Jimmy Page: The Definitive Biography. Chris Salewicz
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do so over the next couple of years. ‘I had to rely on what felt right,’ said Graham, who estimated that he played on 15,000 tunes in the course of his career. ‘I was loud. My trick was, if the singer took a breath, fill in. I was one of the first of the new generation coming in. Jim Sullivan was already in. Jimmy Page – same thing, couldn’t read a note but had a great feel.’
Playing sessions paid good money, £9 a time when the average working man earned little more than that a week. And, as befitted the rules of the Musicians’ Union, there would be three sessions a day: 10 a.m. until 1 p.m.; 2 till 5; and 7 until 10 p.m. During each session the musicians were expected to finish four songs, and afterwards they would be handed small brown envelopes containing their fees in cash. If you worked all three sessions, you’d come away with almost £30 for a day’s work. At the end of each evening, Page, Big Jim Sullivan and Graham would adjourn to such fashionable boîtes of the day as the Cromwellian and Annie’s Room.
‘The weirdest thing I ever did with Jimmy was Gonks Go Beat,’ reflected Graham. ‘Charlie Katz had booked us into Decca number three studio, the cathedral where they did all the classical recordings. I wasn’t supposed to be at that session – it was the only time at the wrong place. My part looked like a map of the London Underground. Jimmy came over and said, “I think we’re in the wrong place. I can’t read my part.” The musical director said, “Are you ready, gentlemen?” and there was complete silence. He looked vaguely in my direction, and I thought he was talking to somebody behind me. He said, “Bob, you’re in at the start,” and I struggled. Finally he put the baton down and came over and ran it through with me. During the session I looked across and Jimmy was thundering away. At the end of the session I said, “You looked all right, Jim.” He said, “I turned my amp off.”’
With Shel Talmy, the trio of the two Jims and Bobby worked with a seemingly endless list of aspirant acts and tunes, such as the Lancastrians’ ‘We’ll Sing in the Sunshine’, Wayne Gibson’s ‘See You Later Alligator’ and the First Gear’s ‘Leave My Kitten Alone’, a cover of a Little Willie John tune and the B-side of ‘A Certain Girl’. ‘Leave My Kitten Alone’ was deemed ‘Page’s most outstanding solo prior to “Whole Lotta Love”’ by US rock critic Greg Shaw.
On 15 January 1965, again for Talmy, Page worked with 17-year-old David Jones, the leader of the Manish Boys, on ‘I Pity the Fool’, a cover of the Bobby Bland tune, backed with ‘Take My Tip’. So as not to be mistaken for Davy Jones of the Monkees, David Jones would soon change his name to David Bowie. (In 1964 Page had been a ‘member’ of Jones/Bowie’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men, a clear publicity gimmick that succeeded in getting Jones on television news. And Page had already played with a pair of earlier David Bowie line-ups, Davy Jones’ Locker and Davy Jones and the Lower Third, both with Shel Talmy producing. And he worked on David Bowie’s first, eponymous album, for Deram Records, produced by Mike Vernon.)
‘That “I Pity the Fool” session was phenomenal,’ said Wayne Bardell, then working in Francis, Day and Hunter, a record shop on London’s Charing Cross Road, but soon to become a successful manager. ‘I was at the session at IBC as a guest of the not-yet Bowie, with Shel Talmy producing, Glyn Johns the engineer and Jimmy Page on guitar.’
‘Well, it’s definitely not going to be a hit,’ Page said, correctly, of the tune that day – it sold no more than 500 copies. But during the Manish Boys’ sessions he gave David Jones a guitar riff that the young singer didn’t yet know how to use: as David Bowie he fitted this riff into two separate songs, first on 1970’s ‘The Supermen’ on his The Man Who Sold the World album, and again on ‘Dead Man Walking’ in 1997. ‘When I was a baby,’ said David Bowie later, ‘I did a rock session with one of the bands, one of the millions of bands that I had in the sixties – it was the Manish Boys, that’s what it was – and the session guitar player doing the solo was this young kid who’d just come out of art school and was already a top session man, Jimmy Page.’
And ‘this young kid’ had every right to be very excited about the part he played on ‘I Pity the Fool’, which, despite his misgivings, was a sensationally great record that should have been a hit; this was thanks in no small part to Jimmy Page adding searing, hard-rock guitar, like something Mick Green could have provided for the Pirates.
‘I Pity the Fool’ might have flopped, but Talmy produced breakthrough singles from a pair of acts that would become two of the biggest UK groups of the 1960s: ‘You Really Got Me’, the Kinks’ third 45, and the Who’s ‘I Can’t Explain’. Page played rhythm guitar on a version of the latter track.
‘Because Shel wasn’t sure I could play a solo, he asked his favourite session guitarist, Jimmy Page, to sit in,’ wrote Pete Townshend in his autobiography. ‘And because our band had rehearsed the song with backing vocals in Beach Boys style, but not very skilfully, Shel arranged for three male session singers, the Ivy League, to chirp away in our place. Shel Talmy got a good sound, tight and commercial, and although there was no guitar feedback, I was willing to compromise to get a hit.’
In Guitar Masters: Intimate Portraits by Alan DiPerna, Townshend referred to Page as ‘a friend of mine’. The guitarists certainly had something in common: a fling with Anya Butler, the beautiful – and older – assistant to Who co-manager Chris Stamp. Townshend was initially puzzled by Page’s presence at the session: ‘I said to Jimmy, “Well, what are you doing here?” He said, “I’m here to give some weight to the rhythm guitar. I’m going to do the guitar on the overdubs.” And I said, “Oh, great.” And he said, “What are you going to play?” “A Rick 12,” I told him. And he said, “I’ll play a …” Whatever it was. It was all very friendly. It was all very convivial.’
And on ‘Bald Headed Woman’, the B-side of ‘I Can’t Explain’, it was Page who played the fuzzbox licks. On the liner notes to the Who’s Two’s Missing compilation album, Who bassist John Entwistle said: ‘The fuzz guitar droning throughout is played by Jimmy Page. The reason being, he owned the only fuzzbox in the country at that time.’
Entwistle was not exactly correct. Gibson guitars had put a fuzz-tone pedal into production in 1962, giving it the brand name of ‘Maestro Fuzz-Tone FZ-1’. Although in limited supply, the devices, imported from the US, could be found from time to time in London’s more select musical equipment stores, and it was from one of these that Page had acquired his gadget.
Like many technological developments, the origins of the fuzzbox and the dirty edge it added to a guitar’s sound – which Page would employ to his maximum advantage and could be heard to its defining fullest when played by Keith Richards on the Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’ – were accidental. In 1951 Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats – actually Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm – had hit the number one slot in the US rhythm and blues chart with ‘Rocket 88’. A distinctive feature of ‘Rocket 88’ was the growling sound of Willie Kizart’s guitar. On his way from Clarksdale, Mississippi, to Sam Phillips’s Sun Studio in Memphis in 1951 to record the tune, Kizart’s amplifier had fallen from his car while a tyre was being replaced. Endeavouring to repair the resulting damage to the speaker cone, the guitarist stuffed it with paper: the marginally distorted sound that resulted became a feature of the ‘Rocket 88’ single, which is often cited as one of the first rock ’n’ roll records. From then on, guitarists sought out the means to deliver a similar grimy sound, the likes of Link Wray – who would poke holes in his loudspeaker – and Buddy Guy consciously damaging their amps to replicate such a tone. And in 1961 the great country singer Marty Robbins’s ‘Don’t Worry’ single hit number three in the US national charts, largely courtesy of his guitarist Grady Martin’s muttering instrument being played through a faulty amplifier. Martin soon put out his own single, ‘The Fuzz’, thus bestowing the malfunction with a semi-official term.
In Los Angeles a radio-station technician developed an electronic device to create such an effect for producer Lee Hazelwood, who employed it on Sanford Clark’s ‘Go On Home’ 45 in 1960. And in the same city, super session player Orville ‘Red’ Rhodes, who would become a member of the celebrated Wrecking Crew and was also an electronics whizz, developed a similar device,