Stairway To Heaven

by Richard Cole

  At age seventeen, John Paul began moving through a few bands, playing Burns guitars, performing songs by Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard, and wearing outfits like purple jackets and white shoes that would have embarassed him years later. The best known of these bands was the Harris/ Meehan Group, fronted by Jet Harris and Tony Meehan, who had sung with the Shadows when that band had a hit record, “Diamonds.” Because of his youth and inexperience, John Paul suffered some unsettled nerves during this time, but his self-confidence kept his performance level high.

  Before long, John Paul found a more lucrative way to make music, namely, by becoming a studio musician. From the beginning, he was serious and methodical, and he was soon offered as much session work as he could handle, accompanying everyone from Dusty Springfield to Tom Jones to Jeff Beck. He played on the “She’s a Rainbow” track for the Rolling Stones and “Sunshine Superman” for Donovan. He also became an arranger for Herman’s Hermits and, in the midst of all this, released a single of his own, “Baja,” whose flip side was the inexplicably titled “A Foggy Day in Vietnam.” Unfortunately, the record achieved about as much popularity as the Vietnam War itself.

  As successful as John Paul was in the studio, it eventually wasn’t enough for him. He began looking for ways to expand his horizons beyond the four walls of the recording halls. To the general public, John Paul was unknown, but he never felt that fame was something he needed; more important, he sometimes had the urge to seek new directions for expressing himself musically.

  At the same time, however, John Paul was a real homebody and earned a comfortable living in the studio that allowed him to spend a lot of time with his wife, Mo, and his two young daughters. So he’d question whether he really wanted to join a band where concerts, traveling, and being away from home were part of the bargain.

  Ultimately, an opportunity would present itself that was too good to ignore. It would come from a young guitarist named Jimmy Page, whom John Paul had met in the studio. Jimmy was impressed with John Paul’s work, particularly after hearing the arrangements he had done for some songs on a Yardbirds’ album. Jimmy kept John Paul’s name in mind and figured their paths would cross again.

  6

  JIMMY

  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.

  7

  PRESIDING OVER A ROCK FUNERAL

  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.