The Led Zeppelin saga begins in 1943, in the blackedout, heavily rationed
England of the war years. A clerk in an aircraft works named James Page
married Patricia Elizabeth Gaffikin, who worked as a doctor's secretary.
On January 9, 1944, she bore her only child, James Patrick Page, in Heston,
Middlesex. After the war the father found work as an industrial personnel
officer, and the Page family lived in Feltham, near Heathrow Airport west of
London. In the mid-1950s the Page family settled in Epsom, Surrey, a quiet
exurb of country landscapes and horse races.
Jimmy grew up almost alone in the Pages' comfortable house on Miles Road. He
doesn't remember having any playmates until he was five. "That early isolation
probably had a lot to do with the way I turned out," he said years later.
"A loner. A lot of people can't be on their own. They get frightened, but
isolation doesn't bother me at all. It gives me a sense of security."
But Jimmy Page found his best friend when he was about fifteen. It was a
Spanish-style guitar with steel strings that someone had brought to the house
after visiting Spain. Jimmy didn't know what to do with the guitar, so he took
it to school and a friend showed him how to tune it. He saw a crowd of kids
surrounding a student who was playing some skiffle song, and later he went up
to the boy and asked him to tune his guitar.
But Jimmy Page got beyond skiffle in a hurry. After he heard American rock and
roll like Elvis's "Baby Let's Play House" and Chuck Berry's "No Money Down,"
as he said, "the excitement and energy just grabbed me, and I wanted to be part
of it." Jimmy took a few lessons from a teacher in Kingston-on-Thames before
turning to the overseas radio and records for inspiration. At night he could
tune in blues and rock and roll on AFN, the U.S. Armed Forces Network from
Germany. "Solos which affected me could send a shiver up my spine," he
remembered later, "and I'd spend hours and in some cases days trying to get
them off. " At first he worked on the chorded solos on Buddy Holly records,
but then he began to concentrate on James Burton, the creative bent-note
guitarist who played on most of Ricky Nelson's hits. Burton's brilliant
guitar solos were little melodies unto themselves. The bendingstring style of
guitar solo drove Jimmy mad; trying to play them from scratch proved extremely
frustrating. Finally someone told him the secret, replacing the usual coated
third string with a much lighter, uncoated string. Otherwise the bent-notes
were almost impossible to duplicate. Soon the guitar was the consuming passion
of Jimmy Page's life, and he began immersing himself in west London's
fledgling circle of young guitarists, record collectors, and blues scholars.
One of his friends was a boy about Jimmy's age named Jeff Beck. Jeff had
built his own guitar and had been playing for a year when he and his sister
took the bus over to Jimmy's house in Epsom one weekend afternoon.
Jeff played the James Burton solo from Ricky Nelson's "My Babe." "We were
immediately like blood brothers," Jimmy recalled.
The Spanish acoustic guitar didn't last long. To duplicate the jangling guitar
sound of Burton, Chuck Berry, or Cliff Gallup (who played with Gene Vincent),
Jimmy had to have an electric guitar. So he delivered newspapers and bought a
Hoffman Senator guitar with an electric pickup. But since the Senator didn't
have a solid body, Jimmy didn't consider it a proper electric guitar. He
convinced his father to cosign a hire/purchase agreement so that he could buy
a cheap electric guitar called a Grazioso, a British copy of the classic rock
and roll guitar, the Fender Stratocaster.
By 1960 Jimmy Page was an adept of the electric guitar. Tall, very thin,
bright and alert, he was the hurdles champion of his school and a good student.
His teachers confiscated his guitar every day as he arrived in school and kept
it locked up until four in the afternoon. "The good thing about the guitar,"
Jimmy maintains, "was that they didn't teach it in school. Teaching myself was
the first and most important part of my education. I know that Jeff Beck and I
enjoyed pure music because we didn't have to."
By the time he was sixteen, Jimmy Page had played in local bands around Epsom.
In 1960, playing acoustic guitar, he accompanied the beat poet Royston Ellis at
a poetry reading at the Mermaid Theater in London. He had regained an interest
in the acoustic instrument after hearing guitarist Bert Jansch, whose
technique and sensibility would echo for years in Led Zeppelin's quieter music.
But Jimmy soon acquired an orange Chet Atkins Country
Gentleman guitar, one of the very few in England at the time, and was
soon playing with bands around western London. One night in 1961 Jimmy was
working in the support band at the Epsom dance hall, warming up the dancers
for the big southern bands of the day, Chris Farlowe and the Thunderbirds and
Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. Jimmy started to
tear the place up with his unique, natural, dancing guitar rhythm, and a
London singer/manager named Neil Christian happened to be there. After the
show he offered Jimmy the job of lead guitar in his band, Neil Christian and
the Crusaders. Since Jimmy had passed his exams, his parents gave their
permission.
The year 1965 was the prime of Swinging London. Beer was three shillings a
pint and the streets were full of Mini cars and miniskirts. There was
something new in the air and great fortunes to be made from the pop
explosion-art, music, and style - that erupted in London that year. By then the
Beatles had become almost too big to perform in public anymore, while the
Stones had deserted the Marquee and other local venues for whirlwind tours of
provincial theaters and the United States. The hippest band in London was the
loud and trendy Yardbirds, with their speedy raving R&B jams and hot young
guitarist, Eric Clapton. Ace session player Jimmy Page, partly because of his
friendship with Clapton and partly just to make the most happening
scene in town, often hung out with the band whenever they worked around London.
The Yardbirds had come out of the Richmond-Kingston area in the wake of the
Rolling Stones. Eric Clapton, rhythm guitarist Chris Dreja, and singer Keith
Relf emerged from west London art colleges, joined by bassist Paul
Samwell-Smith and drummer Jim McCarty, who'd been in a band together at
Hampton Grammar. At first they played acoustic blues as the Metropolis Blues
Quartet on Friday nights at the Railway Hotel, Norbiton. But in early 1963
they heard the Rolling Stones, changed their name to the Yardbirds, and plugged
into the R&B classics the Stones didn't play - the rest of the Howlin' Wolf,
Jimmy Reed, and Bo Diddley songbooks. But the Yardbirds also had a much
different approach than the Stones, who were locked into fairly rigid
arrangements. The Yardbirds took off from
straight R&B into free-form soloing and long instrumental sections, mostly
improvised from night to night. When their first album was released, the
Yardbirds followed the Stones into the exhausting world of package tours,
playing a different theater every night for two months. Unlike the Stones,
the Yardbirds were unable to translate their wild art college R&B into a hit
single. Late in 1964 Giorgio Gomelsky decided to change tactics and produce a
purely pop single for the Yardbirds by an outside composer with no inkling of
their basic R&B act. The song was "For Your Love" by Manchester songwfiter
Graham Gouldman (who went on to form the band 10cc). When "For Your Love" was
released in March 1965, it was an immediate worldwide hit. But blues scholar
Clapton hated the song and the idea of the Yardbirds doing any kind of music
other than R&B. Clapton refused to play on the track after much pleading, and
then quit the band.
Even before Eric Clapton left the Yardbirds, Gomelsky had asked Jimmy Page to
take the job of lead guitar. Page turned him down immediately. Obviously,
Jimmy didn't want a professional quarrel over the Yardbirds to spoil his
friendship with Eric Clapton. Instead, Jimmy gave the Yardbirds another fine
guitarist - Jeff Beck. The Yardbirds had never heard of him.
For the past year Beck had been developing into one of the hottest guitar
players in London, fronting an obscure dance band called the Tridents. But he
was always too broke even to afford new guitar strings. Jimmy was so insistent
that Jeff would be the perfect lead guitar for the Yardbirds that they offered
him the job. Jeff Beck joined the Yardbirds in March 1965. Trying to fill Eric
Clapton's shoes in a successful band was daunting, but Gomelsky took Beck to an
expensive hairdresser for his trademark "puddin' basin" cut and bought him some
flash Carnaby Street stage clothes. Beck took off from there, inventing new
guitar choreography, playing the guitar behind his head, blowing out his amps
with feedback, distortion, and psychdelic effects that would be copied by many
other bands. With no strong visual presence like Mick Jagger in the band,
the Yardbirds developed their guitarist as the group's trademark and became
a laboratory for the guitar showmen who would dominate progressive rock music.
To support their next record, "Heart Full of Soul," the Yardbirds decamped
for America in June 1965. Before he left England, Jeff showed up
on Jimmy Page's doorstep and presented Jimmy with a rare 1958 Telecaster.
"It's yours," Jeff said.
By early 1966 Jeff Beck was already trying to convince Jimmy Page to join him
in the Yardbirds so they could play dual lead guitar on stage. Beck thought
the combination of two howling psychedelic lead guitars would be devastating;
he was also desperate to put life into the band. By April the music press was
full of rumors that Jimmy Page would be joining the Yardbirds, and Jimmy
confirmed it that month at a session he played for singer Ian Whitcomb, saying
that he might replace Beck, who Jimmy said had burned out in America. Jimmy
taught Whitcomb to read the charts for the session ("kind soul," commented the
singer). The bass player was a ubiquitous session arranger who called himself
John Paul Jones.
By this time Paul Samwell-Smith was musical director of the Yardbirds, and he
produced the group's next single, "Over Under Sideways Down," whose guitar part
was reportedly sung to Jeff Beck by Simon Napier-Bell. Samwell-Smith was also
burned out. He was disgusted at the Yardbirds' slack attitude and just wanted
to produce records. In May 1966 tension within the band was obvious. Jimmy Page
drove up to Oxford one night with Jeff Beck to see a Yardbirds show at the May
Ball held every year by the university's undergraduates, who had hired both the
Yardbirds and the Hollies to play three sets apiece. As soon as the two
guitarists made their way backstage and saw the hunchbacked Keith Relf reeling
around drunkenly, they knew it was going to be a long night. The Yardbirds' first
set went well but got little response, which annoyed Relf and got him drinking
even harder. Backstage, Relf and Hollies singer Allan Clarke started to smash
refectory trays with judo blows. Relf broke all the fingers of one hand,
which swelled up like sausages, and this sent him back to the bar to deaden
the pain. During the Yardbirds' second set Relf was shit-faced. While the
band played their hits, Relf farted into the mike, told the formally attired
students to fuck themselves, then started groveling on the floor. When he got
up again he fell back into the drums and had to be dragged off. Out in the
audience Page was doubled over with laughter. For the third set they strapped
Relf to the mike stand and played all their numbers as instrumentals.
Backstage after the show, Paul Samwell-Smith quit the Yardbirds in disgust.
He invited Chris Dreja and Jim McCarty to leave with him, but they refused.
Instead, Jimmy volunteered to replace Samwell-Smith on bass until they found
somebody else. Chris Dreja says, "Page had been doing sessions for years. He
wanted to get out on the road, and I think he saw it as a good opportunity to
join a band that was out in the thick of it. And he jumped at the chance. He
was prepared to possibly play drums if necessary." (In an aside, Dreja
nervously added, "I'll get the evil eye for saying that.")
Jimmy made his debut as the Yardbirds' bassist at the Marquee in London in
June 1966. At first Simon Napier-Bell tried to dissuade the group from taking
on a shrewd professional like Jimmy. To Jeff Beck, he said, "You're the genius
guitarist in the group. To bring in someone as good as you is crazy." But Beck
and the others insisted, and Jimmy was asked to stay with the band. "He was
happy to stay," according to Dreja, "and although it wasn't his normal
instrument, he was happy to remain on bass. I think he just liked being in
the band ... He was very sweet and wanted to please. He'd do anything for you
until his ego got in the way."
In late January 1968 the Yardbirds returned to America for a tour of colleges
and psychedelic ballrooms that provided the main audience for the new
"progressive rock" that had replaced rock and roll. Almost every big city
had one or more FM stereo radio stations that broadcast rock twenty-four
hours a day, in sharp contrast to the constipated pop music policies of the
BBC at home. Sustained by pills, shots, and dope, the Yardbirds prepared to
hit the road. Managing the tour was Richard Cole, a recently hired English
employee of Peter Grant's. Twenty-two years old, six feet two, a gold
earring dangling from one ear, Cole became a central character in Led
Zeppelin's rise to the top. In time his antics with Led Zeppelin created his
own legend for Richard Cole, the ultimate road manager, the complete rock
soldier.
Cole was bom in east London in 1945. He started his career as a scaffolder,
but in a pub one day in 1965 someone offered him a job as a roadie for an
English band called the Unit Four plus Two. By 1966 he was making twenty
pounds a week road-managing the Who until his driver's license was revoked
for speeding. Then he worked for the Searchers and lived in the south of
France. At night he slept in a van owned by an English group called the
Paramounts, who later changed their name to Procol Harum. A timid little
piano player named Reg Dwight was hanging around that scene. Later he changed
his name to Elton John. Cole's next job was driving a van for a band called
Ronnie Jones and the Night Timers, with John Paul Jones on bass and John McLaughlin on lead
guitar. In late 1966 he took a job with the New Vaudeville Band, who hit with
"Winchester Cathedral." That band fulfilled Cole's fervent desire to see
America. As he puts it, "It was anyone's dream, if you're an English road
manager, to come to America. They used to leave their English roadies behind
and pick up a crew over there. They used to. I fucking reorganized that very
sharply. I said, 'Fuck that. Let's take our own equipment over there, wot
we're used to working on.' " The New Vaudeville
Band was managed by Peter Grant. When Cole went to Oxford Street
to ask about the job, Grant offered him twenty-five pounds a week. Cole
said, "Naw, fuck that. Thirty a week, take it or leave it." Grant looked at
the tall, muscular Richard Cole, sized him up as a betterlooking, less
dangerous version of himself, and said he would take it. Cole worked for
Grant - and Led Zeppelin for the next thirteen years.
Richard Cole stayed with the New Vaudeville Band until the end of the year.
(One night in Birmingham a young local drummer, whose kit had been repossessed,
asked Cole if he could set up and play the band's drums. Taking pity on the
sixteen-year-old John Henry Bonham, Cole said yes.) Cole then moved to America
and went to work with the Vanilla Fudge as a sound engineer for a hundred
dollars a week, touring on the strength of the Fudge's big hit, a light/ heavy
version of the Supremes' "You Keep Me Hangin' On." When he heard the Yardbirds
were coming back to America, he wrote
to Peter Grant and asked for the job of tour manager, and got it. I
For a month Richard Cole dragged the recalcitrant, stoned-out Yardbirds all
over America. Cole was as hard as Grant, and actually took physical chances
to protect the musicians under his care, intimidating dishonest clubowners and
beating on aggressive autograph hounds. He knew every groupie in every town,
and could actually say
to a homesick drummer as they were arriving in some wretched midwestem town
that he knew a girl there who loved English drummers. Mother hen, field pimp,
hit man, Richard Cole was dearly loved by every band he worked for. Cole was
the ultimate sergeant - big, nasty, a natural leader, an Anglo-Irish pirate who
would have been at home with the notorious White Companies, looting France
during the Hundred Years War.
The Yardbirds arrived in New York in April 1968 for a date at the Anderson
Theater, a dingy rock palace two blocks from the Fillmore East. It was a bad,
dismal night and the band was jet-lagged from their flight from Los Angeles,
the Yardbirds' adopted home. So they were angry when a staff producer from
Epic, their American record company, announced that he was going to record the
show. Nevertheless, the Yardbirds went on and opened with their theme, "Train
Kept A-Rollin'." "I'm Confused" sounded like the sound track of a horror film,
featuring dramatic hushes (this was in the depths of the Doors' "rock theater"
period), Jimmy's dramatic bow showpiece, and the dazzle guitar solo at the
climax. For "Shapes of Things," Keith Reif introduced
"Jimmy 'Magic Fingers' Page, Grand Sorcerer of the Magic Guitar." After
Jimmy's Indo-Ceitic showpiece,
"White Summer" (played on an Indian-tuned Danelectro guitar), the show ended
with "I'm a Man" and a full blast Yardbirds rave-up, Jimmy playing a wild,
flashing solo on his knees.
A few days later the group went to Epic to hear the playback. "It was a total
embarrassment," Jimmy recalled. "It was recorded on jet lag, and by a guy who
had never recorded a rock band in his life.... He had one mike on the drums,
which was unthinkable, and he miked the wrong cabinet for the guitar so that
the fuzz tone, which gave us all the sustain, wasn't picked up." Even worse,
the producer had tacked on bullfight cheers and sound effects of clinking
glasses to make the concert sound "live." The Yardbirds forbade Epic to release the record.
While the Yardbirds were in New York, Richard Cole hung out with Keith Moon
and John Entwistle at Salvation, the hot disco of the day. One night Moon and
Entwistle were bitching about the Who, about how they hated Roger Daltrey and
Pete Townshend and wanted to break up the Who and form a band with Jimmy Page
and Steve Winwood. And Entwistle said, according to Cole, "Yeah. We'll call
it Lead Zeppelin. Because it'll fucking go over like a lead balloon." Moon
roared out his maniacal bray, and Richard Cole told Jimmy about the idea the
minute he got back to the hotel.
Back in England in the late spring the Yardbirds disintegrated. Keith and Jim
didn't like the music anymore, prefening the softer styles of Fairport
Convention and the Incredible String Band. For them, the Yardbirds were
through. "I tried desperately to keep them together," Jimmy maintained later.
"The gigs were there, but Keith would not take them very seriously, getting
drunk and singing in the wrong places. It was a real shame. The group were
almost ashamed of the very name, though I don't know why. They were a great
band. I was never ashamed of being in the Yardbirds." The band's last show
was at Luton Technical College in July. The next day Peter Grant called Jimmy
and told him that Keith and Jim McCarty had quit. (Relf formed the
short-lived folk-rock band Renaissance with McCarty and Relf's sister Jane.)
Grant also reminded Jimmy that they retained the legal rights to the Yardbirds'
name and that there was a tour of Scandinavia planned for the fall if Jimmy
wanted to go on. Jimmy said he was keen.
Years later, Chris Dreja reflected on Jimmy's role in the Yardbirds:
"He worked very hard at fitting in and contributing music. He had a very
professional attitude; he was very prompt, and we [by the time he joined]
were almost degenerate, undisciplined rabble. We were getting tired, and
Jimmy was fresh and enthusiastic ... he tried to put as much in as he
could ... but he was also using it as a platform for himself, getting into
bowing the guitar and other experiments.
"I think Jimmy had really preconceived the demise of the band. He knew he
wanted to continue, with another band ... I think that both Peter Grant and
Jimmy realized the potential of the coming years, and we'd just done five
years of it, at a time when rock bands and venues were an unknown quantity.
But they realized the potential and they were obviously right."
And, with the endless painful wisdom of hindsight, Jim McCarty added,
"The worst thing was, just after we split up, the whole thing exploded,
didn't it?"
