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,