Jimmy Page: three sessions a day, then Led Zeppelin | Ultimate Guitarist Reunion

Why fans still care

JIMMY PAGE is in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame twice, once with the Yardbirds and once with Led Zeppelin. The Rock Hall calls him Zeppelin’s “guitarist-producer-mastermind”.

He put Led Zeppelin together himself, paid for their first album before they had a record deal, and produced every record they made. Led Zeppelin IV, the album with Stairway to Heaven on it, was 24 times Platinum in the US by November 2021.

When the surviving members played one reunion night in London in 2007, Guinness counted more than 20 million ticket requests.

Early life

Page was born in Heston, near London, on 9 January 1944, and his family moved to Epsom in Surrey when he was about eight. “I was bored so I taught myself the guitar from listening to records,” he has said. The records were early rock and roll, and the guitarists he names are Scotty Moore, who played with Elvis Presley, and James Burton.

At 13 he was on BBC television with his band, on a programme called All Your Own. At 18 he made his first record, The Road to Love, with the Crusaders. Glandular fever cut his touring short, and he went to Sutton Art College instead.

Career chapters

1. 1957On the BBC’s All Your Own, aged 13
2. 1964Session guitar on Goldfinger, Abbey Road
3. 1966Joins the Yardbirds
4. 1968Led Zeppelin, with Robert Plant, Who’s Who number 7 in · Highway to Hell (story coming soon), John Bonham, Who’s Who number 6 in · Highway to Hell (story coming soon) and John Paul Jones; first show 7 September
5. 1969Led Zeppelin released in the US, 12 January
6. 1971Led Zeppelin IV, with Stairway to Heaven
7. 1980The end of Led Zeppelin
8. 1992Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with the Yardbirds
9. 1995Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with Led Zeppelin
10. 2007Reunion at London’s O2 Arena, with Jason Bonham on drums
11. 2012Kennedy Center Honors

The session years early 1960s

Page became one of London’s busiest studio guitarists, playing as many as three sessions a day, six days a week. He played second guitar on The Who’s I Can’t Explain, next to Pete Townshend, Who’s Who number 8, and he’s modest about it: “I wasn’t really needed or necessary.” In August 1964 he was at Abbey Road for Shirley Bassey’s Goldfinger.

The bass player on a lot of those sessions was John Paul Jones. He remembers the line-up as “Big Jim and Little Jim”: Big Jim Sullivan, the senior session guitarist, and the young Page, who usually ended up on rhythm guitar because he didn’t read music well.

The Yardbirds 1966 to 1968

He joined the Yardbirds and played alongside his old friend Jeff Beck, Who’s Who number 15, and they’re both in the band’s scene in the film Blow-Up. Beck, Who’s Who number 15 also gave him a Fender Telecaster, which Page played through the Yardbirds and on into Led Zeppelin.

A 1966 session for Beck’s, Who’s Who number 15 Beck’s Bolero, with Jones on bass and Keith Moon, Who’s Who number 10 in · Ultimate Queen Reunion (story coming soon) on drums, gave Page the idea of a band built on that kind of power. When the Yardbirds ended in 1968, he set out to build it.

Putting Led Zeppelin together 1968

He needed a singer first. Terry Reid turned him down but told him about a 19-year-old in the Midlands, Robert Plant, Who’s Who number 7 in · Highway to Hell (story coming soon), then singing in a band called Hobbstweedle. Page and manager Peter Grant drove up to see him at a teachers’ training college, and Page invited him down to his boathouse on the Thames. They spent the afternoon playing records, including Joan Baez’s version of Babe I’m Gonna Leave You, and talking about what they could do with it.

Plant, Who’s Who number 7 in · Highway to Hell (story coming soon) knew the drummer. John Bonham, Who’s Who number 6 in · Highway to Hell (story coming soon) was an old friend from the Midlands, but he had a paying job backing the singer Tim Rose. Page and Grant raised their offer until he said yes.

The bass player came to them. Jones’s wife saw a note in the music press that Page was forming a group and told him to ring. “My wife made me,” Jones joked later. He called Page and offered to play bass, and Page told him he was on his way to Birmingham to see a singer.

The four of them met in a small room in London in August 1968, and it worked from the first song. They rehearsed, played on a P.J. Proby session that Jones had already booked, and on 7 September 1968 played their first show in Denmark as the New Yardbirds. “Nobody would book us under anything else,” Jones said. By October they were Led Zeppelin.

The first album 1969

Page didn’t wait for a record company. He and Grant paid for the sessions themselves, at Olympic Studios in London from late September 1968, and Page produced. The guitar sound on it is simple: the Telecaster from Beck, Who’s Who number 15, a Supro amp, a Tone Bender fuzz, an Echoplex and a Vox wah. Then they took the finished tapes to Atlantic Records, and Ahmet Ertegun signed them.

Led Zeppelin came out in the US on 12 January 1969, with Good Times Bad Times, Dazed and Confused and Communication Breakdown on it. Other musicians heard the planning in it straight away. “He had the whole thing mapped out in his head,” Joe Perry, Who’s Who number 17 said of the debut, and Aerosmith learned what he called “the arena-rock sound” from those records.

Led Zeppelin 1969 to 1980

The Rock Hall’s list runs from Led Zeppelin and Led Zeppelin II in 1969, through III and IV, to Physical Graffiti in 1975. Led Zeppelin II, IV and Physical Graffiti went 12, 24 and 16 times Platinum in the US. Page wrote, played and produced.

Their last concert with Bonham, Who’s Who number 6 in · Highway to Hell (story coming soon) was in Berlin on 7 July 1980. He died on 25 September 1980, aged 32, at Page’s house in Windsor. On 4 December the others said they “could not continue as we were”.

Writing as a band

Zeppelin songs came out of all four of them. In the spring of 1970, worn out after their fifth US tour, Page and Plant, Who’s Who number 7 in · Highway to Hell (story coming soon) went with their families to Bron-Yr-Aur, a cottage in the Welsh hills with no electricity. “The only song we really finished up there was That’s the Way,” Page said, but the trip set the tone for Led Zeppelin III and its acoustic side.

For the fourth album they took over Headley Grange, an old poorhouse in Hampshire, and lived and recorded there. Jones wrote the main riff of Black Dog on a train home from a rehearsal, jotting it down in a number system his father had taught him. The song was named after an old black Labrador that wandered around the Grange. Bonham, Who’s Who number 6 in · Highway to Hell (story coming soon) had to hold a straight beat under its shifting riff, and Plant, Who’s Who number 7 in · Highway to Hell (story coming soon) sang over the top.

Writing Stairway to Heaven 1970 to 1971

Stairway started as “the long one”. Its bones came together at Bron-Yr-Aur in 1970, and Page worked out the sections at his home in Pangbourne, near Reading.

At Headley Grange, Page sent Plant, Who’s Who number 7 in · Highway to Hell (story coming soon) and Bonham, Who’s Who number 6 in · Highway to Hell (story coming soon) to the pub and sat down with Jones to settle the arrangement for the next day. While the band ran it through, Plant, Who’s Who number 7 in · Highway to Hell (story coming soon) sat on the floor against the wall, writing. “From my recollection he had a good 90% of it then,” Page said. Page kept Bonham, Who’s Who number 6 in · Highway to Hell (story coming soon) out until well into the song, a trick he’d used before, so the drums would hit harder when they arrived.

Page tried the solo at Headley Grange for three hours without getting it. He finished it later at Island’s Basing Street studios in London. To play it all live he needed a double-neck guitar, six-string for the intro and solo and 12-string for the rest.

What Stairway became

Led Zeppelin IV came out in November 1971, and Stairway went to radio without ever being released as a commercial single in the UK or US. (Atlantic did press a promo-only 7-inch for American radio stations in 1972.) By its 20th anniversary, in 1991, it was claimed to have been played 2,874,000 times on the radio, about 44 years of airtime. Page noticed early. At the LA Forum in August 1971, before the album was even out, part of the crowd gave it a standing ovation.

Ann Wilson of Heart, who first heard it on the radio at 19, called it “a complete marriage of music to lyrics”.

After Zeppelin 1980s to 2008

Page went on to the Honeydrippers with Plant, Who’s Who number 7 in · Highway to Hell (story coming soon), the Firm, and No Quarter, again with Plant, Who’s Who number 7 in · Highway to Hell (story coming soon).

In 2008 he appeared with The Edge, Who’s Who number 7 and Jack White, Who’s Who number 26 in the guitar documentary It Might Get Loud, where he showed The Edge, Who’s Who number 7 how Kashmir goes. The same year he rode into the stadium in Beijing on a double-decker flatbed to play Whole Lotta Love at the Olympics.

The O2 reunion with Jason Bonham 2007

On 10 December 2007 Page, Plant, Who’s Who number 7 in · Highway to Hell (story coming soon) and Jones played a full two-hour Led Zeppelin show at the O2 Arena in London. It was a tribute to Ahmet Ertegun, the Atlantic founder who had signed them in 1968, and the drummer was John Bonham’s, Who’s Who number 6 in · Highway to Hell (story coming soon) son, Jason Bonham.

The demand was huge. Only 9,000 pairs of tickets went to the public, at £125 each, given out by ballot through Ertegun’s website, and more than 20 million requests came in. Guinness lists it as the highest demand for tickets for one music concert. Tickets were reported selling for up to £1,800 on eBay.

The show came out in 2012 as the film and album Celebration Day, which won the Grammy for Best Rock Album in 2014.

The Hall of Fame, again 2023

On 3 November 2023 he inducted Link Wray into the Rock Hall and played Wray’s Rumble, which he called “the essence of cool”. It was his first public performance since 2014. He’d been hearing Rumble in his own playing for years: the slashing chords in Immigrant Song have, he once said, “the feel and sound of the way Link plays”.

Craft, sound and style

The bow

A session violinist, the father of the actor David McCallum, asked Page one day if he’d ever tried bowing a guitar. Page said it wouldn’t work. “Have a go,” the violinist said, and handed him a bow. He used it in the Yardbirds, and it became the sound of Dazed and Confused, live and on the first album.

Theremin and Echoplex

On stage Page treated effects such as the theremin and the Echoplex tape delay as instruments in their own right, and he preferred working them by hand so he could shape the sound on the night. On the record of Whole Lotta Love, the eerie high sounds in the middle section are his theremin.

Open tunings and the Danelectro

Page was using DADGAD tuning in the Yardbirds, on White Summer, and on Led Zeppelin’s Black Mountain Side. He kept a Danelectro in that tuning, and on stage it was his guitar for Kashmir and In My Time of Dying, both on Physical Graffiti. Kashmir’s riffs use open strings against the same notes higher up, so the guitar sounds doubled. On Led Zeppelin III he used open G for That’s the Way and a C tuning for Friends.

The guitars

The first album was all the Telecaster from Jeff Beck, Who’s Who number 15, which Page later painted with a dragon. From the second album he moved to the Gibson Les Paul, including his Number One, which he bought from Joe Walsh, Who’s Who number 25. By Presence the setup was the Les Paul and Marshalls.

Who he influenced

The Rock Hall names Van Halen, Guns N’ Roses, Heart, Queen, Aerosmith and Def Leppard among the bands Led Zeppelin influenced. Slash, Who’s Who number 43 heard Whole Lotta Love at seven and linked its sound to the Les Paul because he’d seen pictures of Page holding one.

Black Beauty

Before the sessions he traded a Fender Stratocaster for a 1960 Gretsch Chet Atkins 6120 with a Bigsby, because he wanted Chet Atkins’s fingerpicking sound. His session guitar was a black 1960 Gibson Les Paul Custom, the “Black Beauty”, with three pickups, gold hardware and a Bigsby, bought at Lew Davis on Charing Cross Road. He added two extra switches so he could use any mix of pickups, change the phase or turn them off. It was stolen at a Minneapolis airport in April 1970. It turned up refinished, and was identified from the inlay at the 12th fret in film of the Royal Albert Hall show that January. Collector Perry Margouleff got it back to him around 2015, the news came out in 2016, and it went on show at the Met in New York in 2019.

The Dragon Telecaster

The Telecaster was a late 1959 model, a gift from Jeff Beck, Who’s Who number 15 for getting him into the Yardbirds. After Beck left in late 1966, Page glued small mirrors on it, then stripped it and painted the dragon. In 1969 a friend repainted it and ruined the wiring. Page put its neck on another Tele and, for the Met show in 2019, repainted the body. Guitar World places it on the Stairway to Heaven solo as well as the first album.

Number One and the double neck

He bought his 1959 sunburst Les Paul Standard from Joe Walsh, Who’s Who number 25 for about $1,200, by Walsh’s 2012 account, and Guitar World dates the sale to the April 1969 US tour. The two men tell the handover differently. Page says Walsh brought it to a Fillmore East show, and Walsh says he flew to New York with it. It was soon on Whole Lotta Love and What Is and What Should Never Be. For Stairway live he played a Gibson EDS-1275 double neck, so one guitar could cover the record’s acoustic and two electric 12 strings. He called it a real working tool in the band.

The amps

Page said the first album was the Telecaster, a modified Supro combo, a wah pedal and a Tone Bender MkII. The rig shown at the Met adds a Vox UL4120 head with a Rickenbacker Transonic cabinet, Marshall JMP Super Lead heads, which suited the 1959 Les Paul, and a 4x12 cabinet with “Zoso” on the grille cloth. Engineer Eddie Kramer said Page was the director of Led Zeppelin’s sound, and added that John Paul Jones deserves equal credit for the arrangements.

Stories people still tell

1. The Stairway case.

   In 2014 the trustee for Randy Wolfe of Spirit sued, saying Stairway to Heaven copied the Spirit song Taurus. A jury found for Led Zeppelin in 2016, an appeals court ruled for the band again in 2020, and in October 2020 the US Supreme Court declined to hear it. The estate’s lawyer said the band won “on a technicality”.

2. The black dog.

   The Labrador at Headley Grange disappeared one night and came back worn out, and the band assumed he’d been out on the tiles. They named the song after him.

3. The guitar that went missing.

   Before the Telecaster and the Number One there was the Black Beauty, a black 1960 Gibson Les Paul Custom with three pickups and a Bigsby. He saw it hanging in Lew Davis’s shop on Charing Cross Road and “knew this was it”, and he’d played it since his early session days. In April 1970, on Led Zeppelin’s flight from Minneapolis to Montreal, it went missing. “It had evaporated,” he wrote in Jimmy Page: The Anthology. He ran a missing guitar ad in Rolling Stone for a year and heard nothing. Years before it turned up, he’d asked his friend Perry Margouleff, a collector, to find it. In 2015 Margouleff did, in Minnesota, swapped the man who had it another 1960 Custom, and carried it to Page’s house in London by hand. Page held it back from display until April 2019, when it appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Play It Loud exhibition in New York.

4. A clean head.

   Page has said he doesn’t drink. “So really the intoxicant was the music,” he told the Academy of Achievement.

Legacy

Steven Tyler, Who’s Who number 23 in · Highway to Hell (story coming soon) and Joe Perry, Who’s Who number 17 inducted Zeppelin into the Rock Hall in 1995, and The Edge, Who’s Who number 7 presented the Yardbirds three years earlier. Page produced every Zeppelin album himself.