Jimmy Page: The Definitive Biography. Chris Salewicz
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studio to see what we had. We did “Baby, Please Don’t Go”, “Gloria” and “Don’t Stop Crying Now”, which was released as the first single and died a death.’
The sessions were produced by Bert Berns, a streetwise New Yorker who had become a songwriter and record producer of some significance; a crucial figure at Atlantic Records – he revived the career of the Drifters and brought Solomon Burke to the label – he would later run Atlantic’s BANG label, kickstarting the solo careers of Van Morrison and Neil Diamond. At first, influenced by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the white songwriting team from Los Angeles who via their cartoon-like wit transformed the subject matter of rhythm and blues, Bert Berns had been a composer of considerable success, subtly lacing his tunes with hypnotic Latin influences, especially mambo. Installed in New York’s famous Brill Building, the endlessly and effortlessly enthusiastic Berns co-wrote the Isley Brothers’ ‘Twist and Shout’, Solomon Burke’s ‘Everybody Needs Somebody to Love’, The Exciters’ ‘Tell Him’, Them’s ‘Here Comes the Night’ and the McCoys’ ‘Hang On Sloopy’, among many others. (As befitted the sometimes sleazy, occasionally Mob-affiliated world of New York popular music, Bert Berns, who everyone found a fabulous human being, attractive and glamorous to those with a fondness for boho chic, was allegedly ‘connected’, and possibly even a ‘made man’. From his rarefied perspective he would have given Page interesting instruction about the US music business. At their first sessions Led Zeppelin recorded a song about him, ‘Baby Come On Home’, subtitled ‘Tribute to Bert Berns’, an exceptionally beautiful soul tune of precisely the type Berns would have produced for Atlantic, which was not released until 1993. In Page’s guitar playing on this 1968 recording you can hear his love for Bert Berns.)
It was Bert Berns’s writing of the song ‘Twist and Shout’ that had first brought him to London. Covered by the Beatles, with John Lennon’s extraordinary, searing performance taking the song to a show-stopping further level, ‘Twist and Shout’ closed Please Please Me, the Liverpool group’s first album, the number one LP in the UK for 30 weeks in 1963. Although the Beatles meant nothing in America at that time, Berns’s first royalty cheque for his song on the album was for $90,000. In October 1963 he came over to London to see what was going on, producing a handful of no-hoper acts.
Already working in the British capital was Shel Talmy. A Los Angeleno who had worked with Capitol Records, he had been hired as staff producer by Dick Rowe, the Decca head of A&R – the man who famously turned down the Beatles but redeemed himself somewhat by signing the Rolling Stones. Rowe now decided that Bert Berns might fit as producer with the Belfast act he had signed named Them.
‘Twist and Shout’ had been covered yet again, by Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, who turned it into a Top 10 UK hit for Decca Records. It was something of a revenge release, as the act had been signed by Dick Rowe in preference to the Beatles – Brian Poole and the Tremeloes were, after all, from Essex, which was far more geographically convenient for a Londoner like Rowe than Liverpool.
In London, where he and Talmy were the only American producers working, Bert Berns had secured work through Decca Records, taking on ‘Little Jimmy’ Page as his principal session guitarist, recognising his talent and befriending him. ‘With the new breed of British producers such as Mickie Most or Andrew Loog Oldham trying as hard as they could to make records that sounded American,’ wrote Berns’s biographer Joel Selvin, ‘Berns was the first American producer trying to make records that sounded British.’
The sessions with Them for Decca proved as much, the resulting recorded songs utterly unique in the resounding clarity of their sound. ‘Bert Berns was inveigled into producing the session,’ said Billy Harrison. ‘And he brought in Jimmy Page, and Bobby Graham on drums. There was much grumbling, mostly from me, because I felt we could play without these guys. Jimmy Page played the same riff as the bass, chugging along. I played the lead: I wrote the riff.
‘Bert Berns had arguments with us about the sound. I thought we were playing it okay: if someone brought in session men you took it as a bit of a sleight. I was very volatile in those days.
‘There were various rows. Jimmy Page didn’t really seem to want to talk to anybody. Just a stuck-up prick who thought he was better than the rest of the world. Sat there in silence. No conversation out of the guy. No response.’
Possibly Billy Harrison was misinterpreting the shyness that other musicians felt characterised the quiet Jimmy Page. And he may have been projecting his personal prejudices. ‘He seemed above everybody, above these Paddies. That was the days when guest houses would have a sign up: “No salesmen, no coloured, no Irish”. Page had that sort of sneering attitude, as though he was looking down on everybody. He’s a fabulous technician, but there’s nothing wrong with a bit of friendliness.’
‘Their lead vocalist, Van Morrison, was really hostile as he didn’t want session men on his recordings,’ said drummer Bobby Graham. ‘I remember the MD, Arthur Greenslade, telling him that we were only there to help. He calmed down but he didn’t like it.’
‘Whatever Morrison’s reservations, they worked well together, and Graham’s frenzied drumming at the end of “Gloria” is one of rock’s great moments,’ wrote Spencer Leigh in his Independent obituary of Graham.
And the opening guitar riff on ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ is one of the defining moments of popular music in the sixties. This was all Billy Harrison’s own work. ‘What annoyed me later,’ he said, ‘was that you would start to see how it was being said that Jimmy Page had played a blinding solo on “Baby Please Don’t Go”. I got narked about that: he never said he did it, but he never denied it.’
‘For a long time,’ said Jackie McAuley, who joined Them the next year, ‘Jimmy Page got credit for Billy Harrison’s guitar part. But he’s owned up about it.’
Bert Berns also pulled Page in for ‘Shout’, a cover of the Isley Brothers’ classic that was the debut hit for Glasgow’s Lulu & The Luvvers. And he had him add his guitar parts to her version of ‘Here Comes the Night’, a majestic version that was released prior to Them’s effort, but spent only one week in the UK charts.
Shel Talmy, a former classmate of Phil Spector at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles, also loved Page’s playing, and the guitarist was equally taken with him: a studio innovator, Shel Talmy would play with separation and recording levels, techniques that Page would assiduously study.
Soon after he had arrived in London and started working for Decca, Talmy came across the guitarist: ‘Somebody mentioned that they’d heard this 17-year-old kid who was really terrific, and I went and checked him out and I used him. We got along great and he was fabulous. I thought, “This kid is really gonna go somewhere,” and I only regret that he didn’t call me when he formed Led Zeppelin. It’s a shame! I would like to have done that.
‘He got it. I mean, he was original. At that time in London there were very few really current musicians: a lot of good musicians, but kind of mired slightly in the past. There were, like, one or two good rhythm sections and that was it. I originally started using Big Jim Sullivan, who was the only other one, and then I found Jimmy, who I thought was even better because he was more with it. He was doing what I thought should be done and certainly what was being done in the States, so it was a no-brainer.’
Fitting Page together with drummer Bobby Graham, and from time to time John Baldwin on bass, the producer had a team that was highly resourceful and fast. Talmy has described Graham as ‘the greatest drummer the UK has ever produced’. While playing with Joe Brown and the Bruvvers, Graham had been approached by Brian Epstein at a gig at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton, in June 1962. Would he care to replace Pete Best in the Beatles? Epstein asked him. Graham turned down the offer, leaving the way clear for Ringo Starr.
Graham first met Page when the guitarist was playing with Neil Christian and the Crusaders; they had supported Joe Brown at a show in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. ‘I was so impressed. We became very good friends, and when I became a producer I always used Jimmy. We started a publishing company called Jimbo Music, for stuff we wrote. Jimmy wasn’t one of the most way-out and weirdest characters I ever