Jimmy Page: The Definitive Biography. Chris Salewicz
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the attention of Page; anxious to replicate its juddering sound, he had purchased his own Maestro Fuzz-Tone.
Yet it was not entirely to his satisfaction. Luckily, he already knew someone who could assist him with this. Roger Mayer was a friend from the Epsom music scene. By 1964 he was working for the Admiralty Research Laboratory in Teddington, in the Acoustical Analysis section, having developed into something of an electronics boffin. And their friendship persisted: Page and Mayer would visit each other’s homes to listen to American records. ‘Jimmy came to me,’ said Mayer, ‘when he got hold of the Maestro Fuzz and said, “It’s good but it doesn’t have enough sustain … it’s a bit staccato.” I said, “Well, I’m sure we can improve on that.” That conversation spurred me to design my first fuzzbox.’
‘I suggested that Roger should try to make something that would improve upon the distortion heard on “The 2,000 Pound Bee” by the Ventures,’ said Page. ‘He went away and came up with the first real good fuzzbox … the first thing that really generated this wonderful sustain.’
Running off a 6-volt battery, Mayer’s fuzzbox was constructed within a custom-made casing, which contained controls for gain and biasing along with a switch that would modify the tonal output. ‘Right from square one,’ said Mayer, ‘Pagey and I wanted something that sustained a lot, but then didn’t start jittering as it went away. One of the things that became very, very apparent early on was that you didn’t want nasty artefacts. It’s very easy to design a fuzzbox – anybody can do it – but to make one sound nice and retain articulation in notes, now that’s something else.’
Page’s part in the Kinks’ career is more cloudy. Although it has often been claimed that he played the iconic solo on ‘You Really Got Me’, this is not the case. ‘Jimmy did play rhythm on the first Kinks LP, and certainly did not play lead on “You Really Got Me”, which preceded the LP by several weeks, or anything else for that matter. I only brought him in to play rhythm because at the time Ray wanted to concentrate on his singing,’ said Shel Talmy. In fact, Page had already played acoustic 12-string guitar on ‘I’ve Been Driving on Bald Mountain’ and ‘I’m a Lover Not a Fighter’, on the Kinks’ eponymously titled debut album. (In 1965 Page played the solo on an instrumental version of ‘You Really Got Me’; almost identical to Dave Davies’s original guitar part, it was included on an instrumental album by the Larry Page Orchestra entitled Kinky Music.)
‘My presence at their sessions was to enable Ray Davies to wander around and virtually maintain control of everything, without having to be down in the studio all the time,’ said Page later. ‘Ray was producing those songs as much as Shel Talmy was … more so, actually, because Ray was directing them and everything. At one point, there were even three guitars playing the same riff.’
‘I’ll tell you something about Jimmy Page,’ Ray Davies told Creem magazine. ‘Jimmy Page thinks he was the first person in the world to ever put a B string where a G string should be. And for me, that’s his only claim to fame. Other than that, I think he’s an asshole … Jimmy Page and a lot of other people subsequently came to our sessions when we became hot, and I think he played rhythm 12-string on “I’m a Lover Not a Fighter”, and he played tambourine on “Long Tall Shorty”.’
In fact, Page did not ‘put a B string where a G string should be’. He told Melody Maker that he would substitute the B string with a top E. Rather than the conventional E string he would swap it for a banjo octave string, either tuned to G or A: ‘You’ll get a raving, authentic blues sound that you hear on most pop records with that string-bending sound.’
‘I didn’t really do that much on the Kinks records,’ Page later admitted. ‘I know I managed to get a couple of riffs in on their album, but I can’t really remember. I know that Ray didn’t really approve of my presence. The Kinks just didn’t want me around when they were recording. It was Shel Talmy’s idea. One aspect of being in the studio while potential hits were being made was the press – too many writers were making a big fuss about the use of session men. Obviously I wasn’t saying anything to the press but it just leaked out … and that sort of thing often led to considerable bad feeling.’
For most of these sessions Page employed a Gibson Les Paul Custom, with the frets filed down ‘to produce a very smooth playing action … it just sounded so pure and fantastic,’ he told John Tobler and Stuart Grundy for BBC’s Radio 1.
Despite the griping of Ray Davies and Billy Harrison, Page played on a number of records that were significant cornerstones of mid-sixties British pop – outright classics, some of them. These included Shirley Bassey’s theme song for Goldfinger, the third James Bond film, on which he played with Big Jim Sullivan and Vic Flick, another renowned UK session guitarist – the tune was a Top 10 US hit. Then there was Tom Jones’s ‘It’s Not Unusual’, number one in the UK and Top Ten in the US; Petula Clark’s ‘Downtown’, a US number one; Kathy Kirby’s ‘Secret Love’; Marianne Faithfull’s ‘As Tears Go By’; P. J. Proby’s ‘Hold Me’; the Merseys’ ‘Sorrow’, covered by David Bowie on his Pin Ups album; the Nashville Teens’ ‘Tobacco Road’; Brian Poole and the Tremeloes’ ‘Candy Man’; Twinkle’s ‘Terry’, a motorcycle-death record in the tradition of the Shangri-Las’ ‘Leader of the Pack’ that was number four in the UK charts at Christmas 1964 and banned by the BBC for being in ‘poor taste’; ‘Baby What’s Wrong’ and its B-side ‘Be a Sect Maniac’, the first single from the Downliners Sect, a wild R&B outfit who made the Pretty Things seem like Cliff Richard.
As it had been with Bert Berns, much of Page’s session work was for the Decca label, at their studios in Broadhurst Gardens, West Hampstead, a plain, nondescript building, built like an office block.
He worked extensively with Dave Berry, a Decca solo star from Sheffield whose first hit had been a cover of his namesake Chuck Berry’s ‘Memphis Tennessee’. He was one of British rock ’n’ roll’s first anti-heroes, a true original. ‘I noticed how strippers used to tease the audience in Hamburg,’ he said of his time playing the circuit in the German port. So almost an entire Dave Berry set might consist of him singing his songs from behind the stage curtain, with only his microphone and hand tantalisingly visible.
When Elvis Presley covered Arthur Crudup’s ‘My Baby Left Me’, Scotty Moore’s guitar licks had proved such an inspiration for the teenage Jimmy Page. Now Page took the lead guitar part himself on Dave Berry’s sensational version of the song, with – as was customary – Big Jim Sullivan on rhythm.
Berry’s ‘My Baby Left Me’ only grazed the Top 40, but his sultry ‘The Crying Game’ was a Top 5 tune when it was released in July 1964. However, this time it was Big Jim Sullivan who took the lead part, with Page providing rhythm; on drums, as per usual, was Bobby Graham. There was a picture in the music press, recalled Berry, of Page standing next to him, along with the engineer Glyn Johns, listening to a playback of ‘The Crying Game’. ‘Many of the session musicians would have left as soon as they had done their part,’ said Berry. ‘But Jimmy Page, being a proper player, would listen to his own part. He would sometimes want to do it again. Mind you, at the time Jimmy was in Carter-Lewis and the Southerners: by 5 p.m. he’d be gone to do a gig.’
The specific session players he used, said Berry, ‘were really into it. I must have done a quarter of my career with Decca with that line-up: 25 to 30 songs. Mike Smith would call me with the studio booked. But if Big Jim and Jimmy Page were not available we’d cancel it and wait.’ There were at least four tracks on which Page played harmonica: ‘C.C. Rider’, for example, and Buster Brown’s ‘Fannie Mae’, which relies on a harmonica riff. Meanwhile, Page played both lead guitar and the harmonica part on ‘Don’t Gimme No Lip Child’, the B-side of ‘The Crying Game’.
Was Page, who was only 20 years old, anxious to impose his personality in the studio? Not at all, said Berry: ‘He was very quiet. The true professional players don’t have any edge to them anyway. The bigger the artist, the less edge they have to them. These two guitarists were really great players. And they didn’t stick to how this stuff was written out. Big Jim would be improvising his solo. You could hear him doing a vocal counter-melody.