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Biography



The Led Zeppelin saga begins in 1943, in the blackedout, heavily rationed England of the war years. A clerk in an aircraft works named James Page married Patricia Elizabeth Gaffikin, who worked as a doctor's secretary. On January 9, 1944, she bore her only child, James Patrick Page, in Heston, Middlesex. After the war the father found work as an industrial personnel officer, and the Page family lived in Feltham, near Heathrow Airport west of London. In the mid-1950s the Page family settled in Epsom, Surrey, a quiet exurb of country landscapes and horse races.

Jimmy grew up almost alone in the Pages' comfortable house on Miles Road. He doesn't remember having any playmates until he was five. "That early isolation probably had a lot to do with the way I turned out," he said years later. "A loner. A lot of people can't be on their own. They get frightened, but isolation doesn't bother me at all. It gives me a sense of security."

But Jimmy Page found his best friend when he was about fifteen. It was a Spanish-style guitar with steel strings that someone had brought to the house after visiting Spain. Jimmy didn't know what to do with the guitar, so he took it to school and a friend showed him how to tune it. He saw a crowd of kids surrounding a student who was playing some skiffle song, and later he went up to the boy and asked him to tune his guitar.

But Jimmy Page got beyond skiffle in a hurry. After he heard American rock and roll like Elvis's "Baby Let's Play House" and Chuck Berry's "No Money Down," as he said, "the excitement and energy just grabbed me, and I wanted to be part of it." Jimmy took a few lessons from a teacher in Kingston-on-Thames before turning to the overseas radio and records for inspiration. At night he could tune in blues and rock and roll on AFN, the U.S. Armed Forces Network from Germany. "Solos which affected me could send a shiver up my spine," he remembered later, "and I'd spend hours and in some cases days trying to get them off. " At first he worked on the chorded solos on Buddy Holly records, but then he began to concentrate on James Burton, the creative bent-note guitarist who played on most of Ricky Nelson's hits. Burton's brilliant guitar solos were little melodies unto themselves. The bendingstring style of guitar solo drove Jimmy mad; trying to play them from scratch proved extremely frustrating. Finally someone told him the secret, replacing the usual coated third string with a much lighter, uncoated string. Otherwise the bent-notes were almost impossible to duplicate. Soon the guitar was the consuming passion of Jimmy Page's life, and he began immersing himself in west London's fledgling circle of young guitarists, record collectors, and blues scholars. One of his friends was a boy about Jimmy's age named Jeff Beck. Jeff had built his own guitar and had been playing for a year when he and his sister took the bus over to Jimmy's house in Epsom one weekend afternoon. Jeff played the James Burton solo from Ricky Nelson's "My Babe." "We were immediately like blood brothers," Jimmy recalled.

The Spanish acoustic guitar didn't last long. To duplicate the jangling guitar sound of Burton, Chuck Berry, or Cliff Gallup (who played with Gene Vincent), Jimmy had to have an electric guitar. So he delivered newspapers and bought a Hoffman Senator guitar with an electric pickup. But since the Senator didn't have a solid body, Jimmy didn't consider it a proper electric guitar. He convinced his father to cosign a hire/purchase agreement so that he could buy a cheap electric guitar called a Grazioso, a British copy of the classic rock and roll guitar, the Fender Stratocaster.

By 1960 Jimmy Page was an adept of the electric guitar. Tall, very thin, bright and alert, he was the hurdles champion of his school and a good student. His teachers confiscated his guitar every day as he arrived in school and kept it locked up until four in the afternoon. "The good thing about the guitar," Jimmy maintains, "was that they didn't teach it in school. Teaching myself was the first and most important part of my education. I know that Jeff Beck and I enjoyed pure music because we didn't have to."

By the time he was sixteen, Jimmy Page had played in local bands around Epsom. In 1960, playing acoustic guitar, he accompanied the beat poet Royston Ellis at a poetry reading at the Mermaid Theater in London. He had regained an interest in the acoustic instrument after hearing guitarist Bert Jansch, whose technique and sensibility would echo for years in Led Zeppelin's quieter music. But Jimmy soon acquired an orange Chet Atkins Country Gentleman guitar, one of the very few in England at the time, and was soon playing with bands around western London. One night in 1961 Jimmy was working in the support band at the Epsom dance hall, warming up the dancers for the big southern bands of the day, Chris Farlowe and the Thunderbirds and Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. Jimmy started to tear the place up with his unique, natural, dancing guitar rhythm, and a London singer/manager named Neil Christian happened to be there. After the show he offered Jimmy the job of lead guitar in his band, Neil Christian and the Crusaders. Since Jimmy had passed his exams, his parents gave their permission.

The year 1965 was the prime of Swinging London. Beer was three shillings a pint and the streets were full of Mini cars and miniskirts. There was something new in the air and great fortunes to be made from the pop explosion-art, music, and style - that erupted in London that year. By then the Beatles had become almost too big to perform in public anymore, while the Stones had deserted the Marquee and other local venues for whirlwind tours of provincial theaters and the United States. The hippest band in London was the loud and trendy Yardbirds, with their speedy raving R&B jams and hot young guitarist, Eric Clapton. Ace session player Jimmy Page, partly because of his friendship with Clapton and partly just to make the most happening scene in town, often hung out with the band whenever they worked around London.

The Yardbirds had come out of the Richmond-Kingston area in the wake of the Rolling Stones. Eric Clapton, rhythm guitarist Chris Dreja, and singer Keith Relf emerged from west London art colleges, joined by bassist Paul Samwell-Smith and drummer Jim McCarty, who'd been in a band together at Hampton Grammar. At first they played acoustic blues as the Metropolis Blues Quartet on Friday nights at the Railway Hotel, Norbiton. But in early 1963 they heard the Rolling Stones, changed their name to the Yardbirds, and plugged into the R&B classics the Stones didn't play - the rest of the Howlin' Wolf, Jimmy Reed, and Bo Diddley songbooks. But the Yardbirds also had a much different approach than the Stones, who were locked into fairly rigid arrangements. The Yardbirds took off from straight R&B into free-form soloing and long instrumental sections, mostly improvised from night to night. When their first album was released, the Yardbirds followed the Stones into the exhausting world of package tours, playing a different theater every night for two months. Unlike the Stones, the Yardbirds were unable to translate their wild art college R&B into a hit single. Late in 1964 Giorgio Gomelsky decided to change tactics and produce a purely pop single for the Yardbirds by an outside composer with no inkling of their basic R&B act. The song was "For Your Love" by Manchester songwfiter Graham Gouldman (who went on to form the band 10cc). When "For Your Love" was released in March 1965, it was an immediate worldwide hit. But blues scholar Clapton hated the song and the idea of the Yardbirds doing any kind of music other than R&B. Clapton refused to play on the track after much pleading, and then quit the band.

Even before Eric Clapton left the Yardbirds, Gomelsky had asked Jimmy Page to take the job of lead guitar. Page turned him down immediately. Obviously, Jimmy didn't want a professional quarrel over the Yardbirds to spoil his friendship with Eric Clapton. Instead, Jimmy gave the Yardbirds another fine guitarist - Jeff Beck. The Yardbirds had never heard of him.

For the past year Beck had been developing into one of the hottest guitar players in London, fronting an obscure dance band called the Tridents. But he was always too broke even to afford new guitar strings. Jimmy was so insistent that Jeff would be the perfect lead guitar for the Yardbirds that they offered him the job. Jeff Beck joined the Yardbirds in March 1965. Trying to fill Eric Clapton's shoes in a successful band was daunting, but Gomelsky took Beck to an expensive hairdresser for his trademark "puddin' basin" cut and bought him some flash Carnaby Street stage clothes. Beck took off from there, inventing new guitar choreography, playing the guitar behind his head, blowing out his amps with feedback, distortion, and psychdelic effects that would be copied by many other bands. With no strong visual presence like Mick Jagger in the band, the Yardbirds developed their guitarist as the group's trademark and became a laboratory for the guitar showmen who would dominate progressive rock music. To support their next record, "Heart Full of Soul," the Yardbirds decamped for America in June 1965. Before he left England, Jeff showed up on Jimmy Page's doorstep and presented Jimmy with a rare 1958 Telecaster. "It's yours," Jeff said.

By early 1966 Jeff Beck was already trying to convince Jimmy Page to join him in the Yardbirds so they could play dual lead guitar on stage. Beck thought the combination of two howling psychedelic lead guitars would be devastating; he was also desperate to put life into the band. By April the music press was full of rumors that Jimmy Page would be joining the Yardbirds, and Jimmy confirmed it that month at a session he played for singer Ian Whitcomb, saying that he might replace Beck, who Jimmy said had burned out in America. Jimmy taught Whitcomb to read the charts for the session ("kind soul," commented the singer). The bass player was a ubiquitous session arranger who called himself John Paul Jones.

By this time Paul Samwell-Smith was musical director of the Yardbirds, and he produced the group's next single, "Over Under Sideways Down," whose guitar part was reportedly sung to Jeff Beck by Simon Napier-Bell. Samwell-Smith was also burned out. He was disgusted at the Yardbirds' slack attitude and just wanted to produce records. In May 1966 tension within the band was obvious. Jimmy Page drove up to Oxford one night with Jeff Beck to see a Yardbirds show at the May Ball held every year by the university's undergraduates, who had hired both the Yardbirds and the Hollies to play three sets apiece. As soon as the two guitarists made their way backstage and saw the hunchbacked Keith Relf reeling around drunkenly, they knew it was going to be a long night. The Yardbirds' first set went well but got little response, which annoyed Relf and got him drinking even harder. Backstage, Relf and Hollies singer Allan Clarke started to smash refectory trays with judo blows. Relf broke all the fingers of one hand, which swelled up like sausages, and this sent him back to the bar to deaden the pain. During the Yardbirds' second set Relf was shit-faced. While the band played their hits, Relf farted into the mike, told the formally attired students to fuck themselves, then started groveling on the floor. When he got up again he fell back into the drums and had to be dragged off. Out in the audience Page was doubled over with laughter. For the third set they strapped Relf to the mike stand and played all their numbers as instrumentals.

Backstage after the show, Paul Samwell-Smith quit the Yardbirds in disgust. He invited Chris Dreja and Jim McCarty to leave with him, but they refused. Instead, Jimmy volunteered to replace Samwell-Smith on bass until they found somebody else. Chris Dreja says, "Page had been doing sessions for years. He wanted to get out on the road, and I think he saw it as a good opportunity to join a band that was out in the thick of it. And he jumped at the chance. He was prepared to possibly play drums if necessary." (In an aside, Dreja nervously added, "I'll get the evil eye for saying that.")

Jimmy made his debut as the Yardbirds' bassist at the Marquee in London in June 1966. At first Simon Napier-Bell tried to dissuade the group from taking on a shrewd professional like Jimmy. To Jeff Beck, he said, "You're the genius guitarist in the group. To bring in someone as good as you is crazy." But Beck and the others insisted, and Jimmy was asked to stay with the band. "He was happy to stay," according to Dreja, "and although it wasn't his normal instrument, he was happy to remain on bass. I think he just liked being in the band ... He was very sweet and wanted to please. He'd do anything for you until his ego got in the way."

In late January 1968 the Yardbirds returned to America for a tour of colleges and psychedelic ballrooms that provided the main audience for the new "progressive rock" that had replaced rock and roll. Almost every big city had one or more FM stereo radio stations that broadcast rock twenty-four hours a day, in sharp contrast to the constipated pop music policies of the BBC at home. Sustained by pills, shots, and dope, the Yardbirds prepared to hit the road. Managing the tour was Richard Cole, a recently hired English employee of Peter Grant's. Twenty-two years old, six feet two, a gold earring dangling from one ear, Cole became a central character in Led Zeppelin's rise to the top. In time his antics with Led Zeppelin created his own legend for Richard Cole, the ultimate road manager, the complete rock soldier.

Cole was bom in east London in 1945. He started his career as a scaffolder, but in a pub one day in 1965 someone offered him a job as a roadie for an English band called the Unit Four plus Two. By 1966 he was making twenty pounds a week road-managing the Who until his driver's license was revoked for speeding. Then he worked for the Searchers and lived in the south of France. At night he slept in a van owned by an English group called the Paramounts, who later changed their name to Procol Harum. A timid little piano player named Reg Dwight was hanging around that scene. Later he changed his name to Elton John. Cole's next job was driving a van for a band called Ronnie Jones and the Night Timers, with John Paul Jones on bass and John McLaughlin on lead guitar. In late 1966 he took a job with the New Vaudeville Band, who hit with "Winchester Cathedral." That band fulfilled Cole's fervent desire to see America. As he puts it, "It was anyone's dream, if you're an English road manager, to come to America. They used to leave their English roadies behind and pick up a crew over there. They used to. I fucking reorganized that very sharply. I said, 'Fuck that. Let's take our own equipment over there, wot we're used to working on.' " The New Vaudeville Band was managed by Peter Grant. When Cole went to Oxford Street to ask about the job, Grant offered him twenty-five pounds a week. Cole said, "Naw, fuck that. Thirty a week, take it or leave it." Grant looked at the tall, muscular Richard Cole, sized him up as a betterlooking, less dangerous version of himself, and said he would take it. Cole worked for Grant - and Led Zeppelin for the next thirteen years.

Richard Cole stayed with the New Vaudeville Band until the end of the year. (One night in Birmingham a young local drummer, whose kit had been repossessed, asked Cole if he could set up and play the band's drums. Taking pity on the sixteen-year-old John Henry Bonham, Cole said yes.) Cole then moved to America and went to work with the Vanilla Fudge as a sound engineer for a hundred dollars a week, touring on the strength of the Fudge's big hit, a light/ heavy version of the Supremes' "You Keep Me Hangin' On." When he heard the Yardbirds were coming back to America, he wrote to Peter Grant and asked for the job of tour manager, and got it. I

For a month Richard Cole dragged the recalcitrant, stoned-out Yardbirds all over America. Cole was as hard as Grant, and actually took physical chances to protect the musicians under his care, intimidating dishonest clubowners and beating on aggressive autograph hounds. He knew every groupie in every town, and could actually say to a homesick drummer as they were arriving in some wretched midwestem town that he knew a girl there who loved English drummers. Mother hen, field pimp, hit man, Richard Cole was dearly loved by every band he worked for. Cole was the ultimate sergeant - big, nasty, a natural leader, an Anglo-Irish pirate who would have been at home with the notorious White Companies, looting France during the Hundred Years War.

The Yardbirds arrived in New York in April 1968 for a date at the Anderson Theater, a dingy rock palace two blocks from the Fillmore East. It was a bad, dismal night and the band was jet-lagged from their flight from Los Angeles, the Yardbirds' adopted home. So they were angry when a staff producer from Epic, their American record company, announced that he was going to record the show. Nevertheless, the Yardbirds went on and opened with their theme, "Train Kept A-Rollin'." "I'm Confused" sounded like the sound track of a horror film, featuring dramatic hushes (this was in the depths of the Doors' "rock theater" period), Jimmy's dramatic bow showpiece, and the dazzle guitar solo at the climax. For "Shapes of Things," Keith Reif introduced "Jimmy 'Magic Fingers' Page, Grand Sorcerer of the Magic Guitar." After Jimmy's Indo-Ceitic showpiece, "White Summer" (played on an Indian-tuned Danelectro guitar), the show ended with "I'm a Man" and a full blast Yardbirds rave-up, Jimmy playing a wild, flashing solo on his knees.

A few days later the group went to Epic to hear the playback. "It was a total embarrassment," Jimmy recalled. "It was recorded on jet lag, and by a guy who had never recorded a rock band in his life.... He had one mike on the drums, which was unthinkable, and he miked the wrong cabinet for the guitar so that the fuzz tone, which gave us all the sustain, wasn't picked up." Even worse, the producer had tacked on bullfight cheers and sound effects of clinking glasses to make the concert sound "live." The Yardbirds forbade Epic to release the record.

While the Yardbirds were in New York, Richard Cole hung out with Keith Moon and John Entwistle at Salvation, the hot disco of the day. One night Moon and Entwistle were bitching about the Who, about how they hated Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend and wanted to break up the Who and form a band with Jimmy Page and Steve Winwood. And Entwistle said, according to Cole, "Yeah. We'll call it Lead Zeppelin. Because it'll fucking go over like a lead balloon." Moon roared out his maniacal bray, and Richard Cole told Jimmy about the idea the minute he got back to the hotel.

Back in England in the late spring the Yardbirds disintegrated. Keith and Jim didn't like the music anymore, prefening the softer styles of Fairport Convention and the Incredible String Band. For them, the Yardbirds were through. "I tried desperately to keep them together," Jimmy maintained later. "The gigs were there, but Keith would not take them very seriously, getting drunk and singing in the wrong places. It was a real shame. The group were almost ashamed of the very name, though I don't know why. They were a great band. I was never ashamed of being in the Yardbirds." The band's last show was at Luton Technical College in July. The next day Peter Grant called Jimmy and told him that Keith and Jim McCarty had quit. (Relf formed the short-lived folk-rock band Renaissance with McCarty and Relf's sister Jane.) Grant also reminded Jimmy that they retained the legal rights to the Yardbirds' name and that there was a tour of Scandinavia planned for the fall if Jimmy wanted to go on. Jimmy said he was keen.

Years later, Chris Dreja reflected on Jimmy's role in the Yardbirds: "He worked very hard at fitting in and contributing music. He had a very professional attitude; he was very prompt, and we [by the time he joined] were almost degenerate, undisciplined rabble. We were getting tired, and Jimmy was fresh and enthusiastic ... he tried to put as much in as he could ... but he was also using it as a platform for himself, getting into bowing the guitar and other experiments.

"I think Jimmy had really preconceived the demise of the band. He knew he wanted to continue, with another band ... I think that both Peter Grant and Jimmy realized the potential of the coming years, and we'd just done five years of it, at a time when rock bands and venues were an unknown quantity. But they realized the potential and they were obviously right."

And, with the endless painful wisdom of hindsight, Jim McCarty added, "The worst thing was, just after we split up, the whole thing exploded, didn't it?"

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