Jimmy Page: The Definitive Biography

Graham agreed to sign; his own lawyer told him that as he was acting under duress, it would not be legally binding. Besides, Graham had a plan. Knowing that Led Zeppelin would be staying in San Francisco for a further night following the Sunday show in Oakland, he had arranged with the local district attorney to arrest those culpable on the Monday morning.

At the Sunday concert the loathing of Graham’s entire crew towards Led Zeppelin was palpable: they glowered at the band and anyone connected with them. Page played most of the show seated, and he and Jones both looked bored. Robert Plant, however, sang very well indeed, dropping occasional words of commiseration in the direction of Graham; bootlegs indicate that it was a far better show than the previous day, partly because Led Zeppelin appeared drug-free. Still, it was a tense affair, and many in the audience were drunk and rowdy. Rumours were running round that a murder had been committed the previous day.

The next day, Bonham, Grant, Bindon and Cole were arrested at the San Francisco Hilton and taken, hands cuffed behind their backs, across the bay to Oakland to be booked, where they were held in a cell for three hours. There was a very real chance that if the case went to a criminal court, all involved would be deported and never be able to work again in the United States, a serious financial worry.

Bonham was charged with a single count of battery, as was Grant; Cole and Bindon were each charged with two counts of battery. The news of their arrest and the incident at Oakland Coliseum made the news all around the world. When they were eventually released they were bailed at $250 on each charge.

As the arrests at the hotel were taking place, Jones was exiting the Hilton through a rear door. He climbed into a camper van with his family and drove out of San Francisco towards Oregon and Washington state, on a planned holiday before Led Zeppelin’s next date, in New Orleans, at the city’s Louisiana Superdome. He was set to rejoin the band there on 30 July, in time for the show that night.

‘As far as I was concerned, every one of those guys in the band was absolutely 100 per cent accountable for that shit. Because they allowed it to go on,’ said Bob Barsotti. ‘And we weren’t the only ones it happened to. We were just the last ones. We were the only ones who stood up and said something. When we started looking into it, there were incidents like that all across the country on that tour. Trashed hotel rooms. Trashed restaurants. Literally like twenty-thousand dollars’ worth of damages at some restaurant in Pennsylvania. Really outrageous stuff. Like where they physically abused waiters and people in the restaurant, and then just bought them off.’

‘They would do things after the show,’ said Peter Barsotti. ‘The traditional “go get chicks out of the audience for the band”. I remember standing by the ramp and seeing these guys get girls to come over. It was like no other feeling I’d ever experienced. It was like these girls were going to be sacrificed. I wanted to go out and grab these girls and say, “Don’t do it, honey. Don’t do it.” I’m as hardcore as the next guy. But I was afraid for these girls.’

If it could be possible, worse was to come. Arriving on 26 July at the Royal Orleans Hotel in New Orleans, Plant received a phone call from his wife in England: she told her husband that Karac, their five-year-old son, was seriously ill and had been taken to hospital.

Then came another call from her. Karac had died.

A devastated Plant flew back to England. All remaining dates on that eleventh Led Zeppelin tour of the United States were cancelled.

At the funeral of Karac, Plant was joined by Bonham and Cole. But there was no Page, who had flown instead to Cairo, where he was ensconced by the pyramids in the luxurious Mena House Hotel. Jones, for his part, had simply resumed his family holiday. And Grant had also remained in the US. Plant would not forget this.

On 26 July Graham received a call from the Zeppelin manager. ‘I hope you’re happy,’ Grant muttered down the line.

‘What are you talking about?’ Graham asked.

‘Thanks to you, Robert Plant’s kid died today.’

That one absurd assessment by Grant captured everything that had gone wrong with Jimmy Page’s Led Zeppelin project.

Just considering the death of Karac Plant sets off an inescapable collision of images of those nude blond children crawling up the boulders on the Houses of the Holy sleeve, and of the child being held aloft, as though for sacrifice. You can’t help but feel that this might have crossed the mind of the bereft Robert Plant on his wretched plane ride home.

The Oakland incident, and the death of his singer’s son, marked an extraordinary, certainly hubristic fall for Jimmy Page, who since the beginning of Led Zeppelin in 1968 had become the greatest archetype of a globally successful rock star that Britain has ever seen.

‘Jimmy Page grew up in the hypocrisy of the United Kingdom in the 1950s and found three chords that saved him,’ said his friend Michael Des Barres. ‘As Led Zeppelin developed, heroin was obviously the fuel of that mad coach ride through the countryside. And inevitable.’

The mystery of Led Zeppelin had been established almost entirely through the endless enigma that is Page; later, as the apprentice matured, Plant would offer a separate sort of leadership within the group. In tandem with their extraordinarily lyrical atmospherics, Zeppelin’s complex beats were the dominant soundtrack for popular culture for nigh on a decade. But the music was only one part of it; without Page’s extremely pure comprehension of the intangibles of rock ’n’ roll – the perfect manner in which to exit a limousine, for example – Led Zeppelin would not have been granted their place in the pantheon of rock ’n’ roll gods.

From the very start – those first publicity pictures with his fluttering eyelashes and choirboy’s face – Page displayed a slightly smirking look of utter confidence and haughty control, with a hidden promise of something sinister cloaked beneath it. There is that very early photograph of the four Led Zeppelin musicians in 1968 clustered around the bonnet of a Jaguar Mk 2 3.8, which had a reputation as a bank robber’s car. Page is encased in a then fashionable double-breasted overcoat, its collar pulled rakishly up; he stares at the camera from between those curtains of crimped black hair, smouldering with self-assurance and poise. It is an image maintained in the first official promotional shot of the band, issued by Atlantic Records: the utter Capricorn control of Page leaning over the other three members – his string-pulling hands resting on the shoulders of the two Midlands neophytes, drummer John Bonham and Plant, who resembles a frightened faun caught in the headlights.

Their look – especially that of Page – is like that of Charles I’s cavaliers, perhaps especially of Lord John Stuart and His Brother, Lord Bernard Stuart, Anthony van Dyck’s 1638 painting of two teenagers who would be killed in the English Civil War.

Half an inch under six foot tall, permanently clad in sensuous velvet and sexy ruffled shirts, his jawline frequently dusted with five o’clock shadow, and always with that aura of androgynous otherness, Page looked to many women – and plenty of men too – like dirty sex on a stick. This image was as integral to his art as the 20-minute guitar solos with which he would blast his audience’s eardrums – the violin bow he would employ when performing ‘Dazed and Confused’ clearly doubled as a wizard’s wand to manipulate concertgoers.

And it only gets better: this romantic dandy lives in a castle with a moat. Jimmy Page does very bad drugs seemingly forever and – unlike Keith Richards, a mere also-ran in the greatest ever UK rock star stakes – never gets busted … at least until Zeppelin is over. Moreover, he is held responsible for an entire genre of music – heavy metal! – with which his group is only tangentially involved, his true focus being a blending of UK and US folk traditions with a garage band sense of hard rock.

In his renowned isolation he is like a rock ’n’ roll version of Howard Hughes. But in many ways, the very idea of Jimmy Page is as much a construct as any of David Bowie’s personae. And – lest we take this too seriously – it is worth considering that when his own persona is deconstructed, Page is sometimes little more than a high-art version of Screaming Lord Sutch, the plumber rock ’n’ roll showman on whose attractively kitsch shock-rock records he played session guitar.

‘Everyone I worked with in the 1960s thought that rock ’n’ roll was really an aspect of showbiz,’ said Dave Ambrose, who played bass in Shotgun Express (with Rod Stewart) and the Brian Auger Trinity, who supported Led Zeppelin in San Francisco in April 1969. Later, as an A&R man, Ambrose signed the Sex Pistols, Duran Duran and the Pet Shop Boys, among others.

Many of Page’s expenditures – the palatial residences, the vintage cars he was unable to drive (he never passed his test), the enormous collection of rare guitars – seemed designed to garner respect and support among the world’s wealthy and influential, to make people aware of him, to elevate his extraordinarily inscrutable profile, and to establish himself as one of the principal men about whichever town he found himself in.

But at the same time, here was a rebel cocking a snook at the Establishment, having what he knew he wasn’t meant to have. With Led Zeppelin there always was that sense of being resolutely ‘underground’, a card played with perfect panache by the band for most of their career: hardly ever on television, with no singles released in their homeland, Zeppelin existed from the very beginning as their own outsider identity. In a sense the damning review of their first album by John Mendelsohn in Rolling Stone, a magazine Page came to loathe, was perfect for them; it set in motion the ‘us against them’ agenda from which Led Zeppelin’s success soared.

By 1977, the year their myth savagely unravelled, they would come to be seen as the embodiment of behemoth rock, all that the new punk movement stood against, but when Led Zeppelin started out in 1968 their anti-Establishment stance was about as punk as it could be.

‘The big question today is, Why hasn’t he done new music?’ said Michael Des Barres. ‘Well, why does he have to? Jimmy Page is his own art piece, a performance artist, and he’s busy curating his legacy. There is nobody else whose roadie was Aleister Crowley. And it worked. Led Zeppelin were not a band; they were a cult.

‘Led Zeppelin brought together all those kids who otherwise would just hang around parking lots in two-bit American cities, kids for whom the obvious decadence of the Rolling Stones didn’t really connect. Instead, Led Zeppelin were their cult; they became a focus for and brought together all those disaffected, lost souls who would take the fantasy world of the group and its subject matter and project onto it their own interpretation of what they were.’

The world was ready for just such a package. Around the time the Rolling Stones were writing 1968’s ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had dabbled 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 (#u9f42648e-3e1c-5cb0-9932-1087e0f7fd79)

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 only natural satellite was not yet at its peak. In time Page would become a student of astrology; he would learn that in his astrological chart his moon was in moody Cancer, his sun sign was determinedly ambitious Capricorn, and he had Scorpio rising, with its suggestion of powerful sexuality and interest in arcane areas of life.