Whole Lotta Love

"I’ve got a painting in the attic,” laughs Jimmy Page when I express astonishment at how healthy he looks.

It’s a knowing laugh. We’re both aware of the multi-layered implications of this seemingly innocuous quip.
The boundary between fact and fiction has seldom been as blurred as in the case of the handsome virtuoso rock guitarist who once bought Boleskine House, the Loch Ness lair of Aleister Crowley, the occultist who scandalised society early in the last century and was dubbed “the wickedest man in the world” by the British press.
Page, it was whispered in the ’70s, had sold his soul to the devil. How else were we to explain the phenomenal success of his group Led Zeppelin? And they were huge, setting attendance records, releasing a series of multi-million-selling albums, flying in their own Lear jet, revered by fans, revilled by some critics and, all the while, setting new standards for rock’n’roll excess.
It was said that he enthusiastically indulged in depraved sex orgies of the type Crowley once used to summon otherworldly powers. It was suspected that the guitarist’s interest in Crowley’s writings, not least The Diary Of A Drug Fiend, was largely responsible for the bad luck that dogged the band in its latter years.
This aura of mystery and malevolence continued to cling to the band long after it imploded following the death of drummer John Bonham, as a result of a vodka binge, in 1980. And it became, in part, an obstacle to the band’s reformation.
But there is a painting. And I’ve just seen it.
Perhaps it’s not akin to the mythical Dorian Gray picture to which Jimmy alludes. But, nonetheless, it is impressive. A framed portrait of Jimmy, wearing that famous stage outfit with the dragon emblazoned on it, Gibson in hand, was delivered earlier by Bill Curbishley. It was painted and signed by the late John Entwistle. Jimmy hasn’t seen it yet so I don’t mention it for fear of spoiling the surprise.
But this artwork has the power to take me back to the beginning because, curiously, it’s variously been The Who’s bass-player or drummer Keith Moon who’s been credited with devising the name for the band which would come to dominate rock throughout the ’70s.
Jimmy Page, the whizz-kid session player, who contributed guitar to tracks by hundreds of artists in the ’60s (including The Kinks, The Who, Them, Jackie DeShannon, Lulu, The Redcaps, Marianne Faithfull, Burt Bacharach, Brenda Lee, Dave Berry, Joe Cocker, Nico, Johnny Halliday, Chris Farlowe, Billy Fury. The Bachelors and Val Doonican), had joined The Yardbirds as a bass-player. Eric Clapton had earlier been replaced by Jimmy’s suggested axeman, Jeff Beck. Soon the volatile Beck quit and Page was in control. By the time The Yardbirds collapsed, Jimmy had divined a style that he felt would make for an exciting band.
Having recruited a fellow session-player, John Paul Jones, Page was directed to singer Robert Plant by his first choice frontman Terry Reid. Fortuitously, Plant introduced Page to drummer John Bonham. And, with a minimum of rehearsal in which they reassembled a bunch of old blues riffs and rock’n’roll tunes, The New Yardbirds set off on a short tour of Scandanavia.
It was September 1968. Now he needed a fresh name for this distinctive new outfit. “It’ll go down like a lead Zeppelin,” was the phrase that stuck in Page’s mind from a year earlier when the idea of forming a supergroup with Moon and Entwistle was mooted. He had his name. He had an album, hastily recorded with Page as producer, of the material that made up their early stage repertoire. “It took 36 hours and cost £1,700,” recalled Robert Plant later. “We set standards for ourselves that we knew we couldn’t ever dip away from. I didn’t even know what we had. I was 19 when I heard the tapes of our first rehearsal.”
Led Zeppelin then hit America.
Booking agent Frank Barselona and manager Peter Grant agreed that a hot live band energised by a guitar hero could be worldbeaters. Zeppelin toured extensively. Their live set was so dramatic and exciting that it pulverised any other bands on the bill. The heavier they came, the harder they fell. Iron Butterfly, Vanilla Fudge and Grand Funk Railroad were just some who came a cropper.
Zep’s reputation grew. And grew. They were the rock’n’roll juggernaut that Barselona had wished for. The next time he saw a band which he believed would make a similar impact on audiences he signed them. That was U2.
All these years later, Led Zeppelin can still top the American charts with How The West Was Won, a live triple-CD set of concerts from L.A. and Long Beach in 1972. 2003 also saw a new DVD release of, essentially, three live shows – the Royal Albert Hall in 1970, Earl’s Court in ’75 and Knebworth in 1979.
They function both as a scholarly historic document and an electrifying entertainment package. How it was. What it is. The bomb.

EAMON CARR: It’s astonishing to consider that you’ve gone through two decades and more of your life knowing that these amazing performances were languishing on tape somewhere.
JIMMY PAGE: Yeah but I hadn’t heard them. Back in 1980, when we lost John Bonham, I was very keen then to do a chronological live album which would have taken us right back and started off with the Albert Hall stuff from 1970. We don’t have any multi-track recordings prior to that. And it would have taken us, pretty much as this did, all the way through. I was keen to do that because I felt it was needed – and justified. Because it would showcase the band, and John Bonham’s input especially, ’cos we’d just lost him, and show the ever-changing face of it.
At that time there was only The Song Remains The Same as a visual episode. And even that had all these fantasy sequences in it. Which were fun – but the thing for me was definitely the live aspect of it. It was something which was... you never knew exactly how it was going to go each night. It was pure improvisation, spontaneity, come what will, you know. Something out of the ether, basically.
But Robert Plant wasn’t very keen on the idea then. I don’t know why. You should ask him. We put out Coda instead, which was the remnant of the studio stuff. In fact all we had out there was The Song Remains The Same, which then was VHS, and the CDs of it which came out in advance of the visual. Of course along the way there’s a BBC session.
What precisely kick-started the process?
Really it was as a result of the DVD project getting on a roll, which started because we’d managed to acquire the footage of the Royal Albert Hall – which was the first time we’d tried to film the band. The second time being 1973 in Madison Square Garden. It was in other hands and there was no point in getting into a legal battle with it. The lawyers would have took the money and we would have got nowhere. We just had to buy it back. The rest of the band were quite keen to have the Royal Albert Hall go out on its own as a show. It was good and it had its moments but when I went looking for the 8-tracks, there was all this other stuff winking at me (laughs). I could see a much bigger picture. Which is exactly what we’ve got.
Having missed out on seeing Led Zeppelin in concert, what I’m experiencing on these tapes is something of the freedom of expression that I get at a traditional music session or when I hear a bunch of blues musicians playing together. It isn’t as tightly pre-packaged as the live performances of most rock bands.
It’s mutating and it’s changing. And that’s part of the magic. The set-list actually didn’t change from the beginning of a tour until the end and the reason was because we were changing the numbers inside. There were elements that would come out each night that were fresh. I suppose, in fact, the closest thing to relate it to is jazz. But I never ever listened to jazz. I never made it my business. What I heard was the elements of rock musicians in the ‘50s and blues musicians of Chicago. They were jamming, you see. That was more the element that I was coming from. Whereas jazz players might have wanted to sound like a horn I was wanting to sound like a harp. It was all different.
You know the elements of folk...it’s very curious this. In a way, it is folk music. It’s just that if we’d had been fifty years beforehand we’d have been playing the sort of the folk music that would have been relative to what we would have taken on board as our roots and our influences. It’s just that, as things opened up with communication of music and what was available via discs and all the rest of it, our source was wider. The reality of it is that it’s just something that’s coming from the streets. It’s not something, thank god, that you can learn from a text book. You take it on board. It’s not a thing that’s academic. It’s something that’s taken on more as your passionate appetite.
At what stage back then did you became convinced that you got the musical experiment right?
Oh I knew we had it right, right from the start. Because I had come out of The Yardbirds. The Yardbirds had folded and I’d learnt a lot playing in The Yardbirds. And I had a lot of my own things worked out in their areas of improvisation. They used to call it free-form. Basically that’s what it was and I’d come up with a lot of stuff. And a lot of that was coming through from blues roots. It was going right back to Billy Boy Arnold and those sort of records and that’s basically it. They were jamming on the records. Eric (Clapton), who was in The Yardbirds had his version of it. Jeff (Beck) had his. By the time there was just the four members, I had my version of things.
But also in the meantime, I was listening to what was going on acoustically in folk music and the virtuosity of six-string players in England. The likes of Davy Graham. And really that was one of my access roads through to Arabic music, through hearing him. Because I’d heard he’d been to Tangiers and he’d played with the musicians and I was listening to all this stuff and it was really thrilling for me. And the likes of what Bert Jansch was doing at that time. Mind you, they had come through from that sort of Mingus and soul-jazz aspect of things. And again it was more flavours. And I’d really become quite engrossed in Indian music again, sourced through Ravi Shankar and Vilayat Khan. That was pre-Beatles even. I was a bit of a sponge taking in all these different..er..from the likes of rockabilly, to rock to even the big band aspect of rock, like Little Richard.
But for me, I was also really intrigued at what (made) groups tick. And the interplay of musicians. That was really it. And, this great panorama of music. It’s just like everything else. You know this thing of, ‘What music do you like?’ Well it’s like, ‘I like good music’. There’s a small percentage of good music in any category and the rest is not for my taste. That’s it. I was really fortunate that there was so many different types of music that could capture my imagination.
There’s a curious sense of serendipity in the band’s formation. As I recall, you originally were interested in working with the great Terry Reid, Mister Superlungs, as your vocalist. And he recommended Robert, who in turn introduced Bonzo.
And four people who were so different from each other in their normal life. We were all our own men in that respect as well. It wasn’t like we all hung out socially. That might be a bit of a disappointment to some people but the reality of it was, you put those four people together and you get those instruments starting to tick over and, boy, it was just pouring out. Just stuff that was fantastic. There was definitely some divine intervention that we had to be together.
John Bonham’s concert performances on the DVD are an eyeopener. He was such a powerhouse rock’n’roll drummer – but also wonderfully orchestral.
Yeah. His imagination and his technique was second to none. There’s no doubt about it, he was the greatest rock drummer that ever lived but, taking him out of the category of rock, he’s right up there with the greatest drummers ever.
I sense these releases have prompted a fresh reappraisal of the band and its music.
That’s what I always said. I said, this is going to be reappraised for its musicianship.
But even more than that. I think you can expect a re-examination of the band’s vision and overall contribution. Perhaps moreso in Britain than in America, where you’ve always been regarded as totemic figureheads.
Yeah, we got a hammering in the press. In those days there was there Melody Maker, Sounds and the NME and I’ll tell you, when the fourth album came out, in Melody Maker we got a paragraph as a review.
At the time I thought that was really insulting and that they were taking the piss. Now when I think about the reviews that we got, they’d probably been given an album and had to review it in a very fast time to make the schedule and to be first in there and I think it just baffled them. I think it confounded them. I really do. Each album being so totally different to the one that preceded it, there was no point of reference in the one beforehand, apart from the fact that it was these four musicians making music.
People might have been worried about making a mistake, like rock writer Richard Williams, who reviewed pressings of John and Yoko’s The Wedding Album which inadvertently contained just a series of studio engineer’s test tones.
Yeah, it was like the Emperor’s New Clothes. They were all afraid to fall into certain traps. Anyway, that’s how it went. But we wanted to be measured by the albums and by live performances, because we weren’t doing TV. We weren’t a Top Twenty band. We weren’t miming. We weren’t putting out singles. That’s why we broke that mould and we didn’t get sucked back into it. We were our own band.
The BBC sessions sounded pretty hot. Did you give advice on how best to mike up the amps or the kit on those sessions?
No, no. no. You’ve got to understand that those engineers at the BBC were tip-top. They had the training. It was a real serious apprenticeship. They knew what the microphones were all about. They knew what they were doing. We had some really good BBC sessions. You know what used to happen? When the engineers got really good, they’d take them out of that department and they’d become producers. An engineer would be quite a star if he was out there in another field, like at EMI or whatever. But because it was the BBC you got promoted. I always found that quite ironic.
You know when we were doing ‘Stairway’ on the BBC sessions, it hadn’t even been released. That’s how brave a band we were. It hadn’t been released. At the Royal Albert Hall on the DVD we played ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’ and that wasn’t to come out until much later.
Many people who listen to today’s pop stars and b-list celebrities complaining about overwork and stress have absolutely no idea of just how hardworking a band Led Zeppelin were. And yet, with the exception of Bonzo, bless him, you’ve survived and thrived.
Okay, take this on board. You listen to the How The West Was Won, and admittedly it’s taken from two concerts at LA Forum and Long Beach, but basically it’s one night and it was an insurance to record the next night in case anything went wrong. I took that because I knew how well we played everytime, and I always played well in Los Angeles. Even beforehand, with The Yardbirds, and the early dates we’d done there before 1972, it was always a high point playing in LA. It still was even with Page and Plant.
You’ve got to understand that a three and a half hour concert of that sort of intensity and that sort of, basically, channelling what’s going on, you don’t just come off of that stage and go back home and go to bed. You can’t. You’re just vrroom, vrroom, vrroom! And you’re getting that night after night. I’ll tell you something, when we were in New York doing Song Remains The Same I didn’t sleep for five nights, so that’s six days, because it was right at the end of a tour and I was just going, going , going. I couldn’t conceive of something like that now. I can’t go for a night without sleep now without being absolutely shattered. But then again, if I was on tour and I was getting that adrenalin tap going, I don’t know. I don’t want to try (laughs).
For the record, I’ve got to ask if the band is planning to play some live gigs.
During the time that I was in the studios, and I was going to maybe five studios in one day between audio, video and editing suites, right, I went into the audio studio and Kevin Shirley, who was doing the engineering, said, “It’s in the papers that you’re going to be doing a tour next year.” I said, “I beg your pardon?” He said, “Yeah, it’s everywhere. They say you’re touring next year.” I was really insulted because I was really involved in this and it was a heavy workload. I was quite happy doing it because it was all moving forward but I thought, “What on earth? Who’s gone and made an announcement like that?” Without doubt it certainly wasn’t one of the band. I can put my hand on my heart and tell you that none of the band have even discussed going on the road.
So is a reunion absolutely out of the question?
The fact is, if the three memers could be in a room with their instruments and pick up the instruments and play the instruments and look each other in the eye and have a really good smile behind those eyes, then I could see a way where it would make sense to say, “Well what about if we started to do a few more numbers? Let’s see how we feel.”
But, I tell you what, for me there’s no other reason that would get me out there because (a) you’re going to earn multi-millions or (b) because somebody says, “You’ve got a tour booked and shouldn’t you do it?” It’s got nothing to do with that for me. It’s because the Led Zeppelin legacy, and what it means musically, means so much to people, I
couldn’t go out there and do a half-arsed version of it and I wouldn’t expect anybody else to. ‘Cos people see right through it and because it’s something that never happened before. It just wouldn’t be on. That’s what it means. I’m not counting it out but it’s not on the horizon. That sums it up and that’s all I can say about it.
The timing of these releases in 2003 seems inspired, what with the emergence of so many wonderful guitar bands. I’m thinking here of people like The White Stripes and so on.
Yeah and everybody’s talking about them, no matter where I go. The thing that pulled me into it when I was a kid, and still does, was the energy of these records and the atmosphere. And that’s what they’ve got. They’ve got the thing that punk had, a resurgence of the energy.

[photo:Cathal Dawson]