On 27 March 1964 Page played heavy fuzz-tone guitar on Carter and Lewis’s ‘Skinny Minnie’.
By now this was becoming customary practice for the guitarist. Again, in early 1964, on a session for Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, Page augmented his guitar with his Gibson Maestro Fuzz-Tone on a single that was released in October that year, ‘Dracula’s Daughter’, and its B-side ‘Come Back Baby’, a studio date engineered by the legendary Joe Meek in his tiny Holloway Road set-up. (David Sutch, as his name was registered at birth, was an eccentric English rocker who appeared onstage in a coffin, sometimes dressed as Jack the Ripper – also the title of an earlier Decca single on which Page played – and based his act on the American Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, who had written and recorded ‘I Put a Spell on You’. Sutch’s Savages proved a fertile training ground, employing – among many others – guitarists Jeff Beck and Ritchie Blackmore and drummer Carlo Little, who had played briefly with the Rolling Stones prior to Charlie Watts. In 1963 Sutch stood as a candidate in a UK by-election, representing the Monster Raving Loony Party, the beginning of a career as a perennially unsuccessful Parliamentary candidate. Later, in 1964, Sutch founded Radio Sutch, a pirate broadcaster based in a wartime fort near the Thames estuary. Before the decade was out, Lord Sutch would reappear in the life of Jimmy Page.)
In September 1964 Decca Records paid for the dynamic, soulful American singer Brenda Lee, who was signed to the label, to come to London to record at Broadhurst Gardens. ‘She said to me, “I’ve come here to make a record with the British sound.” She felt she wouldn’t get the same sound in Nashville because they’re only just catching up on the British beat group sound of about six months ago,’ said producer Mickie Most to Rolling Stone magazine.
The tune chosen to acquaint Little Miss Dynamite with the zeitgeist was ‘Is It True’, another song written by Page’s musical allies John Carter and Ken Lewis. The guitarist used an early wah-wah pedal on the record, which hit the same number 17 spot on both sides of the Atlantic.
By now Pete Calvert, Page and Rod Wyatt’s guitar-playing buddy from Epsom, had rented a London flat, 4 Neate House in Pimlico. Page would drop in and sometimes stay over if he had an early gig the next day. Soon Chris Dreja of the Yardbirds moved in to one of the rooms.
A desire to improve upon and expand his natural abilities seemed second nature to Page. Having bought a sitar almost as soon as he learned of the instrument’s existence, he became one of its earliest exponents in the UK. ‘Let’s put it this way,’ he said. ‘I had a sitar before George Harrison. I wouldn’t say I played it as well as he did, though. I think George used it well … I actually went to see a Ravi Shankar concert one time, and to show you how far back this was, there were no young people in the audience at all – just a lot of older people from the Indian embassy. This girl I knew was a friend of his and she took me to see him after the concert. She introduced him to me and I explained that I had a sitar, but did not know how to tune it. He was very nice to me and wrote down the tunings on a piece of paper.’ On 7 May 1966 Melody Maker, the weekly British music paper that considered itself intellectually superior to the rest of the pop press, ran an article entitled ‘How About a Tune on the Old Sitar?’, with much of its information taken from Page.
This questing side of him surfaced again in his efforts to improve his abilities on the acoustic guitar. ‘Most great guitarists are either great on electric or great on acoustic,’ said Alan Callan, who first met Page in 1968 and in 1975 became UK vice president of Swan Song Records, Led Zeppelin’s label. ‘But Jim is equally great on both, because he is always faithful to the nature of the instrument. He told me that, quite early on, he’d gone to a session and the producer had said, “Can you do it on acoustic rather than electric?” And he said he came out of that session thinking he hadn’t nailed it, so he went home and practised acoustic for two months.’
The first half of the 1960s was a boom period for UK folk music, with several emerging virtuosos, revered by young men learning the guitar or – in Page’s case – always eager to improve. John Renbourn, Davey Graham – who incorporated Eastern scales into his guitar playing – and Bert Jansch were the holy triumvirate of these players; Page was especially turned on by Jansch, who introduced him to ‘the alternate guitar tunings and finger-style techniques he made his own in future Zeppelin classics such as “Black Mountain Side” and “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp”,’ according to Brad Tolinski in his book Light and Shade.
‘He was, without a doubt, the one who crystallised so many things,’ Page said. ‘As much as Hendrix had done on the electric, I really think he’s done on the acoustic.’ Al Stewart, a folk guitarist and singer, and, like Jansch, a Glaswegian, explained to Page that Jansch’s guitar was tuned to D-A-G-G-A-D – open tuning, as it was known. Page started to employ this himself.
3
While much of Jimmy Page’s work consisted of bread-and-butter pop sessions, from time to time he would be offered the opportunity to indulge his creative side. On the morning of 28 January 1965, for example, half a dozen of Britain’s most accomplished musicians met at IBC Recording Studios at 35 Portland Place in London for the morning session slot. Page was on guitar, Brian Auger on organ, Rick Brown played the bass and Mickey Waller was the drummer, with Joe Harriott and Alan Skidmore on saxophones. They were assembled to record an album with the American blues legend Sonny Boy Williamson. ‘We started at 10 a.m. and it was all done by 1 p.m.,’ recalled Waller. ‘Also, it was done completely live: there were no overdubs. We all sat in a circle and played.’ After Williamson grew progressively more drunk, his skewed sense of timing made the session increasingly difficult.
Page later recalled: ‘Sonny Boy was living in [Yardbirds’ manager] Giorgio Gomelsky’s flat. Somebody told me once that they went to the house and they heard Sonny Boy plucking a live chicken. I don’t know how true that was. That didn’t happen when I was there. Sonny Boy and I rehearsed these numbers in the manager’s flat, and by the time we got into the studio a couple of days later Sonny Boy had forgotten all of the arrangements. It was cool. Good music comes out of that.’ (During Sonny Boy Williamson’s time in Britain, the bluesman performed at Birmingham Town Hall: there, a 16-year-old Robert Plant, stunned almost breathless from watching his performance, didn’t permit his awe to prevent him from sneaking backstage and stealing one of the blues master’s harmonicas – revenge, apparently, for the legendarily acerbic Williamson having told Plant to ‘fuck off’ when the teenager attempted to greet him while standing side by side at a urinal.)
When the Sonny Boy Williamson album session took place, Page had just become involved with another American – one who was blonde and female. Jackie DeShannon, hailing from Kentucky, was a beautiful singer-songwriter and a musical prodigy from an early age. By the time she was 11 she had her own radio show. In her early teens she had become a recording artist, at first singing country music. Her records ‘Buddy’ and ‘Trouble’ came to the attention of the great American early rocker Eddie Cochran. With Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly, Cochran was a rock ’n’ roll singer-songwriter; by a measure of synchronicity he was also a hero of Page – Led Zeppelin would sometimes feature covers of some of Cochran’s greatest songs: ‘C’mon Everybody’, ‘Summertime Blues’, ‘Nervous Breakdown’ (which effectively was what ‘Communication Breakdown’ was) and ‘Somethin’ Else’. ‘You know, you look like a California girl,’ Eddie said to her. ‘I think that you should be in California if you want to have a great career.’
DeShannon moved to Los Angeles, where Cochran was based, and he teamed her up with singer-songwriter Sharon Sheeley, his girlfriend, who wrote ‘Poor Little Fool’ for Ricky Nelson. The two girls started to write songs together, resulting in ‘Dum Dum’, a hit for Brenda Lee, and ‘I Love Anastasia’, which scored for the Fleetwoods. (Along with Gene Vincent, Sharon Sheeley was injured in the car crash in England that took Eddie Cochran’s