Jimmy Page on the true story behind ‘Stairway To Heaven’

Jimmy Page: the defining figure of a thousand heavy metal tropes, pioneer of stage and studio and the visionary who conjured rock’s greatest ever album sequence. What’s more, he’s been his own archivist since the day he first picked up a guitar. From the creation of Led Zeppelin’s modern mythology to the true story of ‘Stairway To Heaven’, here, in his own words, is the undisputed lord of the riffs
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UNITED KINGDOM - MAY 17: EARLS COURT Photo of Jimmy PAGE and LED ZEPPELIN, Jimmy Page performing live onstage (Photo by Ian Dickson/Redferns)Ian Dickson

Led Zeppelin remain rock’s great colossus, the perennial soundtrack to mayhem and carnage, a band that have, over the years, been yoked to all manner of imaginary rampaging hordes. In their heyday – in the 1970s, when they were fully operational – they were the hard rock equivalent of the thunderous blitzkrieg, a gang of marauding Viking warriors, the template of pre-punk orthodoxy and the bar by which every other rock group was judged.

Few managed it, as Zeppelin’s high-concept, high-octane mix of light and shade, of push and pull and loud and quiet – all of it determined by the group’s leader, Jimmy Page – was nigh on impossible to top.

Of course, it couldn’t last. When punk rock consumed the music industry towards the end of the 1970s, Zeppelin were suddenly regarded as unnecessary behemoths, the veritable dinosaurs of rock. But in the last 30 years or so, there has been something of gradual volte-face, through which the band have been promoted back to the industry premiership, where they now reside as permanent fixtures – inviolate, immaculate and beyond reproach.

They remain an incubator of heroic fantasies and it is now impossible to listen to the likes of “Trampled Under Foot”, “Kashmir”, “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” or any of their other Wagnerian classics, complete with their wailing and their titanic rock riffs, without imagining yourself as the invading conqueror of something or other – even if you’re just overtaking someone on the M40.

Jimmy Page knows this, and he knew it at the time, when he was masterminding all of the band’s momentous records: their 1969 debut, Led Zeppelin, which invented the 1970s in the space of 44 minutes and 54 seconds, and at a cost of just £1,782 (one of Page’s original names for the group was the more prosaic Mad Dogs; they had only been together for two-and-a-half weeks before they recorded it); Led Zeppelin II, also from 1969, the heaviest rock album ever made; 1970’s Led Zeppelin III, in which the band showed their acoustic side; Led Zeppelin IV, from 1971, which contained “Stairway To Heaven” (unceasingly voted the greatest rock song ever recorded, for a while this became the most played track on US radio; it was so beloved by aspiring guitarists that it was actually banned from being played in some guitar shops); 1973’s relatively lacklustre Houses Of The Holy; 1975’s monumental double album Physical Graffiti, which continued their acknowledgement of what would soon become known as world music; their 1976 pre-punk showpiece Presence; and their 1979 swan song In Through The Out Door. Page produced each and every one of them, alone. The band were Page’s vision and he crafted them according to what he thought a modern rock band should be: explosive, dynamic, all-conquering, the last word in savagery.

When you listen to Zeppelin you can imagine the four of them – bare-chested singer Robert Plant, bulldozer drummer John Bonham and the inevitably quiet bassist, John Paul Jones, all lending support to Page’s vision – standing tall, standing proud, putting their hands on their hips (perhaps under the mighty brow of a prophetic mountain) and surveying the skyline, almost as though their music was being made without them. In a sense that wouldn’t have been so surprising, because as Zeppelin’s extraordinary sound started to become so otherworldly – it was on Led Zeppelin II that the futuristic brutality of their noise began to take shape – it became easy to assume that this really was the music of the gods, with Page and co acting as mere conduits.

In their time, these conduits certainly attracted their own disciples, because in the first half of the 1970s most young men between the ages of 15 and 25 tried to look like Page or Plant: shoulder-length locks, billowing flares (covered perhaps in one of the band’s rune-like symbols), maybe a velvet jacket and a pair of platform boots. It was during the cooler months when their disciples could be mistaken for a real army, however, as they would wander around in old army great coats, the type with big fat belts, possibly holding a Zeppelin album under their arm, to show their allegiance. For some reason – probably because of its extremely recognisable cover, which was based on a photo of Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, and his “Flying Circus” Jagdstaffel 11 squadron during the First World War from 1917 – this was usually a copy of Led Zeppelin II. So not only did Jimmy Page’s band sound like nothing on earth, but they managed to co-opt an entire generation of decidedly earthbound devotees.

The band always felt that too much explanation of their work or the examination of its origins was unnecessary, yet at their heart they were a modern blues band, a heavy one at that. If you aspired to be a member of the rock fraternity in the early 1970s, you were judged on how “heavy” you were, how loud, how showy, how dynamic. If your power chords were riotous and barbarous and “authentic” enough (whatever that meant and, actually, no one ever really knew) then you were allowed into the fold. Zeppelin were universally considered to be the heaviest group of them all – Page’s riffs and power chords had monumental strength – and so consequently they were often deemed to be the coolest.

The band also became a byword for debauchery and excess, and everything they did was on a grand scale: comestible-covered groupies seemed to be readily available, Bonham could be seen riding motorcycles down hotel corridors, while rented rooms were regularly trashed and “redecorated”. Once, when a hotel receptionist said it must feel great to throw a television through a window, the band’s legendary manager, Peter Grant, took $200 out of his wallet and said, “Here, be our guest.” One story has Page being delivered to a waiting throng of girls on a room service trolley. Their sexual extravagance was mirrored in some of their songs: during “Communication Breakdown”, for instance, Robert Plant can be heard to scream, “Suck it,” just before Page delivers a ferocious guitar solo. While this seems unconscionable now, it was symptomatic of the age. More menacingly, Page had a fascination for the occult, especially the work of the author and magician Aleister Crowley. This allowed the increasingly copious number of Zeppelin fantasists to paint ever-more colourful narratives of the band’s so-called “deal with the devil”. Of course, none of it was true, but it was great for business.

There were many who thought they were pretentious and preposterous and actually rather full of themselves, but the band had the weight of numbers behind them – they were the biggest concert attraction, the greatest album sellers, the loudest! – and for the first half of the 1970s were as unimpeachable as Clint Eastwood, Jack Nicholson or The Rolling Stones, outcasts who had been adopted by the mob. They weren’t all liked by the same people, but their level of fame was such that it made any kind of qualitative criticism redundant.

Perhaps sensing they were irreproachable, for a while they became rather imperious, which obviously turned the critics against them, critics who understood the mass appeal of the music, but who couldn’t fathom the band’s disregard for the fourth estate. Thus they were painted as scoundrels and so became even more hip. It might please pop historians to paint Zeppelin as the prime exponents of an outmoded and justifiably redacted part of the post-War music narrative, but in their time they actually were the coolest band in the world.

Even cooler now.

And Jimmy Page is the man who made it all happen. From Heston, Middlesex, Page was born in 1944 and in his youth was obsessed with just two things: art and music, notably the guitar. He largely taught himself by listening to the solos on records by Elvis Presley, British folk artist Bert Jansch and a host of vintage blues guitarists.

UNITED KINGDOM - MAY 17: EARLS COURT Photo of LED ZEPPELIN and Jimmy PAGE, Jimmy Page performing live onstage . Kneeling on stool playing acoustic guitar (Photo by Ian Dickson/Redferns)Ian Dickson

It’s fascinating to learn, however, that a lot of his early influences came from classical music.

“My introduction to the world of recorded sound came when my family lived in Feltham, London,” he says. “There was a neighbour on our road who’d recently acquired a top-of-the-range stereo record player and he was inviting neighbours to come and listen to his prize possession. We went round to his house – I would have been around seven years old at the time. He played these audio file recordings for hi-fi enthusiasts, including a steam train, like a Flying Scotsman, zooming across from the right speaker to the left with all its undeniable drama. Curiously enough, that’s just the kind of thing I did later with tape recorder facilities when I was playing live with The Yardbirds.

“He also played some stereo classical music on his system and it was a listening experience that really opened up my ears. At home, we had our little radio with a little speaker, but it couldn’t compete with the magnificence of a classical orchestra in our neighbour’s house. My parents occasionally listened to BBC radio at home. However, through my neighbour’s hi-fi, I actually heard and felt a full orchestra in stereo for the very first time. It was probably something like Elgar or Wagner, a really passionate piece. The whole landscape of music, and the depth and texture of it, really affected me. I don’t think I’d ever listened in such detail before.”

In the 1960s Page became the most sought-after and prodigious session player in London, playing on hundreds of records by the likes of The Who, The Kinks, Donovan, Lulu, PJ Proby, Burt Bacharach and Cliff Richard. In 1964 alone he worked on Marianne Faithfull’s “As Tears Go By”, The Nashville Teens’ “Tobacco Road”, The Rolling Stones’ “Heart Of Stone”, Them’s “Here Comes The Night” and Petula Clark’s “Downtown”. He even contributed to the incidental music on The Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night. In 1966 he replaced Eric Clapton in The Yardbirds and then, when that ran its course, created The New Yardbirds, who almost immediately turned into Led Zeppelin.

They famously disbanded in 1980. That September, Bonham was picked up by an assistant to attend rehearsals at Bray Studios for a tour of North America, the band’s first since 1977. On the journey, he asked to stop for breakfast, where he drank four quadruple Screwdrivers (16 shots of vodka). He continued to drink heavily during the day, before moving on to Page’s house in Windsor. When Bonham fell asleep some time after midnight, he was taken to bed. He was found dead the following afternoon and the Zeppelin dream was suddenly over.

Describing the end of the band, Page says, “It was like staggering away from the vacuum caused by a great explosion, with your eardrums ringing. I found myself standing on a street corner, clutching 12 years of my life, with a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye, and not knowing which way to go. It was a most peculiar experience, because I knew that the dream was over and everything was gone. It was just a memory.”

Page would have a peripatetic and largely successful solo career, although there was always a lot of pressure for the band to reform. They occasionally did so. Their appearance at Live Aid was considered to be something of a failure (thought to be because guest drummer Phil Collins hadn’t had enough time to learn the parts – had he never heard any Zeppelin records?), while their one-off gig at London’s O2 arena on 10 December 2007 is justly considered to be one of the greatest concerts of all time. I was there and it was. Think of the gatefold sleeves, think of the violin bow power chords, think of the head thrown-back wail and think of the most important neanderthal noise made since Elvis fused country and rhythm and blues. In their sonic pomp, Zeppelin were the mothership of motherships; what was extraordinary was how similar they sounded at the O2. It was the gig of gigs, full of expectation and – who knew? – satisfactory delivery. To these ears they sounded just like they had in their heyday, perhaps even better. Monstrous, thunderous, epic.

Last month, Genesis Publications published Jimmy Page: The Anthology, a career deep dive that includes hundreds of items from his private collection, including costumes, stage equipment and instruments that have had a profound impact on the history of rock. The Anthology documents Page’s remarkable musical journey, from listening to blues records with childhood friend Jeff Beck to performing on TV in a skiffle band; from his colossal body of session work in the 1960s through to The Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin and on to such bands as The Firm, Coverdale and Page and Page and Plant. Page also tells the stories of the instruments that have long been mythologised in rock’n’roll history. The collection has been specially photographed under Page’s art direction, from the curation of the items to the lighting and the composition. It is fully annotated and fascinating. Page approached the book with the same fastidiousness he applies to everything, focusing on the details within the details. He is almost mathematical in his methods, planning its execution in the same way he used to plan the recording of Led Zeppelin records. Here, in a conversation that took place towards the end of September, he talks us through the book and, in tandem, the full saga of Led Zeppelin in all their pomp.

Charming, erudite and very particular, Jimmy Page remains one of rock’s great gentlemen.

So how was lockdown for you, Jimmy?

Well, I’m fortunate enough to have a place in the countryside as well as the one in London, so just before we went into lockdown I came down here. I haven’t really seen too many people and I’m feeling quite relieved that I’m not in London in crowded places. I sort of settled in here, which didn’t take that long, because I’m quite used to the place. I thought, ‘Now’s the time to actually do the things you complain you don’t have enough time for normally.’ So I got into a regime: I would have breakfast and then get straight on to the guitar. I’m always complaining that business things overwhelm me and that I don’t have enough time to play, so that’s what I did. Oh, and I got a chance to put my records in proper order. And my books. I guess everybody did a bit of that. Then the machinery got back into gear, with business and requests and one thing or another, but I’m still managing to play. So lockdown did me a favour, really, although it’s obviously been a horror for some people.

There’s an amazing collection of material in the book. Have you always been a hoarder? I wouldn’t have thought you had the time.

Some people call it work, some people call it wasting time, but I’ve always been a bit of a collector. But given the circumstances of the collection I have that relates to my career, I always thought having been born when I was, and witnessing first-hand the rock’n’roll revolution and the youth music that came from America, with Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly, and then sort of accessing the blues, that was the lucky thing. I could see it was quite a phenomenon. So I threw away anything that wasn’t important, but kept everything that was. I’ve even got the letter from my headmaster giving permission for me to play with my skiffle group on a BBC TV show when I was 14. So I kept all this stuff, as opposed to just clearing house all the time. I put it all in suitcases and in storage. It’s an autobiography in pictures, from being headhunted for my first band, right up to Led Zeppelin and beyond. Here it is, the detail behind the detail of the first book. I decided to do it this way, because, like we all do, whenever I buy a biography or an autobiography, I always go straight to the pictures to see what they have managed to access that you may not have seen before.

You seem to take enormous care with all the rereleases, books, DVDs and films you’ve been responsible for, particularly all the Led Zeppelin material. You seem to be incredibly fastidious.

I think the quality is always the important thing in the end, being creative and always aiming for the very best quality. With Zeppelin, I’m sure the record company would be more than happy to put out the same old stuff, but I always want to improve the sound.

The first time I realised this was when you put together the Led Zeppelin remasters box set in 1990, which probably turned a whole new generation on to the band. Was that the intention or were you simply trying to improve the quality of the CDs that were available at the time? It was so obviously a labour of love.

Basically, what I wanted to do was present a snapshot of the albums, but there was a real method to it. I suppose it was like another portal into the work. It was for the fans, but it was also for musicians too. I’ve always thought the Led Zeppelin catalogue was a sort of textbook for people who wanted to learn instruments or wanted to learn how bands play together or the production of the records.

In the book there is a huge celebration of your work as a session guitarist in the 1960s. Do you look back fondly on those days?

Enormously, although it’s not something a lot of people know about. One of the things about being a studio musician at the time was that you kept it pretty quiet, you know? You didn’t go around talking about it. And as my diary from the time shows, I would get the recording date, turn up and I literally wouldn’t know who was going to come in the door. Sometimes I would recognise the person, but more often than not I had no idea. It wasn’t your business. You were contracted to do what you did and that’s all. Though I was asked to make things up as well, just improvise my parts. It was quite a weird world really. And it was tough. If you were a young session musician and you mucked it up or made a mistake so you’ve got to do another take and that means 15 minutes’ overtime for everybody in the studio, you probably wouldn’t be asked back. But I didn’t think about the pressure at the time, I didn’t even consider it. I found it really exhilarating to do these sessions and bring something to the party. Some guys couldn’t hack it. Maybe their nerves got the better of them, but I always treated it as fun.

You played on hundreds of sessions, so your confidence must have grown.

Well, I could play in lots of different genres, as I’d been playing for some time. I could play rock’n’roll, R&B, city blues, folk, finger picking... I could play slide as well and harmonica. So I could do a number of things and fit into so many different recording sessions. I was at least seven years younger than any other musician on those sessions. But I enjoyed coming in and doing what I was asked to do, as I found it a challenge. I guess I was lucky, as I didn’t make a huge balls of it.

What were your favourite sessions or the most important sessions you remember from those times?

There was a big James Bond session in EMI Studio Number One, where I was playing guitar in the orchestra for John Barry. The full orchestra sounded absolutely amazing, but then Shirley Bassey arrived. This was “Goldfinger”. She arrived with a friend, was very quiet and then was asked to come out and sing. And it took her just one take. And at the end of the tape she collapsed on the floor. At the end of the song she just held this one note and she basically ran out of breath and collapsed. You know how dramatic she is usually, what with all the stuff she does with her hands, but this was even more dramatic – and I was in the front row of the musicians, so I really had a good view of all of this.

I also played with Burt Bacharach at Pye Studio at Marble Arch. Again, there was a full orchestra, with me on guitar. And there was this piano sitting right in the middle of the orchestra, all by itself. Burt Bacharach comes in, he says, “Morning, gentlemen, and, well, it goes like this.” And he sits at the piano and started playing this extraordinary music. It was beautiful to actually hear him playing on the piano. And suddenly the whole place just took so much notice. String players who normally couldn’t give two hoots about who they were playing with, they were rapt. You could see the whole orchestra waking up and paying so much attention. The whole studio came alive. Everybody wanted to play for Burt Bacharach. That was pretty magical, you know?

You also played guitar on The Who’s “I Can’t Explain”.

I was actually pulled in as a second guitarist alongside Pete Townshend, which was pretty amazing, because we were recording it in a really small studio. Pete plays lead and, by God, does he play the lead on “I Can’t Explain”. Again, this only took a couple of takes, but you can imagine what the energy was like in that room, being in an enclosed space playing along with The Who. I wasn’t really needed or necessary, but it’s OK to talk about those things now because Pete’s fine with it. And he knows he played absolutely magnificently.

When you were doing all the sessions and you were gaining more expertise and playing with different musicians and in different genres, were you sort of building a sound in your head? Was this all a kind of preparatory work for creating something of your own?

I was doing home recordings before I got a chance to do any of this stuff in a professional studio and so I sort of cut my teeth listening to Johnny Burnette and Elvis records, all that early rockabilly stuff. I was also listening to Chuck Berry, Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. As much as listening to the music and the guitar playing, I was studying the recording techniques, certainly with the Sun stuff. I was listening and developing my own ideas of how things might be done. But when I started as a session player, I’d ask questions about how certain things were done and I’d watch a lot. I’d study. Bit by bit I started developing relationships with engineers. I’d say, “How do you think this is done?” I played them records and then they’d say how they would go about it. I was using it as an apprenticeship, not only to improve myself as a guitarist with studio discipline, but to learn how these things were being done professionally. I started properly putting the sound in my head together with The Yardbirds, like using reverse echo. I said, “Can I try an idea on this?” as it was something I tried at home. After that I obviously used it on the first Zeppelin album. So everything was sort of building up to Zeppelin. As soon as I heard the sound of John Bonham’s drums, I knew I could do something special with it. I knew how and where to put the mics. I was learning all of these production techniques as a session player. There was a plan.

Did you always consider The Yardbirds to be a stepping stone to what you wanted to do next?

No, I didn’t. The thing is, I’d seen The Yardbirds at the original Marquee Club in Oxford Street, around the time they were recording Five Live Yardbirds, with Eric [Clapton] and they were absolutely phenomenal – I mean, the energy of it, the dynamics. And Paul Samwell-Smith was just the most extraordinary bass player. The band was fantastic, first with Eric and then, of course, with Jeff [Beck]. I’ve been friends with Jeff since we were eleven or 12 and we were good pals. So I knew what I was getting into. I had seen all my friends touring and making music and writing music, but I really wanted to develop things in the studio. The Tone Bender was one of the original fuzzboxes and I had one before anybody else. Occasionally when I was doing a session, people would ask if I had anything I wanted to add and I’d take out my fuzz pedal, plug it in and out would come this huge noise. You could see the other guitarists turning white, because here was this young kid who’s come in and he’s definitely not being kicked out. It got to the point where I was doing things I really wanted to make more of, but I couldn’t necessarily do within my day job. The Yardbirds allowed me to do that and I do have an affection for them because they made so much fantastic music when I wasn’t even in the band. I thought they were really moving the frontiers of group music and Jeff was instrumental in that.

You obviously had very particular ideas about the sonic quality of Led Zeppelin.

Like Jeff Beck said, I always had a very eclectic record collection, with Indian music, Arabic music, classical, electronic, lots of avant-garde stuff. I was constantly trying to play various styles at the start, but not necessarily very successfully. I mean, I wasn’t as fluent a jazz guitarist as I would have liked, but I just somehow developed my own sort of style. It’s all about the player. If you have a guitar and an amplifier and Jimi Hendrix comes in to play, he’s going to sound like Hendrix and it would be the same with Jeff or Eric.

As the architect of the whole Zeppelin ethos – the sound, the look, everything – how important in the early days was it that the band adhere to your vision?

I think one of the things that was really key was that I’d had a lot of experience, both on my own and with bands, especially with The Yardbirds. Robert [Plant] and John Bonham were slightly younger than us. But because we had the time to rehearse, we quickly developed how the band should sound. We also did a little tour, which was something The Yardbirds would have done if they hadn’t broken up. So we could go out and showcase what we wanted to record. It gave us a lot of confidence to go in on that first set of recording sessions, because it was already tried and tested. That’s why the album was done really quickly.

But I did have a whole sort of audible vision of what I was trying to achieve with it, because having played with The Yardbirds in America, I could really feel what the scene was over there. And with the advancement of FM radio, which was starting to play album tracks, I could see where it was all going. They weren’t yet playing the whole sides of albums, but I thought, “They will! They will!” I was aiming at the album market and I figured if you have something that is so interesting that one track leads into the next and it’s not just the same sort of vibe on every sort of song, if you are giving variety, and with all the different styles of guitar I played... That’s what I wanted to showcase on the first album. I wanted everybody to feel that they’re going to be able to reinvent themselves and play the best they’d ever played, which is of course what happened. It was the start.

Every Zeppelin album is very different and you obviously knew exactly what you wanted them to sound like before you recorded them.

I really did know what I was trying to do with each album and the important thing was making sure they were different from the one that preceded it. We had made a policy not to release singles and so we never worried about recording one.

I interviewed Paul McCartney a few months ago and he said he avoids reading books about him or The Beatles, as there can be just one little thing wrong that can irritate him. Do you read books about yourself?

I know exactly what he means. So many of the people who were around at the time are no longer with us and so can’t give their testimony, although there seem to be an awful lot of people who write these books who were nowhere near the action. A lot of people are dining out on stories that have been amplified and exaggerated, with a lot of colour thrown in for good measure. These people could be stand-up comedians, as they build these stories into comedy routines. And they weren’t even there! They over-colour it. I see stuff that’s written and it’s just absolutely nothing like what happened or the truth. So how can someone say what happened on the recording of “Stairway To Heaven”? How many people were there? Just four musicians and one engineer, in the moment.

UNITED KINGDOM - MAY 17: EARLS COURT Photo of Jimmy PAGE and Robert PLANT and LED ZEPPELIN, L-R: Robert Plant, Jimmy Page performing live onstage (Photo by Ian Dickson/Redferns)Ian Dickson

How important is legacy to you?

Somebody once asked me if I was intimidated by my past and I wasn’t being flash when I said this, but it was actually an immediate response. I said, “No, it inspired me.”

I know it’s problematic at the moment and will be for the foreseeable future, but are you looking forward to performing again?

When we first went into lockdown I thought, “Right, now’s the time to start thinking about coming back at some point and being able to perform.” But it’s such a very sad and desperate time and what this virus has done internationally to families, to the arts and everything we love and hold dear and the whole concert situation, it does worry me. Playing live is so important for young musicians. When we were young, we all had these little gigs, hoping to play somewhere bigger and it’s such an important part of that communion of musicians playing together. For me it’s always been the most important thing. I will never be one of those people who’ll record alone and send someone a file. I never went into music in the first place to do that, it was for playing together and this is what it means. We need to play with people, we need gigs and we need community. Because without that, music means nothing.

Jimmy Page: The Anthology is out now.

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