Jimmy Page: The Definitive Biography. Chris Salewicz
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warned off, the pair never even approached the Spencer Davis Group’s Steve Winwood.
There was even controversy over the ‘Beck’s Bolero’ production credit. Mickie Most claimed it, part of a contractual issue between him and Beck, his managerial client. Simon Napier-Bell would insist it was his, and Jimmy Page claimed that he had done the record’s production, staying behind in the studio long after Napier-Bell had gone home.
‘The track was done and then the producer just disappeared,’ Page told Steve Rosen in September 1977. ‘He was never seen again: he simply didn’t come back. Napier-Bell, he just sort of left me and Jeff to it. Jeff was playing and I was in the box [studio]. And even though he says he wrote it, I’m playing the electric 12-string on it. Beck’s doing the slide bits, and I’m basically playing around the chords.’
Simon Napier-Bell has a different point of view. ‘Jimmy Page was being demeaning when we were making the record: he was sneering. Later, when Beck and Page were discussing how the mix should be, I went away to leave them to it. The purpose of a producer is so that the record ends up as it should. That’s why I went away – to leave them to it. As for Mickie Most, my agreement with him over the management of the Yardbirds was that all product reverted to him. I just said, “What the hell, I don’t need it.” I didn’t really – but that track became a rock milestone.’
When Pete Townshend discovered that Keith Moon had played on the session, he was furious. He began to refer to Beck and Page as ‘flashy little guitarists of very little brain’. Page’s response? ‘Townshend got into feedback because he couldn’t play single notes.’ Townshend later commented: ‘The thing is, when Keith did “Beck’s Bolero”, that wasn’t just a session, it was a political move. It was at a point when the group was very close to breaking up. Keith was very paranoid and going through a heavy pills thing. He wanted to make the group plead for him because he’d joined Beck.’
Later, it was claimed that Moon had declared that if the studio line-up became an actual band, it would go down ‘like a lead balloon’. According to Peter Grant, Entwistle then added, ‘like a lead zeppelin’. (Entwistle was always adamant that he came up with the Lead Zeppelin name all on his own; and also that he had the idea of a flaming Zeppelin as an album cover.)
When writing his Keith Moon biography Dear Boy, Tony Fletcher interviewed Jeff Beck about the ‘Beck’s Bolero’ session. Fletcher asked Beck if Moon had been using him to pressure the Who for his own ends. Beck replied that that wasn’t the case at all: the subtext to the ‘Beck’s Bolero’ session was the relationship between Jimmy Page and himself: ‘No, it was something to do with Jimmy and me. I had done sessions for Jimmy. He used to get me to do all the shit he didn’t want to do. He used to get me to pick him up in my car and pay for the petrol, and I’d find out he was on the session anyway. When he heard what I was doing on the sessions … he started taking an interest in my style, and then we went from there. And then the Yardbirds got in the way – I can’t remember the sequence of events. I remember thinking, “Why can’t I have what I want instead of what I’ve got?” That’s always the way. To have someone who’s so musically aware and talented as Jim alongside me was something I could really do with. But that wasn’t to be until later on in the Yardbirds. Meanwhile, I’m watching the Who going from strength to strength with a fantastic powerful drummer and knowing that that was what I really needed to get myself going. So it was a guiding light in one sense and fragmented what I already had. I was never content being in the Yardbirds, and I left Jim to paddle his canoe in the Yardbirds.’
The Yardbirds’ rhythm-guitar player Chris Dreja was yet another denizen of the Surrey Deep South from which Page, Clapton and Beck hailed. Brought up in Surbiton, where he continued to live, he would from time to time run into Page while the guitarist was studying at Sutton Art College. On more than one occasion he came across him in nearby Tolworth, outside the tropical-fish shop: Page was a tropical-fish enthusiast. ‘Hello, Chris, I’ve just bought a nice thermometer for my fish,’ he once greeted him.
On 18 June 1966 Page travelled up to Oxford in the passenger seat of Jeff Beck’s maroon Ford Zephyr Six to watch his friend play with Chris Dreja and the other Yardbirds at the May Ball at Queen’s College. They were on the same bill as seasoned Manchester hitmakers the Hollies. Not that that ‘seasoned hitmaker’ rubric couldn’t also have been applied to the Yardbirds. Since Beck had joined the band it seemed like they were never out of the UK charts – and increasingly the US hit lists were also welcoming the group’s 45s: ‘Heart Full of Soul’, ‘Evil Hearted You’, ‘Shapes of Things’ and ‘Over Under Sideways Down’ had all been hit singles. Meanwhile, their critically acclaimed Yardbirds album – more generally known as Roger the Engineer – was about to be released in the middle of July 1966.
Although events such as the May Ball paid well, they were formal, black-tie occasions, in the main quite uptight and, as defined in the new underground vocabulary, extremely ‘straight’. Becoming increasingly drunk as the evening progressed, Keith Relf, the Yardbirds’ singer, took exception to this prevalent social posture, and he began to harangue and berate his audience of bright young things. It was a stance that Page, notwithstanding his fondness for tropical fish, always a rebel and in tune with the more esoteric minutiae of pop culture, admired greatly: he thought Relf put on ‘a magnificent rock ’n’ roll performance’. Paul Samwell-Smith, the Yardbirds’ bass player, was so appalled by Relf’s stance, however, that as soon as their show was over he quit.
With further dates coming up, the Yardbirds were concerned about how they could play them without a bass player. On the spot, Page volunteered his services. ‘They had a show at the Marquee Club, and Paul was not coming back. So I foolishly said, “Yeah, I’ll play bass.” Jim McCarty says I was so desperate to get out of the studio that I’d have played drums.’
For some time Page had harboured doubts about whether he could continue working as a session player. ‘My session work was invaluable. At one point I was playing at least three sessions a day, six days a week. And I rarely ever knew in advance what I was going to be playing. But I learned things even on my worst sessions – and believe me, I played on some horrendous things. I finally called it quits after I started getting calls to do Muzak. I decided I couldn’t live that life any more; it was getting too silly.’
‘I remember the May Ball,’ said Beck. ‘Jimmy Page actually came to that gig. He came to see the band and I told him things were not running very smoothly. There were these hello-yah Princess Di types around. Trays with drinks with sticks. And as soon as we started Keith fell over back into Jim’s drums. After, I said, “Oh sorry, Jim, I suppose you’re not interested in joining the band?” He said it was the best thing ever when Keith fell back into the drums. It wasn’t going to put him off that easily.’
And so, slightly oddly, Jimmy Page joined the Yardbirds. That Marquee show took place three days later, on 21 June. How was Page’s performance? Terrible, according to Beck. ‘Absolute disaster. He couldn’t play the bass for toffee. He was running all over the neck. Four fat strings instead of six thin ones.’
Whatever. As soon as Page became a part of the group, he changed his look entirely: he presented himself as a highly stylised, very chic rock star, someone of ineffable good taste and class. And very quickly, with his characteristic diligence, he became adept on the bass guitar.
Before Page formally joined the Yardbirds, he went round to Simon Napier-Bell’s flat in Bressenden Place, near Buckingham Palace, for a meeting with the group and their manager. ‘When he arrived,’ said Napier-Bell, ‘he had an enormous swollen lip. Nobody knew who’d done it. He said some people had stopped him in the street and hit him. I remember thinking that if you’re Jimmy Page that could happen to you because of your sneering. Jimmy’s superciliousness was hard to take. When Jimmy Page looked as nice as he does, maybe he thought he could get away with it.
‘He came into the group. I said, “We don’t really get on.” “You’re my manager: I want to see the contract,” he said. I said, “You won’t. I’ll take my percentage off four-fifths of the money, and I won’t manage you.” Because I knew he would want to pull a stunt and say the contract was terrible.