Jimmy Page was born in 1944 in Heston, Middlesex, but much of his youth was spent in Feltham, a London suburb so close to Heathrow Airport that he could feel the airplanes land. His idle time was spent fishing and collecting stamps, until at age twelve, his life changed when he heard an Elvis record, “Baby, Let’s Play House.” It wasn’t just Elvis’s distinctive voice that caught Jimmy’s attention. It was the instruments behind him—the electric guitar, the acoustic guitar, the slap bass—that compelled him to play and replay the record ad nauseum until the needle had almost worn through it.
With Elvis on his mind, Jimmy picked up a Spanish guitar with steel strings, trying to copy the sounds he had heard. His attempts were understandably rusty at first. But it didn’t matter. Overnight, he was hooked. He could feel the excitement rushing through him. He couldn’t have put the guitar down even if he had wanted to.
Jimmy was a star hurdler in school, but everything was soon overshadowed by the music. He asked a friend at school to teach him a few chords. He bought a self-teaching book, Play in a Day, at a local music shop. He would scan the backs of album covers, looking for familiar names among the guitarists—Scotty Moore, who played on Elvis’s records, James Burton, who performed behind Ricky Nelson, and Cliff Gallup, who accompanied Gene Vincent. He still loved the Top 40—from “Stagger Lee” to “Jailhouse Rock” to “Save the Last Dance for Me”—but he found himself listening more to the background musicians than the lead vocalists.
Jimmy’s father was an industrial personnel manager and—almost by default—began encouraging Jimmy’s musical talents. Jimmy’s other real love was art, which to the elder Page seemed even more of a dead end. So once Jimmy was out of school, his dad only flinched a little when, while performing at a dance hall in Epsom, Jimmy was spotted by Neil Christian, a vocalist who invited Jimmy to become part of Neil Christian and the Crusaders. Christian, ever a polite fellow, even sought the permission of Jimmy’s parents. “I’ll keep an eye on your boy,” he promised them.
The Crusaders had the misfortune of never falling fully in sync with their audiences. Even though the band gradually built up a following, they preferred playing old Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, and Gene Vincent songs, while the crowds wanted to hear the Top 10. To make matters worse, the Crusaders traveled in a dilapidated van that had more breakdowns than an entire ward of psychiatric patients. So despite their talent, they seemed doomed from the start in their quest to become the next Bill Haley and His Comets.
Nevertheless, their talents did not go unnoticed. Jeff Beck, whose sister introduced him to Jimmy, saw the Crusaders play one night and was awestruck by the presence of Pagey onstage. The guitar, he told friends, was almost bigger than Jimmy, who “was this skinny guy whose arms and legs projected out like toothpicks.”
Even then, Jimmy dressed distinctively and created some guitar licks and melodic phrasing that sometimes almost made Neil Christian stop singing in midsong and let his young guitarist take center stage.
Jimmy was earning about twenty pounds a week with the Crusaders, but the fast pace of the band’s one-night gigs finally took a toll upon his health. He may have been a star athlete in high school, but his body was no match for the physical demands of nonstop touring. Suffering from exhaustion, Jimmy developed a chronic cough that turned into a severe case of glandular fever.
One night, while standing outside a club in Sheffield, Jimmy collapsed. Doctors examined him that night and again the following day and offered a simple but firm prescription: “Slow down.” Jimmy, weary and weak, was in no mood to play around with his health. He quit the Crusaders.
During his recovery, Jimmy enrolled in art college in Sutton. But as much as he enjoyed art, he wasn’t happy solely with brushes and easels. He couldn’t put music completely behind him and kept picking up his guitar. There were moments when he contemplated setting aside the rigors of music for the seemingly less stressful life of an artist. “Maybe art is my calling,” he sometimes reasoned. “Anything I do with music should be a hobby.” But before long, he began going to clubs in the West End like the Marquee and Crawdaddy, where he would jam with just about anyone who would play with him. Sometimes for hours, he would play old Chuck Berry hits until the blisters on his fingers would almost burst. He absolutely loved it.
Like John Paul, Jimmy slipped into session work—and stayed there for six years, finally putting his palette and paints aside, virtually for good. Almost overnight, he was bombarded with session opportunities, not only because he was as good as they came, but he was reliable, too, capable of playing just about any kind of music—from rock to blues to jazz. At first, he really enjoyed it, and sometimes he was in awe of the artists he backed, including the Rolling Stones, Herman’s Hermits, the Kinks, and even Petula Clark and Burt Bacharach. He played on Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man” and the Who’s “I Can’t Explain.” He was once hired to play for a Muzak recording session, and there were even some commercial jingles.
Initially, because he didn’t have formal musical training, Jimmy had some self-doubts about how he’d fare in the studio. No one could “feel” the music any better than he, but he was often called upon to play according to someone else’s vision, not his own. And that meant following the sheet music in front of him, measure after measure.
It took Jimmy a while to learn to read music, and there were some awkward, difficult moments when his shaky skills caused embarrassing mistakes. He often said that when he first started, the sheet music looked like a bunch of crows on telephone wires. Even so, almost from the beginning, he was earning a very good living in the studio.
Not surprisingly, Jimmy’s skills intimidated some of his fellow musicians. Producer Shel Talmy once told him, “The Kinks are recording a new album called You Really Got Me. I’d like you to sit in on it.”
Shel explained that Jimmy’s talents would contribute immeasurably to the recording sessions—but the band itself wasn’t so sure. “What do we need him for?” an anxious Peter Quaife was supposed to have asked. “Dave Davies can handle the lead guitar work just fine. This is ridiculous, Shel!”
Shel sat back and let them vent their anger and apprehension. Then, once the emotional level had settled down, he brought in Jimmy. In short order, the Kinks became converts. Once they heard Jimmy play, no one in the band questioned Shel’s judgment.
As the years wore on, and one recording session blended into the next, Jimmy developed feelings of boredom and emptiness. He told friends that the session work was robbing him of his creativity. “You go in, they tell you what they want you to play, and to keep them happy, you avoid improvising,” he said. “It’s all so mechanical.”
At one point, when Jimmy’s frustration level was particularly high, he met Andrew Oldham, the Rolling Stones’ manager, who told him about the formation of a new record label. “We could use you a lot, Jimmy,” Oldham told him. “Not just for session work, but for producing.”
It sounded like a new challenge, a way to expand his musical horizons. So Jimmy jumped at the opportunity to become the house producer of the new label, Immediate Records, where he worked on sessions with John Mayall and Nico. It provided a surge of new enthusiasm that he desperately needed.
During this time, Jimmy bumped into Eric Clapton, literally in the lobby of a recording studio. Under his contract with Immediate, Jimmy began producing some blues cuts with Eric—songs like “Double Crossin’ Time” and “Telephone Blues.” The two sensed a special chemistry between them, and they would often jam with one another when their schedules allowed. One night at Jimmy’s house, they played together for hours, drawing upon each other’s energy, excited at the synergy of merging their enormous talents. Jimmy even recorded some of their jamming that night on a simple, two-channel tape recorder.
During those sessions, Jimmy realized that he had more to offer the music world beyond his studio work. As he looked in other directions, he was intent on making the kind of music he wanted to. When he joined the Yardbirds—and later formed Led Zeppelin—he demanded as much control as he could possibly get.