About Jimmy Page

Jimmy Page also played with Yardbirds, Led Zeppelin

Taking up guitar when he was 14 years old, Jimmy Page made his first TV appearance the same year, playing in a skiffle group on a talent show – when his stated ambition was to become a research biologist rather than a musician. A couple of years later, he’d changed his mind and left school to join the rock’n’roll circus. He played with a few minor acts and was making a reasonable living from it, but had to abandon touring when he fell ill with glandular fever and recommenced education, as an art student.

He carried on playing, though, and often sat in with acts at the Marquee Club, which led to him being recruited to play sessions while he was still a teenager. His first session for the Decca label was on Diamonds (a track for former Shadows members Tony Meehan and Jet Harris) which reached number one in January 1963 shortly after Page had turned 19. And there, but for the grace of God, went James Patrick Page.

Sessions were certainly lucrative for him: As Tears Go By (Marianne Faithfull), Tobacco Road (The Nashville Teens), Hear Comes The Night (Them, with Van Morrison) and contributions for The Kinks and The Who were just some of his output for 1964. The following year he was recruited by Andrew Loog Oldham, manager of the Rolling Stones, as producer and head of A&R for Immediate Records and began writing songs. His credentials for his future role with Led Zeppelin – for whom he was producer and a major contributing writer as well as guitarist – were in place.

It was the diminishing importance of the guitar in the pop music of the time that led to his disenchantment with session playing. Right on cue, a vacancy arose in the Yardbirds – a group which had previously approached him to replace Eric Clapton, but which he turned down because he was unwilling at that time to give up his session career, recommending Jeff Beck instead. This time, Page was so keen to take the job that he started by playing bass, until Chris Dreja, the band’s rhythm guitarist, took over and Page joined Beck in a twin lead lineup.

The Yardbirds, once Page had joined, became the prototype for Zeppelin, which was originally billed as The New Yardbirds and was formed to fulfil outstanding commitments when the band had effectively split in 1968. The new band – Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones (who Page knew from the session scene) and John Bonham – also played some old Yardbirds material, notably Dazed and Confused (available on the Lick Library DVD/CD Jam with Led Zeppelin), and, Page has said, was conceived to help realize creative ideas that he had begun to assemble while with the Yardbirds.

Led Zeppelin was an instant success – with the public – though reviewers (notably John Mendelsohn in Rolling Stone) slammed their first album, released in January 1969). That album made number 10 in the American charts, and has, to date, sold more than eight million copies in the US alone. The follow up, released the same year, went to number one on both sides of the Atlantic, and the two together (along with the Zeppelin stage show) virtually set the blueprint for the heavy metal acts that sprang up in their wake.

Page’s playing has also acted as a template for aspiring learners with Led Zep tracks such as Heartbreaker, Immigrant Song, In My Time Of Dying, Ramble On and Whole Lotta Love among the most popular downloadable DVD lessons from LickLibrary.com, the world’s premier online guitar tuition site. The mix of styles on these tracks – ranging from heavy electric riffing to screaming soloing to fingerstyle-based acoustic and 12-string backings – provides an object lesson in thoughtful arrangement and layering of guitar textures.

Jimmy Page’s guitar work is not always perfect, but particularly on the early material it is always exciting and frequently innovative, as is his production, with pioneering techniques such as reverse echo and ambient mic placement. And Led Zep also had a distinctive sound through Plant’s unique vocal style, plus a rhythm section in Jones and Bonham that was less jazzy and fluid than Bruce and Baker had been with Cream but every bit its equal in technical proficiency. And, as purveyors of a more straight ahead form of music, Led Zeppelin reaped even greater rewards, becoming the world’s biggest act in the ensuing decade.

The band called it a day upon the death of Bonham in 1980 save for a couple of reunions for special functions – the most recent of which was at the tribute concert for Ahmet Ertegun, boss of Atlantic, Led Zeppelin’s record label, in 2007. Although Page continued to work after 1980, unsurprisingly none of his subsequent ventures have touched the heights of Led Zeppelin – and alongside his charity work (for which he was awarded an OBE in 2005) he has since devoted considerable time to remastering the band’s catalogue.