Jimmy Page: The Definitive Biography. Chris Salewicz

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СКАЧАТЬ on his way to being just as wide, he certainly had the physique for physical work, but he quickly changed course, first becoming a messenger delivering photographs on Fleet Street for the Reuters news agency, and then a stagehand at the Croydon Empire Theatre.

      After National Service in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, where he attained the rank of corporal, he became doorman – bouncer, really – at the 2i’s Coffee Bar on Old Compton Street, the birthplace of British rock ’n’ roll and the venue from which sprang Cliff Richard, Tommy Steele and Adam Faith, among others. It was during this time that he met Mickie Most, who had recently returned to London after finding success as a pop star in his wife’s native South Africa.

      Through connections he made with Most, Grant was swept up into the newly popular world of televised professional wrestling, appearing as both Count Massimo and Count Bruno Alassio of Milan. From this springboard Grant secured bit parts in a number of films – among them A Night to Remember, The Guns of Navarone and the epic Cleopatra – and television shows – The Saint, Dixon of Dock Green and The Benny Hill Show, among others.

      Grant pulled together his 2i’s connections, bought a minibus and started a business transporting rock ’n’ roll musicians to their gigs. He started off with the Shadows, before he was approached by Don Arden, who gave Grant the task of road-managing American acts he brought over for tours – the Everly Brothers, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, Gene Vincent and Brian Hyland – a role he performed with alacrity, personally ensuring the artists were paid every penny owed, in cash.

      Arden had a very nasty reputation: he was rumoured to have held Steve Marriott, of the Small Faces, out of a third-floor office window by his ankles when the diminutive singer requested an accurate accounting of his earnings. Grant learned from such behaviour. ‘When he was with Led Zeppelin he was a batterer of people,’ said Napier-Bell. ‘Although that was probably because of the drugs. When he had cleaned up he became a very nice person.’

      But that was all yet to come. Grant also acted as road manager for the Animals and the New Vaudeville Band, and began sharing an office with Mickie Most at 155 Oxford Street, on the border of then sleazy Soho in London. When Most took over the management of the Yardbirds from Napier-Bell, Grant became their de facto manager and Most’s partner in RAK Management.

      ‘They needed someone like Peter Grant,’ said Napier-Bell. ‘He wouldn’t stand for Jimmy Page’s sneering.’

      The group was losing traction in the UK, but in America they still carried considerable cachet. Grant travelled with the band on the road in the US, and, for the first time, they returned to England with money in their pockets. ‘He was a great manager for the time,’ said Chris Dreja. ‘He was hands-on, nuts and bolts. He travelled with the band. He made sure they didn’t get screwed. He loved his artists. He changed the music scene. He was responsible, especially with Zeppelin, of course, because they had such a huge audience, for changing the percentage points around between the record companies and the artists and the promoters. He was just a fantastic manager.’

      On a date in a snowbound northern American state, the bad weather caused the Yardbirds to arrive late, almost missing their call time. Furious at being so put out, the pair of Mafia promoters refused to pay the group’s fee, one of them pulling a gun. Peter Grant walked his considerable girth up to the man: ‘What? You’re going to kill me for a thousand dollars? I don’t think so.’ He got the Yardbirds their money.

      Grant became close to Page, who, he noted, seemed in control of himself and intelligent, far more businesslike than the other Yardbirds and apparently much older than his 22 years. In this odd-couple relationship, Grant expressed his ‘utter faith’ in the young but extremely seasoned guitarist. ‘It was funny how well Jimmy and Peter got on because Jimmy was a very softly spoken, gentle guy and Peter was from a very different background and education,’ said Napier-Bell. Among other things, the pair shared an interest in antiques, and they would go shopping for them together on tour.

      ‘“Peter, there’s only one problem with the band,”’ Grant had been told by Napier-Bell. ‘“There’s a guy there who’s a real smart arse, a real wise guy.” I said, “Who’s that?” He said, “Jimmy Page.” I was a bit puzzled. I thought, he must know I’ve known Jimmy since 1962/63. Apart from Neil Christian, when I was in business with Mickie Most, he did all the Herman’s Hermits and Donovan. So when I met Jimmy I said, “I hear you’re a bit of troublemaker and I should get rid of you. What have you been up to?” He said, “We did a four-week tour of the UK with the Stones and an American tour and we got £112 each.” And he was the only one who had the balls or savvy to say something. By then Mickie Most was recording them. Mickie Most is a pop producer, an excellent pop producer. And there was always a bit of friction there. The way I saw the band going, the way they wanted to carry on, was against the pop thing.’

      Yet Mickie Most appeared unaware of the cultural wind of change. ‘The intention,’ he said, ‘was to try and resuscitate their pop career.’

      In October 1967 Most insisted that a new Yardbirds 45 was released in the United States: ‘Ten Little Indians’, a song penned by Harry Nilsson and included on his second album Pandemonium Shadow Show. A truly dreadful record, it climbed no higher in the American charts than number 96, although Page had attempted to save the song, which featured a cloying brass section, by turning this into a feature after it had been subjected to what became known as ‘reverse echo’.

      That ‘Ten Little Indians’ was only released in America was a testament to how out of touch Mickie Most had become. Both Page and Grant were well aware of the emerging new underground scene in America, the more reflective, less materialistic outlook of the hippie audiences at Bill Graham’s Fillmore West auditorium in San Francisco, which became almost a temple to the Yardbirds. The soundtrack to this counter-culture was provided by the advent of FM radio and its new ‘progressive rock’ stations like San Francisco’s KSAN, New York’s WNEW and Orlando’s WORJ, which were prepared to play an entire album with no commentary from a DJ (in the UK this was mirrored to an extent by John Peel’s late-night The Perfumed Garden show on the pirate-ship Radio London).

      The ‘Season of the Witch’ was upon us. There was a new generation of American music-makers with very strange, surreal and hitherto unimaginable names that suggested copious drug consumption: Strawberry Alarm Clock, Captain Beefheart, Love, the Doors, Iron Butterfly, Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Grateful Dead. They were all allied to the burgeoning ‘rock’ album audience, a development spurred by the arrival in late 1965 of the first relatively cheap stereo systems. Long-haired, free-loving, pot-smoking and acid-dropping, this new market was cemented together by the considerable schism in American society brought about by the ceaselessly expanding war in Vietnam. Crisscrossing the United States with the Yardbirds, Page and Grant witnessed the success of first Cream and then the Jimi Hendrix Experience, seeing how they fitted perfectly into this new world. It was a musical and cultural sea change.

      Another of these novel new acts, the Velvet Underground, championed in New York City by the artist Andy Warhol, supported the Yardbirds on several shows in the winter of 1966, most notably a show at Michigan State Fairgrounds. Soon the Yardbirds started dropping a snatch of the Velvet Underground’s ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’, the group’s paean to heroin dealers, into the middle section of an extended version of their own tune ‘I’m a Man’. Page had heard the Velvets’ first album while touring the USA with the Yardbirds. ‘I’m pretty certain we were the first people to cover the Velvet Underground,’ he said. At one of those Manhattan parties at which Andy Warhol was ubiquitous, the artist asked the guitarist to take part in a screen test for him for a movie he had in mind.

      As the sole guitarist with the now four-piece Yardbirds, Page spent much of 1967 and the first half of the next year on long, gruelling tours in far-flung places. It was relentless. СКАЧАТЬ