by George Case
John Bonham
Like many other drummers of his generation, Bonham was motivated by the stardom of swing heavyweights Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich, then found inspiration closer to home with the visibility (and audibility) of English rock ’n’ rollers Keith Moon and the singular Ginger Baker. Sandy Nelson, the American session ace of the early 1960s known for “Let There Be Drums” and “Teen Beat,” was another likely influence. Young Bonham had also attended to the subtleties of Dave Brubeck’s timekeeper Joe Morello, the irresistible grooves laid down by James Brown, Motown’s Benny Benjamin and Uriel Jones, and New Orleans legend Earl Palmer, and in time checked out the radical fusion drumming of Larry Coryell percussionist Alphonse Mouzon.
Devil He Told Me to Roll: Jimmy Page’s Pre-Zeppelin Gigs
The bright and sensitive youngster who became Led Zeppelin’s enigmatic sorcerer started off his musical career in the manner of thousands of other British lads of the 1950s: discovering first the homey busking of skiffle music, then the darker strains of the blues, and eventually immersing himself in the first wave of the new American fad of rock ’n’ roll. Before slotting into his pivotal job as a London session guitarist, Page had already paid dues in many amateur and professional engagements around Britain.
c. 1955 Sings in choir at St. Barnabas Church in the London suburb of Epsom
1958–60 Sits in and performs with various school chums, including Malcolm Austin and the Whirlwinds
1958 Appears with neighborhood friends in the J. C. Skiffle Group playing “Cotton Fields” and “Mama Don’t Allow No Skiffle Around Here” on the All Your Own children’s talent television show
1960–61 Plays guitar in Epsom dance hall house bands; plays guitar with Red E. Lewis and the Red Caps
1961–62 Plays guitar with Red E. Lewis and the Red Caps, and with Neil Christian and the Crusaders; accompanies poet Royston Ellis at spoken-word performances
1962 Performs occasional gigs with the Cyril Davies R&B All-Stars
1962–63 Occasionally sits in with the Marquee Club house band
1962–66 Gigs as session musician
1963–64 Holds nominal membership in Carter-Lewis and the Southerners, Mike Hurst and the Method, Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, and Mickey Finn and the Blue Men; accompanies Sonny Boy Williamson on English recording sessions
1965 Releases a solo single, “She Just Satisfies” b/w “Keep Movin’”
1966–68 Plays with the Yardbirds
1968 Gigs as a session musician, forms the New Yardbirds
You’ve Been Learnin’: John Paul Jones’s Pre-Zeppelin Gigs
In contrast to his future bandmates, young John Baldwin entered the music business as a practical family trade rather than in a vague quest for fame and fortune. Quickly learning the basics of sight-reading and the discipline of playing in a range of styles, he also became proficient on not one but two instruments, his versatility ultimately adding greatly to Led Zeppelin’s work. As a bass player he was enlisted in several ephemeral acts that disbanded as soon as they were formed, giving him valuable experience without requiring a commitment to any one lineup or set list. Instrumentalists of Jones’s caliber were more common in a time when live entertainment—house bands, dance orchestras, nightclub journeymen—had yet to be replaced by the DJs and piped-in music that have transformed the entire music industry. Wherever his vocation took him, it seems Jones, perhaps alone of the foursome, would have maintained a lifelong career as a performer, accompanist, arranger, or instructor, whether or not he became a rock star.
1960 Serves as organist and choirmaster in his local church; accompanies Joe Baldwin on bass at a summertime residency
1961–62 Performs in various groups with schoolmates; plays bass with the Deltas; performs shows with several pro acts at US military bases in the UK
1962–63 Serves as bass player with Jet Harris and the Jet Blacks; occasionally sits in for gigs, e.g., playing keyboards for saxophonist Mick Eves, bass for the Ronnie Jones and the Night-Timers, and playing in the backing band for Herbie Goins
1962–68 Works as a session musician
1964 Releases a solo single, “Baja” b/w “A Foggy Day in Vietnam”
1967 Reportedly accompanies Herman’s Hermits at a few German gigs
1968 Plays in the New Yardbirds
Stars to Fill My Dreams: Robert Plant’s Pre-Zeppelin Gigs
Unlike his future compatriots Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, Plant remained on the edges of the English pop music scene throughout the 1960s. Though never lacking in enthusiasm, dedication, or fundamental talent, the vocalist lived too far from the metropolis of London and had no formal credentials as a singer, and as a result he was for several years only one of thousands of hopefuls struggling to find the right combination of musicians to front and a steady schedule of gigs to earn a living. Though he is today a wealthy and honored performer whose position in rock ’n’ roll history is secure, the fact is that, but for the chance opportunity of meeting ex-Yardbird Jimmy Page, the twenty-year-old Robert Plant might very well have abandoned his dreams of musical success and resigned himself to a life revolving around humdrum office jobs, a private collection of rare country blues records, the complete works of J. R. R. Tolkien, and a discreet marijuana habit.
Plant was no amateur, however. He had sung in professional or semiprofessional acts since his teens, gaining valuable stage experience at local shows and regional tours, and he had learned by heart an extensive number of obscure blues, folk, soul, psychedelic, and R&B tunes—perhaps learned them a little too well for Led Zeppelin’s initial critics. Since Plant became famous, a retrospective of his promising but unfulfilled work before autumn 1968 has gradually been pieced together, including short- and long-term employment in several bands around mid-1960s Birmingham and even an abortive recording contract. Despite being the creator of an immortal rock god persona, it was to this modest background he would eventually return following the Zeppelin’s deflation.
1962–63 Sings with Andy Long & the Original Jurymen
1963 Sings with the New Memphis Bluesbreakers, the Brum Beats, and the Sounds of Blue
1964 Sings with the Delta Blues Band and Black Snake Moan
1964–65 Performs with the Banned
1965 Sings with the Crawling King Snakes
1966 Performs with the Tennessee Teens, and Listen; records one single with Listen for CBS: “You’d Better Run” b/w “Everybody’s Gonna Say”
1967 Performs with the Band of Joy / Robert Plant and His Band of Joy; records two singles as a solo performer on the CBS label: “Our Song” b/w “Laughin’, Cryin’, Laughin’,” and “Long Time Coming” b/w “I’ve Got a Secret”
1968 Records demos of “For What It’s Worth,” “Hey Joe,” and “Adriatic Sea View” with the Band of Joy (none of which is released for many years); performs with Alexis Korner’s band; records “Operator” and “Steal Away” with Alexis Korner (the tracks remain unreleased until 1971 and 1996, respectively); sings with Obs-Tweedle; performs with the New Yardbirds
Over the Top: John Bonham’s Pre-Zeppelin Gigs
Along with Robert Plant, the teenage Bonham was one of many young people hoping for a big showbiz break that had yet to materialize. In his case, however, “Bonzo” had the advantage of all rock ’n’ roll drummers over singers and guitarists: rarity. The size and investment represented by a decent drum kit was enough to dissuade all but the most committed, and thus Bonham was quickly taken up into several working acts around Birmingham from his earliest forays into the pop music scene.
Because of his loud and hard-hitting style, however, Bonham was sometimes ejected from groups who found his playing to be a liability in scoring club dates. He was unapologetic about this and, until 1968, rarely strove to toe anyone’s line. More than most percussionists, Bonham moved from band to band, sitting in with whoever needed him at the moment while keeping his ear open for better opportunities with others. This ultimately worked in his favor in Led Zeppe
lin, where he at last found the right combination of musicians to keep time for, but in the mid-1960s, the struggling Midlands stickman’s long-term future looked uncertain.
Though Bonham was obviously a natural drummer for whom even marriage and fatherhood weren’t cause enough to steer into steadier work (he wed Pat Phillips in 1966 and Jason Bonham was born the same year), his professionalism was raw and he was not the type to plot a diligent climb up the career ladder. Before he joined Zeppelin his last gig was with Tim Rose, best known for the moderate hits “Hey Joe” and “Morning Dew,” but how long the association might have lasted is dubious, and Bonham might have continued bouncing from prospect to prospect—impressing with his talent and his technique but always just a little too noisy for the bands who hired him. Fortunately for the music world, but perhaps unfortunately for Bonham himself, his connection to Robert Plant landed him the biggest gig of his life and the last one he would ever know.
1963 Gigs with the Blue Star Trio
1963–64 Plays with Gerry Levene and the Avengers
1964 Plays with Steve Brett and the Mavericks, Terry Webb and the Spiders, and the Senators; records “She’s a Mod” with the Senators, which is released on a local compilation, Brum Beat
1964–65 Performs with Locomotive
1965 Gigs with the Nicky James Movement; performs with A Way of Life
1965–66 Plays with the Crawling King Snakes; rejoins A Way of Life
1967–68 Plays with the Band of Joy
1968 Gigs with Tim Rose’s band and with the New Yardbirds
Now I’ve Reached That Age: Jimmy Page as a Session Musician
An indelible part of his legendary stature, Page’s employment as a versatile and in-demand studio guitarist in London from 1962 to 1966, and briefly again in 1968, is invariably mentioned when tracing his artistic and professional growth. That some of the songs to which he contributed became worldwide hits predating his successes with Led Zeppelin only adds to the legend.
The story is complicated, however, by Page’s own downplaying of his session years as an apprenticeship that he eventually sought to leave behind. Sometimes he has credited his studio career as a valuable training he would later recall when producing, playing, and orchestrating the Zeppelin canon. “I learned an incredible amount of discipline…. [H]aving to vamp behind people like Tubby Hayes, who was a big jazz saxophonist in England, or play on several of Burt Bacharach’s pop sessions, gave me a fantastic vision and insight into chords.” In other instances, he has dismissed most of the material he backed up—“I’ve got a lot of skeletons in my closet”—and openly admitted to not remembering a large percentage of the songs in whose recording he was hired to assist. “I learned things even on my worst sessions,” he has compromised. “And believe me, I played on some horrendous things.”
Some of the divide between myth and reality here is due to the nature of studio work in the 1960s. Jimmy Page’s job at most of these dates was not to produce, arrange, or otherwise supervise the music being made, but only to chip in a suitably polished guitar part—sometimes only a guitar solo—on songs that had already been laid out by the artist, the manager, or the studio overseer. In this capacity, he would have had no say in where his performance figured in the eventual mix or which take was finally put to disc; he was paid for being on hand, ready to play, regardless of what the finished record sounded like or its ultimate commercial fate. Some of his work went no further than preliminary or demo tracks before later musicians would copy his ideas, and at other times he would just fake his way through the session (with amplifier turned down or unplugged altogether), then collect his fee and walk away when the rest of the personnel were satisfied with the day’s productivity.
A few of Page’s sessions were controversial jobs where he and other professionals secretly substituted for less experienced players whose names and faces were shown on the resulting product, but more often the guitarist was a welcome backup to performers with no permanent band of their own. Indeed, some acts he played for were “studio-only” outfits whose sole income came from record sales rather than live concerts. Despite the growing draw of such self-contained groups as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, and the Who (and, in time, Led Zeppelin), the music industry of the 1960s was still based around an elaborate hierarchy of songwriters, instrumentalists, technicians, A&R (Artist and Repertoire) officials, and other contributors, all of whom might claim a part in putting together a hit song or hit record. Page’s role on the studio floors was therefore a limited one that any young and ambitious musician would find increasingly frustrating.
How did his session stint affect Jimmy Page’s subsequent career? Certainly the practice of repeatedly putting down take after take of similar passages prepared him for the music he made with Led Zeppelin, where he would layer two, three, four, or more tracks of his own guitars on top of each other: the massed “guitar armies” of “Black Dog” or “Achilles Last Stand” depended on his ability to carefully replicate given riffs or progressions, bulking up their sound without letting them deteriorate into a mess of overdubs. While there are some brilliant spontaneous single takes in his oeuvre, much of Led Zeppelin’s acoustic identity comes from his experience going over songs until they were just the way he wanted them, a skill which would have been foreign to rawer musicians more accustomed to the randomness of stage performance than the formal routine of the studio. As a session man Page also saw and heard a range of recording techniques—some effective, some not—he would recall when producing all of Led Zeppelin’s albums, and he has often noted how his innovations in microphone placement and stereo imaging were learned from observing and then listening to the indifferent, by-the-book regimens of journeymen like Shel Talmy or Mickie Most. “When I was playing sessions,” he remembered, “I noticed that the engineers would always place the bass drum mic right next to the head. The drummers would then play like crazy, but it would always sound like they were playing on cardboard boxes.” Usually Page kept his head down and did as he was told in such circumstances, but when he elected himself Led Zeppelin’s producer, he had already spent several years absorbing the dos and don’ts of recording pop music.
The most important legacy of Page’s session period was to confirm his position as an industry professional. Not only did he make a name for himself as a reliable and more than competent guitar player, but he had also made connections with numerous other newcomers, budding stars, and confirmed heavies he would befriend and work with in the decades to come: producers Joe Meek and Andrew Loog Oldham, songwriters Burt Bacharach and Jackie DeShannon, record executives Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, engineers Glyn Johns and Eddie Kramer, and performers as diverse as Chris Farlowe, David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, and Donovan. All these links gave him entrée to business and creative circles traditionally cool toward the starry-eyed amateurs, teenage hopefuls, and Next Big Things whose publicity shots and audition tapes were cluttering their in-boxes. In 1968 Jimmy Page asked one studio colleague, a soft-spoken, formally trained young arranger and player named John Paul Jones, if he’d be interested in joining his new band. The rest was history.
A complete discography of the pre-Zeppelin Page is probably impossible to assemble. Some estimates have him playing on over three-quarters of the pop and rock ’n’ roll music recorded in Britain between 1963 and 1966, although such a percentage can never ascertained and—in view of the thousands of songs commercially released during these peak years of the British Invasion—is physically implausible to associate with single musician. Page has reported, “At one point I was playing at least three sessions a day, six days a week,” but this schedule does not necessarily translate into eighteen completed songs available on album or single. Nor was Jimmy Page the only guitarist employed in the London recording rooms of the mid-1960s, as regulars such as Vic Flick and Big Jim Sullivan were heard on memorable tracks like John Barry’s inimitable James Bond theme (Flick) and P. J. Proby’s “Hold Me” (Sullivan), and later “name” gu
itarists like Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore and rockabilly ace Albert Lee were also honing their chops in the same studios as Page. At different times any of these players, or other anonymous guitarists, could join up or trade places with Page for session jobs while they, like Page, were also scoring occasional work in performing bands (Page even wangled his friend Jeff Beck a few studio bookings). The following list is drawn from various accounts from the musicians involved, compilation records anthologized to appeal to Zeppelin completists, and credible if not infallible documentation that ties Page to particular artists or producers. Though some songs provide tantalizing tastes of his later work with Led Zeppelin, more are ordinary mid-’60s pop where guitar heroism is scarcely in evidence. For Jimmy Page, the best was yet to come.
• Chris Andrews: “Yesterday Man”
• The Authentics: “Without You,” “Climbing Through”
• Burt Bacharach: Hit Maker
• Long John Baldry: Looking at Long John
• John Barry/Shirley Bassey: “Goldfinger”
• Paul Bedford: “Will You Follow Me,” “Head Death”
• Dave Berry: “The Crying Game,” “My Baby Left Me,” “Baby, It’s You,” “One Heart Between Two,” “Little Things,” “This Strange Effect”
• The Blue Rondos: “Baby I Go for You,” “Little Baby”
• Brook Brothers: “Trouble Is My Middle Name,” “Let the Good Times Roll,” “Once in a While”
• Sean Buckley and the Breadcrumbs: “It Hurts Me When I Cry,” “Everybody Knows”
