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