Unlike Plant, he hasn’t made a string of solo albums. Instead, when the singer made clear his reluctance to continue touring with the former Zeppelin guitarist following their temporary late-’90s reunion, Page took to the road playing Zep songs with The Black Crowes.
In talking to him, it swiftly becomes obvious why he was so delighted with the Grammy. Now 61, slightly less than one-fifth of his life was spent in Led Zeppelin. But he clearly does regard those dozen years as his lifetime’s achievement.
In fact, long before Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page had already enjoyed a music career that would have been sufficient to earn him a place in the rock history books. Indeed, when he first joined forces with Plant in the summer of 1968, the contrast between them could hardly have been greater. By his own admission, Plant was a 19-year-old ingénue whose nascent singing career was going nowhere fast – so much so that he’d been reduced to laying tarmac to pay the rent and was thinking of resuming his training as an articled clerk with a Midlands chartered accountant. Page was only four-and-a-half-years older, but in terms of experience it might as well have been half a lifetime. Growing up in the same triangle of the Surrey stockbroker belt that produced Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, Page was playing an electric guitar before the ’50s were over. By the time he was 17, he was already famous on the London music scene as the hottest young guitar slinger in town, long before anyone had heard of either of his Surrey compatriots.
His first studio session was playing on “Diamonds” with two former members of The Shadows, Jet Harris and Tony Meehan. It was also Page’s first No 1, topping the British charts in January 1963.
After that, he became the first name that stellar producers such as Shel Talmy, Andrew Loog Oldham and Mickie Most called on when they had a hit to record. Among those whose records Page’s guitar graced were Them (“Here Comes The Night”), The Who (“Can’t Explain”), Lulu (“Shout”), Tom Jones, Donovan (“Hurdy Gurdy Man”), Herman’s Hermits (“I’m Into Something Good”), The Kinks (“You Really Got Me”), Chris Farlowe (“Out Of Time”), and even Val Doonican (“Walk Tall”).
By early 1965, round about the same time an awestruck teenage Robert Plant was seeing Sonny Boy Williamson at Birmingham Town Hall and sneaking backstage to nick one of his harmonicas, the 21-year-old Page was actually recording with the blues legend in a London studio. That same year, he was invited to replace Clapton in The Yardbirds. As he was making far more money playing sessions, he turned down the gig and recommended his mate Jeff Beck, taking up a post as a staff producer on Oldham’s Immediate Records instead. He ended up producing tracks for John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, whose lineup by then featured Clapton.
In short, he was, as Stephen Davis put it in Hammer Of The Gods, “The wise hack of the pop world, a consummate pro making a fortune while the rest of his generation of English musicians toiled for little money.” Yet Page was also growing increasingly dissatisfied with playing anonymously on other people’s records, and when he was asked a second time to join The Yardbirds in 1966, he agreed, even though the invitation was initially to play bass, before he switched to a dual lead guitar role alongside Beck.
By that time, The Yardbirds had already passed their zenith and, as early as late 1966, Page and Beck were talking about a new band that was to include another well-known London sessioner, John Paul Jones, on bass. Steve Marriott and Steve Winwood were both approached to fill the vocalist spot. In the end, it never happened but, as Page explains below, the idea became the prototype of the band that he would eventually put together with the assistance of new manager Peter Grant when The Yardbirds finally disintegrated in the summer of 1968.
What happened next was either fate or simply a slice of extraordinary luck. Singer Terry Reid, who Page had got to know on a ‘British Invasion’ package tour of America, was approached to join the new band and declined the invitation, but recommended his old Midlands mucker instead.
Unconvinced by the Buffalo Springfield covers Plant was singing with his then band, it took a musical bonding session over a mutual love of the blues at Page’s Pangbourne home on the Thames before the guitarist was convinced he’d found a singer with the right alchemy to realise his vision.