Jimmy Page: The Definitive Biography. Chris Salewicz

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СКАЧАТЬ carried on,’ he said, ‘the pure nature of the band was that they had a lot of numbers you could really stretch out on.’

      Back in Britain from Australia during February 1967, Page worked with Brian Jones at IBC Studios on the soundtrack for A Degree of Murder. Directed by German New Wave filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff and starring Jones’s girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, the film was entered for competition at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival. Although both Page and Nicky Hopkins, the celebrated session pianist, played on the soundtrack, along with Small Faces drummer Kenney Jones, with Glyn Johns engineering, there was never an official release for Brian Jones’s music. ‘Brian knew what he was doing,’ said Page to Rolling Stone. ‘It was quite beautiful. Some of it was made up at the time; some of it was stuff I was augmenting with him. I was definitely playing with the violin bow. Brian had this guitar that had a volume pedal – he could get gunshots with it. There was a Mellotron there. He was moving forward with ideas.’

      ‘I don’t remember much about the sessions other than we got Jimmy Page to come and play some amazing guitar during the murder scene and that the German director was thrilled with the end result,’ recalled Glyn Johns.

      Page still had time to play the occasional session. For the past couple of years, Johns had produced Johnny Hallyday’s records, a Gallic Elvis who was indubitably the biggest music star in France. Hallyday would often record in London, and a distinct attraction for anyone working on his sessions was that he always paid in cash. But on this occasion he decided to work in Paris, with his own band, which included Mick Jones, later of Spooky Tooth and then Foreigner. ‘I took Jimmy Page,’ recalled Johns. ‘He was nothing short of brilliant.’

      On the tune ‘À Tout Casser’ Page performed one of his greatest session moments. And on ‘Psychedelic’ he employed a bluesy, Albert King-like bending riff that would resurface a couple of years later on Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’. The tune has a classic freak-out section as Hallyday repeats the word ‘psychedelic’ over and over to blasts of Jimmy Page guitar.

      During this period in early 1967 Page became briefly involved with 19-year-old model Heather Taylor. A friend of New York photographer Linda Eastman, Taylor had run the fan club for Monkee Davy Jones and briefly been his girlfriend; she had also been a lover of Jimi Hendrix – ‘Foxy Lady’ was allegedly written for her – and Jeff Beck.

      After Page met her at Ondine, the fashionable Manhattan nightclub, she had followed him to London. But he quickly told her they were ‘seeing too much of each other’ – after only three dates in London. Taylor was later introduced to the Who’s Roger Daltrey by her Californian friend Catherine James, who was living in London with former Moody Blue Denny Laine. Taylor would go on to marry Daltrey, while Catherine James would crop up again in Page’s future.

      Fresh from his experience on the A Degree of Murder soundtrack, which was very much part of the ‘progressive’ new musical order in his eyes, Page was keen on leading the Yardbirds in a similar heavier and more experimental direction. Later in 1967, this would include the group’s rendition of a new song, sometimes known as ‘I’m Confused’, but more reliably as ‘Dazed and Confused’.

      On 25 August 1967, the peak of the year’s alleged Summer of Love, the Yardbirds played two shows at the Village Theater in downtown Manhattan. They were supported by the Youngbloods and by Jake Holmes, a singer-songwriter who spun a twist on the folk tradition by working with a guitar and two bass instruments but no drums. Watching from the wings, Jim McCarty was impressed by Holmes’s song ‘Dazed and Confused’, with its descending riff, as was Page. The next day they went and bought The Above Ground Sound of Jake Holmes, his debut album, on which ‘Dazed and Confused’ was featured. Adapting the song, but only to an extent, with Keith Relf altering the lyrics, ‘Dazed and Confused’ became a stand-out performance in Yardbirds live shows for the last ten months of the group; Page’s dramatic and highly effective flourishing of a violin bow on his guitar during the performance was an undoubted highlight. ‘Dazed and Confused’ became a showcase tune on the first Led Zeppelin album.

      In the UK the Yardbirds were beginning to seem increasingly irrelevant, but in the United States they remained a substantial concert attraction. Yet even there, the hits didn’t keep coming, largely because – as with ‘Ten Little Indians’, which would be released later that year in the US – their selection made almost no sense.

      The Yardbirds’ Greatest Hits was released in March 1967 in America, and made number 28, their biggest-selling US album. But whereas the Yardbirds’ three biggest singles had been written by group members, from now on Mickie Most brought in – as he had done with their first hit ‘For Your Love’ – songs by established hit-making teams.

      Accordingly, the choice of some of the 45s released seemed baffling. Written by Harold Spiro and Phil Wainman, ‘Little Games’ was released in March 1967 in the US and a month later in the UK. It only reached number 51 in America and didn’t even chart in the UK. As the title track of the next Yardbirds album, released in mid-July only in the United States – a mark of their dwindling UK status – the single was intended as a trailer for the LP.

      There were further odd decisions. ‘Ha Ha Said the Clown’, for example, had been a Top 5 hit in the UK for Manfred Mann, but had failed to gain any chart movement whatsoever in America. Most persuaded the Yardbirds – or, more accurately, Keith Relf plus session musicians, including John Paul Jones, who arranged much of Most’s material – to record the song and release it in the States. In July 1967 ‘Ha Ha Said the Clown’, not featured on Little Games, staggered up to the number 45 slot in America. The breezy pop tune was an extraordinary choice for the Yardbirds to release, utterly inappropriate for the market they were trying to build in the States. But the B-side was another matter altogether: the explosive ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor’, written by Page and Jim McCarty, with a bass-line like a relentless train rolling, featured the first recorded instance of Page using a violin bow on his guitar.

      The Little Games album – derided by Page as ‘horrible’ – did contain some interesting moments: ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor’ itself, and ‘Glimpses’, a suggestion of the way Page’s compositional mind was developing. ‘It featured the violin bow, and when it was played in concert I had tapes that played all this stuff – the Staten Island Ferry, locomotives, shock sounds – with textures from the bow. But we didn’t get a chance, with the Yardbirds, to take it far enough,’ he told Rolling Stone’s David Fricke; and ‘White Summer’, a mesmerising instrumental piece that he would perform live, both with the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin, on his 1961 Danelectro 3021 or his 1967 Vox Phantom XII 12-string guitar.

      ‘Goodnight Sweet Josephine’ was the Yardbirds’ last single, released in March 1968. Written by Tony Hazzard, who had also composed ‘Ha Ha Said the Clown’, it was about a man-eating groupie who lived in Clapham in south London – where Hazzard himself was based. Uncertain whether to commemorate its clear music-hall origins or celebrate its implied cultural comment, it did neither and ended up truly awful – a shockingly bad record. First recorded at the end of 1967 at Advision Studios in London, with Mickie Most producing, the Yardbirds disliked the final result so much that they insisted on doing a further version, on 6 February, at De Lane Lea Studios. It was no help, however; the single was the worst they ever released, and the group quickly asked for it to be recalled, reissuing a further version in the United States and Australasia. On the other hand, the single’s B-side ‘Think About It’ had much more going for it – a shredding solo midway through that Page would take in all its glory into Led Zeppelin’s version of ‘Dazed and Confused’. With his assiduous thoroughness, the guitarist had grabbed the production of the B-side from Mickie Most.

      On 6 March 1968 Page gamely went to plug ‘Goodnight Sweet Josephine’ on the long-running BBC radio show Saturday Club – the show had been a Saturday morning feature of the Light Programme before the СКАЧАТЬ