Jimmy Page: The Definitive Biography. Chris Salewicz

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СКАЧАТЬ in a friendship with the Californian film director and occultist Kenneth Anger, but – as though proof that in such areas they were distinctly lightweight – fled his company the next year after the debacle of Altamont. Instead it was Led Zeppelin, driven by Page’s assiduous academic interest in altered states and realities, that provided the soundtrack to the building public interest in the occult. In 1972 TIME magazine ran a cover story bearing the strapline ‘Satan Returns’. Colin Wilson’s mammoth groundbreaking study simply titled The Occult had been published in 1971. More populist was the Man, Myth and Magic partwork series, which commenced in 1970, providing highly readable accounts of a secret world that was exciting to the newly stoned with their now-opened third eyes. As was the manner of partworks, Man, Myth and Magic was extensively plugged in television adverts, featuring an image of a demonic figure, painted by Austin Osman Spare. Spare had been close to Aleister Crowley and was sometimes described as ‘Britain’s greatest unknown artist’; Page would become the world’s leading collector of Spare’s work.

      By then there was something frightening about the very notion of Led Zeppelin. After I interviewed Page in 1979 in a relatively forthright manner for the NME, a senior editorial member asked me if I wasn’t nervous of any potential repercussions. When I told casual acquaintances I was writing this book, I was met with similar responses: ‘Jimmy Page? Black magic?’

      For some years – a decade or so – this was the prevailing view of Page. But of course time is a healer, so it should be no great surprise that by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, and in his own seventh and eighth decades, Page had redeemed himself to become the most loved and revered of all classic rock stars.

      This redemption was fitting, given that this is the man who almost singlehandedly established the notion of the guitar hero as part of contemporary culture. ‘What about Eric Clapton?’ you may ask. No: Clapton was too diverse in the paths he trod. It was the singularity of Page’s work with his vehicle Led Zeppelin, underpinned by his extraordinarily startling and sinisterly attractive appearance, that awarded him the guitar hero crown. Guitar hero? Guitar god, more like.

      His is an extraordinary story that has taken him to the very darkest of areas – but always driven by the search for his art. You might not approve of the methods employed to unleash and liberate his creativity, and you can’t avoid the impression that Page was vain, arrogant, fanatical and power-hungry, and indulged in a scandalous private life – much, of course, to the adoration of his fans. Yet many of the accusations against him were probably fabricated or at least exaggerated by his numerous enemies – though many of these, in the timbre of the times, were no more than cosmic spivs.

      Certainly, Page was a man of his age – ambitious, worldly and pleasure-loving – but the demonic caricature of evil is mostly an elaborate myth. Not that he didn’t gladly play it himself, of course. By mentioning in a very matter-of-fact manner how the congregation of the original church at Boleskine House, a home of Crowley, had burned to death, Page was positioning himself as being metaphysically hard, a cosmically tough motherfucker with complex connections to ghoulish gangs of strange spirits. It was, of course, a good way to attract impressionable women, a variant on those college student ‘astrologers’ who would take girls back to their rooms to read their charts and then shag them.

      For a time Page was fascinated with – to give it its full title – the Isis-Urania Temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a late-19th-century group of occultists whose members had included the Irish poet W. B. Yeats and Crowley, who – unsurprisingly – considered his poetry superior to that of Yeats and had a bitter falling out with the Irishman.

      ‘Much of the Golden Dawn magic,’ wrote Gary Lachman in his biography of Crowley, ‘as well as Crowley’s, has to do with what is called the “assumption of the god form”, when the magician imagines he has become the particular god he wants to invoke by visualising his form enveloping his own.’ Except you might feel that the ‘particular god’ Page wished to invoke was none other than himself: Jimmy Page, rock god.

      And this stance was carried through to every aspect of his existence, including his appearances on stage.

      ‘On the surface,’ writes the American cultural commentator Erik Davis, ‘Page’s live performances present typical rockist values of spontaneity, virtuosity and sweaty abandon. But Page adds a novel element to the figure of the guitar hero, an element … of mystery. So even as Page bares his cock rock before tens of thousands of fans, the Zoso doodle emblazoned on his clothes, he reminds us that he knows something that we don’t. There is a gap between the hero whose performance we consume and the sage behind the curtain, who remains concealed, literally occult. This mystique makes Page far creepier than Ozzy Osbourne, who is hiding nothing, except maybe his debt to The Munsters.’

      A balanced appreciation of Page’s character reveals traits both admirable and detestable, but claims of his ethical failings have sometimes overshadowed an appreciation of his keen creative mind. Besides, his flamboyantly dissolute lifestyle was hardly different from that of many other rock stars of his age – such as David Bowie, or Mick Jagger, or Rod Stewart.

      But Page had a longstanding relationship with the art of destruction, and had been preparing for a career of hotel-wrecking since early in his life. At the rear of the secondary school he went to, on Epsom’s Danetree Road, there was a bomb shelter left over from the war. Although efforts to destroy it had been made on several occasions by his fellow pupils, it was a 14-year-old Jimmy Page who finally succeeded.

      In what seems less an example of urban terrorism and more like a yarn from one of Richmal Crompton’s Just William stories, an older boy had combined sodium sulphate, weed killer and icing sugar to make several miniature bombs. A couple of these had exploded in the school grounds, with the blame always attributed to the rough kids from the neighbouring council estate.

      But then this arms race escalated. Another boy constructed a pipe bomb and placed it inside the bomb shelter. Once lit, however, the fuse on the bomb burned interminably slowly. After some 20 minutes without much progress, one of boys offered a solution: he had a fuse taken from a Jetex, a motor for model aircraft that was popular at the time, which they put in the pipe bomb.

      ‘But nobody dared light it,’ remembered Page’s friend Rod Wyatt. ‘So Jimmy said, “I’ll do it.” So he goes in the entrance of the shelter, and then he comes running out. As he runs out it goes off: P-F-O-O-F! B-R-A-MMM! And the whole corner, which was thick concrete, flies up in the air, bricks following it. And Jimmy is running out, laughing his head off into the playground.

      ‘Reflecting on this, I thought, “Was that a sign of the times? That he was going to be part of the loudest rock ’n’ roll band ever?” This gentlemanly young guitar player says, “I’ll light the jet engine. I don’t mind.” It fits Led Zeppelin perfectly.’

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       SPANISH GUITAR IN SURREY

      Born at 4 a.m. on 9 January 1944 in Heston, Middlesex, on the far fringes of London’s western suburbs, James Patrick Page was the son of an industrial personnel manager, also called James, and Patricia, a doctor’s secretary. The future superstar musician’s name was a combination of both of his parents’, who had been married at Epsom Register Office on 22 April 1941.

      According to the mythology of his rock-star legend, Jimmy Page was ‘born on a full moon’, with all the occult, mystical weight that that phrase carries. Yet this is not precisely true. He was in fact born 31 hours before the full moon of 10 January 1944. While the baby boy and his mother might have felt the powerful energy of the rising Cancer full moon as he was born, the earth’s СКАЧАТЬ