The story of how over the next dozen years Led Zeppelin trampled the rock world underfoot has literally become the stuff of legend. Yet, according to Page, off the road, the four members of Zeppelin were as meek and mild as a bunch of church mice. “Two of us lived in the south and two lived in the Midlands and, apart from when we got together to do rehearsals and write and record, we were all family men with separate lives,” he says. But when they came together, he concedes they “created this fifth monster”.
At this point, he’s talking mostly about their musical chemistry. But it might just as easily apply to the lifestyle that went with the band, and which Page once famously likened to “a stag party that never ends”. For Zeppelin on tour invented the template for Rock’n’Roll Babylon later lampooned in movies such as This Is Spinal Tap and Almost Famous. Many of the greatest excesses were undoubtedly down to the mercurial John Bonham. It was the drummer who was at the heart of the notorious incident involving the groupie and the ‘mud shark’ at the Edgewater Hotel, Seattle in 1969. And it was Bonham who in 1971 reduced John Paul Jones’ room at the Tokyo Hilton to matchwood with a samurai sword, earning the group a lifetime ban from Hilton hotels worldwide.
Page was less into mindless destruction and more interested in serious and serial debauchery. He reputedly indulged some strange tastes. In Pasadena in 1969, he was said to have enjoyed the spectacle of two groupies sharing a bath in his hotel room with four live octopuses. On the road in LA in 1972, he became infatuated with 14-year-old schoolgirl Lori Maddox and spent the next 18 months hiding her in his hotel room. Then there is the lurid account of Pamela Des Barres in her book Rock Bottom, which paints a picture of drug-taking with drag queens in the toilets of the transvestite clubs Page was said to enjoy visiting after a typical Zeppelin show.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3rkGVVmrik
He was also famously fascinated – some would say unhealthily obsessed – with the occult and, in particular, the black magic practices of Aleister Crowley, the self-styled “Great Beast” who was once dubbed by the press as the “most evil man in Britain”. Page even bought Crowley’s former castle on the shores of Loch Ness. When a series of disasters and mishaps befell the band, from Plant’s car crash and the loss of his son to Bonham’s death at Page’s home in Windsor, some superstitious and/or mischievous souls were all too ready to blame the guitarist’s dabblings with the occult.
It’s not an area of his life Page has ever been prepared to talk about. Certainly, such talk seems a long way from the avuncular image Page presents today, a born-again family man who rises early to ready his kids for school and is clearly appreciating the opportunity to lead his life away from the pressures and excesses of rock’n’roll touring.
There is an undeniable air of irritation on the part of Zeppelin’s former members about the stories of drug-crazed hell-raising. They make no effort to deny the stories, but there’s a feeling that the lurid headlines have in some way served to obscure or diminish the potency of the music they made. Was that the reason that Zep never received a Grammy nomination, let alone won an award, when the band was still on active service?
As Page will insist to Uncut in the quiet and cultured tones of lace-curtained Surrey suburbia that have never left him: “Forget the myths. Because it was really all about the music.”
Today, Jimmy Page is talking about a new album, which, apart from a live recording with The Black Crowes, will be his first since 1998’s Walking Into Clarksdale with Robert Plant. There are no plans for them to work together again and, talking to the two of them, it’s hard to envisage the circumstances in which that might happen.
But then, Jimmy Page has already achieved enough to last several lifetimes.