The artists were the least important people, because they didn’t write the songs. You would much rather have the session singers and the session musicians than the guys who’d just about learned their three chords.
LAURENCE MYERS
GLYN JOHNS I decided the only way to get any experience as an engineer was to get down-time in the studio and invite musicians in, so I started doing Sunday sessions at IBC studios in Portland Place. The Stones were the very first act that came in under that agreement. The older guys at the studio didn’t get it and they didn’t like it, so I created an opportunity and it gobbled me up. I think Jimmy turned up at one of those sessions.
JIMMY PAGE I sort of stopped playing and went to art college for about two years. I was concentrating more on blues playing than on my own, and from the art college there was the Marquee club and Cyril Davies and by this time it had just started happening and stuff had come around again, so I used to go up and jam on a Thursday night with the interlude band.
CHARLIE WATTS (drummer with the Rolling Stones) Within about a month of Alexis starting on those Thursday nights, Harold Pendleton had 950 people packed in there; he wasn’t allowed to admit any more.
JIMMY PAGE Somebody came up to me at the Marquee and said, “Would you like to play on a record?” I said, “Why not?” That was my first proper session, which was for Carter-Lewis & the Southerners. And that record, which was called “Your Mama’s Out of Town”, made a dent in the charts.
GLYN JOHNS Jimmy rang me and said the art school had found out he was earning and he was going to lose his grant, so he wasn’t going to do any more sessions. Well, that lasted two minutes. The phone started ringing and all of a sudden he was doing three sessions a day for everybody and their mother – and quite right too.
I would get Jimmy in whenever I could. He was a very ordinary, nice, quiet, young guy, and obviously immensely talented. As things progressed with both of us, we became more friendly and I would always give him a lift home from sessions in my convertible E-Type. We’d go to the pie stall on Battersea Bridge and have something to eat. In the back I had one of the Stones’ first Vox PA columns sawn in half and a four-track cassette deck. And I’d drive back down the A3 with the roof down, Jimmy sitting next to me, with the objective of getting the engine note to alter with the chord sequence of whatever was playing. Good fun.
JIMMY PAGE Big Jim Sullivan was carrying the whole weight on his shoulders – he was the only other young face there.
CHRIS DREJA We all knew about Big Jim. I suspect that initially Jimmy was playing rhythm parts and second guitar work, but it didn’t matter. To do session work you needed to be focused, professional, and be able to deliver it in ten minutes. Big Jim took Jimmy under his wing. He sorted him out because there weren’t that many good guitar players around.
BIG JIM SULLIVAN (session guitarist in the Sixties) We said hello, sat down, started chatting. Had a blow. He was great, obviously. He covered parts that I hadn’t covered. That was the thing about what Jimmy did – certain phrases, mostly James Burton phrases. He used to call me Big Jim and I’d call him Little Jim. I taught Jim to read, basically. If it was country I’d do it; if it was rock he’d do it. That was the general rule.
JIMMY PAGE I was in on a lot of sessions for Decca artists at the start, and some were hits, although not because of the guitar playing. Nevertheless, I’d been allowed into the whole sort of impenetrable brotherhood.
DAVID WILLIAMS Eventually the recordings would be released commercially, and Jim would have to go to the local store and purchase a record in order to hear what his work sounded like. […] He would play me the records and occasionally express disappointment when he felt his best efforts had been lost or buried in the mix.
JOHN PAUL JONES I had been in various small bands and done all the American bases. Jet Harris was with the Jet Blacks; I walked up to him on Archer Street and asked him if he needed a bass player. He said, “No, I don’t, but they do,” pointing me towards the Jet Blacks. He was leaving them, so I auditioned and joined up. Later he heard about me, swapped his bass player for me and I went on the road with them. I was seventeen and earning £30 a week with Jet and Tony Meehan … that’s when I first met Peter Grant. He was tour-managing Gene Vincent for Don Arden.
RICHARD COLE (Zeppelin’s road manager, 1968–80) I left Herbie Goins and the Night-Timers as road manager around about June 1965, which was when John Paul joined them. Mick Eve, the sax player, told me, “He’s really a bass player but he also plays fantastic keyboards.”
GLYN JOHNS I worked with John Paul almost every day. First of all, one of the nicest blokes you’ll meet. Second, I went to his flat in town once and there was a bloody Hammond B3 in his living room – I’d had no idea he played anything other than the bass.
ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM (manager of the Rolling Stones and founder of Immediate Records) There was a young arranger I knew named John Baldwin. The thing was, I wanted my arranger to have a more artistic surname than Baldwin, particularly as I’d be recording a single with him. There was a new Robert Stack movie going the rounds, called John Paul Jones. I had no idea what, or who, it was all about, but the name had the kind of ring to it that I’d always liked. I called up John and told him the news: “No more answering to the name of Baldwin. From now on, you’re John Paul Jones.”
JOHN PAUL JONES I was very grateful, because [Andrew] trusted me with these sessions and all these musicians. His sessions were always fun: everybody used to enjoy going to them, he was always funny on the talk-back mic. So many sessions were run-of-the-mill, banal, mundane, very boring, you couldn’t wait to get out of them.
BP FALLON (UK press officer for Zeppelin, 1972–6) John Paul I met in 1965, when he was one of Andrew Oldham’s bright young kids and came over to Dublin to produce Rosemary and Howard’s “Broken Promises”, a Del Shannon song on Tony Boland’s Tempo label. He was very cool, very chilled.
JOHN PAUL JONES Somebody came up to me and said, “Can you arrange?” I said, “Sure. What do you want?” “Well, we’ve got this horn section and …” “Okay, don’t worry.” I rushed out and bought Forsythe’s book of orchestration to find out where to write the instruments. Oh, it was appalling. I had it all too low and muddy.
EDDIE KRAMER (Zeppelin engineer, 1969–72) My clearest memory is of John Paul walking into Olympic Studios through the double doors carrying his bass on one shoulder and the charts under his arm while he wheeled in his amp. It’s a sixty-piece orchestra and he sets up all the charts and does all the arrangements – and wonderful arrangements, too. He would plug in and we’d section off a little area because nobody played very loudly on those sessions. Then he would get the orchestra together and stand up on the conductor’s rostrum with the score open and – literally with the bass in his hand – stand there and conduct the whole bloody orchestra with the bass waving around. He was so cool.
John Paul Jones in session at Olympic, 1967 (Eddie Kramer Archives)
JOHN PAUL JONES I can’t remember what the session was, but it was probably about 1964 and [Jimmy and I] were booked on the same date. Decca or somewhere like that, up in Broadhurst Gardens in West Hampstead. I was just really happy to see another young face. I think he was the youngest session musician until I came along.
CLEM CATTINI The thing was with us was that we all came from a rock ’n’ roll background, whereas most of our peers came from the jazz world. Suddenly you’ve got these hooligans like myself and Jim that had come in from the rock ’n’ roll era from groups.
JOHN PAUL JONES It was always Big Jim and Little Jim – Big Jim Sullivan and Little Jim and myself and the drummer, either Bobby Graham or Clem Cattini. Apart from group sessions, where he’d play solos and stuff like that, Page always ended up on rhythm guitar because he couldn’t read too well.
BIG JIM SULLIVAN John Paul, surprisingly, could read. The three of us plus Bobby Graham were the rhythm section. Bobby had good rhythm, good time. It was terrible pressure but you learn to live with it after a while; it became second nature. Time was of the essence.
BOBBY GRAHAM (leading session drummer on London Sixties scene) Charlie Katz … was the fixer for everybody. He was like God, very tough and very touchy. He’d ring up and say, “Bob, I’d like you to be at Decca studios tomorrow morning at ten o’clock until one o’clock.” “Charlie, who’s the musical director on it?” “Bob, do not ask the names of the higher-ups.”
Jimmy wasn’t one of the most way-out and weirdest characters I ever met; he was very quiet, very shy. He had a slightly dirtier sound than Big Jim Sullivan.
BIG JIM SULLIVAN You had to be a special breed of person to do sessions, almost insensitive. Some of the producers were assholes, they didn’t know what they were doing. There were a few who allowed us our rein, where we could do more what we liked; people like Mike Vernon. The worst ones were when Charlie Katz booked us at Decca 3, the big studio at the back, and you knew it would be an orchestra, a muzak act.
CLEM CATTINI I remember during one session at Decca, Charlie was saying to the string section, “It’s the 15th for that session.” To which one of the guys replied, “I can’t, it’s my wedding anniversary.” And he knew that if he said no he would be put on holiday, depending on how long Charlie decided he wanted to put you on holiday. They had a lot of power at that time until us lot came in, the Jimmy Pages and the John Paul Joneses, the guys people were asking for.
JOHN PAUL JONES [Jimmy] was always very interested in recording. We were kind of geeks in those days, in a way. At the end of a session, most of the musicians would sit back and read their golf magazines, but we would always go into the control room to listen to playbacks and to watch the engineers, watch the producers.
EDDIE KRAMER In 1963 I was working at Pye in London recording the Kinks. I was an assistant engineer and my memory tells me that Page came in and did an overdub. It was for Shel Talmy, who was half blind and a fantastic producer.
The next time I’m aware of Page is at Olympic in 1967. The studio has just opened and we’re very busy and Mickie Most books a session for Donovan and I’m the engineer on it. Concurrently with Jimmy being in the studio doing overdubs, John Paul Jones was a huge participant in the session-musician entrée into the studio. He was always in, always out, always coming in.
JIMMY PAGE Sessions with staff producers could be fairly impersonal. It comes down to costs again. Someone like Shel Talmy was just producing groups, and you’d be there to strengthen the weak links if the drummer wasn’t tight enough or the guitarist not up to scratch.
RAY DAVIES (lead singer and songwriter with the Kinks) The recording of “All Day and All of the Night” was a frantic affair, with the Kinks arriving in London late at night from a gig up north to record the song the following morning at Pye Studios, where the first album had been recorded. […]
When we went upstairs to hear the playback in the tiny control room, we found it crowded with onlookers and assorted musicians. Among them was Jimmy Page, who cringed as it came to Dave [Davies]’s guitar solo. Perhaps [he] was put out about not being asked to play on the track, and we were slightly embarrassed by the amount of jealousy shown by such an eminent guitarist.
KIM FOWLEY (LA producer and scenester) Jimmy was the session genius that everybody sought out. When I showed up in London in 1964 as P. J. Proby’s publicist-cheerleader, Jimmy was just a tremendous one-take wonder. He was a great musician because he could listen, and a lot of musicians don’t listen.
A few months later I found myself at Regent Sound with Andrew Loog Oldham, and there are Jimmy and John Paul Jones and a forgotten genius engineer named Bill Farley. This is the first time I have ever been recorded as a singer and my backing band features Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones! Both of them were very patient and didn’t laugh or throw their guitars down in disgust.
HARVEY LISBERG (manager of Herman’s Hermits) John Paul was Mickie Most’s right-hand man, really. All the early Herman’s Hermits stuff was arranged by him, so I got to know him quite well, but there was also Lulu and Donovan. He was terribly quiet, very introverted and serious. You hardly noticed him.
MICKIE MOST (producer of Herman’s Hermits and founder of RAK Records) John Paul did a lot of bass playing and arrangements for me, and Jimmy used to play on my sessions. If you get the best people, it’s much easier, and I don’t think it’s anything to do with the musicians in the band feeling hurt.
ANDY JOHNS (brother of Glyn; Zeppelin engineer, 1969–71) Glyn was doing some sessions at IBC and Jimmy comes in with this fuzz box and says, “This is a fuzz box.” It was held together with bits of Sellotape and string, very home-made, and he plugged it into a Vox and went, “Bloody hell!”
Before you know it I’m at Glyn’s bungalow in south Epsom, where he was living with Ian Stewart. Suddenly there’s a knock at the door and it’s Pagey and he’s got a bloody lip. Glyn goes, “What happened, man?” Jimmy says, “I was just getting off the train, you see, and these three chaps jumped me.” Glyn said, “Don Arden, right?” “Well, I disparaged Don last week to somebody and they didn’t like it much.” So that’s why Pagey later got Peter Grant. Because he’d been duffed up.
MARTIN STONE I was working on the Croydon Advertiser and they farmed me out to the Sutton and Cheam Advertiser. They didn’t quite know what I could usefully do, so they gave me the “Youth” page. Once a week I had to seek out local youths who were doing interesting stuff.
I found out there was this boy-genius guitar player living in Epsom, so I went out to 34 Miles Road and interviewed him for the Sutton and Cheam Advertiser. He was already doing sessions, and that was the thrust of the piece. The skiffle Jimmy was long gone, because he certainly didn’t look like that when I met him. I guess I saw him as a kind of fellow spirit or outlaw. He’d probably come to Aleister Crowley the same way I did, through liking supernatural fiction and horror stories – Arthur Machen and so on. From there you get interested in the true occult, which leads you to the Tarot and Crowley.
CHRIS DREJA Jimmy started to get a bit of a reputation on the grapevine of being a little off-centre. He quite liked schoolgirls. The thing about him in a way is that in many respects he’s quite effeminate. Maybe those amazing unbelievable riffs come about as a counter-punch to sounding a little bit, you know, “I want to be a medicine man when I grow up and do good things in Africa.” You know which devil panned out in the end.
ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM He didn’t suddenly come in and say, “Look, I’m fucking brilliant.” I more recall him working his way in slyly. We offered him the job as in-house producer, based really on an affinity of purpose. We were so fed up with old farts that you would gravitate towards people your own age. It was all in the nod, the look in the eye. And I saw that in Jimmy.
JIMMY PAGE I got involved with Immediate, producing various things including John Mayall’s “Witchdoctor” and “Telephone Blues” around late ’65. Eric [Clapton] and I got friendly, and he came down and we did some recording at home. Immediate found out I had tapes and said they belonged to them, because I was employed by them. I argued that they couldn’t put them out because they were just variations on blues structures, but in the end we dubbed some other instruments over them and they came out – with liner notes attributed to me, though I didn’t have anything to do with writing them. Stu was on piano, Mick Jagger did some harp, Bill Wyman played bass and Charlie Watts was on drums.
ALAN CALLAN Most great guitarists are either great on electric or great on acoustic. But Jim is equally great on both, because he is always faithful to the nature of the instrument. He told me that, quite early on, he’d gone to a session and the producer had said, “Can you do it on acoustic rather than electric?” And he said he came out of that session thinking he hadn’t nailed it, so he went home and practised acoustic for two months.
JACKIE DESHANNON (LA pop/folk singer-songwriter) I wanted to record at EMI Studios in Abbey Road – a singles date, four sides. I took the songs with me: “Don’t Turn Your Back On Me, Babe” and a bunch of others. I wasn’t really familiar with the musicians – who might be the best to work with. I wrote on acoustic guitar, so those riffs were really the backbone of my records. I asked them who the best acoustic guitarist was. They suggested Jimmy Page. They said he was one of the best session guitar players in town and he’d played on a lot of hit records – he could play any style. I said, “Great, let’s get him!”
The call went out and we found out that my session was scheduled for when he was in art school, so we would have to wait for him to get out of school. I said, “He’d better be really good.” I played Jimmy the songs. He listened and played them back so perfectly, with so much soul and technique, that I could tell instantly what a brilliant artist he was. He could play anything, even at his young age. He was a big part of those records.
MARIANNE FAITHFULL (Immediate Records singer and girlfriend of Mick Jagger) In the hotel room next to mine, Jimmy and Jackie were having a very hot romance. He played on almost all my sessions in the Sixties, but he was very dull in those days. This was before he went away and became interesting. I guess what he was doing in that hotel room was getting interesting.
Tony Calder said to them, “As soon as you two are finished in that room fucking each other’s brains out, why don’t you write Marianne a song as well.”
JIMMY PAGE We wrote a few songs together, and they ended up getting done by Marianne, P. J. Proby, and Esther Phillips or one of those coloured artists … I started receiving royalty statements, which was very unusual for me at the time, seeing the names of different people who’d covered your songs.
KIM FOWLEY One morning at the beginning of 1965, I’m having breakfast by myself at the Continental Hyatt House in Hollywood, and in staggers Jimmy. I said, “What happened to you?” He said, “Jackie invited me to spend some time with her. And she restrained me.” So I said, “What exactly did she do?” And he wouldn’t answer, but whatever it was, it appeared that he’d been held against his wishes.
Up to this point, Jimmy was like a Jonas Brother, a very gentle Yes-Sir-No-Ma’am kind of guy, and here he was as some kind of boy-toy captive of Jackie DeShannon. Possibly it was in his own mind, but he seemed to think he had gone through some kind of restraint that was rather traumatising. Possibly Jimmy was naive. Or possibly he was the best actor who ever lived.
*
CLEM CATTINI I wasn’t getting frustrated, but I was getting fed up with sessions. People don’t realise the pressure we were under.
KEITH ALTHAM I’d see Jimmy on the platform at Epsom. It struck me even then that he was frustrated that other people – like Eric Clapton – were getting further down the line. I think he was quite envious of the idea of being in a group situation and wanted something that would propel him in that direction rather than just being the guy that everybody called to play the more complicated guitar parts.
CHRIS DREJA I don’t know what Jimmy was paid in those days – it was probably quite a lot of money. But he must have got to a point where he found the studio a bit too claustrophobic and he saw the way bands were going and I think he wanted a bit of it. I think he thought, “I could die and nobody would know who I was. I want to be out there on stage.”
JIMMY PAGE “She Just Satisfies” and “Keep Moving” were a joke. Should anyone hear [them] now and have a good laugh, the only justification I can offer is that I played all the instruments myself except the drums.
JAKE RIVIERA (founder of Stiff Records and manager of Swan Song artist Dave Edmunds) I’ve got a copy of Beat Instrumental from the Sixties that has an interview with Page in it. He was pushing himself when no one knew what Jim Sullivan or Vic Flick even looked like.
JIMMY PAGE A point came where Stax Records started influencing music to have more brass and orchestral stuff. The guitar started to take a back trend, and there was just the occasional riff. I didn’t realise how rusty I was going to get until a rock ’n’ roll session turned up in France and I couldn’t play. I thought it was time to get out, and I did.
CLEM CATTINI I remember Charlie Katz saying to Jim, “Silly boy, you’re giving up a good career.”