Jimmy Page: The Definitive Biography. Chris Salewicz

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СКАЧАТЬ their joint screen time, Page’s almost girlishly pretty looks – which crease momentarily into a smile – contrast powerfully with Beck’s pugnacious posture, like that of a yob awaiting his borstal sentence. You can see why, for the brief time they played together, the pair proved such a potent force in the Yardbirds.

      Along with the Yardbirds on the Dick Clark Caravan of Stars tour were bill-toppers Gary Lewis & the Playboys, whose singer was the son of comedian Jerry Lewis. The group – safe in a Herman’s Hermits/Gerry and the Pacemakers kind of way – had seven successive US Top 10 singles. Then there were ‘Wooly Bully’ hitmakers Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs; the Distant Cousins; Bobby Hebb, high in the US charts that summer with his sophisticated, sexy ‘Sunny’; and early sixties vocal star Brian Hyland, purveyor of puppy-love pop. Soon, as album rock became the principal market force, several of those acts would see their careers nosedive forever.

      The tour wound through the south, the Midwest and East Coast before winding up in Huntington, West Virginia, on 27 November. ‘Thirty-three dates, I think, and of those twenty-five were doubles, two shows in one night,’ said Page. ‘You’d think a double would be played in the same town, but it wasn’t – it was two different towns. The show was in two halves. When the first half finished, and there was an interval … the performers would get on the coach driving to the next venue, while the second half carried on. Then, they in turn carried on to the next place, where the others had by then finished. It was the worst tour I’d ever been on, as far as fatigue is concerned. We didn’t know where we were or what we were doing.’

      Travelling conditions were abysmal, the artists being driven 600 miles or so a day in a pair of converted Greyhound buses to play four songs each at every show. ‘The other acts had little or nothing in common with us,’ said Jim McCarty. ‘Sam the Sham and his Pharoahs, Brian Hyland. I mean, they were just so different, though Sam the Sham had his moments. Anyway, when they let us off the bus, we’d go onstage and they’d shout, “Turn the guitars down!” Jimmy was getting through it because he was a professional. Chris and I stood up to it because we were creating humour from all sorts. Keith was drinking his way along. But Jeff …’

      Jeff Beck was becoming a specialist in crossing the United States in a bad mood: ‘The bus was supposed to have air-conditioning, but didn’t seem to. And all the American groups on the bus played their guitars non-stop, and were always singing. Could you imagine? Cooped up on a stuffy bus with everyone around you singing Beatles songs in an American accent?’

      His technique honed on the set of Blow-Up, Beck cut a destructive swathe through the tour’s initial dates: amps thrown out of windows, instruments smashed. ‘Jeff Beck had to be coaxed into smashing his guitar for the Blow-Up scene,’ said Napier-Bell. ‘And then he fell in love with doing it and with smashing his amp. I’m sure Jimmy Page was counting the nights, because then Jeff Beck left.’

      The frustration within the group began to mount, and, as Beck would admit in hindsight: ‘I was quite messed up. At 21 I was really on my last legs. I just couldn’t handle it.’

      ‘One time in the dressing room,’ recalled Page, ‘Beck had his guitar up over his head, about to bring it down on Keith Relf, but instead smashed it to the floor. Relf looked at him with total astonishment, and Beck said, “Why did you make me do that?”’

      In the middle of the tour, in Harlington, Texas, Beck caught a taxi to the airport and flew to Los Angeles – where, of course, Mary Hughes awaited him. Beck’s explanation for his departure? A return of his chronic tonsillitis. He was going to have treatment and would soon return, he said.

      The day after Beck disappeared, Napier-Bell was obliged to appear on a local television show to announce that the next Yardbirds concert had to be cancelled. Showing that they were perfectly adaptable under stress, Relf and Page scoured the area for a joke shop. When Napier-Bell took a lengthy pull on the cigar his pair of charges had presented to him, he had to jump back as it exploded in his mouth – in the middle of the live television broadcast. At the time there was a term for such behaviour among UK groups: looning. Page’s part in this moment clearly showed that he was not above indulging in this, although, given the complicated relationship he had with his manager, was there a subconscious maliciousness in the very notion of this deed?

      Once again, Page took over as the sole lead guitarist. ‘Jimmy was always a real pro,’ said Chris Dreja, ‘whereas Jeff was a man of emotion. I think Jeff always found it harder than Jimmy because he was prone to playing according to how he felt, whereas Jimmy’s idea was always, “We’re professional entertainers.”’

      ‘I didn’t like my territory being encroached upon, and I wanted to be it, to do all the guitar playing,’ admitted Beck. ‘And when it got to the point when I was exhausted, we then embarked on a six-week Dick Clark tour. Six hours in that thing was enough for me. To be faced with those kind of travel problems and emotional tear-ups, and you’d get to the end and play a toilet gig with music you didn’t feel comfortable with, was a recipe for disaster. Things just got on top of me and I cracked up, basically. I wanted to do something other than travelling … So it’s not important whether I was kicked out or I left – it just happened.’

      After a period of reflection in Los Angeles, Beck attempted to return to the Yardbirds. He realised that he had essentially been suffering from a minor nervous breakdown. But when word got back to the Yardbirds that their AWOL guitarist had been seen enjoying himself in LA nightclubs, they voted Beck out of the group.

      ‘That was the point at which I gave up on trying to manage the Yardbirds,’ said Napier-Bell. ‘I thought it was too difficult and the only person I really liked in the group – apart from Chris Dreja, who is a nice guy, a good person – was Jeff Beck. So I kept the management of Jeff Beck. I found Jimmy very difficult to deal with. Always narky.’

      Page, however, felt it was unsurprising he was considered awkward: ‘Bloody right. We did four weeks with the Rolling Stones and then an American tour and all we got was £112 each!’

      One aspect of Page that Napier-Bell had observed was the guitarist’s tendency to be tucked away in a corner reading yet another esoteric volume by Aleister Crowley. ‘People would ask him about it, and he would reply something along the lines of, “Oh, you wouldn’t understand it. You’re not intelligent enough.”’

      6

       ‘YOU’RE GOING TO KILL ME FOR A THOUSAND DOLLARS?’

      If Aleister Crowley performed a role as a kind of absent metaphysical father figure to Jimmy Page, the fastidiously loyal Peter Grant would prove to be a very physical manifestation of one.

      Born into considerable poverty on 5 April 1935 in London’s South Norwood, Peter James Grant was the illegitimate son of a secretary. He never met his father, who was rumoured to have left his mother because she was Jewish – even though she was employed as a typist for the Church of England Pensions Board.

      Soon Grant and his mother moved to a tiny terraced house in down-at-heel Battersea, on the edge of the Thames. During the Second World War his school was evacuated, and he was sent to Godalming in Surrey, where he was educated at posh public school Charterhouse. Bullied by resentful incumbents, he developed an abiding loathing of the upper classes that would remain with him all his life. Emotionally distraught at being torn from his mother and home, meagre though it was, Grant began to put on the excessive weight that would characterise him.

      ‘This boy will never make anything of his life,’ read the final report by the headmaster of the south London school where Grant finished his education.

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