What’s wrong with you bastards? Don’t you have any professionalism left?”
Jimmy Page had run out of patience. He was pacing the floor and lecturing Keith Relf, lead vocalist for the Yardbirds, minutes after the end of a concert in Chicago during which Relf’s drinking had taken precedence over the music itself. Jimmy kicked wildly at a nearby guitar case, knocking it onto its side. His arms were crossed across his chest. The aggravation showed in his furrowed brow, his agitated voice.
“You come onto the stage, Keith, and you act as though you’re spending the evening at a fuckin’ pub,” Jimmy shouted. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
That night, Relf had carried several bottles of booze right onto the stage with him—Scotch, brandy, bourbon, and beer. After the last chords of “Heart Full of Soul” resonated, he bent down to pick up the Scotch, then guzzled it straight out of the bottle. He did the same after “For Your Love”—in fact, after nearly every song. All the while, Jimmy glared at him from across the stage, yelled at him to “cool it,” but to no avail. Keith was so sloshed that the rest of the band should have dragged him off the stage.
The Yardbirds were disintegrating, and Jimmy knew it. It kept him awake at night. And for a musician with such enormous talent and such unwavering perfectionism, Pagey seemed like an unlikely candidate to preside over the demise of one of the best-known rock bands of the sixties. Yet when I began working with Jimmy and the Yardbirds early in 1968, that was precisely what he was doing. The Yardbirds were crumbling around us.
By that point, Jimmy had been with the band for nearly two years, joining them as their bassist in June 1966. When he became a Yardbird, he saw it as an escape…his avenue for finally fleeing the creative straightjacket of London studio work. It also eventually provided Jimmy with the springboard that launched him into a twelve-year career with Led Zeppelin.
But first, Jimmy had to officiate at the funeral procession of the Yardbirds, where I served as one of the pallbearers. I worked as the band’s tour manager on its final American tour that began in March 1968.
Peter Grant, then the Yardbirds’ manager, had hired me to join the final Yardbirds tour after I had traveled with another of his acts, the New Vaudeville Band. Mick Wilshire, a drummer who I had met two years earlier while on vacation in Spain, was part of the New Vaudeville Band, and arranged for my first meeting with Peter. When I walked into Grant’s office for the first time, he was sitting comfortably behind an oversized desk. It was a large office, befitting a man like Peter, who was one of the biggest fellows I had ever met. When he rose to greet me, I gulped. It seemed to take him forever just to stand all the way up. At six-foot-six, he was an imposing presence. Later, when I learned he had once been a nightclub bouncer, a professional wrestler, and a movie double for heavyweight British actors like Robert Morley, I wasn’t surprised—and was a little more cautious when I was around him.
Peter was raised by his mother in a poor neighborhood in London. He dropped out of school, was scrambling for odd jobs by his early teens, and eventually stumbled into the music business. He became the British tour manager for American performers like the Everly Brothers and Little Richard, during which time he developed a show-no-mercy attitude toward anyone who crossed him. I heard the story that one evening, he pummeled a rock promoter who tried to cheat Little Richard out of a few pounds; not only did Peter’s anger send the poor fellow to the emergency room, but Peter also punched out several cops who had been called in to quiet the disturbance. For Peter, it was just like being back in the wrestling ring.
I was always known as a tough guy, but Peter Grant, I figured, was in a class by himself. At that first meeting, I told Peter a little about myself and the bands I had worked for. “Well, Cole,” he finally said, “the tour manager’s job with the New Vaudeville Band is open. I can pay you twenty-five pounds a week. Do we have a deal?”
“Not yet,” I answered without a pause. “Thirty pounds a week, that’s what I need…. Take it or leave it!”
Peter seemed astonished by my response. Frankly, so was I, particularly since I was still feeling anxious sitting across from this oversized man. Later Peter told me, “I wasn’t used to people talking to me like that. But on balance, I figured it was a good sign. I doubted you would take shit from anyone.”
Peter agreed to the thirty-pound-a-week salary. We shook hands, and then as I headed for the door, he bellowed, “One more thing, Cole.” I turned, and he was shaking his index finger at me. “I never want to hear that you’ve repeated anything that goes on in this fucking office. If you do, I’ll cut your ears off! Cut ’em right off!”
At that moment, I had no doubt that he would.
“Give me a call at the end of the week, Cole. By then, I’ll know when you’re going to start.”
That was my introduction to Peter Grant. It was also my foot in the door to Grant’s organization, which eventually led me to the Yardbirds.
My tenure with the Yardbirds was a difficult experience for both me and Pagey. In the pre-Page era, the Yardbirds had enjoyed a reign of enormous popularity that began in London in 1963. Throughout the midsixties, their name alone made rock fans worldwide take notice, in large part because of their superb guitarists. Before Jimmy, the Yardbirds had provided forums for two of the finest of the era—Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck. Few guitarists could follow in those footsteps; Jimmy Page was one of them.
When Paul Samwell-Smith quit the Yardbirds in 1966, Pagey took his place. For the next two years, he was a permanent fixture in the band. But by early 1968, when I joined the Yardbirds as their tour manager, they were on their last gasp—a fact of life that everyone in the band acknowledged. If burnout can happen to rock musicians, it had definitely steamrolled its way over the Yardbirds. Of the original 1963 Yardbirds lineup of five musicians, three of them—Keith Relf, Chris Dreja, and Jim McCarty—were still hanging on at the end, although with almost no measurable enthusiasm.
From the moment Jimmy joined the Yardbirds, he ended up carrying the band as best he could. Particularly during that final 1968 tour, Relf was just going through the motions. “We’ve got some contractual obligations, so I’m willing to meet them,” Keith told me one afternoon while sipping on a beer in his hotel room. “But I’m tired of it all. I’m just used up.”
During that last tour, Relf was a shadow of what he had once been—drowning in his excessive use of alcohol and angel dust. He did a lot of acid, too, often in his hotel room with incense burning nearby. Jimmy and I would sometimes have a snort of coke together, but Keith seemed incapable of knowing when he was overdoing it. “I’m fine!” he used to shout when I showed some concern. “Damn it, you’re my tour manager, not my mother!”
Throughout that tour, we traveled primarily in a leased Greyhound bus that had most of its seats removed. Canvas beds had been anchored to the floor, and that’s where we slept, or at least tried to, when we weren’t in hotels. There was a single bathroom in the back, but no stereos, cooking facilities, or power outlets. It was a third-class, thoroughly cheerless operation all the way.
Jimmy had clearly assumed leadership of a band capsizing at sea. While the other musicians were suffocating in their own depression and despondency, approaching the last Yardbirds tour as thought it were a death march, Jimmy would kick them in the ass and try to get them excited about making music again. “Let’s give the fans their money’s worth tonight,” he would plead with the rest of the band. But no matter how passionately his appeals became, he was usually ignored.
When Keith Relf was drunk, he played the harmonica like he had just picked it up for the first time. He also stumbled over song lyrics. He even yelled obscenities at the audience and at the other Yardbirds. Nevertheless, it was my job to try to keep Keith singing for an hour, get the money from the promoter, and deal with any complaints later.
Most of the complaints came from Pagey himself. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Jimmy seethed after the disastrous Chicago concert. “These fans are paying money to hear us sing, Keith, not to watch you get drunk.”
His anger fell on deaf ears. “I’m not hurting anyone, Jimmy,” Keith said. “I didn’t hear that anybody asked for their money back.”
Despite the noticeable stress upon Jimmy, I watched him emerge as the consummate professional—the same qualities he later demonstrated throughout the reign of Led Zeppelin. Even near the final hours of the Yardbirds, Pagey would sometimes spend much of the afternoon carefully coiffing his hair and selecting stylish attire, highlighted by ruffled shirts, antique scarves, and velvet jackets. While the rest of the band was wearing jeans, beads, and caftans, Jimmy had the look of an eighteenth-century British gentleman. He felt the fans deserved something special, even if he was the only Yardbird who did.
There was another factor at work besides Jimmy’s professional pride. He also hoped to do something with the name “Yardbirds” down the road. He still believed there was some luster associated with the Yardbirds name, and at one point he approached Relf and McCarty:
“If you’re not going to carry on, I’d still like to. I’m thinking of forming a new band and would like the rights to use the name.”
Relf laughed. “Is there actually something left that’s worth anything?” Without hesitating, he added, “It’s all yours. I don’t want anything to do with that fuckin’ name anymore!”
They signed some legal documents, and Jimmy assumed ownership of the “Yardbirds.”
The last Yardbirds concert in America was on June 5, 1968, at an auto raceway on the outskirts of Montgomery, Alabama. That morning, we were sitting by the pool of our hotel while a nearby radio blared a series of news bulletins:
“Senator Robert Kennedy, who was shot last night at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, is lying near death in a hospital.”
I was mortified. I felt the country was coming apart before my eyes.
For that final concert, the Yardbirds performed on a makeshift stage consisting of two thirty-five-foot flatbed trailers. The fans—spanning the dirt racetrack to the edges of the stage—were remarkably enthusiastic. Just before Jimmy went onstage, he said to me, “It’s sad, isn’t it? This band could have gone on for years if the enthusiasm were there. I hate to see a great band die.”
But that night, it did. As a single spotlight lit up Relf, then Page, then Dreja and McCarty, they played as the Yardbirds for the last time in America: “Heart Full of Soul”…“Over Under Sideways Down”…“Shapes of Things.” When the last chords of “For Your Love” faded into the night, any nostalgia that I felt was overshadowed by a sense of relief that it was finally over. Jimmy was wonderful to work with, but the tension within the band was almost unbearable at times.