Jimmy Page: The Definitive Biography. Chris Salewicz

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СКАЧАТЬ and Page began to spend afternoons and evenings at Page’s parents’ home, playing together and bouncing ideas off each other. Page would be playing a Gretsch Country Gentleman, running through songs like Ricky Nelson’s ‘My Babe’ and ‘It’s Late’, inspired by Nelson’s guitarist James Burton – ‘so great’, according to Beck. They would play back and listen to their jams on Page’s two-track tape recorder. The microphone would be smothered under one of the sofa’s cushions when they played. ‘I used to bash it, and it would make the best bass drum sound you ever heard!’ said Beck.

      But this extra-curricular musical experimentation was not necessarily in opposition to what Page was doing on his art course at Sutton Art College: rather, these two aspects of himself complemented each other. Many years later, when asking Page about his career with Led Zeppelin, Brad Tolinski suggested that ‘the idea of having a grand vision and sticking to it is more characteristic of the fine arts than of rock music: did your having attended art school influence your thinking?’

      ‘No doubt about it,’ Page replied. ‘One thing I discovered was that most of the abstract painters that I admired were also very good technical draftsmen. Each had spent long periods of time being an apprentice and learning the fundamentals of classical composition and painting before they went off to do their own thing.

      ‘This made an impact on me because I could see I was running on a parallel path with my music. Playing in my early bands, working as a studio musician, producing and going to art school was, in retrospect, my apprenticeship. I was learning and creating a solid foundation of ideas, but I wasn’t really playing music. Then I joined the Yardbirds, and suddenly – bang! – all that I had learned began to fall into place, and I was off and ready to do something interesting. I had a voracious appetite for this new feeling of confidence.’

      Despite starting his studies at Sutton, Page would, from time to time, step in during evening sessions with Cyril Davies’s and Alexis Korner’s R&B All-Stars at the Marquee Club and other London venues, such as Richmond’s Crawdaddy Club or at nearby Eel Pie Island. Soon he was offered a permanent gig as the guitarist with the R&B All-Stars, but he turned it down, worried that his illness might recur.

      There was another guitar player on the scene at the time, a callow youth nicknamed Plimsolls, on account of his footwear. Although at first Plimsolls could hardly play at all, he was known to have a reasonably moneyed background that enabled him to own a new Kay guitar. He had another sobriquet, Eric the Mod, a reflection of his stylish dress sense, and he would shortly enjoy greater success when, rather like his idol Robert Johnson, he seemed to suddenly master his instrument, and he reverted to his full name: Eric Clapton.

      Page recalled that one night after he had sat in with the R&B All-Stars, ‘Eric came up and said he’d seen some of the sets we’d done and told me, “You play like Matt Murphy,” Memphis Slim’s guitarist, and I said I really liked Matt Murphy and actually he was one of the ones that I’d followed quite heavily.’

      Eric Clapton was not the only one to note Page’s expertise. Soon came an approach from John Gibb of the Silhouettes, a group from Mitcham, on the furthest extremes of south London. Gibb asked Page to help record some singles for EMI, starting off with a tune called ‘The Worryin’ Kind’.

      The Silhouettes would later occasionally feature Page’s new friend Jeff Beck on guitar. What has always been a fascinating psychogeographical truth is that Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, Britain’s greatest and most creative rock guitarists of the 1960s, grew up within a radius of about 12 miles of each other.

      Having witnessed Page’s guitar skills with the R&B All-Stars at the Marquee Club, Mike Leander, a young arranger and producer, pulled him into a studio for a stint as rhythm guitarist in late 1962. Page was moonlighting from art school – something that would become a pattern.

      Leander had been alerted to go and check out Page by Glyn Johns, another Epsom boy, a couple of years older than Page who had watched him play years before and was now a tape operator. Of that first meeting, years before, Johns said: ‘One evening we had a talent night. I remember a boy in his early teens no one had seen before, who sat with his legs swinging over the front edge of the stage and played an acoustic guitar. He was pretty good, he may have even won, but I don’t think anyone in the hall that night had any idea that he was to become such an innovative force in modern music.’

      ‘I was really surprised,’ Page told Beat Instrumental magazine in 1965 about Leander asking him to play. ‘Before that I thought session work was a “closed shop”.

      ‘Mike was an independent producer then. And he wanted me to play on “Your Momma’s Out of Town” by the Carter-Lewis group. The record was released and I believe it helped him considerably in joining Decca full time.’

      Soon Mike Leander had another, more prestigious session gig for Page. This studio date was with Shadows expatriates Jet Harris, a bass player, and drummer Tony Meehan. The resulting tune, ‘Diamonds’, was a number one smash, the first of a run of hits for the duo. Later, Harris and Meehan hired one John Baldwin to accompany their act on the road. Already there were glimmers of some kind of destiny at work; soon John Baldwin would metamorphose into John Paul Jones, so renamed for a solo single by Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham; Baldwin’s new moniker was derived from the film John Paul Jones, a popular 1959 movie about the famed US naval commander.

      Even though Harris and Meehan had departed the Shadows, it was a huge honour for the 18-year-old Page to play with the alumni of the group that, prior to the Beatles, was the biggest in the UK, largely due to the skill and charisma of Hank Marvin, their bespectacled guitarist.

      ‘When did I first discover Hank Marvin? When I was about 14, because in those days it was really skiffle for young kids who wanted to learn three chords and have a good time,’ Page told John Sugar on BBC Radio 4 in 2011. ‘But going past that, more into the world of the American rockabilly and rock ’n’ roll was starting to seduce us all as kids. Then you had Cliff Richard and the Drifters [as the Shadows were first known] at that time, putting forward a really, really damned good rendition of it, but it still had that sort of grit identity to it.

      ‘So really it was a question of seeing Hank playing with Cliff as a kid, looking at Hank on the television. He was good, but he came alive with the Shadows. I mean it was such a really, really good band and Hank was such a stylist … I mean, he was so cool. He was and still is. He had this image … He was such a fluent player … In those early years, all of us – Jeff Beck, myself, Eric Clapton – we all played things like “Apache”, “Man of Mystery”, “F.B.I.”, those sort of [Shadows] hits …

      ‘Hank managed to come up with this unique sound, and that sound is just so recognisable. He inspired so many guitarists in those days as kids, kids who had no idea they may even be rock stars themselves one day.’

      Playing guitar with Jet Harris and Tony Meehan on live dates, along with John Baldwin, was one John McLaughlin, who had given Page some guitar lessons when McLaughlin was working in a guitar shop. ‘I would say he was the best jazz guitarist in England then, in the traditional mode of Johnny Smith and Tal Farlow,’ said Page. ‘He certainly taught me a lot about chord progressions and things like that. He was so fluent and so far ahead, way out there, and I learned a hell of a lot.’

      The ‘Diamonds’ session kick-started a new career for Page, one in which he would play up to ten sessions a week, although he was still officially at Sutton Art College. For the next three and a half years, again while officially still a student, he became one of the UK’s top two guitar session players: the other was Big Jim Sullivan, and for a time the boy from Epsom, where he continued to live at his parents’ house, became known as ‘Little Jim’. Working with all manner of artists and styles, he honed his guitar СКАЧАТЬ