Jimmy Page: The Definitive Biography

‘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. There were five American tours, a UK tour, a European tour and in January 1967 an Australasian tour with Roy Orbison and the Walker Brothers, playing two shows a night. But it was not without its rewards. ‘When Jeff left and we 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 station was transformed into Radio 1 the previous autumn, a supposed substitute for the now-banned pirate stations. Interviewed by the ever-avuncular Brian Matthew, the self-styled ‘old mate’ of his audience, Page described the troubles around making the record in his boyish, accentless voice and concluded, ‘It’s quite a good product now.’

However, Jeff Beck’s summary was more to the point. ‘When I heard “Goodnight Sweet Josephine” I thought, Thank God I left the Yardbirds.’

Three days after that Saturday Club performance the Yardbirds were in Paris. They played at the Assas Faculte du Droit, supported by the Brian Auger Trinity, featuring Julie Driscoll, and recorded the Bouton Rouge television show, performing ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’’, ‘Dazed and Confused’ and ‘Goodnight Sweet Josephine’.

The next day, 10 March, the Yardbirds played at Paris’s legendary Olympia venue. Afterwards the group moved on to a private party thrown by Eddie Barclay, who ran the renowned Barclay Records. Among the celebrated guests was Brigitte Bardot, dressed in leather motorcycle gear. She looked ‘hot’, noted Page.

Back in London on 15 March, Page played a session for Joe Cocker, for his ‘Marjorine’ single and its B-side, ‘The New Age of the Lily’. (Later in the summer he would play on Cocker’s epochal version of Lennon and McCartney’s ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’, the song that made Cocker’s career.) The next day he was again in Paris with the Yardbirds for a show.

A week later, following a concert at Retford College in Nottinghamshire on 23 March, the Yardbirds flew to New York for the start of their American tour. The opening date, 160 miles from Manhattan, was at the Aerodrome in Schenectady in New York state, a venue with a famously tremendous sound system, the kind favoured by Page for the more complex sound he was developing on tunes like ‘Think About It’, ‘White Summer’ and ‘Dazed and Confused’. But such aural developments would not be employed for much longer with the Yardbirds, as the band knew before they even set off that this was to be their final ever tour.

Inspired by the prevailing softer sounds of the likes of – curiously – the Turtles and Simon & Garfunkel, and by LSD, Keith Relf and Jim McCarty had concluded that they no longer wanted to be part of the Yardbirds and would form a more folk-influenced outfit instead.

Two nights later, at Manhattan’s Anderson Theater, the Yardbirds played a pair of shows that Epic Records recorded for a live album, which would eventually be released in January 1971 but quickly withdrawn after Page protested that it was a cash-in on the success of Led Zeppelin. ‘We knew the American tour was going to be the last one, and all the pressure was off,’ said the guitarist. ‘We played well and had a really good time. We even managed to play consistently good venues; it was almost entirely universities and psychedelic ballrooms. The only low point was the Andersen Theater gig in New York, which was recorded for a live album. The rats at Epic had got wind of the break-up and decided to get the last drop of potential profit out of us. It was pure convenience for them, being based in New York, where we didn’t like playing anyway. It should have been done at somewhere like the Shrine in LA, or the Fillmore. The Anderson Theater was a horrible place, very cold and unfriendly, and it didn’t help that the Vanilla Fudge, currently local heroes, were playing across town at the Fillmore East. To cap it all, the Epic sound team had no idea how to record us. They were really straight and they just draped a few mikes around. It was pathetic. When they discovered the inadequacies of the recording, they dubbed on all those ridiculous bullfight cheers.’