confused, with Page using a violin bow on his guitar strings, that were the most memorable. That and the bunch of young females standing just behind us who I felt sure were going to wet themselves every time Robert Plant opened his mouth, which did get a bit wearing.

Moving on - Page has been a buddy of Roy Harper since the 1960s and has played on ten Harper tracks including a jointly billed album, Harper and Page's Whatever Happened to Jugula, made in 1984. The two musicians played many gigs as an acoustic duo, some of them billed anonymously. I've had a memorable first hand report of one such gig, which I'll keep for another occasion. Page has appeared with Harper sporadically since and I saw one such gig, Roy's 70th birthday event at the Royal Festival Hall in November 2011. Page came on to duet with Harper on The Same Old Rock, one of Harper's most significant songs, from his 1970 masterpiece album Stormcock, one of their earliest recorded collaborations. The song ends with an extended acoustic guitar duet which I still find breathtaking, having listened to it endlessly since I was a student. I say duet, but it is, of course, Harper backing Page. Fortunately 40 years on Jimmy's dexterity had not been too dulled by all the drugs and he nailed it.

It seems to me that, back in the day, many of the most successful musicians served an apprenticeship of some duration before they found fame. Page has said on numerous occasions that his sessions and then touring experience with the Yardbirds was the making of him. He would play three sessions a day, six days a week, never knowing what he would be playing in advance and having to hit the notes as soon as he was counted in.

And, as far as anyone having that much success can do, he seems to have remained as modest as when he first met Roy Harper. Harper has recounted that, when playing at a festival in the late 1960s, a quiet chap "with trousers that were too short for him" queued up to ask for an autograph, shuffling off without saying a word. It was only later that Harper realised the chap with the trouser issue was Jimmy Page of the new group Led Zeppelin, who were also on the bill. Their subsequent long friendship led to recording and touring together in Britain and the States and the tribute track, Hats Off To Harper, on Led Zeppelin III.

There have been many reports about Page's spat with his neighbour in London. But then that is Robbie Williams, over the latter's plans for an iceberg style underground house extension next door to Page's grade 1 listed house, the Tower House in Melbury Road,  Holland Park built by the architect and designer William Burges which is significant enough to have its own Wikipedia page. Page has owned and lived in it since 1972. Apparently Page, mindful of the delicate plasterwork, only ever plays the acoustic guitar at home and is concerned about vibration damage during excavation. Anyone who dislikes Williams has good taste as far as I'm concerned but, more importantly, unlike some top guitarists Page is a master of both main forms of his instrument.

So, whether or not he's a decent bloke, Jimmy Page is undoubtedly a fine guitarist and he's on my shortlist.

* On the way to Led Zeppelin: Jimmy Page on the Yardbirds years, Rolling Stone 27 Nov 2012

Also Wikipedia and stuff I've picked up all over the place, including being there.

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