By the time Napier-Bell wrote the ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’ lyrics, he was manager of the Yardbirds, having replaced Giorgio Gomelsky. That the talented and fascinating Gomelsky had been fired was perhaps not surprising; later he declared, ‘I should never have been a manager: I need someone to manage me.’ Though there were no suggestions of impropriety, the Yardbirds had dismissed him because of his inability to turn a profit for the group. All the same, Gomelsky had been an inspirational figure for the Yardbirds, under whose auspices they had become a hit recording act. During their first US tour in 1965 he had even secured a recording session at Sun Studio in Memphis with Sam Phillips, who had mentored Elvis Presley early in his career. The tune they recorded? The Tiny Bradshaw 1951 jump-blues classic ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’’, reworked in a rockabilly style by the Johnny Burnette Trio in 1956, and included on the Yardbirds’ US album release Having a Rave Up. ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’’ was a song that would replay significantly in the Yardbirds’ career.
‘Some time around the end of 1965 or the beginning of 1966,’ recalled Napier-Bell, ‘Paul Samwell-Smith, who played bass with the Yardbirds, called me. His girlfriend, later his wife, was Vicki Wickham’s secretary. I went to a gig the Yardbirds played in Paris. I quickly realised that a manager’s job was to keep the group together.’
Behind Napier-Bell’s management of the Yardbirds lay a continuous awkward subtext: ‘The Yardbirds were blokes in a pub talking about football. I was gay and couldn’t really enter into that world.’
During his time working in recording studios Napier-Bell had always employed session musicians. ‘You never think session players aren’t playing well: they know they are in the top league, the best in the world. They can play next to the guys in LA who would play with Sinatra.’
Napier-Bell’s first choice for guitarist was ‘always Big Jim Sullivan’. Even though, he says, ‘these guys were all infuriating. They’d put you through it. Big Jim Sullivan would always have a paperback book with him that he would read as you did a take: it would be balanced on his music stand. He would even read it halfway through the take until it came to his moment – he would be doing it to show off.’
If an additional guitarist was required, it would invariably be Page. ‘He and Big Jim would work out their parts between them. I talked to Jimmy Page enough to know he was a real session player. I knew he was a brilliant technician and admired by others. We’d also use John Paul Jones, who did all the arrangements for Herman’s Hermits. But I never really liked Jimmy Page. He had a sneer about him. At school the people who bullied me had this terrible, frightening sneer and Jimmy Page reminded me of those people. People who sneer have usually had unhappy childhoods.’
On 16 and 17 May 1966, at IBC Studios in London’s West End, Jeff Beck and Page were involved in what in retrospect can be seen as one of the very first super-sessions.
The tune was ‘Beck’s Bolero’. Maurice Ravel’s Boléro, which was first performed in 1928 at the Paris Opera, provided the basis for ‘Beck’s Bolero’; the Russian ballet dancer Ida Rubinstein had commissioned Ravel to write the work, an undulating, insistently repetitive piece based around the Spanish music and dance known as bolero.
By 1965, largely influenced by the tastes of the likes of Paul McCartney, always an assiduous culture vulture, assorted classical composers had become fashionable among fans of what formerly would have been known as ‘pop’. These composers included Bach, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Gershwin, Debussy and Ravel, whose Boléro was relatively well known in 1966. The song’s structure is considerably amended in such a way that it could be interpreted as the first blow of the hard-rock sound that Led Zeppelin would very soon develop.
‘Beck’s Bolero’ employed a formidable cast: Beck on lead guitar, Page on acoustic, revered session pianist Nicky Hopkins, the Who’s Keith Moon on drums and John Paul Jones on bass. The Who’s John Entwistle, Moon’s bass-playing rhythm partner, had originally agreed to do the session, but when he failed to turn up John Paul Jones was called in.
‘I heard rumours that Jimmy was talking with Keith Moon about joining his supergroup,’ said Napier-Bell. ‘I don’t think the name Led Zeppelin was in the air at that time, though it may have been mentioned between them. Cream was being formed at the same time. Whether that had much influence on Beck, Page and Moon, I don’t know. The Who’s managers, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, were in the same building as Clapton’s manager, Robert Stigwood. So when he was putting Cream together, they would have known all about it, as I did too. Keith Moon would have heard from Kit and Chris as to what was going on too. From my point of view, I was thinking only of keeping Jeff in the group [the Yardbirds]. Jimmy, I think, was thinking of a new group, which would be a blend of all their talents.’
‘I always try to do things wholeheartedly or not at all,’ said Beck, offering a slight rewrite of history, ‘so I tried to imagine what my ideal band would be. We had the right producer, Keith Moon on drums, Jimmy on guitar and John Paul Jones on bass. You could feel the excitement in the studio, even though we didn’t know what we were going to play. I thought, “This is it! What a line-up!” But afterwards nothing really happened because Moony couldn’t leave the Who. He arrived at the studio in disguise so no one would know he was playing with another band.’
‘Jim Page and I arranged a session with Keith Moon in secret, just to see what would happen,’ said Beck. ‘But we had to have something to play in the studio because Keith only had a limited time – he could only give us like three hours before his roadies would start looking for him. I went over to Jim’s house a few days before the session and he was strumming away on this 12-string Fender electric that had a really big sound. It was the sound of that Fender 12-string that really inspired the melody. And I don’t care what he says, I invented that melody. He hit these Amaj7 chords and the Em7 chords, and I just started playing over the top of it … He was playing the bolero rhythm and I played the melody on top of it, but then I said: “Jim, you’ve got to break away from the bolero beat – you can’t go on like that for ever!” So we stopped it dead in the middle of the song – like the Yardbirds would do on “For Your Love” – then we stuck that riff into the middle. And I went home and worked out the other bit [the uptempo section].’
‘Even though he said he wrote it, I wrote it,’ said Page, presenting an argument that would become somewhat familiar.
‘Moon did this amazing fill around the kit, and a U47 mic just left its stand and went flying across the room; he just cracked it one,’ said John Paul Jones.
‘I remember Jimmy at the studio yelling at us and calling us fucking hooligans,’ said Beck. ‘Everyone had prior commitments. That session that day, it was one day that really started my head turning – we were almost doing it.’
That band, claimed Beck, was the original Led Zeppelin – ‘not called “Led Zeppelin”, but that was still the earliest embryo of the band’.
‘It was going to be me and Beck on guitars, Moon on drums, maybe Nicky Hopkins on piano. The only one from the session who wasn’t going to be in it was Jonesy, who played bass,’ said Page. ‘It would have been the first of all those bands, sort of like Cream and everything. Instead, it didn’t happen – apart from the “Bolero”. That’s the closest it got … The idea sort of fell apart. We just said, “Let’s forget about the whole thing, quick.” Instead of being more positive about it and looking for another singer, we just let it slip by. Then the Who began a tour, the Yardbirds began a tour, and that was it.’
In fact, there had been some efforts by Page and Beck to find an appropriate vocalist to transmogrify the ‘Beck’s Bolero’ studio line-up into a working outfit, as Page told Guitar World’s Steve Rosen: ‘Well, it was going to be either